Rene — Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement
Topic(s): US Analysis | Comments Off on Rene — Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of StatementGalloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement
Tuesday, May 17, 2005 by the
Times Online (UK)
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.
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.”