5-18-05, 10:12 am

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) the GOP chair of a senate sub-committee 'investigating' the UN oil-for-food program wasn’t up to the task of interrogating British Member of Parliament George Galloway Tuesday (May 17). The Republican Senate leadership had intended to use Galloway to extend their party’s floundering attack on the UN for supposed corruption surrounding the oil-for-food program that governed the sanctions regime over Iraq in the years leading up to Bush’s war in March 2003.

Galloway a staunch opponent of the US-led war on Iraq had been accused by the Republicans and the pro-war elements in his country of opposing the war only because he had financial connections to the Saddam Hussein regime.

Republican Senators attempted to publicize the so-called scandal in the UN as away to divert attention from collapsing support for Bush’s war, the administration’s credibility problems and international horror at the administration’s torture policy that led to the Abu Ghraib atrocities, the attacks on civilian targets in Fallujah, Najaf and other Iraqi cities, as well as Bush’s faltering domestic agenda.

It blew up in their faces when they asked George Galloway to testify this week. Republicans and their doting 'news' channel FOX tried desperately to hang corruption around Galloway’s neck even before his appearance. Using forged documents and other sources widely regarded as discredited, FOX and the Republicans pronounced Galloway guilty.

Norm Coleman is a lawyer by profession, but his performance Tuesday could have had anyone guessing. Galloway’s stern and forthright responses to Coleman’s blundering questions bludgeoned the outmatched senator from Minnesota into withering silence. By the end of Coleman’s time, he was quietly examining his notes looking for a real question and seemed to be wishing he hadn’t agreed to try to take on the much more able senior parliamentarian.

Remarkably, while Galloway was asked to appear as a means for the Republicans to indict the UN for corruption, Galloway turned their antics on their heads and indicted the Bush administration and the Republican Party for lying and misleading the world into a costly, deadly and illegal war in Iraq and for the atrocities that have flowed from that war.

Below are some pertinent clips from Galloway’s testimony.

To Coleman, Galloway directly remarked: '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.' On the allegations that Galloway met with Saddam Hussein in order to make 'oil deals' with the former dictator: '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 Defense 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.' On Republican charges repeated on FOX News that Galloway owned oil companies that profited from the UN program: '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.' On the sources for the Republican senator’s information about Galloway’s involvement with oil-for-food: '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.' On the Senate’s secret informants: '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?' On the legitimacy of the Republican Senator’s information: '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 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.' On the forgery of documents implicating Galloway: '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. [...]

'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.' On the political motivations of pro-war politicians to attack Galloway: '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.' On corruption rampant in the US-appointed Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq after the fall of the Hussein regime that presided over the loss of billions of US taxpayer’s dollars: '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 Halliburton 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. On the fact that US-based oil companies like Condoleezza Rice’s former employer Chevron continued to deal with Iraq right up to the start of the war: '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.' Yes, Senator Coleman should hide in his notes. He and the Republican leadership ought to be ashamed of this stunt. While trying to point fingers at the UN, they have only revealed more fully the truth about their war: their lies and misleadership, their corruption, and their policies that have led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

The Iraqi people, the American dead and wounded, and the world cry out for justice.