>An oldie..But a Goodie
The Real Sanctions Busters Were Your Own Companies, With the
Connivance
> of Your Own GovernmentThusly, I Humiliated Norm Coleman
> By GEORGE GALLOWAY
>
> Testimony before the Senate panel investigating the UN Oil-for-Food
> Program.
>
> 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. |
