Help get Galloway's statement in the Congressional Record

[Guest guest]

To get a little truth in government, we have to " import " it.

 

 

" Zepp " <zepp

Sat, 21 May 2005 13:37:00 -0700

[Zepps_News] Help get Galloway's statement in the

Congressional Record

 

 

 

[For those who are unaware, the Senate Homeland Security Committee

excised Galloway's devastating testimony from the official record.

 

Help remind Coleman and Levin that what happened on the 17th really did

happen, and won't go away because they want to play Orwell games. Full

text of Galloway statement follows]

 

They don't want this in the Congressional Record- Let's help them

remember that George Galloway actually WAS there and DID say these

things:

 

Fax Phone and email:

 

Norm Coleman, Chairman of the Committee

 

Washington Office:

320 Senate Hart Office Building

Washington, DC 20510

Main: 202-224-5641

Fax: 202-224-1152

Scheduling: 202-228-1503

 

Minnesota Office in St. Paul:

2550 University Ave W, Suite 100N

St. Paul, MN 55114

Main: 651-645-0323

Fax: 651-645-3110

Toll Free: 800-642-6041

 

Minnesota Office in Mankato:

12 Civic Center Plaza

Suite 2167

Mankato, Minnesota 56001

Main: 507-625-6800

Fax: 507-625-9427

 

 

Carl Levin, Ranking member

269 Russell Office Building

U.S. Senate

Washington, DC 20510-2202

 

Phone (202) 224-6221

Fax (202) 224-1388

8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

 

 

" 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. "

 

--

 

 

 

" As democracy is perfected, the office of president

represents, more and more closely, the inner soul

of the people. On some great and glorious day the

plain folks of the land will reach their heart's

desire at last and the White House will be adorned

by a downright moron. " --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

 

 

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Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.