Maybe Chris Matthews Should Read This
On a semi-regular basis, Hardball’s Chris Matthews marvels at polls that show that a large percentage of Americans believe that Iraq had ties to Al Queda, and that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Matthews asks his Hardball guests how Americans can believe this when there is not a shred of evidence to support it. Maybe he should read Claudia Rosett’s piece in today’s Wall Street Journal.
In Oil-for-Food, “Every contract tells a story,” says John Fawcett, a financial investigator with the New York law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, which has sued the financial sponsors of Sept. 11 on behalf of the victims and their families. In an interview, Mr. Fawcett and his colleague, Christine Negroni, run down the lists of Oil-for-Food authorized oil buyers and relief suppliers, pointing out likely terrorist connections. One authorized oil buyer, they note, was a remnant of the defunct global criminal bank, BCCI. Another was close to the Taliban while Osama bin Laden was on the rise in Afghanistan; a third was linked to a bank in the Bahamas involved in al Qaeda’s financial network; a fourth had a close connection to one of Saddam’s would-be nuclear-bomb makersWe knew before going into Iraq that Saddam was supporting terrorism by paying the families of suicide bombers. We may never know the full extent to which the funds that flowed through the Oil-for-Food program went to terrorist financial networks, but we are seeing some dots starting to connect.
The decision to go into Iraq was about 9/11 and the American people understand that. What Matthews, and others like him, don’t understand is that Iraq wasn’t about 9/11/01 in New York and D.C, but about the potential 9/11/05 in Chicago, or 9/11/06 in San Francisco, or 9/11/07 in some small town in the middle of the Bible Belt. Maybe if the media looked at the Oil-for-Food contracts as closely as they have the Halliburton contracts, we would find out the Americans in those polls weren’t so wrong after all.
-- Lorie Byrd