← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 18289 | Posts: 15 | Started: 2005-05-18
2005-05-18 08:55 | User Profile
May 18, 2005
Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement
[URL=http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html]By Times Online[/URL]
George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption
George Galloway after arriving in the Senate committee room to give evidence (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.
"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.
"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.
"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.
"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.
"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.
"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.
"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.
"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.
"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.
"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.
"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.
"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.
"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.
"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].
"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.
"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.
"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?
"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.
"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.
"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.
"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.
"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.
"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.
"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.
"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.
ââ¬ÅI told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.
"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.
"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."
2005-05-18 11:05 | User Profile
This guy's got some big cahunas, huh?.
He's really going out of his way to hack off the Heebs.
Good for him.
2005-05-18 11:58 | User Profile
Audio + video links:
[url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showpost.php?p=113727&postcount=4[/url]
2005-05-18 12:59 | User Profile
Great stuff! :thumbsup:
I heard some excerpts on the car radio this morning, but the statement as a whole has a particularly strong impact.
2005-05-18 19:27 | User Profile
Splendid stuff.
2005-05-18 20:46 | User Profile
Outstanding. It's quite refreshing to see someone be so blunt.
2005-05-18 21:57 | User Profile
I hate to use a Will Smiff-ism, but it fits here...
Dayummm.
2005-05-20 09:03 | User Profile
Magnificent. :clap:
2005-05-20 12:52 | User Profile
Cue theme from "Rocky". Galloway deserves special applause just for the enemies he's made; here's hoping he keeps it up and doesn't meet with an unforseen health crisis delivered at the tip of an umbrella.
[url]http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/051305Madsen/051305madsen.html[/url]
[B]Special Report
Galloway hounded by AIPAC cell within U.S. Congress; Bolton tied to same cell[/B]
By Wayne Madsen Online Journal Contributing Writer
Download a .pdf file for printing. Adobe Acrobat Reader required. Click here to download a free copy.
May 13, 2005ââ¬âAt a time when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is being investigated for its role in an espionage case involving Larry Franklin, a Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official indicted for passing top secret classified information to two AIPAC officials and possibly the government of Israel, a senator who is bought and paid for by AIPACââ¬âRepublican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesotaââ¬âhas decided to change the subject and point to newly elected Respect Party Member of Parliament George Galloway as receiving oil funds from Saddam Hussein.
The charges against Galloway and other politicians around the world were originally based on documents secured from the rubble of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and proffered by the corrupt Ahmad Chalabiââ¬âthe man who pressured the Bush administration to use discredited "intelligence" about Saddam's mobile chemical and biological weapons laboratories from an alcoholic, congenital liar and mentally unbalanced cousin of one of his associates, an individual code-named "Curveball."
Coleman, with pro-AIPAC Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, is using the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations to rehash charges that foreign and even U.S. officials financially benefited from the United Nations' Oil for Food program. These charges, which later were proven false, first surfaced in the neoconservative controlled London-based Daily Telegraph, owned by the Hollinger Corporation, a company that had financial ties to arch-neoconservative Richard Perle. The charges by both the Daily Telegraph and now Coleman's committee are based on documents as bogus as the Niger yellowcake documents and those proffered by Curveball and Chalabi about Iraq's fantasized weapons of mass destruction. Galloway successfully sued the Telegraph for libel over its baseless Oil for Food allegations against him.
The only new information on which Coleman is basing his allegations are interviews conducted with Iraq's former vice president and deputy prime minister both of whom are in U.S. custody and awaiting war crimes trials led by Iraqi prosecutor Salam Chalabi, a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi and law partner of Marc Zell, the Washington, DC, law partner of Douglas Feith, the person for whom accused spy Larry Franklin worked at the Pentagon while spying for Israel. If ex-Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz are receiving even one-eight the harsh treatment meted out by U.S. troops and Israeli contractors to prisoners at the Abu Ghraib concentration camp, none of their so-called testimonies are worth the paper on which they are printed.
Coleman charges that Galloway received up to 20 million barrels of oil allocations between 2000 and 2003 from Saddam's government. Galloway rightly charges that Coleman and other committee members are "lickspittle Republicans" acting in the servitude of Bush and his cronies. In addition to the statements of the imprisoned Saddam Hussein officials, Coleman is also basing his new allegations based on documents retrieved from the Iraqi Oil Ministry from convicted embezzler, con man, and neocon puppet, Ahmad Chalabi.
