- Well, ho ho ho! It's an early Christmas for James Baker
III.
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- All year the elves at his law firm, Baker Botts of Texas,
have been working day and night to prevent the families of the victims
of the 9/11 attack from seeking information from Saudi Arabia on the Kingdom's
funding of Al Qaeda fronts.
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- It's tough work, but this week came the payoff when President
Bush appointed Baker, the firm's senior partner, to restructure the debts
of the nation of Iraq.
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- And who will net the big bucks under Jim Baker's plan?
Answer: his client, Saudi Arabia, which claims $30.7 billion due from Iraq
plus $12 billion in reparations from the First Gulf war.
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- Puppet Strings
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- Let's ponder what's going on here.
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- We are talking about something called "sovereign
debt." And unless George Bush has finally 'fessed up and named himself
Pasha of Iraq, he is not their sovereign. Mr. Bush has no authority to
seize control of that nation's assets nor its debts.
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- But our President is not going to let something as trivial
as international law stand in the way of a quick buck for Mr. Baker. To
get around the wee issue that Bush has no legal authority to mess with
Iraq's debt, the White House has crafted a neat little subterfuge. The
official press release says the President has not appointed Mr. Baker.
Rather Mr. Bush is "responding to a request from the Iraqi Governing
Council." That is, Bush is acting on the authority of the puppet government
he imposed on Iraqis at gunpoint.
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- I will grant the Iraqi "government" has some
knowledge of international finance; its key member, Ahmed Chalabi, is a
convicted bank swindler.
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- The Bush team must see the other advantage in having
the rump rulers of Iraq pretend to choose Mr. Baker; the U.S. Senate will
not have to review or confirm the appointment. If you remember, Henry Kissinger
ran away from the 9/11 commission with his consulting firm tucked between
his legs after the Senate demanded he reveal his client list. In the case
of Jim Baker, who will be acting as a de facto U.S. Treasury Secretary
for international affairs, our elected Congress will have no chance to
ask him who is paying his firm, nor even require him to get off conflicting
payrolls.
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- This takes the Bush administration' Conflicts-R-Us appointments
process to a new low.
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- Or maybe there's no conflict at all. If you see Jim Baker's
new job as working not to protect a new Iraqi democracy but to protect
the loot of the old theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the conflict disappears.
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- Iraq's debt totals something on the order of $120 billion
to $150 billion, depending on who's counting. And who's counting is very
important.
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- Much of the so-called debt to Saudi Arabia was given
to Saddam Hussein to fight a proxy war for the Saudis against their hated
foe, the Shi'ia of Iran. And as disclosed by a former Saudi diplomat, the
kingdom's sheiks handed about $7 billion to Saddam under the table in the
1980's to build an "Islamic bomb."
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- Should Iraqis today and those not yet born have to be
put in a debtor's prison to pay off the secret payouts to Saddam? James
Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, says 'No!' Wolfensohn has never
been on my Christmas card list, but in this case he's got it right: Iraq
should simply cancel $120 billion in debt.
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- Normally, the World Bank is in charge of post-war debt
restructuring. That's why the official name of the World Bank is "International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development." This is the Bank's expertise.
Bush has rushed Baker in to pre-empt the debt write-off the World Bank
would certainly promote.
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- "I Fixed Florida"
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- Why is our President so concerned with the wishes of
Mr. Baker's clientele? What does Bush owe Baker? Let me count the ways,
beginning with the 2000 election.
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- Just last week Baker said, I fixed the election in Florida
for George Bush. That was the substance of his remarks last week to an
audience of Russian big wigs as reported to me by my somewhat astonished
colleagues at BBC television.
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- It was Baker, as consiglieri to the Bush family, who
came up with the strategy of maneuvering the 2000 Florida vote count into
a Supreme Court packed with politicos.
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- Baker's claim to have fixed the election was not a confession;
it was a boast. He meant to dazzle current and potential clients about
his Big In with the Big Boy in the White House. Baker's firm is already
a top player in the Great Game of seizing Caspian Sea oil. (An executive
of Exxon-Mobil, one of Baker Botts's clients, has been charged with evading
taxes on bribes paid in Kazakhstan.)
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- All In The Family
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- Over the years, Jim Baker has taken responsibility for
putting bread on the Bush family table. As Senior Counsel to Carlyle, the
arms-dealing investment group, Baker arranged for the firm to hire both
President Bush 41 after he was booted from the White House and President
Bush 43 while his daddy was still in office.
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- Come to think of it, maybe I'm being a bit too dismissive
of the Iraqi make-believe government. After all, it's not as if George
Bush were elected by voters either. It would be more accurate to say that
TWO puppet governments have agreed to let the man who has always pulled
the strings come out from behind the curtain, take a bow, take chargeóthen
take the money and run.
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- - Greg Palast is an award-winning investigative reporter
for BBC Television's Newsnight and The Observer of London. His most recent
book is The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes
The Truth About Globalization, Corporate Cons and High-Finance Fraudsters,
published by Plume, an imprint of The Penguin Group.
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- http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9571
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