The "rule of law" is an idea that has never really penetrated the upper reaches of the Republican party, which has substituted for "law" the "rule of secrecy" and the "rule of cover-up." Laws are for ordinary citizens and foreign countries—not for the likes of them.

But just because the Republicans are by and large criminals doesn't mean they're accomplished criminals. To begin with you would need to be intelligent, and that accusation is seldom heard of top Republicans and their henchmen. Add to that an uncontrollable greed that puts them on the level of compulsive shoplifters—only for items in the million-dollar range—and an arrogance that deludes them into thinking that they are going about like the Invisible Man and what you get is a succession of scandals from one Republican President to the next which finally are dubbed by the media as the "gates."

Iraqgate was the contribution of the first George Bush, though the affair had gotten underway under Ronald Reagan. The operation was complex, international, and a great deal still hangs in a cloud of mystery. Basically, it was about secretly arming Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, an activity that continued after the war had ended. President Clinton aided in suppressing the revelations of that period.

As Jon Elliston wrote in Parascope,

Due to the complexity of Iraqgate -- the tangled international arms networks, the puzzling paper trail of export credits, the hard-to-track secret White House initiatives -- this is a scandal that simmers steadily but has never broken big-time. Despite the disclosure of their hidden support for Saddam, Presidents Reagan and Bush, along with leaders from other western countries that armed Saddam, have emerged relatively unscathed from the numerous official investigations into the scandal.

New York Times columnist William Safire, who has frequently written about Iraqgate, calls it "the first global political scandal." Referring to the United States, Britain and Italy (the latter two also covertly backed Iraq during the 1980s), Safire charges that "the leaders of three major nations are implicated in a criminal conspiracy: first, to misuse taxpayer funds and public agencies in the clandestine buildup of a terrorist dictator; then to abuse the intelligence and banking services of these nations to conceal the dirty deed; finally to thwart the inexorable course of justice."

I have praised before (here) the civil lawsuit as perhaps the most important tool in ferreting out the truth of government and corporate crimes.1 The defendant has fewer protections than in a criminal trial, and the process known as "discovery" can go where no man has gone before.

So now comes this news, as reported by Steven Pollak of the Fulton County Daily Report—

An Italian bank is suing the Iraqi government in Fulton County Superior Court in a bid to recover more than $1 billion the bank lent to Saddam Hussein's regime 15 years ago.

Those loans -- which originated in the Atlanta office of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro -- were at the center of an international scandal commonly referred to as "Iraqgate," during which critics blamed the first Bush administration with arming Saddam's government in the late 1980s.

To put the importance of these loans in context, consider this Mother Jones article by Steve Pizzo in 1992—

In a letter written just days before the presidential election last fall, with George Bush trailing in the polls, House Banking Committee Chairman Henry Gonzalez (D-TX) accused the U.S. Department of Agriculture of spending an entire weekend shredding documents that described the administration's role in obtaining $5.5 billion in U.S.-taxpayer-guaranteed agricultural loans for Iraq from the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). Gonzalez demanded that all shredding equipment be removed from the department immediately. It wasn't.

According to Pizzo, the shredding also extended to the Justice Department—

Beginning the day after the [Clinton] election, according to Justice Department sources, wholesale shredding began to take place on the DOJ's sixth floor, where the key administrative offices are located.
....

The shredding occurred against a backdrop of chaos at the Department of justice. The DOJ was awash in allegations of deception, cover-up, perjury, theft, and obstruction of justice. Even as Attorney General William Barr was refusing to comply with congressional demands for an independent special prosecutor to investigate the BNL case, his Justice Department was under investigation by FBI Director William Sessions, who was himself briefly the target of a DOJ criminal probe.

Investigations up to this point have led only to the conviction of an underling of the bank—

Two inquiries by Republican and Democratic-controlled Justice Departments cleared the Bush administration of any wrongdoing. But many continue to speculate over how Atlanta bank employees lent the Iraqis billions of dollars -- some of which was backed by the U.S. government through two agricultural programs -- without the knowledge of their superiors in Rome or any high-ranking American officials.

The Justice Department accused the manager of the bank's Atlanta office, Christopher Drogoul, of organizing illicit loans and thereby defrauding the bank and the U.S. government. Some 18 months after FBI agents raided the bank's Atlanta offices, a federal grand jury in 1991 indicted Drogoul, along with some of his subordinates, a government-owned Iraqi bank and five Iraqi officials.

The indictment said the local officers of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, or BNL, received lavish gifts and bribes to extend more than $4 billion in unauthorized credit to Iraq.

Drogoul subsequently pleaded guilty in 1993 to two counts of lying to the Federal Reserve Board and one count of mail fraud. Judge G. Ernest Tidwell of the Northern District of Georgia sentenced the bank manager to 37 months in prison.

So the bank's lawsuit, assuming that the Iraqi government doesn't just fork over the money to end the matter, may take us a great deal further into determining who was really responsible for a multi-billion dollar line of credit to Saddam Hussein.

One judge involved in the criminal proceedings against Drogoul has already stated his thoughts on that case—

Senior Judge Marvin H. Shoob .... said Friday he believed the local bank officials were "small potatoes" in a larger conspiracy.

"They were pawns," Shoob said.

---

I should have noted the case title. It's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro v. Ministry of Trade of the Republic of Iraq, No. 2005CV104420 (Fult. Super. filed Aug. 4, 2005).

Related posts
Mud-wrestling: Dyncorp vs. Aegis (Updated) (7/22/04)
Plamegate (7/21/05)