WASHINGTON -- Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
An indictment unsealed in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam's regime. Prosecutors say Iraqi intelligence officials paid for the trip through an intermediary.
At the time, the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq.
The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. None was charged and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators "have no information whatsoever" any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.
"Obviously, we didn't know it at the time," McDermott spokesman Michael DeCesare said Wednesday. "The trip was to see the plight of the Iraqi children. That's the only reason we went."
(Really? See the article below by Stephen Hayes.)
Both McDermott and Thompson are popular among liberal voters in their reliably Democratic districts for their anti-war views. Bonior is no longer in Congress.
Thompson released a statement Wednesday saying the trip was approved by the State Department.
"Obviously, had there been any question at all regarding the sponsor of the trip or the funding, I would not have participated," he said.
...Oklahoma Sen. Don Nickles, the second-ranking Senate Republican at the time, said the Democrats "sound somewhat like spokespersons for the Iraqi government." Seattle-are[a] conservatives dubbed McDermott "Baghdad Jim" for the Iraq trip.
Al-Hanooti was arrested Tuesday night while returning to the U.S. from the Middle East, where he was looking for a job, his attorney, James Thomas, said. Al-Hanooti pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges of conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, illegally purchasing Iraqi oil and lying to authorities. He was being held on $100,000 bail.
Between 1999 and 2006, he worked on and off as a public relations coordinator for Life for Relief and Development, a charity group formed after the first Gulf War to fund humanitarian work in Iraq. FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents raided the charity's headquarters in 2006 but charged nobody and allowed the agency to continue operating.
McDermott identified that charity as the group financing the Iraq trip. In House disclosure forms, he put the cost at $5,510. Thompson also understood the charity to be financing the trip, spokeswoman Anne Warden said.
Prosecutors said Al-Hanooti was responsible for monitoring Congress for the Iraqi Intelligence Service. From 1999 to 2002, he allegedly provided Saddam's government with a list of U.S. lawmakers he believed favored lifting economic sanctions against Iraq.
In exchange for coordinating the congressional trip, Al-Hanooti allegedly received 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil, prosecutors said.
None of this should come as a surprise. It's sickening but not surprising.
In the October 14, 2002 issue of The Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes wrote an interesting, albeit nauseating, piece, "The Baghdad Democrats."
IT'S A RARE POLITICAL MOMENT when Terry McAuliffe says no comment. Yet McAuliffe, the garrulous chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said just that last Wednesday at the Brookings Institution after a speech by Al Gore. Asked about the trip to Baghdad taken by three of his fellow partisans--Representatives David Bonior, Jim McDermott, and Mike Thompson--McAuliffe was nonplussed.
"Have we issued anything on that?" he asked DNC spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri, who shook her head.
"I don't think we have," he said with a shrug of his shoulders.
"We handle the politics, and leave those comments to elected officials," Palmieri explained. "But nice try."
Problem is, the elected officials aren't saying much either. Bonior was until recently the second-ranking Democrat in the House, and yet it's nearly impossible to get Democrats to say anything about his and the others' trip to Baghdad.
But if other Democrats aren't talking about the Baghdad tour, Bonior and McDermott themselves won't shut up. And the more they talk, the more scrutiny they invite.
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."
McDermott didn't backpedal at all: "I believe that sometimes they give out misinformation. . . . It would not surprise me if they came out with some information that is not provable, and they, they shift it. First they said it was al Qaeda, then they said it was weapons of mass destruction. Now they're going back to and saying it's al Qaeda again." When Stephanopoulos pressed McDermott about whether he had any evidence that Bush had lied, the congressman replied, "I think the president would mislead the American people."
An American official floating unsubstantiated allegations against an American president during a visit to Baghdad would be troubling enough. But McDermott compounded his problem by insisting, despite its twelve years of verifiable prevarication, that the Iraqi regime should be given the benefit of the doubt on inspections and disarmament. Said McDermott on "This Week": "I think you have to take the Iraqis on their face value."
But McDermott and Bonior only accept Iraq's more conciliatory statements at face value. They selectively ignore those statements by Iraqi officials defying the international community's demand for unfettered inspections. Even after Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan made clear that inspectors would not be allowed into presidential sites--some 12 square miles of Iraqi territory--McDermott claimed the Iraqi regime really wanted to be accommodating. "They have given us assurances that there will be unfettered inspections," McDermott said at an October 2 press conference he held with Bonior after returning from Iraq. "In the United States, we have a tradition, we have a Constitution that says if there's a bad person there, we give them due process and inspections is the due process in this example."
