Voter Fraud in Texas

7 Responses to Voter Fraud in Texas

1. caveat bettor says:

   10/1/2007 at 8:12 pm

   Laying low, because they took money from low lifes like Norman Hsu and Oscar Wyatt?
2. Al Swearengen says:

   10/1/2007 at 10:19 pm

   Which is much worse than taking money from the late Kenneth Lay, right?
3. caveat bettor says:

   10/2/2007 at 4:48 pm

   Wyatt and Lay, yeah I see the moral equivalence. Props.
4. caveat bettor says:

   10/3/2007 at 3:22 pm

   Claudia Rosett in today’s WSJ with a timely update (what an amazing investigative journalist she is):

   Having stood trial for almost a month in a Manhattan federal courtroom, 83-year-old Texas tycoon Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. struck a deal Monday. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United Nations’ former Oil for Food program for Iraq. Brushing past me on his way out of the courtroom — he’s clearly familiar with my writing on the subject — he shot a remark: “You ought to be happy.”

   Actually, the pity is that the trial ended sooner than expected. Wyatt is the first major Oil for Food contractor — anywhere — to face a jury in open court. His weeks on trial brought the most vivid glimpses yet into the labyrinth of graft and greed in the U.N. program, operating from 1996-2003, that was meant to allow Saddam Hussein to sell oil solely to relieve suffering in his country.

   Wyatt’s trial also underscored the vitality and ingenuity with which private players can drive, fly, haggle and connive their way past embargoes — especially those enforced by the murky, politicized and largely unaccountable bureaucracy of the U.N. (Benon Sevan, the former head of Oil for Food who was indicted in New York in January on charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, is a fugitive, denying wrongdoing but beyond reach of U.S. extradition on his native Cyprus).

   Despite many investigations launched in the U.S. over the past few years, the inside players who witnessed Saddam’s machinations firsthand have remained offstage, their stories distilled second-hand into written reports. Not here. Star witnesses facing Wyatt from the stand included two former Iraqi officials, Mubdir Al-Khudair and Yacoub Y. Yacoub. They have never before been questioned in a public setting, and were relocated to the U.S. by federal authorities this past year to protect them against retaliation in Iraq for cooperating in this probe.

   Messrs. Khudair and Yacoub described a system corrupt to the core. Their duties inside Saddam Hussein’s bureaucracy consisted largely, and officially, of handling and keeping track of kickbacks. That included who had paid and how much, and via which front companies. When Saddam’s regime systematized its Oil for Food kickback demands across the board in 2000, keeping track of the graft flowing into Saddam’s secret coffers became a job so extensive that the marketing arm of Iraq’s Ministry of Oil, known as SOMO (State Oil Marketing Organization) developed an electronic database to track the flow of the “surcharges,” as they were called.

   To show how this worked, prosecutors last week produced a silver laptop onto which Saddam’s entire oil kickback database had been downloaded by Mr. Yacoub, from backup copies he made just before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. With the laptop display projected onto a big screen before the jury, Mr. Yacoub booted up the system and into a query box typed “Coastal,” the name of Wyatt’s former oil company. Up came itemized lists of millions of dollars worth of surcharges he testified that Wyatt’s company, or affiliated fronts, had paid to the Iraqi regime. These were broken down not only chronologically, but according to which front companies Mr. Yacoub said had channeled the money.

   The other Iraqi witness, Mr. Khudair, corroborated parts of this scene. He explained to the jury a series of detailed notes taken at secret Baghdad meetings, which he had recorded by hand in desk calendars provided as gifts by oil contractors in Iraq.
5. Al Swearengen says:

   10/3/2007 at 9:57 pm

   Great read, thanks for posting that. I wonder why Cypress isn’t prosecuting their man or handing him over to us. Without follow-through in these instances, international law is decimated.

   The CIA will kidnap and rendition terror suspects to be tortured in Morocco, Egypt or some other place, but the white-collar strain of criminality isn’t pursued nearly as ruthlessly.
6. HipHopHustler says:

   10/24/2007 at 6:45 pm

   I saw this video on GlobalGrind.com, I can’t believe they’re doing this and not even being secretive about it. I hope a law gets passed where you need to show ID to vote.
7. Al Swearengen says:

   10/24/2007 at 11:37 pm

   Where the reps and senators would have to show ID to vote? I think you’re mixing up the issue.

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