What has Coleman's panties in a twist is the fact that in the recent British elections, Galloway, who was expelled from the Labor Party for his anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush politics, made easy work of his Labor Party opponent and Tony Blair sycophant, Oona King, an African-Jewish daughter ofââ¬âironicallyââ¬âan African-American draft evader from the Vietnam War. King was one of Tony Blair's most ardent supporters for his decision to join Bush in a genocidal war against Iraq. For that, she earned the support of the international neoconservative network of influence holders and peddlers that can, according to a senior Bush administration official, create their own reality because of their ownership of much of the international media. However, King also earned the enmity of her large Muslim constituency in East London's Bethnal Green and Bow district. They rejected King and threw their political weight behind Galloway.
There is little doubt that the neocons in the British Labor Party are working hand-in-glove with people like Coleman and his neocon friends and political supporters in AIPAC to punish Galloway and make it hard for him to use his reinstated House of Commons platform to launch expected fierce broadsides against Blair and other pro-Iraq War Laborites, most notably Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defense Secretary John Reid, and former Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon. The neocons also want to deal a blow to the anti-war Respect Party, which gave Labor a run for its money in a number of other hotly contested constituencies in Britain.
Coleman, who also sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used his Oil for Food charges against Galloway, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, and an unnamed former French foreign minister to bolster the nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the UN. The Bolton affair has revealed even more proof that a shadow intelligence network has operated within the U.S. government.
Bolton had on his staff a "special adviser" named Matthew Freedman who pulled down a $110,000 per annum salary. Freedman is also a lobbyist who represents "private clients." He refused to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who those clients were. However, it has been discovered that Freedman, a long time GOP operative like Bolton, is tied to the same oil industry network that once used Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as agents of influence.
While working for the GOP-connected public relations firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly (BMS&K) and the PBN Company, Freedman counted Chevron, Bechtel, Shell, and the governments of Nigeria and Kazakhstan as clients. Freedman also represented Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Philippine President Salvador Laurel. According to The Washington Times, Laurel sought the assistance of the George H. W. Bush administration to oust President Corazon Aquino in a military coup.
Other espionage charges have swirled around Bolton. The State Department's Bureau of Near East Affairs reported that Bolton met with Mossad officials in Israel without obtaining country clearance from the bureau. During a trip to the United States, former Mossad official Uzi Arad was questioned by FBI agents about his connections to Larry Franklin. FBI officials were also interested in an Israeli Embassy official named Naor Gilon, the chief of political affairs and widely believed a major Mossad asset at the Washington diplomatic post. The FBI possesses videotaped surveillance tape of Gilon having a luncheon meeting with two AIPAC officials and Franklin at a Washington hotel.
Bolton is also under suspicion for his ties to Taiwan. Before joining the Bush administration, Bolton was on the payroll of the government of Taiwan, advocating UN membership for the breakaway island nation. Like Bolton's secret trips to Israel, Britain, and other nations, Donald Keyser, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and a colleague of Bolton, made secret trips to Taiwan. He was arrested by the FBI in September 2004 after he was witnessed passing classified documents to Taiwanese agents in Washington.
There is ample evidence of a major foreign intelligence penetration of the United States State and Defense Departments, as well as U.S. intelligence agencies, involving Franklin, AIPAC officials, Mossad agents, and leading individuals in the neoconservative network operating from inside the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. Congress, and think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hudson Institute. Bolton is a central figure in this cabal.
The focus of the U.S. investigatory apparatus should not be on George Galloway and his newly-enfranchised East London supporters, but should be on the dark sinews that bind together anti-democratic intelligence functionaries in Washington, Jerusalem, and London. In addition, with his possible links to illegal espionage and influence peddling, in addition to other serious charges surrounding John Bolton, now is not the time for the U.S. Senate to be confirming a person who could be the most damaging U.S. government employee for national security since the Cold War days of John Walker, Ronald Pelton, and Jonathan Pollard.
Click here to read Hayden memo Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based journalist and nationally distributed columnist.
2005-05-20 16:11 | User Profile
It's about time those loathsome, disgraceful, arrogant asshole US Senators had their bells rung by a man who's not afraid to tell the truth as well as unafraid to expose the despicable American double-standards regarding foreign policy.
Love live Galloway!