At the same press conference, McDermott and Bonior retrospectively revised the primary goal of their trip. (Thompson, who wasn't at that appearance, kept a relatively low profile both on the trip and after his return. He was the only one of the three to emphasize that Saddam Hussein, and not the U.S. government, bears responsibility for conditions in Iraq.) "First of all," said Bonior, explaining the objectives of the trip, "we wanted to impress upon the Iraqi government and the people of Iraq how important it was for them to allow unconditional, unfettered, unrestricted access to the inspectors." It was such an important point that he revisited it later.
"The purpose of our trip was to make it very clear, as I said in my opening statement, to the officials in Iraq how serious we--the United States is about going to war and that they will have war unless these inspections are allowed to go unconditionally and unfettered and open. And that was our point. And that was in the best interest of not only Iraq, but the American citizens and our troops. And that's what we were emphasizing. That was our primary concern--that and looking at the humanitarian situation."
But if the return of inspectors was the "first" and "primary" purpose of the trip on October 2, it wasn't quite as important on September 25. In the joint press release all three congressmen issued before their trip, posted on each of their websites, there were many stated goals, and plenty of criticism of U.S. saber rattling and pounding of war drums. But there was no mention of inspections at all.
Instead there was much talk of "gaining insight into the humanitarian challenges another war on Iraq would have on innocent Iraqis and the dangerous implications of a unilateral, preemptive strike on U.S. national security."
It's reassuring to know that these congressmen were concerned about our national security, even if the source of their concern was our president rather than the brutal dictator with weapons of mass destruction the United States is trying to stop. What apparently didn't concern the congressmen was the damage their trip might do abroad to any U.S.-led effort to deal with Saddam. Or any difficulties they may have created for U.S. efforts to fashion a friendly post-Saddam Iraq.
EVEN BEFORE the Baghdad boys left Iraq, media outlets throughout the Middle East gleefully highlighted divisions in the U.S. government and the travels by the "antiwar" congressmen. The Iraq Daily, for example, published by Saddam's Ministry of Information, printed daily updates of the trip and posted them in English on their website.
For example, a September 30 report says, "the members of the U.S. Congress delegation has underlined that this visit aims to get acquainted with the truth of Iraq's people sufferings due to ongoing embargo which caused shortage in food and medicine for all Iraqi people." (That article appeared next to a report on Saddam's continuing financial support for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or, to use the paper's formulation, "intrepid Palestinian uprising martyrs." Also in that issue is an article by American white supremacist Matthew Hale, "Truth About 9-11: How Jewish Manipulation Killed Thousands.")
Hayes details how the three Congressmen were used as propaganda tools by the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.
On September 27, viewers of Iraqi Satellite Channel Television learned the following (this translation comes from U.S. government sources):
"Three U.S. Congressmen arrived in Baghdad this morning on a visit lasting several days. The delegation will hold several meetings with Iraqi officials and members of the Foreign Relations Committee at the National Assembly. They will also visit hospitals to see the suffering caused by the unjust embargo and the shortage of medicines and medical supplies. Congressman Jim McDermott told reporters upon arrival at Saddam International Airport that the delegation members reject the policy of aggression dominating the U.S. administration."
The video then showed McDermott talking, with a voiceover translation in Arabic. Here is what Arabic-speaking audiences heard from McDermott:
"We are three veterans of the Vietnam War who came over here because we don't want war. We assert from here that we do not want the United States to wage war on any peace-loving countries. As members of Congress, we would like diplomatic efforts to continue so as not to launch any aggression. We will visit children's hospitals to see the negative impact of the sanctions imposed on Iraq. We hope that peace will prevail throughout the world."
So how does it feel to be used as a propaganda tool against your own country? McDermott, who was asked that question by CNN's Jane Arraf when he was still in Baghdad, said it feels fine. "If being used means that we're highlighting the suffering of Iraqi children, or any children, then, yes, we don't mind being used."
The adventures of McDermott, Bonior, and Thompson in Iraq were truly stunning.
In October 2002, George Will commented on "Baghdad Bonior."
Hitler found ``Lord Haw Haw''--William Joyce, who broadcast German propaganda to Britain during the Second World War--in the dregs of British extremism. But Saddam Hussein finds American collaborators among senior congressional Democrats.
Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC's ``This Week'' from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word, but should not take President Bush at his. McDermott, in his seventh term representing Seattle, said Iraqi officials promised him and his traveling companion, Rep. David Bonior, a 13-term Michigan Democrat, that weapons inspectors would be ``allowed to look anywhere.''
Bonior, until recently second-ranking in the House Democratic leadership, said sources no less reliable than Saddam's minions told them that inspectors will have an ``unrestricted ability to go where they want.'' McDermott said: ``I think you have to take the Iraqis on their value--at their face value.'' And: ``I think the president would mislead the American people.''
