'Six Degrees': The Barack-Saddam connection.

Those of you familiar with the game 'Six Degrees of Separation' (or, if you prefer, 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon') may find interesting that Barack Obama can be linked to Saddam Hussein in just two links.

It goes like this.

Barack H. Obama is friends with a guy by the name of Tony Rezko. As you may have heard, Rezko's on trial in Chicago for corruption and has, just recently, had his bail revoked for not disclosing a $3.5 million loan from a British billionaire named Nadhmi Auchi. (SOURCE)

Mr. Auchi is, according to The Guardian, a Baathist who once stood trial for conspiring to assassinate the Iraqi Prime Minister, Abdul Karim Qasim. In fact, the gun that Saddam Hussein himself used in the assassination attempt was from Auchi's house.

Auchi made his money (in part) dealing with French Oil company Elf-Aquitaine. He was later convicted of profiteering in those dealings by the Paris Criminal Court in what London's The Guardian described as "the biggest fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War."

Mr. Auchi was also the largest private shareholder in a company called BNP Paribas which was, until 2001, responsible for managing the escrow account that the money for the corrupt Iraqi Oil-for-Food program flowed through.

Which brings us to (SOURCE):

A great deal of Mr. Auchi's money was made doing business with the regime of Saddam Hussein, much of it under the table. In 1987, Mr. Auchi helped French and Italian firms win a huge oil pipeline contract in Iraq, chiefly by paying off Iraqi officials, according to testimony given by an Italian banker to prosecutors in Milan. In 2003, he was convicted for his role in what was then the largest scandal in French history, involving payoffs from executives of the oil company now known as Total to political figures in Spain, Germany and Africa.

And:

Mr. Auchi was a leading supplier of arms to Saddam's regime. A former Belgian ambassador to Luxembourg charged that a bank in Luxembourg owned principally by Mr. Auchi laundered funds -- including oil for food money -- for Saddam and other Islamic dictators.

Beyond that, according to Nibras Kazimi (a 'Visiting Scholar' at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC):

Back in the opposition days, the name “Nadhmi Auchi” was just another front for Saddam’s intelligence service, or so we thought. Auchi (…a Chaldean Christian; there’s a Muslim family by that name too) knew Saddam intimately enough in his youth to the point of conspiring together to pull off an assassination attempt on Soviet-leaning Iraqi strongman Col. Abdul-Karim Qasim in 1959. Auchi was considered one of Saddam’s guys, who mysteriously left his job in the Ministry of Oil to start a business in Luxembourg with school-pal Nasseer ‘Abid (…Shia from Nassiriya). Auchi’s brothers stayed behind in Iraq and fixed deals with their brother to bring oil industry spare parts, but one of them got too greedy and went too far—from the regime’s perspective—in hoarding kickbacks and was executed over corruption charges in the mid-1980s on Saddam’s personal orders. Yet, even after this, Auchi maintained a connection to Saddam, according to what we in the opposition believed at the time.

And, interestingly, Mr. Auchi helped then-cash-strapped Rezko buy a parcel of land at way-above-market value from the same guy that sold Barack and Michelle Obama their Chicago home at way-below-market value on the same day the Obamas closed their house deal. (SOURCE and SOURCE):

The most eyebrow raising connection between Mr. Rezko and Sen. Obama is the assistance Mr. Rezko provided in the purchase of the mansion on Chicago's South Side that Sen. Obama bought in 2005. The Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million -- $300,000 below the asking price -- perhaps because Mr. Rezko's wife purchased from the owner an adjacent garden plot for $625,000. (The sellers deny they offered the Obamas a discount.) The Times of London wondered where Mrs. Rezko got the money to buy the garden plot. At the time, she had a salary of $37,000 and assets of only $35,000, the Times learned. Her husband told a court that at the time he had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets," the Times said.

The Times learned Mr. Rezko received an earlier $3.5 million loan from Mr. Auchi on May 23, 2005, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA.

No wonder Obama opposed the Iraq war!

And, how do liberal bloggers feel about the accusations that are now coming to light? Well, one writes:

As an Obama supporter, I’ve tried writing all this off as Republican smear tactics run amok, but Rezko’s unsavory associations won’t so easily float from mind. That’s because Obama’s running as a sort of Boy King Arthur, pulling the sword from the stone and restoring the wasteland to a veritable garden of unity and fertility in which new idealism may take root grounded in human decency.

So what’s he doing hanging out with money launderers and influence peddlars and weapons dealers with so many Mideast ties? Honestly, I know it’s not as bad as it sounds ...

The thing is, Obama claims to be different, and cozying up to power brokers and arms merchants–if that’s what Obama did–is not C-H-A-N-G-E. Rather, it’s the oldest game in the world. If Rezko is found guilty, and Auchi is implicated, this could be toxic to Obama, given his middle name and given that, before it’s done he’ll be dodging charges (some already hurled by right-wing bloggers) that old, laundered money from Hussein made it into the real estate deal with Rezko, if not into Obama’s campaign.

If you'd like to see and hear more, check out this VIDEO.