2005-05-23 17:39 | User Profile
Give 'em hell Charlie!
[url]http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20050523/index.php[/url]
Galloway A Hero
If you would like a role model on how a manly person should act in front of politicians and the media, I highly recommend the Honorable George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament.
A Senate subcommittee out to discredit the United Nations made the mistake of inviting Galloway to appear before its members. They had smeared him. Accusing a man of serious wrongdoing without a shred of evidence is a smear job, plain and simple. Sen. Norm Coleman, like most senators, is used to people either fawning or being timidly evasive. Boy, was he in for a surprise. Galloway landed on him like a rattlesnake.
Coleman had dredged up the old accusations that Galloway made money off Iraqi oil or was otherwise receiving money from Iraq. A little background is necessary. Long before Iraq became an issue, the outspoken Galloway was a gallant defender of Palestinian rights. Both in England and the U.S., to speak up for Palestinians will get you on the s-list right away. Fanatical supporters of Israel are well-entrenched in both the British and American establishments. Their standard response to supporters of Palestinians or critics of Israel is character assassination.
The Christian Science Monitor took a run at him and was forced to admit that the documents it had based its story on were forgeries. The British Daily Telegraph ran the same charges Coleman has dragged out and lost a libel suit. It's too bad U.S. senators have immunity from libel and slander suits.
At any rate, Galloway laced into them: "Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never see a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one ââ¬â and neither has anyone on my behalf."
Galloway had led a campaign to get the sanctions lifted from Iraq and also strongly opposed the war against Iraq. In the good old corrupt United States, where dishonesty and deceit and greed have become the norms, it's inconceivable to many people like Coleman that anybody would do anything just because he or she believed in it.
Galloway picked their report to pieces. They claimed he had had "many meetings with Saddam Hussein." He had, in fact, only two, and he pointed out that that was the same number that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had during the Reagan administration. The difference, he said, is that Rumsfeld was there to sell Saddam guns, and he, Galloway, was there to promote peace and persuade him to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to come in.
He then pointed out that he had been an opponent of Saddam when the U.S. was his ally, an ally that made excuses for the gassing of Kurds, blaming those deaths on Iran. Oh, yes, I found the original story about the U.S. investigation of the gassing in The Washington Post archives years ago. Another blunder he pointed out was that the committee claimed its documents (provided by the infamous Ahmad Chalabi, who has boasted of having deceived the United States about weapons of mass destruction) were current, while the Daily Telegraph's libelous story was based on documents dating to 1992-1993. Galloway delighted in putting this lie to rest. Both sets of documents covered the same period, and there wasn't even an oil-for-food program in 1992-1993, he said.
After exposing their errors, Galloway laced into them, pointing out that 100,000 people, including 1,600 Americans, have died because of "a pack of lies" spread by Coleman and his neocon allies. He pointed out that during the 14 months the U.S. was in charge, $8.8 billion went missing. He pointed to the corruption of the American corporations.
The slimy Coleman tried to save face afterward by telling the press that Galloway wasn't "a credible witness." The hell he wasn't. It's Coleman and his subcommittee who lack credibility, not to mention ethics or a sense of justice.
Follow the example of a brave man. Don't let politicians or the media browbeat you, intimidate you or lie about you. Be honest. Tell the truth, and don't sugarcoat it. The world needs more Galloways and far fewer Colemans.
2005-05-23 19:15 | User Profile
[IMG]http://images.ucomics.com/comics/tmdho/2005/tmdho050518.gif[/IMG]
2005-05-23 19:34 | User Profile
Why does the example of Boobus americanus in that cartoon look like Al Gore? Wouldn't he be more accurately represented by a Podhoretz-like mug?
2005-05-23 19:36 | User Profile
[QUOTE=MadScienceType]Why does the example of Boobus americanus in that cartoon look like Al Gore? Wouldn't he be more accurately represented by a Podhoretz-like mug?[/QUOTE]
And notice how much bigger the American is compared to the skinny Brit.
2005-05-24 01:44 | User Profile
If an American poletician was to talk like Mr. Galloway about, Zionist, illegals, the economy, schools, wars and so on I would follow him to hell and back.
Is time for the American politicians to accept Mr. Galloways example of a fined tuned machine that will run over anything that anyone were to place in front of him.
But becasue we are humans I would tell this person to first come clean with his background even with the fact that he might or is being blackmailed by the Jews.