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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

James wrote:
>
> Then as now, no difference, you have to have some excuse to invade another
people
> even if you have to make up that excuse after the fact.
>
>
Which brought to mind an article I read today.

Lynda

> Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement
> George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this
> statement to US Senators (on Tuesday) 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
> "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 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.
>
> "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 realize 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 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.
>
> "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 Times Newspapers
>