Post-SOTU Al-Kaidee-On-The-Run OPEN THREAD (3 UPDATES)

To the previous poster, with all due respect, shut-up. Susan was not making a sexual reference. Personally, I believe Obama views politics as a sport. His arrogance gets in the way of him recognizing that politics is not a game, it is about the experiences of people’s lives. He is a little, little man, and that is coming through more and more these days. I once thought I could support him, but he has demonstrated his arrogance again and again and again. It is shocking for a man who actually has so few accomplishments. I say this not to be mean, or to bash Senator Obama, but because I am actually disgusted with his arrogance and gracelessness.

I was not disappointed when I heard the 16 words I was waiting for. “Iran has longer range missle and is making nukes for desert…Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran”

Keith O played them and had to remind the viewers that this said tonight and not 5 years ago….

Chris Hitchens pillories Hillary’s husband as Slate. The magazine started to help insert more right leaning topics into the mainstream, from a supposedly independent perspective.

Huffington was running it without the author byline on their front page, after complaint they added his name, as a qualifier of its author, to any who cared to link it for a read.

The statement itself, ‘Clintons are playing race card,’ is what they want out there.

Never mind that Hitchens is a windbag and hates the Clintons, to the point he made a cottage industry attacking on them.

It surprisingly matches previous opposition talking points put out by campaign staffers.

At another site I speculated that Rezko’s $3.5 million dollar friend was part of the Contra network, our Iraq side of the deal.

Seeing he lived in London the INC immediately came to mind.

Turns out he’s involved with both, as most of the contras were.

The Luxembeourg banking interests of Auchi, that hooked up with Rezko, also was a middle man for arms dealing into Iraq with a contra financier.

Denis Robert und Ernest Backes, two journalists, have written a book, Revelations, about the Leir/Auchi connection.

The book covers Auchi to a considerable extent.

He facilitated its entry and integration into World business and Finance. Henry J. Leir, who died three years ago in New York, headed many companies for decades from New York, Luxemborg and Lausanne, in many areas (raw materials, metalls, weapons, finance), and by the fifties he was already one of the world’s richest men. In close cooperation with the political establishment he used Luxemburg as a basis and diving board for his businesses. He succeeded in making the country one of the most trustworthy of America’s partners. His nearness to the Republican party as to the Government of Luxemburg and the court of the duke he employed to the glory and success of his divergent businesses. ”

A man who, one would assume, would shrink with horror from partnering with a minion of Saddam. Yet Auchi and Leir seemed to hit it off. Perhaps this is because Leir, and Luxemborg banks, have a long history of supping with various devils. Roberts’ book reveals more than the machinations of Auchi in the present. Ernst Backes was a central figure, apparently, in the setting up of an international clearing house in Luxemborg. He was involved, for instance, in the transfer of seven million dollars from a private American bank to the national bank of Algeria in 1980, which was the basis for the arms for hostages deal cemented between Reagan and Iran.

http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2003/04/bollettino-bagmen-coups-are-expensive.html
Unfortunately, his link will no longer hook up for me to verify. Some corroborating links do hook up, mostly UK guardian, other EU papers. The two key items do not, but contain directive headers.
Look further for Blair’s connection–Labour blocks extradition of Iraqi tycoon | Special reports
observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,887393,00.html

Again, his good friend appears to have been a middle man for Israeli proliferation as well.

The Observer article doesn’t touch on his connections with one Henry J. Leir. If you touch on that connection, you can get sued for libel, as Le Soir in Belgium found out. There is an article of mysterious provenance floating on the web none the less, in which it is claimed that Auchi was connected as an arms dealer with Leir. Leir, apparently, is golden: a major player in channeling enriched uranium to Israel — again, for you libel lawyers out there, this is all wink wink. Leir endowed a chair at Tufts university in — oh, spirit of the age — peace, and seems to be an establishment figure in America — but in Europe he has a different reputation.

Six degrees of separation from the yellowcake forgery?

Why yes, Rezko’s overseas financier is indeed an Oil for Food holdover. He aslo is connected with direct ties to the October Surprise, from the above thread comment.

Iraqi Born Billionaire Has Stake in Bank That Holds Oil for Food Funds
By TIMOTHY L. O’BRIEN
http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/news030430b.html

One of the largest private shareholders in BNP Paribas, the French bank that holds more than $13 billion in Iraqi oil funds administered through the United Nation’s oil for food program, is an Iraqi born businessman who once helped to arm Iraq in the 1980′s and brokered business deals with Saddam Hussein’s government, according to public records and interviews.

The involvement of the businessman, the British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, raises questions about how carefully the United Nations has vetted the bank in its continuing role as repository of oil for food funds.

