Federal prosecutors say 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.

From a Weekly Standard article at the time:

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.”

Contrary to reports put out by ABC News, in their rush to put something up that wasn’t true or maybe ABC is just that stupid, the documents given to them by the Penagon shows that Saddam Hussein had plenty of ties to all sorts of terrorist groups, including radical Islamist jihadis. Ed explains what you will find in the report.

WOW:

How the classified military documents from Iraq, which named the coordinates of where the Army suspected weapons of mass destruction to be hidden, ended up in an Arabic translator’s apartment on Hoyt Street in Brooklyn, is clear.

Not likely to be known anytime soon is what, if anything, the army contractor did with the documents.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, which is prosecuting the case, appears to have little direct evidence that Noureddine Malki passed information on to the insurgency, either during his time in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, or upon his return to America in 2005. But it has raised the possibility that he may have done so. The government has said Malki regularly called phone numbers connected to insurgents and took bribes of at least $11,500 from Sunni tribal leaders.

The government, prosecutors wrote in one court filing, could “establish that the defendant had an opportunity to provide stolen classified information to anti-coalition forces.”

A surge they all opposed!

Are we supposed to just forget that on September 11, 2007, Hillary Clinton stopped short of calling General David Petraeus a liar, whe she told General Petraeus that his progress report on Iraq required “a willing suspension of disbelief?” I’m guessing that to be the case based on this performance on Meet The Press.

Gateway Pundit offers two very important quotes:

Hillary Clinton on October 2, 2002:

“So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interest of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war. It is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president.”

Hillary Clinton on February 7, 2007:

“Nearly four years ago our president rushed us into war in Iraq.”

Yet today, this troubled and dishonest politician is bashing antiwar Barak Obama for his stand against the war we are now winning.

According to the Washington Times, the U.S. press played a crutial role in the Marines loss of control in Fallujah back in 2004. What should have been a victory in a military fight, was anything but that:

“The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion — coalition victory,” read the assessment, prepared by analysts at the U.S. Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC.
“But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. … The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations,” concluded the assessment. …

The authors said the press was “crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations,” from the Iraqi government and the Coalition Provisional Authority, which resulted in a “unilateral cease-fire” by U.S. forces on April 9, after just five days of combat operations.

Much ado about his latest statement in which he says that he opposed the war in Iraq:

During a campaign swing for his wife, former President Bill Clinton said flatly yesterday that he opposed the war in Iraq “from the beginning” — a statement that is more absolute than his comments before the invasion in March 2003.

Before the invasion, Mr. Clinton did not precisely declare that he opposed the war. A week before military action began, however, he did say that he preferred to give weapons inspections more time and that an invasion was not necessary to topple Saddam Hussein.

At the same time, he also spoke supportively about the 2002 Senate resolution that authorized military action against Iraq.

Advisers to Mr. Clinton said yesterday that he did oppose the war, but that it would have been inappropriate at the time for him, a former president, to oppose — in a direct, full-throated manner — the sitting president’s military decision.

H/T to Allahpundit for this link to Tony Blair’s speech, that he gave in New York City, last night:

Islamist extremism is similar to “rising fascism in the 1920s and 1930s”, Tony Blair said last night in his first major speech since leaving office…
He told the audience, which included New York governor Eliot Spitzer and mayor Michael Bloomberg, that Iran was the biggest exporter of the ideology, and that the Islamic republic was prepared to “back and finance terror” to support it…
“Analogies with the past are never properly accurate, and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading but, in pure chronology, I sometimes wonder if we’re not in the 1920s or 1930s again…
He added: “There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone.
“I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone. “They have made their choice and leave us with only one to make - to be forced into retreat or to exhibit even greater determination and belief in standing up for our values than they do in standing up for their’s.”

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. ~Thomas Paine

NEW YORK – Oscar Wyatt, the 83-year-old Texas oilman charged with paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime to win oil contracts under the Oil-For-Food Program, will enter a guilty plea, WNBC.com has learned.

According to law enforcement sources, Wyatt will plead guilty to wire fraud and other federal charges. He is on trial in federal court in Manhattan.

At the time of Wyatt’s indictment in October, 2005, U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said, “The Oil-For-Food Program was designed to provide humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people; these defendants undermined those relief efforts to line their own pockets with oil profits.”

Allahpundit brings up a very good point about a major thoroughfare in the West Bank that was funded by USAID that honors executed Saddam Hussein,  to emphasize ‘values of Arabness, Jihad he represented’

Our State Department’s been covering for these fascist, murderous wretches for more than 30 years. Why wouldn’t we lay down some asphalt for them too?  Their Holocaust-denying “moderate” president met with the leader of Hamas in Damascus over the weekend to see if they could agree about not killing each other. They couldn’t.

The President spoke with  Scott Pelley, of 60 Minutes, at Camp David.  Here is the link to the transcript and here is the video link.  Much was brought up, obviously, but this particular portion is what I was struck by:

PELLEY: Is Muqtada al-Sadr an enemy of the United States?

BUSH: Anybody who murders innocent people or frustrating the ambitions of the Iraqi people and the United States.

PELLEY: I was on the battlefield in Najaf when al-Sadr’s people killed your United States Marines.

BUSH: Right. And we killed them, as you recall.

PELLEY: Is Muqtada al-Sadr an enemy of the United States?

BUSH: If he is ordering his people to kill Americans, he is.

PELLEY: Without al-Sadr, there’s no Maliki government.

