Mar 26 2008
Saddam’s Surrendercrat Puppets In Congress, Working For The Enemy
Many of us conservatives still supporting the war efforts in Iraq and this President overall (which makes not ‘true conservatives’ of course) have many times stated the liberal democrats undermine our war efforts and do more for our enemies than for our nation, or for our troops fighting to protect our nation. I have said their calls for surrendering Iraq sound like they get their talking points from al-Qaeda HQ. The Surrendercrats work with the Surrender media to drain our resolve and sow hopelessness in our cause (as we saw when the stated the Surge had failed before it had even begun), as well as to cripple our security outright by exposing it through cooked-up conspiracy theories (which they did when the exposed the terrorist surveillance program where NSA leads were now being sent to the FIS Court as evidence for probable cause, which they did when the exposed the international money tracking efforts to locate terrorists and active cells by following the money flows, as they did when they exposed how the CIA transports key prisoners from the battlefields to safe houses for interrogation).
Prior to the war in Iraq three notoriously liberal congressman went to Iraq to say Saddam was a reasonable guy (ignore the gassing of Kurds and the invasion of two countries) who could be trusted not to get mixed up with al-Qaeda. Worst yet, they began what Joe and Valerie Wilson tried to finish by claiming Bush would lie and present false evidence to get us into a war with Iraq. Turns out there was no false evidence because it was Joe Wilson who lied about forged documents being used by Bush to sell the Iraq war.
Here is how Stephen Hayes responded to Rep Jim Mcdermmot and his scurrilous lies on ABC’s This Week:
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.”
Some Surrendercrats know no bounds when proving Darwin was right about how some individuals are just destined for extinction – like they are wired to be destroyed by their own stupidity. Well, it seems these paragons of surrendermania were the dupes, the ones representing a lie. In fact, they were not in Baghdad representing American interests, they were there representing Saddam’s interest, and we know that because he paid for their trip:
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.
The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam’s regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil.
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.”
This is not the first time McDermmott has taken money from terrorist sympathizers and our enemies, there have been other incidents like this one from May 2003:
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who famously traveled to Baghdad last fall and pronounced President Bush a liar, accepted a cash payment less than a month later from an Iraqi-American businessman with ties to Saddam Hussein.
McDermott collected the payment from Shakir al-Khafaji, the same Detroit-based Baghdad apologist who paid former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter $400,000 two years ago to make a pro-Saddam documentary about Iraq.
Appearing live from Baghdad on the Sept. 29 broadcast of ABC’s “This Week,” McDermott proclaimed, “The president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.” The comment generated a firestorm of criticism in the U.S. that earned him the moniker, “Baghdad Jim.”
A little less than a month later, on Oct. 25, McDermott accepted a check from al-Khafaji for $5,000, made out to the antiwar Democrat’s “Legal Expense Trust.”
McDermott set up the trust to fend off a lawsuit filed by Ohio Republican John Boehner stemming from McDermott’s relationship with a Florida couple who wiretapped a 1997 conference call between Boehner and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, along with several other Republicans.
The revelation that on the eve of war, a pro-Baghdad U.S. congressman was accepting cash from a Saddam ally was first reported in this week’s Weekly Standard.
As the saying goes, ignorance is not a valid excuse for breaking the law. Being unknowing puppets of Saddam Hussein is still a dereliction of duty (as well as a sign that maybe one is sleep walking through life oblivious to the dangers around). Being paid agents for a man we were still technically at war with (we only had a cease-fire in place since Gulf War I) is a crime. Not knowing you were a paid puppet doesn’t really gain you any brownie points. It’s like saying “I did not know a car could kill someone if you struck them with it” – dumb is not an excuse.
Mcdermmott and his idiot pals may have given Saddam the wrong ideas. They may have given him false hope he could play is way out of war. For all we know now McDermmott’s baseless lies about our President may have made it impossible for us to avoid war with Iraq. Who knows how Saddam might have capitulated to the UN’s demands if he felt there was no other way out?
