Exactly a week ago, Tuesday, May 19th,
George Galloway, a Member of the British Parliament who made his name
opposing the United States led invasion of Iraq appeared before a United
States Senate Committee investigating the Iraqi Oil-for-Food-Scandal
that had earlier indicted him of corruptly benefiting from the scandal.
His testimony before this committee was unprecedented in the annals of
the United States history. He appeared as an underdog but by the time he
finished his testimony, he humiliated the Senate beyond repairs. He told
them point blank some basic truths that no man has done before. That is
why we feel it is important to reproduce his statement transcript by
Times Online for your reading delight. Also at a time when the United
States government is advising Americans to be very careful about
visiting Nigeria because of large concentration of “Al Qaeeda”
terrorists and general insecurity problems, one cannot but pity the
Americans for swallowing and believing their own lies. In addition, in
the same week, they disgraced Nigeria by opposing Olabisi Ogunjobi,
Nigeria’s nominee for the African Development Bank presidency. Yet, we
are being told that the United States is our “friend”. So far, to
paraphrase the late Chief MKO Abiola, with “friends” like the United
States, we certainly do not need enemies! Please read Galloway, the man
that single-handedly took America to the cleaners:
“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 writing to me or telephoning 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 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 Tahar Yassin Ramadan. Well, you have
something on me, I’ve never met Mr Tahar Yassin 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 Tahar Yassin 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 is the money. Senator? Who paid me
the 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 name 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 be 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.”
So, dear reader, this is George Galloway for you on his mother of all
smokescreens. Uncle Sam is never ashamed of telling lies and even when
caught, he is never ashamed of telling more lies to cover the first set
of lies. May be it is time somebody should tell President Obasanjo to
reexamine his friendship with the United States. Try as he did in the
last six years to please them, they always reciprocate by embarrassing
him and his country. To my mind, Nigeria should seriously review its
relations with the United States and all our supposed friends that
refuse to support us in our time of needs. Imagine South Africa and
Britain opposing our candidate for the ADB presidency? Otherwise, a
shocker awaits us at the United Nations as we scramble for a seat at the
Security Council.
Source: Daily Trust Tuesday,
May 24, 2005