Innuendo 101: O'Reilly and Hunt on U. N. Oil-for-Food
Reported by Marie Therese - December 14, 2004
Yesterday (12/13/04) Bill O'Reilly interviewed Jonathan Hunt, FOX News Correspondent, FNC's Oil-for-Food Program guru. Needless to say, the U.N. scandal was the topic of conversation, but with a slight twist. The name of Marc Rich was injected into the conversation. Who are the two people with connections to Rich? In case you've just returned from Planet Altair, they are, of course, Bill and Hillary Clinton.
There is evidence, as yet sketchy, that some American individuals and companies, including Mr. Rich, might be involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal, for example, Texaco and Chevron (now merged into ChevronTexaco Corp.), Mobil (now Exxon Mobil Corp.) and a third company listed as Phoenix International. CNBC's Jane Wells reported this morning (12/14/04) that Tyco International has also been implicated.
It would appear that the stage is being set - as I predicted several weeks ago - for an investigation of Hillary Clinton by Sen. Norm Coleman's Senate committee and/or the Justice Department. It is absolutely essential for Karl Rove and the GOP to destroy the New York Senator long before the 2008 elections. In my opinion their strategy can be summed up as "What worked for the husband will work for the wife." I wonder how much this NEW Clinton witch hunt will cost us as the Republicans squander millions trying to prove that Mrs. Clinton profited from the Oil-for-Food scandal?
During this interview, Bill O'Reilly and Jonathan Hunt took innuendo and the barest of hints and treated them as if they were hard news. My transcript with running commentary follows.
O'Reilly: Tonight the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal is heating up and there are now accusations that fugitive billionaire Marc Rich was a central player, helping Saddam by brokering major oil deals for him. Rich, as you may know, was pardoned by President Clinton, but is still afraid to come back to the USA from Switzerland. Joining us now from Washington is FOX News correspondent, Jonathan Hunt, who is following the story.
Ya' know, this is rich, pardon the pun, for those of us who felt that the Marc Rich pardon on the last day of the Clinton Presidency - something wrong with it because this guy was the biggest tax cheat in American history. Showed no remorse at all. His wife gave a million dollars to Hillary's Senate campaign and about $500,000 to the Clinton Library and - presto! - he gets a pardon. Now, what are the allegations after he received the pardon vis a vis Saddam?
[COMMENT: Denise Rich is in fact Marc Rich's EX-wife. The actual amount donated to Hillary's Senatorial campaign was $70,000 in 2001, a year after Bill Clinton left office. Denise Rich's Clinton Library donations were made between July 1998 and May 2000 and totaled $450,000. Sources: Time Online 2/13/01 and BBC News 2/10/01.]
HUNT: Here's one of the points, Bill. It appears, if these allegations are correct and are proven, that immediately in the immediate months after that pardon, that is precisely when Marc Rich went back to doing these kinds of shady deals. Now, the way the Oil-for-Food program worked is, Saddam handed out these so-called oil vouchers, basically, giving X million barrels of oil to an individual. It could have been an oil trader. It could have been an oil company. That, all perfectly proper. But, in many cases, it wasn't. It was a power broker. It was a politician from Europe or some European country. It may have been somebody that Saddam wanted to bribe, cajole, influence - however you want to put it. Now, those people weren't in the business of shipping oil or trading oil, so they had to move those vouchers on to somebody who was. That's where the profit lay.
[COMMENT: Notice how vague Hunt is. He uses qualifying language such as "if these allegations are correct and are proven." He does not specify exactly what kind of "shady deals" Mr. Rich possibly engaged in, preferring to leave the viewer to make the ASSUMPTION that, just because Hunt and later O'Reilly use Rich's name in the same sentence or group of sentences as the Oil-for-Food scandal, Rich must be guilty of illegal brokering of oil vouchers. Yet, a lawyer would be hard-pressed to find anything in Hunt's wording that actually makes that point directly.]
O'Reilly (overtalks the last five words of Hunt's): Let me stop you, let me stop you there. Let me stop you there so even I can understand this. You know I'm a little slow, Jonathan. Saddam hands me a piece of paper like this (he holds up a sheet of paper and points to it). It says "You have the right to buy 2,000 barrels of Iraqi oil at this price, a low price." OK?
HUNT: Yup.
O'Reilly: Alright. Bill has 2,000 ... barrels of oil. But Bill doesn't have a tanker. Bill doesn't know who to sell it to. Bill needs somebody to set all that up.
HUNT: Exactly.
O'Reilly: Where does Bill go?
HUNT: So you go to the classic old back room fixer, Bill, and that is where names like Marc Rich come in. It is alleged and it is being investigated whether Marc Rich was exactly the kind of person that Bill would go to and say "I need to sell this on to a real oil company or a real oil shipper."