McDermott and Bonior are two specimens of what Lenin, referring to Westerners who denied the existence of Lenin's police-state terror, called ``useful idiots.'' Perhaps Iraqi officials, knowing fathomless gullibility when they see it--they have dealt with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan--actually said such things. Or perhaps McDermott and Bonior heard what they wished to hear.
...McDermott's accusation that the president--presumably with Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and others as accomplices--would use deceit to satisfy his craving to send young Americans into an unnecessary war is a slander licensed six days earlier by Al Gore. With transparent Nixonian trickiness--being transparent, it tricks no one--Gore all but said the president is orchestrating war policy for political gain in November.
Gore and many other Democrats who supported the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, with which the Clinton administration endorsed regime change, are now engaged in moral infantilism--willing the end but refusing to will any realistic means to that end. Such evasions define today's Democrats, even in domestic policy, as when Tom Daschle and others say Bush's tax cuts are calamitous, but flinch from saying the cuts should be rescinded.
McDermott's and Bonior's espousal of Saddam's line, and of Gore's subtext (and Barbra Streisand's libretto), signals the recrudescence of the dogmatic distrust of U.S. power that virtually disqualified the Democratic Party from presidential politics for a generation. It gives the benefits of all doubts to America's enemies and reduces policy debates to accusations about the motives of Americans who would project U.S. power in the world.
Conservative isolationism--America is too good for the world--is long dead. Liberal isolationism--the world is too good for America--is flourishing.
Also in October of 2002, Joseph Farah provided some fascinating information on David Bonior.
Rep. David Bonior, a 13-term Michigan Democrat – and until recently second-ranking in House Democratic leadership – worked tirelessly for years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, for rules ensuring Middle Easterners would not receive any unusual scrutiny at the nation's airports.
He was successful – even at getting President Bush to sign a new law to that effect, one that might have contributed directly to the deaths of 3,000 Americans.
Bonior also championed the case of Dr. Mazen Al-Najjar, jailed before Sept. 11 because the FBI and Immigration officials suspected the Gaza native was a mid-level terrorist operative, and because he had violated the terms of his visa.
He was unsuccessful in this endeavor. Al-Najjar was ultimately deported to the United Arab Emirates.
Bonior, who lost a bid to become Michigan's governor, also took campaign contributions from Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor said to be Islamic Jihad's front-man in the United States. Al-Arian and his wife, Nahla, donated at least $3,450 to Bonior's campaigns. Al-Arian also raised funds for Islamic Jihad – an ally of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
What did such campaign contributions buy for Al-Arian? We got a clue in June 2001, just three months before the terror attacks on the U.S. During a White House meeting on President Bush's "faith-based initiatives" that month, a uniformed Secret Service officer felt compelled to remove a 20-year-old Muslim intern working for Bonior. Apparently the young man was seen as a security threat – and understandably so. The intern's name was Abdallah Al-Arian – the son of Sami Al-Arian.
And if all this isn't incestuous enough, it turns out Al-Najjar is Al-Arian's brother-in-law.
In a speech to the American Muslim Alliance in 1998, Bonior urged lifting the sanctions on Iraq, claiming they had killed some 700,000 children. More recently, since returning from Baghdad this week, Bonior has revised that estimate downward to 500,000 – even though four years have transpired since his earlier estimate and even while claiming 50,000 children a year continue to die as a result of U.S. actions.
It's hard to believe, with a record of achievement like this, that anyone would take anything Bonior says as credible. It's hard to believe he is still permitted to serve in the House of Representatives. It's hard to believe that he was so high in leadership within his party for so long.
Hard to believe, but true.
Al-Hanooti certainly delivered for Saddam Hussein when he pegged Jim McDermott, David Bonior, and Mike Thompson as "useful idiots."
As stated in the New York Times:
The Justice Department said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein’s principal foreign intelligence agency and an Iraqi-American man had organized and paid for a 2002 visit to Iraq by three House Democrats whose trip was harshly criticized by colleagues at the time.
The arrangements for the trip were described in the indictment of an Iraq-born former employee of a Detroit-area charity group who was charged Wednesday with accepting millions of dollars’ worth of Iraqi oil contracts in exchange for assisting the Iraqi spy agency in projects in the United States.
The indictment did not claim any wrongdoing by the three lawmakers, whose five-day trip to Iraq occurred in October 2002, five months before the American invasion.
Two continue to serve in the House: Jim McDermott of Washington State and Mike Thompson of California. The other, David E. Bonior of Michigan, has since retired from Congress.
“None of the Congressional representatives are accused of any wrongdoing, and we have no information whatsoever that any of them were aware of the involvement of the Iraqi Intelligence Service,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice spokesman.
I think it's important to draw a distinction between the Congressmen's wrongdoing in terms of the trip's funding and their wrongdoing in terms of how they behaved and the things they said while in Iraq.
In my view, there definitely was wrongdoing.
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