As stuff happened

White House photo by Eric Draper

Former commissioner of the New York Police Department, Bernie Kerik, will be indicted for corruption today. It's important to remember that Kerik did stuff after leaving the NYPD and before being nominated to head the federal department of homeland security. Like being put in charge of training the Iraqi National Police, in the fateful year of 2003. Here's a little from the event associated with the picture above, where Kerik reports back to his boss --

THE PRESIDENT: .... First, I want to welcome Bernie Kerik to the South Lawn, and to the Oval Office. We just had a fascinating discussion about what he did in Iraq, what he saw in Iraq. He can speak for himself. But let me characterize it this way, that he went to help the Iraqis organize a police force. He showed up at times of chaos and confusion. Because of his leadership, his knowledge and his experience, he was able to stand up a police force in Baghdad in a very quick period of time. I think he told me opened up 37 different precinct stations -- 35 different precinct stations. They activated and trained 35,000 Iraqi police force. And that's important because the ultimate solution to the security issues in Iraq is for the Iraqi citizens to manage their own affairs.

Bernie went there and made a big difference. And for that our nation is very grateful. We appreciate it a lot.

Kerik showed himself to be a loyal Bushie, because this event came right after the administration was forced to fall back on the construction "weapons of mass destruction related program activities" given the absence of any actual WMD in Iraq. Kerik had his answer

And I read some of the articles about this, about Dr. Kay's report today, in my opinion, there was one weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, and it was Saddam Hussein

Kerik's remarks are worth reading in full, since they reveal a 9/11 endowment of self-righteousness that probably had him convinced he was doing nothing wrong in the activities that got him indicted. But when people look back trying to figure out how Iraq went so wrong, having a cult-of-9/11 crony like Kerik in charge of building up the police force will be part of the answer.