Saddam Funded Terrorists
Captain Ed
The Scotsman, doing yeoman work on the Duelfer report on the Iraq Survey Group investigation, reports that recently uncovered documents reveal a series of payments to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is a PLO splinter group that has spent most of the time since Oslo setting off car bombs to derail the peace processes, such as they are:
<<<The PFLP, whose history of terrorism dates back to the "black September" hijackings of 1970, was personally vetted by Saddam to receive oil vouchers worth £40 million.
The deal has been uncovered by US investigators, trawling millions of pages of documents showing a network of diplomats bribed by Saddam’s regimes, and political parties who qualified for backhanded payments from Baghdad.
The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which is still working its way through 20,000 boxes of documents from Saddam’s Baath party discovered only recently, found a list of pressure groups bankrolled by Saddam.
Using the United Nations’ own oil-for-food scheme - ironically intended as a sanction to control the behaviour of his dictatorship - Saddam gave Awad Ammora & Partners, a Syrian company, two million barrels of oil.
Documents handed over to US authorities by a former Iraqi oil minister only four months ago show that this was a front for the PFLP - which was then embarked on a spate of car bombings aimed at Israeli officials.>>>
Unlike other deals listed in the Oil-For-Food program, the AAP deal was completed, meaning the money went to the PFLP as planned. Forty million pounds sterling went from Saddam directly to terrorists, and long-standing terrorists at that. The PFLP accomplished the spectacular simultaneous hijacking of four American jets in 1970, an eerie foreshadowing of 9/11 and likely an inspiration for the al-Qaeda operation. They've focused more on bombings targeting Israel in the past few years, and just announced this week that they would merge with Hamas.
Not only does this show how the UN allowed money to flow through Saddam to our (other) enemies, aided and abetted by our so-called allies that some feel are essential to approving our national-security initiatives, it demonstrates that Saddam had no qualms about funding and supporting terrorists. Bear in mind that these payments went out while Saddam was supposedly "contained" and "in his box", as John Kerry likes to put it. Saddam never had it so good, we now know; he could rely on his European enablers to veto any attempt to enforce UNSC resolutions and to turn a blind eye to the massive corruption that allowed the UN to feed Saddam's iron grip on Iraqi oil revenue. Saddam, in turn, spread the wealth around to terrorists like the PFLP.
Perhaps now the American media will finally start telling the truth about Saddam. Or perhaps they'll continue to wait until November 3.
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