[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:16573] quite worth reading

Wed May 18 08:42:52 CDT 2005

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Kathleen de la Peña McCook" <kmccook at tampabay.rr.com>
> Date: May 18, 2005 12:50:21 AM CDT
> To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
> Subject: [SRRTAC-L:16573] quite worth reading
> Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>
> SHOWS HOW LIES ARE SPREAD AND THE NAIVE BELIEVE
> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
> Date sent:      	Wed, 18 May 2005 00:59:43 -0400 (EDT)
> From:           	moderator at portside.org
> Subject:        	Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement
> To:             	portside at lists.portside.org
> Send reply to:  	portside at portside.org
>
> Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement
>
> TimesonLine (London) - May 18, 2005
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html
> By Times Online
>
> George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow,
> delivered this statement to US Senators today who have
> accused him of corruption
>
> "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.
>
> “I 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."
>
> =====
>
> Here's the most dynamic four minutes of British MP
> James Galloway's testimony before the US Senate. Worth
> watching and spreading.
>
> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8866.htm
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>

Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801

tel. 217-333-6519
fax 217-333-2214
akagan at uiuc.edu
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