See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil
Photo from CNN
The images of the three monkeys leapt into my mind as we’re all treated to a replay of the three Congressmen standing on the roof of Saddam Hussein’s palace and preaching to us ignorant Americans that Hussein was more trustworthy than our own president. from the Weekly Standard;
The controversy ignited on September 29 when Bonior and McDermott appeared from Baghdad on ABC’s “This Week.” Host George Stephanopoulos asked McDermott about his recent comment that “the president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.”
In an interview with CNN’s Paula Zahn, Bonior was asked if he trusts Saddam Hussein;
ZAHN: Representative Bonior, do you trust Saddam Hussein?
BONIOR: Well, of course, Saddam Hussein has committed some very bad atrocities while he has been in public office, and we all know that. The question is not whether or not I trust Saddam Hussein. The question is whether I trust impartial observers, like Mr. Blix from the United Nations, to come in and make a good judgment.
So we shouldn’t have questioned the trustworthiness of Saddam Hussein, but it was fine to mistrust the US President. Sweet. Apparently, Hussein’s money for propaganda was well spent. I’d remind the reader that the actual invasion of Hussein’s Iraq wouldn’t happen for another five months after this trip – in the “rush to war”.
Well, now it turns out that the trip was financed with profits from Hussein’s corrupt manipulation of the Oil For Food program – meant to feed Iraqis affected by the UN’s 1991 sanctions against the country. The money from the Hussein regime flowed through his agent in the US, Muthanna Al-Hanooti. Ed Morrisey of Hot Air writes;
Bonior, Thompson, and McDermott apparently didn’t know about Al-Hanooti’s connection — but they don’t appear to have asked, either. Instead, they got snookered into a ploy by Saddam to buy some American dissent at a time when our nation still reeled from the deaths of 3,000 people in a terrorist attack. Wouldn’t the possibility of exploitation have crossed their minds — and shouldn’t the three Congressmen have asked the FBI to check out Al-Hanooti at the time?
Al-Hanooti appears to be an official of CAIR, according to Debbie Schlussel and Michele Malkin. From Ms. Schlussel;
Today, Al-Hanooti, a former chief of CAIR-Michigan was indicted for acting as a spy for Saddam Hussein in America. (And–shocker–he has a second wife and family in Iraq.) To me and anyone who followed the story and read a newspaper, that isn’t news. In fact, the indictment is far too little, far too late. The indictment says that a trip taken by three Congressmen–liberal Democrats Jim McDermott, David Bonior, and Mike Thompson–to Iraq in 2002, was funded by Saddam Hussein, using a third party to arrange the financing, and Al-Hanooti to put the trip together. Again, not news, since I wrote about it repeatedly on this site and also in The New York Post as far back as 2003.
Baldilocks says this explains why George Galloway was in an extra-pricky mood when he was being questioned by Norm Coleman about the Oil-for-Food Program – he knew he wasn’t the only dirty politician who’d benefitted from Iraq’s new-found largesse. I’ll bet that if anyone ever shakes that fig tree, we’ll be up to our necks in corrupt politicians who benefitted from that “humanitarian program” administered by the UN.
Category: Foreign Policy, Legal, Politics, Society, Terror War