The oil for food program began in 1996 as an effort to ease the impact of economic sanctions on civilians after the United Nations imposed them on Iraq in 1990. Although the United Nations pressed Iraq to allow banks other than BNP Paribas to be the primary repository for billions of dollars in oil revenue, Iraq successfully insisted that BNP Paribas remain the sole caretaker of the program’s escrow account

.
Oil scandal billionaire tells French court of bribes
Iraqi-born Briton describes huge kickbacks
Paul Webster and Martin Bright in Paris
Wednesday May 7, 2003
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,950522,00.html

An Iraqi born British billionaire told a French court yesterday how he had paid millions of pounds in kickbacks to French oil executives.
Nadhmi Auchi, 65, reputedly Britain’s seventh richest man, is one of 37 company administrators and business partners accused of being involved in France’s biggest postwar financial scandal in which the oil firm, now TotalFinaElf, allegedly paid out huge sums in bribes and backhanders to expand its empire.

April 18, 2003
Oil, Food and a Whole Lot of Questions
By CLAUDIA ROSETT
New York Times

As for the program’s vast bank accounts, the public is told only that letters of credit are issued by a French bank, BNP Paribas. Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq, entitled to goods funded by 13 percent of the program’s revenues, have been trying for some time to find out how much interest they are going to receive on $4 billion in relief they are still owed. The United Nations treasurer told me that that no outside party, not even the Kurds, gets access to those figures.

Then there is the program’s compensation commission, which is supposed to dole out 25 percent of all oil for food proceeds to people and companies harmed by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It has so far dispensed $17.5 billion and approved a further $26.2 billion. Who decides on compensation claims? Commission members are picked from a “register of experts” supplied by Mr. Annan. One staff member told me that that this register cannot be released because it is “not public.” The identities of the individual claimants are, of course, “confidential.”

So oil for food scammers were basically laundering funds back into the USA for propping up politicans and running land flips. Let’s look a bit closer at relief for the credit bubble now!
http://boards.biography.com/click.jspa?searchID=-1&messageID=177454

Wingers from the boards who maintained copies of those links are due a schadenfreude overdose.

Perhaps Obama will want to ask Rezko about his financier Auchi and the man’s role in supplying arms for genocide in the Sudan:

Paging Alan

Comments Off Posted in ROPMA by Andrew Ian Dodge on June 8th, 2007

The little-known Anglo-Arab Organisation claims to promote a better understanding between Britain and the Arab world. Its president, Nadhmi Auchi, recently met with the genocidal President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, and invited him to come and visit Britain. Bashir accepted.

This may come as something of a shock to one of the AAO’s patrons, Conservative shadow secretary of state for transport, Alan Duncan. Only a month ago he signed an early day motion on Sudan Divestment, which campaigns to end global financial support for the Sudanese government. Seems like grammar schools aren’t the only thing that the Tories are in a state of confusion over.

Via: Popbitch.

The Pentagon has asked the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad to cancel three contracts for Iraqi cell phone networks, worth about $500 million annually, citing fraud and the companies’ links to an Iraqi-born Briton with ties to Saddam Hussein. According to the Washington Times, “the companies are suspected of rigging the bids for the cell phone contracts in favor of Nadhmi Auchi, who owns part of Orascom and a controlling interest in the bank BNP Paribas, which ‘is the French bank selected by Saddam Hussein to run the Oil for Food program.’”

posted at 7:14 AM by GS(he linked to the Washington Times, front page, from the 06/20/2004 blog date).
pondblog.blogspot.com

People were making some connections on these campaign characters from day one of the political season, including this lady:

(Has anyone investigated Chicago Obama’s connections to Tony Rezko and Nadhmi Auchi? Sometimes ya gotta wonder which foreign power brokers pay who to help bring about the new world the billionaires are paid to bring about. But – I guess the campaign laws are too severe for anyone to do anything illegal, right?)

http://kateablog.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabama-tv.html

She can speak with some gravitas perspecitve:

Mother of five (four in military uniform including daughter-in-law). Grandmother of seven. Central America (under Reagan/Bush) – Been there, done that. When I was 17 it was a very good year for small town girls….

Keith has Sen.Kennedy saying Barack was against the war.

I see Obama making statements against not fighting a “smart war” at the time. He did say we should unilateral force.

Yet Sen.Kennedy(voted in support of AUMF) assures me Obama opposed it.

In October 2002, Obama told an anti-war rally in Chicago: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

So, judging by his votes in the Senate, we can assume he’s convinced we’re fighting Iraq and Afghanistan smartly, otherwise he’d oppose it.

He can hold the vote against anyone else(one person voted against it on record in both Legislative bodies, and 2 Senator, 10 Reps. who voted present).

To do so he’d have to have voted against the ‘dumb war’ funding Bush is waging. That would be political suicide with soldiers held hostage by Bush policy.

Didn’t Colin Powell assure Obama that he’d fight the war smartly?

I take umbrage at the notion he opposed the war, he was actually neutral.

When Barack Obama was a state legislator running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2003 opposition to the war in Iraq was extremely popular in African American communities and among the progressive voters he needed in order to win. Brother Obama was on the case, doing what he had to do to sew up that vote early, showing up at local antiwar meetings and rallies, and making speeches like the one opposing “a dumb war” which is now trotted out as evidence of his fervent and prescient antiwar stand.

Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, and by late May declared “mission accomplished” and victory in “the battle of Iraq” from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. With the president riding high in national polls, this reporter checked Obama’s campaign web site and noted that all the evidence of and references to candidate Obama’s prior opposition to the invasion of Iraq had been deleted. The visionary Barack Obama appeared to be leaning rightward with the prevailing wind, distancing himself from his prior opposition to the war.

After calls to Obama’s campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his web site and public statements. We noted with consternation that the Democratic Leadership Council, the right wing Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party, had apparently vetted and approved Obama, naming him as one of its “100 to Watch” that season. This is what real journalists are supposed to do — fact check candidates, investigate the facts, tell the truth to audiences and hold the little clay feet of politicians and corporations to the fire.

Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator’s June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three “bright line” issues that clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama’s response on June 26, 2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles can be found here.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=468&Itemid=34
Four years after senatorial candidate Barack Obama had to be summoned back into open opposition to the war in Iraq, scant weeks after his admission that he would not bring the troops home before the end of 2013, and in the face of dozens of public statements between 2003 and the present advocating an extra hundred thousand bodies to the Army and Marines, a higher Pentagon budget than even Bush is asking for, and the bombing of Iran and Pakistan, history has been rewritten to make Obama an early, consistent and principled voice for peace. This history is written, of course, by the same media that sold us the lies which enabled the war to begin with.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/12/388346.html
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
The man is quite impassioned about the topic. unfortunately he doesn’t cross link his items, you can can still google most of the phrases up.

He’s got some amazing insight to Obama, as a the hopeful future triangulator in chief.

He is pretty much diagnosing Obama as a DLC amnesiac.

He quotes DLC literature, which mirrors Obama’s own approach, though Barack later issued a disclaimer directly to the writer.

Barack Obama is listed in the DLC/New Democrats directory of local elected officials, and was featured in its 100 Democratic Leaders to Watch in 2003. It would be a shame if he is in the process of becoming “ideologically freed” from the opinions of the African American and other Democrats whose votes he needs to win.

Here is the insight of the DLC:

The DLC/New Democrat position is identical to that of the White House, “free” and scornful of all opposition voices. Here we have it the words of DLC founder Al From.

” … Democrats must overcome both their own and the opposition’s partisan instincts, and act in the national interest. The president’s decision to prosecute this war without explicit authorization from the United Nations was a close call, but it was the right call.
” … Iraq is clearly involved in both the quest for weapons of mass destruction and in fomenting anti-Western terrorism, whether or not there are direct links between Baghdad and Al Qaeda. The risks of war are eclipsed by the risk of tolerating a conjunction between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, in a country ruled by a bitter enemy of America, and in the most volatile region of the world.”

The articles occur after the war, and aren’t really filled with strident objections to the war, based on contact with his office.

There are several phases of policy he seems to have adhered, falling prey to the mission accomplished state in removing the reference then from his website.

Keep in mind this is a writer with a background of political activism, opposition to conflict, and personal involvement with voter registration.

He has some very good background on Obama, who helped Carol Moseley get to the Senate, and he also helped Bill Clinton with a ’92 Presidential campaign with his efforts in that state.

I’m pretty confident if you read that you’ll confirm your previous belief for or against, since he’s done policy tightwires across dual narratives.

The writing is quite good, an impassioned skeptic is the best measure of things. He’s got every reason to want to believe in the energy and enthusiasm, and still tempers this with a critical lens.

It would be nice to see his role in media elevated in any case, maybe visits to his site will help that. His opinion now would also be valued in regards to how it has or has not changed past his 2008 posting of these archives.

His concerns for the candidate may be mirrored elsewhere.

Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Chicago), perhaps Obama’s most prominent supporter among local elected officials, knows well the power of passion in the political process.

You think perhaps Bill Clinton was alluding to such a connection, that the energy and some of the persons who helped him(Jackson) win there, were still in play for that state when Sen.Obama won? That his son Jesse L. Jackson Jr. often works with matters in Illinois State from the Rep. to Sen. perspective for their offices in the US Congress?

How many of the reporters were familiar enough with the background to say so?

Perhaps Chicago papers could note it, but there’s so much trouble around Rezko that there’s no room for other topics up front.

Susan,

I counted the word freedom eight times. Hic!

Mr. Murder,

It wouldn’t surprise me if Auchi has ties to Marc Rich. Follow the breadcrumbs.

So knowing Marc Rich all of a year equals Rezko’s seventeen years?

Was Marc Rich the number one contributor to the Clintons?

Obama said he knew Rezko for “five hours” and that was it. That’s not even a good liar. He admits later he knew the man longer.

I’m not buyin’ it… for me the important story of the evening was Sen. Clinton giving a standing ovation to Bush’s lie that the surge was a success. Who is she kidding?