"Madam, I'm Saddam." Did Condi Rice approve money for Iraq's oil-for-food program, back in the days of Saddam Hussein? The right-wingers talk of that program as though it were the greatest corruption to afflict mankind since Eve bit the apple. But:
Condi sat on the board of directors of Chevron Corp. while they were paying illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime to purchase Iraqi oil from unscrupulous, shady dealers as part of the Oil-for-Food program...And yet Rice herself has decried the Oil-For-Food program. Emptywheel goes into this matter in some depth:
The Iraqis started demanding the kickbacks in the summer of 2000. And at the time, Condi, had she been performing her fiduciary duty to Chevron’s shareholders, would had to have known about the dealings. See, she was head of Chevron’s public policy committee, which, according to the Times, "oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company." The committee held three meetings in 2000, according to SEC filings.
Condi's neocon buddies spent two years investigating the oil for food program as their surrogate "crime" in the absence of the WMD. Why isn't Condi responsible for that crime? Why isn't Dick Cheney responsible for the bribes paid to Nigeria while he was CEO of Halliburton?Mr. Tenet, about that PDB: More people are paying attention to George Tenet's confirmation that, yes, he really did go to Crawford to warn W about Bin Laden's attack plans. But perhaps the former DCI can tell us whether the PDB available to the public was originally ten pages longer?
Also in that earlier post, I discussed then-current reports that the CIA had a man within Bin Laden's organization. More recent accounts hold that it was the French who got a "man inside." What did the French tell Tenet, and what did Tenet tell the President?
RFK Jr.: 'Put Rove and Griffin in jail!' Tim Griffin, a.k.a. "Rove's Brain," is now the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas -- the guy who replaced corruption-fighter Bud Cummins.
“Timothy Griffin,” said Kennedy,”who is the new US attorney in Arkansas, was actually the mastermind behind the voter fraud efforts by the Bush Administration to disenfranchise over a million voters through ‘caging’ techniques - which are illegal.”Joe Conason endorses the October Surprise thesis of the 1980 election. Conason, it seems, got as peeved as I did with Guiliani's clam that the Iranians released the hostages on inaugural day because they were so frightened by Ronnie's aura of testosterone.
Available evidence strongly indicates that when the Iranian regime released American hostages in January 1981, within hours of the first Reagan inauguration, that decision had nothing to do with fear of the new President and everything to do with a prearranged deal. While no proof of that plot has ever emerged, the covert sequel that commenced three years later certainly arouses suspicion."No proof," Joe? The October Surprise thesis has been confirmed by:
Between 1984 and 1986, the Reagan administration tried to free American hostages in Lebanon from their Shiite captors, not by confronting the terrorists militarily but by negotiating with their presumed Iranian sponsors. By then, Reagan had already retreated from Lebanon, withdrawing the Marines after the terrorist bombing of their Beirut barracks had claimed 241 American lives.
* French intelligence chieftain Alexandre de Marenches
* Former Russian prime minister Sergei V. Stepashin
* Israeli secret agent Ari Ben-Menashe
* Former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr
* Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
* Former Israeli prime minister Yitshak Shamir.
I doubt that you could ever have gotten those six guys to agree on anything else. They probably would not have agreed that the sun is hot. But they all said that, to their personal knowledge, the October Surprise thesis describes actual events. After a certain point, we have to consider the matter resolved beyond intelligent debate.
1 comment:
Post a Comment