The aftermath of Hurricane Irene has created not only an estimated $12 billion worth of damage, but it continues to leave many east coast residents without power and access to basic necessities.

In Vermont, where flooding has cut off a dozen towns from the rest of the state and left thousands without access to electricity, the state’s ability to respond to Irene has been hobbled by a previous disaster: the war in Iraq.

The Burlington Free Press reports that the state has had to borrow 10 helicopters total from Illinois and New Hampshire to respond to the disaster because all six of its Black Hawk helicopters are still in Iraq:

Eight helicopters on loan from the Illinois National Guard were expected to arrive Tuesday night in Vermont to help the Vermont National Guard deliver food, medicine, water and other supplies to 13 Vermont towns cut off from the rest of the state in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene. The outside helicopter support is needed because all six of the Vermont Guard’s Black Hawk helicopters are still in Iraq, where they and 55 Vermont soldiers are wrapping up a yearlong hospital transport mission, said Lt. Lloyd Goodrow, spokesman for the Vermont Guard. [...] The New Hampshire National Guard sent over two of its Black Hawk helicopters on Monday. The two were used to transport Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate, Gov. Peter Shumlin, Sen. Bernie Sanders I-Vt., and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., on a survey of flood-damaged areas in the state.

“We’d be in a very different scenario if they were here,” said Lt. Lloyd Goodrow, a spokesman for the Vermont National Guard, of the six Black Hawk helicopters. The helicopters being used in operations to drop supplies to the dozen towns that have been cut off are smaller than Vermont’s Black Hawks, and deliveries are occurring slowly.

Today, Al Jazeera reports on an explosive new story that finds that the very same Bush official who spearheaded normalizing relations with Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi was secretly working with the dictator as late as this month to design a public relations campaign to undermine both the rebel forces and NATO.

Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal unearthed files in Libya’s intelligence headquarters that suggest that David Welch — the former assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush who brokered the deal that normalized relations between Libya and the United States and who later went on to work for the manufacturing and development giant Bechtel — met with Libyan officials in early August to coordinate on undermining the Libyan rebels and NATO forces by, for example, trying to establish ties between the uprising and al Qaeda:

I found what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting between senior Libyan officials – Abubakr Alzleitny and Mohammed Ahmed Ismail – and David Welch, the former assistant secretary of state who served under George W Bush and the man who brokered the deal which restored diplomatic relations between the US and Libya in 2008. [...]During that meeting Welch advised Gaddafi’s team on how to win the propaganda war – suggesting several “confidence building measures”, the documents said. The documents appear to indicate that an influential US political personality was advising Gaddafi on how to beat the US and NATO. [...] Minutes of this meeting note his advice on how to undermine Libya’s rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel. “Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It’s better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries…”

Watch Al Jazeera’s video report about the documents:

It is unclear exactly what would motivate Welch to help Qaddafi battle the pro-democracy uprising and even his own country, but it should be noted that Welch’s position at Bechtel put him in a spot where he was incentivized to maintain strong business relationships with Libya. Shortly after helping normalize relations between the two countries, Welch became a vice president at Bechtel, overseeing the company’s Middle Eastern operations. Under Welch, the company rapidly expanded in Libya, even setting up its first office in the country since the 1960s.

Also included among the documents that Al Jazeera uncovered was evidence that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a Libya war foe, had contacts with Qaddafi’s regime and had asked for evidence of corruption or al Qaeda contacts among the rebels.

In a statement released yesterday, House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) called for the U.S. to violate its own laws and ratified international treaties governing the U.S. role as host to the United Nations.

In the statement, which focused on sanctioning officials from the Iranian government, Ros-Lehtinen said the U.S. should deny Iranian and Syrian officials access to the U.S. for the upcoming U.N. General Assembly:

And with the U.N. General Assembly convening in New York in weeks, the U.S. must unequivocally deny all Iranian and Syrian regime officials access to U.S. soil.

It’s impossible to read this statement as anything but a call from the top foreign policy official in the House of Representatives for the U.S. violate its own laws, specifically those enacted by the Congress in 1947 that established New York City as the host of the international body.

The U.S. and the U.N. signed the “Headquarters Agreement,” also known as U.S. Public Law 80 – 357, in June 1947 and both Houses of Congress subsequently passed the measure and the President signed it into law.

Article IV of the Headquarters Agreement outlines several provisions with regard to travel to New York by representatives of Member States:

Article IV — Communication and Transit
Section 11
The federal, state or local authorities of the United States shall not impose any impediments to transit to or from the headquarters district of (1) representatives of Members or officials of the United Nations [...]
Section 12
The provisions of Section 11 shall be applicable irrespective of the relations existing between the Governments of the persons refereed to in that section and the Government of the United States.
Section 13
(a) Laws and regulation in force in the United States regarding the entry of aliens shall not be applied in such a manner as to interfere with the privileges referred to in Section 11. When visas are required for persons referred to in that Section, they shall be granted without charge and as promptly as possible.

While Ros-Lehtinen has long been an opponent of the U.N. — she introduced a bill this week that would withdraw much of the U.S. funding for the organization — her call yesterday demonstrates that her anti-U.N. ideology trumps even respect for established U.S. law.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been making the media rounds to promote his new memoir, and this morning, he stopped by Fox and Friends where he credited the Iraq war with helping to start the Arab Spring. While Cheney cautioned that it’s hard to lump all Middle East countries together, he said it’s likely that the pro-democracy movement that swept the Arab world in the past six months is a “ripple effect” of the introduction of democracy in Iraq:

KILMEADE: Is it a reach to say Libya’s unrest…all has a lot to do with what happened in Iraq? Letting those people, seeing those people vote, and the Arab community seeing what’s going on?

CHENEY: Well, I think there may be some of that going on. [...] But I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.

Watch it:

A number of Bush foreign policy apologists have tried to claim the Arab Spring as vindication of the Iraq War and its cheerleaders’ claim that the invasion would help spread democracy across the Middle East. But as CAP’s Matt Duss pointed out this month, “there is no real evidence for the claim.” The war was overwhelming unpopular in the region and, as an April 2010 RAND study concluded, “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

Indeed, Iraq is hardly a model of democracy, and its leaders, rather than seeing solidarity with activists in other Arab countries and encouraging them, have done little to help the pro-democracy movement and at times even expressed sympathy for the autocratic regimes the movement is seeking to overthrow.

Addressing the question in July, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook concluded, “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas.” “There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship,” he added.