Interview with British MP George Galloway

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Wed, 1 Jun 2005 09:44:42 -0700 (PDT)

Interview with British MP George Galloway

 

 

 

 

Interview with British MP George Galloway

 

Published on Saturday, May 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Interview by Thom Hartmann

 

 

[Thom Hartmann] George Galloway!

 

[Thom Hartmann] Thom Hartmann here with you on AM 620 KPOJ in Portland

and we're also going to record this and play it on our national

program. Thanks so much, Mr. Galloway for being with us today.

 

 

 

[George Galloway] You're most welcome.

 

[Thom Hartmann] First of all, my apologies if I have your title wrong.

I'm calling you mister. Is that how?

 

 

 

[George Galloway] Mister, mister's more than adequate.

 

[Thom Hartmann] OK. I'm wondering, what is your opinion on the

legality of Guantanamo Bay and what do you think of the construction

of a death chamber there, which was reported by the BBC yesterday?

 

 

 

[George Galloway] Well, it's an utterly illegal process which is being

followed. People are being taken, in some cases from third countries.

One of the British citizens, for example, was taken from the Gambia.

Others have been taken from Pakistan. Others still from, from

Afghanistan. They're taken by force, drugs forcibly injected into

them, hooded, chained, and taken to a cage in the tropics where by all

accounts they're being kept in conditions that you wouldn't keep a dog

in in your country or mine. And if you did, you'd be, you'd be had up

for cruelty by the authorities.

 

 

 

And then there's very clear evidence of systematic torture. There's

the desecration of the Koran which may or may not have happened,

depending on which edition of Newsweek you are prepared to believe.

This is a big scar on the face of the United States. And it seems to

me that too few citizens of the United States have fastened on to the

fact that the protestations by your president and your government of

being interested in human rights and democracy and freedom are quite

negated by the very existence of Guantanamo Bay.

 

 

 

But of course, that's not the end of it. Bagram Air Base is exactly

the same kind of place. Abu Ghraib prison, well we perhaps, on a

family show, shouldn't probe too deeply into the disgusting

obscenities that were going on there. And, it turns out, that where

the United States itself is not prepared to physically torture people,

it merely subcontracts out the task; sending people to the likes of

Uzbekistan and Egypt and other prison states where less squeamish

governments will torture people for the United States and give the

U.S. the testimony they get as a result. Which, of course, it goes

without saying, is almost never of any use because anyone will say

anything under torture.

 

 

 

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah.

 

[George Galloway] And all sorts of wild goose chases are no doubt

embarked upon as a result of all this. So I'm afraid Guantanamo is a

blot on the landscape and the fact that the United States occupies it

in Cuba without Cuba's agreement is just the icing on the cake.

 

 

 

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah. George Galloway, Member of Parliament in the, in

Great Britain, of the House of Commons. Why do you believe that Blair decided to join president Bush in waging war when, as has

recently emerged with this Downing Street memo, he knew that the case

was flimsy, and do you think that either Blair or Bush or people in

their administration should be prosecuted on any, on any level for

this activity?

 

 

 

[George Galloway] Well, first of all I am sure that they will not be

prosecuted, because it is only losers that are prosecuted. In the

international system that we have there's no chance of the likes of

Henry Kissinger, for example, the greatest living war criminal in the

world today with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and

Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor or in many other places on

his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars. That's

for the tin pot tyrants, the tiny tyrants like Milosevic; they get

sent there. The big tyrants never face justice.

 

 

 

I wish I knew the answer to your first question, why did Tony Blair

join it? Certainly, it's been utterly ruinous to his political

reputation. He will, he will be followed into the history books and

into the grave with this mark of Cain on his forehead. He will be

remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush over

a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven't yet reached the

bottom, I'm afraid. All I can say from my own conversations with Mr.

Blair, man to man, are that I think that both him and George W. Bush

are possessed of a kind of messianic belief that somebody, God

perhaps, gave them the job of shouldering the white man's burden,

which is the world. That someone gave them the right to step outside

of international law; go anywhere, do anything, pay any price in other

people's blood, to reshape the world in their image; in the image that

they want to see. And I think that both men will be damned in history.

Both men have made their respective countries the two most hated

countries in the world. They have endangered the lives and safety of

our citizens. They have damaged our economic and cultural and social

interests, and they should face prosecution, but never will.

 

 

 

[Thom Hartmann] Mr. Galloway, you called for a police inquiry into

ballot fraud and ghost voting in Bethnal Green and Bow. In America,

now, we just have this, just recently released, Congressman John

Conyers went to Ohio and held hearings, 13 or 12 members of Congress,

several weeks of hearings under oath, and determined that there was

considerable election fraud in this last election where George Bush

became president. And of course we know now that, in fact it was first

reported on the BBC - Americans didn't know it but, but folks in the

UK knew - within weeks of the 2000 election, that George Bush's

brother Jeb and Kathleen Harris in Florida had conspired to remove the

names of thousands of legally registered, tens of thousands of legally

registered African Americans - largely Democratic voters - from the

rolls there in Florida. What do you think is the solution to making

elections, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, and

around the world for that matter, open, fair and accurate?

 

 

 

[George Galloway] Well, you know, we're used to sending observers to

third world countries and former banana republics to observe their

elections. But the British election recently, and your election just a

little more distantly, and the one in 2000 for that matter, really, if

they had been observed by third world observers would have been

declared bogus and deeply flawed.

 

 

 

Your president stole the presidency in Florida using his brother and

his brother's close friends to cheat the people of the United States

out of their freely elected president who was undoubtedly Al Gore.

Even if you only counted the votes that actually made it through the

hoops in order to be cast, the president was really Al Gore. And in

Ohio, and I've read the stuff that Congressman Conyers is doing and I

commend it, it's clear enough on the face of it that there was

substantial fraud in that state and thus delivering the Electoral

College vote for president Bush.

 

 

 

In our country, the government have vastly inflated the number of

people voting by post which, as the courts have found, is wide open to

electoral fraud, and electoral fraud there has been. I don't need to

deal with the allegations, which are in their thousands. I can just

deal with the cases that have already been dealt with. Six new Labour

councillors were struck off and thrown out of the council in

Birmingham, which is Britain's second city, having been caught

red-handed in a room around a table at the dead of night, at midnight,

with thousands, and I mean thousands, of other people's ballot papers

that they were happily filling in, and they are now facing criminal

prosecution as a result. Another new Labour councillor in the town of

Blackburn, where the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw represents, and he

was a close associate of Jack Straw, and he was a 65 or 67 year old

man, has just been sent to prison for three and a half years for

having been caught red-handed doing exactly the same thing.

 

 

 

When you add the thousands of allegations that there now are of voter

fraud in the last election then I've called for the police to move in

en masse, because we are heading down the road towards a kind of

corruption that we never thought we'd see. Perhaps it's an innate

sense of democratic superiority on our part. We use to think that that

kind of ballot-rigging and voter fraud was something that happened in

other countries, not in the mother of democracies, Great Britain.

 

 

 

[Thom Hartmann] Now this was a vote by mail problems that you had in

the UK. Here in Oregon, we have the only vote by mail system in the

state and I think we always thought that it was impregnable. It was,

it was immune to this sort of thing.

 

 

 

More- http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0528-27.htm