Let me add two more stories that I found.
1. 40 Russian Firms Accused of Hussein Ties
Jan 30, 2004
40 Russian Firms Accused of Hussein Ties
The Moscow Times More than 40 Russian companies, including entities linked to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Communist Party and the Liberal Democratic Party, allegedly took part in an illegal kickback scheme for trading Iraqi oil under Saddam Hussein's regime, according to documents obtained by Baghdad-based newspaper al-Mada.
"Almost all Russian companies that worked in Iraq [were involved in this]," said Fakhri Karim, the editor of the recently created newspaper, in an interview with Vremya Novostei published Thursday.
"There are Russian diplomats of a very high level, too," he said.
Vremya Novostei published last weekend a list of more than 270 people and organizations from 46 countries including Russia, France, China, Italy, Austria, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, who allegedly took part in a scheme to trade contraband Iraqi oil in breach of the United Nations regulated oil-for-food deal.
The newspaper says it based its list on documents obtained from the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
Iraq's Governing Council on Wednesday ordered an investigation into al-Mada's allegations.
On Thursday, the Orthodox Church called its inclusion in the list "nonsense."
"This is some kind of nonsense. I have no other word for this," Metropolitan Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church's external relations department told reporters Thursday, Interfax reported.
"Nothing of the sort happened and could not have happened."
LDPR chief Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was a vocal supporter of the Hussein regime, has also denied having taken part in the scheme.
"The Communist Party took part. I was told this by several representatives of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry," he said, Interfax reported.
"But I did not get one dinar, one dollar from Hussein."
A spokesperson from the Communist Party has also denied the allegations.
An al-Mada employee told Vedomosti that the list of entities taking part in the scheme also included representatives of the Chechen administration, Yabloko and Emercom.
Emercom, a trading company affiliated with the Emergency Situations Ministry, was accused by Western diplomats back in the summer of 2002 as having taken part in a kickback scheme for Iraqi oil.
At the time, the ministry denied any wrongdoing and said Emercom had not violated UN regulations in its dealings with Iraq.
A spokeswoman for Yabloko denied the allegations in an interview with Vedomosti.
Karim told Vremya Novostei that the affair was casting a pall over Russia's relations with the current Iraqi administration.
L Copyright 2002, The Moscow Times. All Rights Reserved
Story 2.
Saddam's Cash
From the May 5, 2003 issue: And the journalists and politicians he bought with it.
by Stephen F. Hayes
Editor's note, 1/30/04: On January 25, 2004, a daily newspaper in Iraq called al Mada published a list of individuals and organizations who it says received oil from the now-deposed regime. Among those listed is Shakir al Khafaji, an Iraqi-American from Detroit, who ran "Expatriate Conferences" for the regime in Baghdad. Al Khafaji also contributed $400,000 to the production of Scott Ritter's film "In Shifting Sands." Finally, al Khafaji arranged travel and financing for the "Baghdad Democrats"--Jim McDermott, Mike Thompson and David Bonior--last fall. Following the trip, al Khafaji contributed $5,000 to McDermott's Legal Defense Fund. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has contacted McDermott's office about returning the contribution. McDermott spokesman Mike Decesare said this morning that he had not yet spoken with McDermott, since it's three hours earlier on the West Coast. Asked about the contribution and the subsequent allegations about al Khafaji and oil, Decesare said, "I don't know anything about it." THE WEEKLY STANDARD will post a response from McDermott's office as soon as we get one. In the meantime, it's worth taking a second look at "Saddam's Cash."
SCATTERED AMONG the loose papers and bound files unearthed last week at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad was "letter no. 140/4/5," labeled "Confidential and Personal" and addressed to "The President's Office--Secretariat." The letter concerns George Galloway, a pro-Saddam member of the British Parliament, who founded a charity known as the Mariam Appeal, ostensibly to aid Iraqi children suffering under U.N. sanctions. The missive, from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, is a request that money be funneled directly to Galloway. It reads in part:
His projects and future plans for the benefit of [Iraq] need financial support to become a motive for him to do more work. And because of the sensitivity of getting money directly from Iraq, it is necessary to grant him oil contracts and special and necessary commercial opportunities to provide him with a financial income under commercial cover without being connected to him directly.
The letter further conveys Galloway's demand that "the name of Mr. Galloway or his wife should not be mentioned."
It also describes a meeting between Galloway and an Iraqi intelligence officer and states that Galloway sought to "ensure confidentiality in his financial and commercial relations with the country and reassure his personal security." Galloway, the letter went on, "needs continuous financial support from Iraq." He got it. Galloway "obtained through Mr. Tariq Aziz three million barrels of oil every six months, according to the oil-for-food programme. His share would be only between 10 and 15 cents per barrel. He also obtained a limited number of food with the Ministry of Trade."