[COMMENT: Read what Hunt says and you'll find it says absolutely nothing but in a very provocative way. Boiled down to basics, he says that "back room fixers" like Marc Rich exist - he does not claim that Rich actually engaged in oil price fixing or brokering per se. He says - in a piece of tabloid flummery - that there are claims that Marc Rich is the type of person who might broker a dirty deal. Notice how the name "Bill" has been smoothly introduced into the conversation. An unobservant viewer or one that arrived late in the discussion would not necessarily identify the "Bill" being spoken of as Bill O'Reilly. They might easily think Hunt and O'Reilly were referring to another Bill, e.g., Bill Clinton.]
O'Reilly (overtalks): Right and then Marc Rich...
HUNT: ... so that I can make....
O'Reilly (interrupts): Marc Rich contacts an oil company.
HUNT: Exactly.
O'Reilly: And says "I can deliver 2,000 barrels of oil" - probably doesn't tell him who it's from .
HUNT: Probably.
O'Reilly: Probably wouldn't tell us who it's from - at this price, which is higher (points to the sheet of paper again) than obviously what, you know, I paid Saddam, more than double, and then Marc Rich takes a cut of that, probably 30%. Correct?
HUNT: Exactly. That is exactly how it would have worked and both Marc Rich and whoever had got that voucher in the first place could have made millions of dollars on the ...
O'Reilly (interrupts): Yeah. I mean, you know. I say 2,000 but it could have been 200,000, it could have been a million barrels whatever
HUNT: Most of the ...
O'Reilly: Saddam could have said "Bill..."
HUNT: Yeah. Most of the figures we've see, Bill, were in the millions of barrels range.
O'Reilly: Yeah, Saddam could have said "I want you to say nice things about me on The Factor and, if you do, 500,000 barrels of oil will be given to you and you contact this person."
O'Reilly: Now, is the evidence against Marc Rich at this juncture damning evidence? Is it just the beginning? Where is it?
HUNT: We're really just at the beginning. Now FOX News first reported the Marc Rich connection just about six months ago, Bill. That is when the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York started looking into it and the Manhattan DA's office. Now, they are still in the very early stages. There is nothing proven here about illegal activity and it's gonna be very hard to prove as well, Bill, because this is a very murky scheme. It was well hidden and proving whether it was actually illegal is a very different thing ...
O'Reilly (interrupts): Well, I don't care about that.
HUNT: ... to proving whether it was immoral.
O'Reilly: I don't think anybody cares about whether they're provin' it. But, you really need somebody to step forth and say "I gave 100,000 barrels of oil from Saddam to Marc Rich to sell for me." That's what you need. Correct?
HUNT: And everybody was making a profit here, so it's not in anybody's interest to say that that's one of the problems.
O'Reilly (makes a fist): Unless you get em (shakes fist), unless you're squeezin' them on something else.
HUNT: Yeah.
O'Reilly: Unless you got em on somethin' else.
HUNT: Yeah. And that's exactly what all of these investigators here on Capitol Hill, at the Manhattan DA's office and ...
O'Reilly (interrupts): And in the United Nations a lot of people, mark my words, were doin' just that. Jonathan, thanks very much. We appreciate it.
COMMENT
O'Reilly and Hunt. If these two guys were sitting in a screenwriting class, tossing around ideas for a made-for-TV movie, I'd have no problems with such flights of fancy. In fact, it might even make a good flick. However, when two supposedly responsible "correspondents" use words like "could have," "would have" and "probably" to palm conjecture off as news, it is a disgrace. The sad thing is that there are millions of Americans out there who are being bamboozled on a nightly basis by such tabloid shenanigans!
And, once again, I repeat this prediction. The GOP through FOX News plans to use Marc Rich and Oil-for-Food to launch a preemptive strike on Senator Clinton. I hope she's prepared.
UPDATE:
Here is a press release sent to News Hounds by Marc Rich Holding.
MARC RICH + CO HOLDING GMBH
Statement
Oil-For-Food Program
Zug, December 15, 2004 The Marc Rich Group feels compelled to make the
following statement to rectify false reports regarding the UN's Oil-For-Food
program for Iraq.
Recent publications in the press have alleged that Marc Rich or one of his
companies were illegally involved as a "middle man" in transactions regarding
the Iraqi Oil-For-Food program.
These rumours originated from a report broadcasted by the US TV channel ABC on
December 1, 2004.
Marc Rich Holding has been in contact with ABC to learn about the evidence
behind the allegations, and has so far not been presented any documents proving
any illegal involvement in the Oil-For-Food program.
Marc Rich Holding rejects all the allegations regarding its involvement in the
UN's Oil-For-Food program for Iraq.
Further information:
Thomas Frutig
Marc Rich + Co Holding GmbH
Tel.: +41 41 709 07 00
Fax: +41 41 709 07 97
thomas.frutig@marcrichgroup.com