Ignorance is not an excuse to be working for an enemy during times of war. It may minimize the sentence handed out, but it doesn’t negate the crime itself. Come one folks, you don’t need a 2×4 upside the head to figure this one out. These people are taking money from enemies of this nation to stop us from destroying said enemies of this nation. In a fight to the death, which this war on terror is (either we win and they die or they win and we die), you don’t work to help the enemy – and you don’t take money in return (which is so dumb it actually supports the idiot-defense).
I think it’s way past time for some indictments for treason, don’t you think? And Rockefeller too ..They’d sell their soul to the devil for power. Disgusting.
During the last scandal (I forget which one), I saw tons and tons of progressives saying how they police their own. I’m watching and waiting.
.. and just why do Congress-ones take trips on the dime of a “charity†?
Since when did trips for Congress-ones become an “act of charity†?
Just when do charges of treason kick in? Has the bar been so lowered that anything goes? I, for one, am sick and tired of these congressmen and senators of both parties going all over the globe trying to set foreign policy. Don’t they realize that they represent the people in their district and that’s all? Do people get Ptomac fever when they go to Washington? Do they get the big head and think they are way, way above the rest of us? No, what they do is think they are above the law and the Constitution. I wish the American people would get a clue and vote these longtimers out of office. They have been there to long. Their whole attitude is entitlement. I really wish the founding fathers had put term limits in the Constitution. It would settle a lot things.
Also, I would like to know why the go between was indicted but not the recipiants. They are just as guilty as he is. And isn’t it against the law for a congressmen to accept gifts and bribes from foreign powers no matter how it was done or for whatever reason?
If we are going to indict people why don’t we include Teddy Kennedy and his gang who comspired with the USSR to defeat Ronald Reagan’s efforts to bring down that Communist system. KGB files revealed correspondence from Teddy asking the Russians what he could do to thwart Reagan’s efforts. Any American Citizen, regardless of whether he is Joe Six Pack or an elected official, should be held accountable for working with foreign governments and entities against his own country. It has always been treason and it should be labeled treason even in today’s politically correct world. If notations of their activities were added after their names in news stories, People wouldn’t be so likely to forget their treasons. How about : Sen. Teddy Kennedy, who conspired with the USSR to thwart Ronald Reagaon’s efforst to end the cold war, etc, etc. Or Jim McDermit, who illegally tapped Newt Gringrich’s phone and then released the tapes to the press, and went to Iraq on Saddam Hussien’s dime prior to the start of the war with Iraq.
Lee Atwater said, “The public’s memory is about two weeks long.” You have to keep reminding them. The voters are going to forget Obama’s middle name is Hussien because nobody dare mention it any more.
It will be interesting to see if there are further indictments. And I think AJ is right about Saddam not capitulating because of this kind of thing. He had bribed so many people for so long that he thought he could go on buying his way out of trouble. Thanks to guys like this.
When Bill Clinton was president, Saddam was on the list of terrorist supporting dictators. He was not a friend even then. Scarcely a year went by that Clinton did not find a reason to lob cruise missiles at Iraq and they were still under the sanction regime. I honestly do not see how these people can get away with something like this.
One of Thomas Jefferson’s biggest regrets was not placing term limits on members of congress.
If we had a real president, these three would be indicted including Nancy Pelosi.
Vince,
I share your frustrations. But I don’t think indictments are up to the President. “Political witchunt” is all we would hear. The Dem Party hasn’t changed since Vietnam.
And I think Iran is on something of a leash and is being monitored closely.
Bush lets actions speak for him.
All men are not created equal….some are stupid, some are evil, some are both. McDermott personifies what is wrong with politics in this country and the influence stupid , evil people still have in even this glorious form of government. They must be held in check which used to be the role of journalism….thanks to AJ for keeping the light of day on such miscreants…hold them responsible and those who elected them.
BTW: what’s going on with the guy from Louisiana with the money in the fridge, I think he was a democrat with a name close to a former president’s?