The letter, discovered by David Blair, a Baghdad-based reporter for the London Daily Telegraph, and his Iraqi translator, was revealed early last week. The next day, the Telegraph reported that Galloway had asked for more money, something the regime initially said it couldn't provide.
Galloway denies everything. He says the documents were forged--perhaps by foreign intelligence or by the Daily Telegraph. In a move sure to galvanize his critics, Galloway issued his denials from his vacation home--worth $400,000--on the coast of Portugal.
The Galloway revelations surely help explain the ravings of a fringe British politician. But they are more important for what they reveal--or more precisely, remind us--about the Iraqi regime.
Saddam Hussein has a long history of bribing anyone who could help his regime--businessmen, diplomats, politicians, and journalists. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, Saddam lavished Arab leaders with gifts and contracts in exchange for their support. Shortly before his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, he shipped 100 new Mercedes 200 Series cars to top editors in Egypt and Jordan. Two days before the first attack, he offered Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak $50 million in cash, ostensibly for grain. After the invasion, he sought to buy neutrality or at least complacency by promising Mubarak and other Arab leaders that he would forgive all Kuwaiti debts once Iraq annexed the tiny nation as its nineteenth province.
As the Galloway affair makes clear, these practices continued throughout the 1990s, despite the increased scrutiny of Iraq's financial dealings by the United Nations. Before the recent conflict, says Tareq al-Mezrem from the Kuwaiti Information Office, the Iraqi regime gave journalists luxury "villas in Jordan, Tunisia, and even Lebanon.
Some of the transactions were straightforward cash payments, often in U.S. dollars, handed out from Iraqi embassies in Arab capitals--luxury cars delivered to top editors, Toyotas for less influential journalists. "This was not secret," says Salama Nimat, a Jordanian journalist who was jailed briefly in 1995 in that nation for highlighting the corruption. "Most of it was done out in the open."
Other transactions were surreptitious or deliberately complex--coveted Iraqi export licenses for family members of politicians, oil kickbacks through third parties, elaborate "scholarship" arrangements. In a region where leaders count their fortunes by the billion and workers by the penny, such payoffs are common. The Saudis, of course, have financed public works throughout the Middle East and Africa. But no one played the game like Saddam Hussein.
The Galloway affair was triggered when a reporter happened upon a slim, blue folder at one of the 23 Iraqi ministries--a snowflake in the avalanche of information loosed by the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Some of the regime's records no longer exist. Iraqi officials destroyed some before the war began. Coalition bombs wiped out others. Looters made off with more. Still, Bush administration sources say they have recovered enough Iraqi government and Baath party documents to fill 100 semi-trailers. "We're overwhelmed with information," says one Pentagon official. "It's going to take a long time to go through it all."
That process is just now beginning--a fact that is surely rattling nerves around the world.
IRAQ IS WINNING the battles in the propaganda war with
a modest media strategy, despite a multi-million dollar U.S. campaign featuring painstakingly choreographed briefings and Hollywood-style sets. Undeterred by America's elaborate media plan, Iraq is making its mark on the airwaves with its decidedly basic approach, media pundits say.
From a crude Baghdad set, Iraqi ministers each day knock down Western media reports and list their latest claims of conquest, sometimes wielding chrome-plated Kalashnikovs. Unlike America and its allies, theirs is a simple message delivered directly: "We will defeat the infidel invaders."
Despite poorly-lit surroundings and a sea of microphones often crowding the view, Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf has become something of a global television star . . .
Those words came from Reuters' European media reporter Merissa Marr on April 1, 2003, in a news report that despite the dateline apparently was not a parody. Marr either did not know or chose to ignore a crucial fact: Scores of journalists throughout the Arab world and Europe were on Saddam Hussein's payroll.
"For years, the Iraqi leader has been waging an intensive, sometimes clandestine, and by most accounts highly effective image war in the Arab world," wrote Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Geraldine Brooks in an exposé published February 15, 1991. "His strategy has ranged from financing friendly publications and columnists as far away as Paris to doling out gifts as big as new Mercedes-Benzes."
That campaign continued until days before the regime was deposed. "If they're not bought and paid for, they're at least rented," says a top national security official, who adds that the administration has intelligence implicating big-name journalists throughout the Arab world and Europe.
"I could give you lots of names," says Tareq al-Mezrem. "Everyone knows them on the street. Everyone knows this information."
In a series of interviews conducted in Kuwait City and Washington in recent weeks, Arab journalists and media experts said the same thing. Several of those interviewed, with assurances of confidentiality, provided names, lots of them. If their reports are accurate, the Iraqi regime's "modest media strategy" so appealing to Reuters' Marr was actually an elaborate scheme to buy victory in the propaganda war with the United States.
"To lots of people, Saddam Hussein and his regime was a godsend," says a Washington-based columnist for a prominent Arabic-language newspaper. "Only a few journalists [in the Arab world] didn't take money from him."
