[Mb-civic] Galloway tesimony - ouch!

[Mike Blaxill]

"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."