BUSH: Well, Mr. Maliki has said publicly that militia, including Jaysh al-Mahdi, will either put down their arms or will be dealt with by Iraqi and US forces. And we’re gonna hold them to it.

I told you Bob Woodward had a knack for having a manuscript ready for publishing at the drop of a body!  According to Scott, he is publishing a book based on a secret interview he had with Saddam:

Mr. Woodward, who recently permitted his employer to publish a similar covert interview with the late former President Gerald Ford, said Mr. Hussein agreed to the no-holds-barred chat on the condition that the transcript be embargoed until after he “retired from public life,” which he did earlier today.

“I have always thought that President Bush did the right thing when he ordered the invasion,” Mr. Hussein told the star reporter. “However, I never understood why he made WMD such a big deal. Those canisters are so easy to hide and ship, and the lab just looks like any other lab after we scrub it.”

Good, because I don’t see anything wrong with the fact that you had a room full of emotionally spent witnesses to the execution of a brutal dictator, and some could not control their emotions.  Get over it!  Could our press go out of it’s way to any greater degree in order to make a story out of a non-story? 

The Bush administration sent conflicting signals Wednesday about the taunting and baiting that accompanied Saddam Hussein’s execution, with the White House declining to join criticism of the procedure and the State Department and U.S. military raising questions about it.

What is so conflicting about it?  It wasn’t our operation, therefore what is the Whitehouse to criticize?   I would like to see the AP spend a little more time explaining the Jamil Hussein fiasco they have on their hands.  If that proves to be too much for them, how about they start covering the Conyers flap…that does send conflicting messages.  It doesn’t look like either of us will get our wish!

The title, Rush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned, should give the reader a good idea of what they are in store for. The reader only need read a few sentences such as: “Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power”, “the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows”, and “that might have assured Mr. Hussein a more dignified passage to his end.”, to understand that the authors seem a bit upset that the Iraqis followed their laws and are none to pleased that their hero, Saddam Hussein, was put to death.

On December 26, 2006, the Iraqi Appeals Court upheld  the death sentence for Saddam Hussein in his first trial and said it must be carried out within 30 days. 

Did you really expect the NYT’s to ring in the New Year any differently?
 

Via ALLAHPUNDIT

Click image to watch

AP Says: “His family’s going to bury him in Ramadi, ground zero of the Sunni insurgency, ostensibly to prevent Shiites from desecrating his grave but actually to give the local barbarians a little inspiration. It’ll work, too.”

Others blogging:

• Blogs of War
• Right on the Right » Saddam Hussein Coverage Part 2
• Right on the Right » Saddam Execution Video- Uncut
• Bill’s Bites
• Patterico’s Pontifications » Saddam’s Last Words: Three Different Versions (Plus Video)
• VerbalCaricature.com : Exaggerating the News to Truth
• Assorted Babble by Suzie
• JammieWearingFool
• The Political Pit Bull
• Cao’s Blog
• Right Pundits
• FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog » Saddam Hussein Watch: Saddam’s Execution Video UNCUT
• Michelle Malkin
• 7.62mm Justice
• RightWinged.com
• Jihadi Du Jour
• Knickerbocker News
• Frenchman
• Macsmind - Conservative Commentary and Common Sense » Blog Archive » For the left, let the mourning begin
• RightWinged.com
• Planblog » Blog Archive » Execution 2.0
• Secular Blasphemy
• Church and State
• Bill’s Bites
• Tom “Papa” Bryant
• Demon Blog
• Infidels Are Cool » Blog Archive » Saddam Bites The Dust
• Saddam Executed [ Tempus Fugit | TxFx.net ]
• Leaning Straight Up
• Saddam is dead UPDATED « Hidden Dragon

An American soldier ties a rope around a statue of Saddam Hussein shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 (Peter Nicholls)

Word just in from al-Arabiya that Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti is dead.  Al-Hurra is reporting it too. Al-Hurra’s the American-backed Arab station, FYI, so their sources here are probably trustworthy. HuffPo “celebrates.”  Al-Arabiya (via Fox) says  photographers and cameramen were on the scene.

Iraqi-Americans cheer reports of Saddam’s execution

The AP Has this:

Najeeb al-Nueimi, a member of Saddam’s legal team in Doha, Qatar, said he too requested a final meeting with the deposed Iraqi leader. “His daughter in Amman was crying, she said, ‘Take me with you,’” al-Nueimi said late Friday. But he said their request was rejected.

Also to be hanged were Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, the adviser said.

Picture blatantly stolen from 7.62mm Justice 

From Fox News:

“The final meetings have taken places,” the official said, adding in Iraqis have requested Sddam be turned over to them. “The process is now in the final stage.”

Earlier, the Associated Press reported via a top Iraqi official that Saddam would be hanged before 10 p.m. ET Friday night (6 a.m. Saturday in Baghdad).

The official witnesses to the impending execution gathered Friday in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone in final preparation for his hanging, and state television broadcast footage of his regime’s atrocities.

Allahpundit has a great roundup.

Others blogging:

H/T to Ace for this link:

According to a U.S. military officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, Saddam will be hanged before the start of the Eid religious holiday, which begins this Sunday.

The hanging could take place as early as Friday, NBC’s Richard Engel reported.

The U.S. military received a formal request from the Iraqi government to transfer Saddam to Iraqi authorities, NBC reported on Thursday, which is one of the final steps required before his execution. His sentence, handed down last month, ordered that he be hanged within 30 days.

Happy New Year indeed Ace! And a special thanks to ALLAHPUNDIT if he can come through with his promise to do everything in his power to post the video tape of the execution!