“Gassing of the Kurds” American government originally attributed to Iran when he was “our guy.” “technically still at war with”
not if you accept true conservative Ron Paul’s Congress must declare
war explanation, which is why Jane Fonda wasn’t arrested for her actions in Vietnam, incidentially, so Strata here is grasping at
straws.
Besides all this is superfluous. Scott Ritter, (who incidentially proved his reliability by correctly predicting both the no-win quagmire Bush’s coterie didn’t anticipate–and the absence of WMDs)—established that Bush & Co were perfectly aware Saddam was telling the truth when he told Dan Rather on “Sixty Minutes” the Americans knew he no longer had the WMDs.
The “Downing Street Memo” fix was in.
truth (what an oxymoron), when you went to the admitted Downing Street forgeries (yes, the reporter admitted it after I called him on his crappy forgeries) you sent yourself into the too naive too know better.
If you watch “Bush’s War” you will see that ex agents Paul Pillar, (who admits he was subtly browbeaten, and apologizes for his submission,) and Tyler Drumheller vouchsafe that the Downing Street Memo spirited fix was in. When Greg Thielmann, Powell’s chief intelligence aid resigned due to Powell’s sellout at the UN, he also grasped what was ensuing. And of course Ray McGovern
has written widely in agreement on the matter-and caught Cheney with his pants down at a press conference, lying (Cheney) about his lies. “What a tangled we we weave–when we bungle an occupation after we’ve deceived.”
If I was a Surrendercrat, I’d sure use this to show the surge wasn’t working.
A spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahsin al-Sheikhly, was kidnapped from his Baghdad home by armed men on Thursday, security officials told Afp.
An interior ministry official told the Associated Press that three of spokesman’s bodyguards were killed. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to release the information.
The officials said Sheikhly, a Sunni who often appeared with U.S. military and embassy officials at news conferences to tout the successes of the crackdown that began in Baghdad and surrounding areas more than a year ago, was abducted from his home in Baghdad’s al-Amin neighbourhood at around 2:30 pm (1130 gmt).
Truth,
You are so myopic I envision you wearing coke bottle bottoms as glasses. al-Qaeda can hit in Iraq, what they cannot do is thrive. They cannot grow and build a following. They are being hunted by fellow Muslims. That will not change. They are finished, but there will always be some fools who try and keep them alive.
For example, We have crime in the US – but the US is not being run by the gangs or thugs. You are grasping AND missing the total picture. Quite a talent for being mistaken you have there.
You should get your story straight, Strata—you keep shifting from if we leave, Al Qaeda can take over Iraq (that was your theme when you developed “Surrendercrat” propaganda which you repeatedly applied to surrendering Iraq to Al Qaeda!)
Of course Moslems nowhere in the world in numbers want to be part of an international caliphate which would make their national
boundaries meaningless. Al Qaeda types in Iraq never composed more than 10% of the otherwise native and nationalist insurgency; it was your good buddy who pretended otherwise to fearmonger.
When the Sunni Awakening crowd broke away from these foreign jihadists, you shifted propaganda and pretended they had come over to America’s side and permanently. Problem is, Maliki won’t give
allow most of them into his military and many are already decrying America once again, while stillbeing occasionally killed by
a somewhat resilient al Qaeda–which never took its orders from
bin Laden’s crew anyway.
Iraq is in such a state of anarchy, Strata, Shia could have done the kidnapping, Baathists could have done the kidnapping. Point is, you have no friends in Iraq–not even Maliki in the long run.
Iraq is in such a state of anarchy
What do you care?
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/03/executions-in-0.html#more
I also care when you single out Arab groups as if Israel doesn’t practise terror too, example just documented.
About the “consensus” government.
Bush encourages Maliki’s anti Sadr attacks, boasts of how they are a mark of Iraq government success. This from the Arab press today:
The attempt of parliament to meet and take up the issue of the battle with the Mahdi Army failed when the federal legislature could not muster a quorum. The session then turned into a mere discussion session. Al-Hayat, writing in Arabic, says that one reason that parliament could not get a quorum was that the Kurdistan Alliance and the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite) support al-Maliki and boycotted the session.
Consensus government, yeah right.