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Did The Fed Finance Saddam’s Military?

Posted by Jon King on Mar 02, 2010

Tagged with: baghdad, ben bernanke, donald rumsfeld, iraq, new world politics, ron paul, ronald reagan, rt, saddam hussein, US federal reserve, war on terror

Ron Paul: US Federal Reserve loaned billions to Iraq to buy weapons from America…

Did The Fed Finance Saddam’s Military?

Robert Bridge ● RT

As Congress debates legislation to make the US Federal Reserve less secretive, Republican Ron Paul said the Bank loaned Iraq billions of dollars to buy US weapons in the 1980s.

Ever since the bottom fell out of the US economy in 2007, triggering an economic crisis of titanic proportions, the US Federal Reserve has found itself on the defensive as lawmakers are demanding more supervision over the tight-lipped money-printing outfit.

The man who is leading the fight against “the Fed” is Texas Congressman Ron Paul, 74, an outspoken critic of US foreign and monetary policy. And given the present economic and social conditions inside of the United States, which are quickly converging to form the perfect political storm, Paul may be successful in passing his Federal Reserve Transparency Act that will give lawmakers the authority to audit the Federal Reserve – a power that it presently does not enjoy.

On the rocky road to that elusive goal, Paul appeared this week alongside fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill where they had the pleasure of putting Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke in the hot seat for a painful Q&A session. Bernanke, incidentally, is the guy who ran the money-printing machines at full speed to bail out the American economy, if not the entire globalization project itself, following the Collapse of 2007.

Paul, who regularly provides the fireworks to otherwise drab Congressional hearings due to his profound knowledge of the issues, slammed the “cozy relationship” that now exists between lawmakers and the Federal Reserve Bank, which creates what the congressman from Texas has labeled the “inflationary tax.”

“There has been a political cozy relationship between Congress and the Federal Reserve,” said Paul, addressing his comments at Bernanke.

“The Congress has been derelict in its duties to provide oversight … Congress can keep spending and getting reelected. They don’t have to raise taxes, so the Fed can act as a taxing authority: you print the money, [which] dilutes the value of the money, prices go up, and price inflation is a tax and when people pay a lot more for their medical care than they used to they ought to think about the inflationary tax.”

Paul then discussed the lack of transparency in the Federal Reserve, and how this may have contributed to more than one under-the-table transaction that worked to disrupt US foreign policy.

_“I would like to get to more specifics on the ‘transparency bill’ because it has been reported in the past that during the 1980s the Fed actually facilitated a $5.5 billion dollar loan to Saddam Hussein, and then he bought weapons from our military industrial complex,” Paul said, adding that was also the time when the Iraqi dictator invested in a nuclear reactor. There is a famous photo of Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of former US president Ronald Reagan, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on December 20, 1983 during the height of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). According to the National Security Archive (NSA), “Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.’s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq’s oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran’s ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory.”_

The NSA goes on to say that “although official U.S. policy still barred the export of U.S. military equipment to Iraq, some was evidently provided on a “don’t ask – don’t tell” basis.”

Paul then fast forwarded to a less benevolent period in American-Iranian relations, in 2003, shortly after US forces occupied Baghdad and taken control of the country.

Read Full Article HERE…

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image: RT