Sunday, September 19, 2004

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Possible Saddam-Al Qaeda Link Seen in U.N. Oil-for-Food Program

Do they make tin foil hats for the right wing? Because, this just in, breaking news, thank god for fox news, if you play 6 degrees of kevin bacon in the mid-east, you might get what could possibly be a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. More specifcally, between someone (Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed) who runs a company (HSA) that sold something ($20 million dollars of palm oil) to Iraq while it was under sanctions, and someone else (Ahmed Idris Nasreddin) who is "on the U.N. watchlist of entities and individuals belonging to, or affiliated with Al Qaeda". Now, that palm oil was priced at 15% above market value, so Saddam could maybe have been sending $3 million to a guy who knows a guy who may know Osama.

It's estimated by the "General Accountability Office[sic]" (actually the Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office, so it's not a hard mistake to make, although, you know, you could fact check...)(gao.gov) that Saddam got at least $4.4 billion out of the program by overpaying for goods. So, if you do the math, and if I didn't carry the one here, let me know, .07% of the minimum ammount that Saddam overpayed for foodstuffs went to a guy who knows a guy who knows bin laden.

OK. But....

Why is this kind of reasoning and dot-connecting crazy when Michael Moore does it, but newsworthy and groundbreaking when FOX News does it?

(Not that I think it's particularly persuasive when Moore does it, by the way...)

Is this connection the reason that Donald Rumsfeld got a bit confused on Friday, September 10th at the National Press Club?

Saddam Hussein (sic), if he's alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught. And we've not seen him on a video since 2001. Now he's got to be busy. Why is he busy? It's because of the pressure that's being put on him.
...
(actually from earlier in the talk than that other line)
But if you think about it, that's not the way the world really was before September 11th. Consider the world of September 10th and before. Two Americans and six others stood on trial by the Taliban in Afghanistan for the crime of preaching their religion. The leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, Massoud, lay dead, his murder ordered by Saddam Hussein -- by Osama bin Laden, Taliban's co- conspirator. An Iraqi newspaper put out by Saddam Hussein's son Uday called on European corporations to pressure their governments to break with the United States and Britain, so that the sanctions would be lifted.


That's the guy who runs our army, navy, etc. I know he's endearing in a crazy uncle sort of way, but he should at least be able to keep our enemies straight. It's really hard to get fired in this administration, unless you tell the truth about what something will cost.

I'm tempted to mention some of the more direct connections between world leaders and entities guilty of moral and/or criminal wrongdoing that FOX News could be investigating, but I think it would be inappropriate in a criticism of tin-foil-hat journalism to encourage more of it.

Cheers. This one's for Johnny Ramone.

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