Galloway blows away the "mother of all smokescreens"
Alan
http://www.respectcoalition.org/mp3/galloway.mp3
http://www.respectcoalition.org/audio/ggtest2.asx
http://www.respectcoalition.org/index.php?ite=782
9/05/2005
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
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 that 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 March 15 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 (legal counsel) Mr Greenblatt.
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 name 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 1992-93. 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
1992-93, 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 1992-93.
These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as
forgeries.
Now, the neocon 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 be 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-Qaida. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had
no connection to the atrocity on September 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 - 1,600 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 the 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.
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
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Absolute Anarchy
Alpha
John F.
(as mention in GG's speech).
"Alpha" <newsgro...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1138650870.7...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> A Great Speach...........
>
Acharya
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1607720,00.html
Taha Yassin Ramadan, the ousted Vice-President of Iraq, told Senate
investigators last month that Mr Galloway had been granted the oil
allocations because of his opinions about Iraq and because he wanted to lift
the embargo against the country. Another Saddam-era official told US
Treasury Department officials in 2003 that a British MP, identified as Mr
Galloway, "benefited tremendously from the illegal trade of oil by Iraq".