GALLOWAY VS. COLEMAN: British MP blasts U.S. Senator for lying about Iraq disaster

George Galloway, recently elected MP in the British Parliament, was accused by some U.S. politicians, including Senator Norm Coleman, of profiting from Iraq's oil-for-food program. Galloway asked for an opportunity to clear his name, and was allowed to testify before Senator Coleman's Senate sub-committee on May 17. His explosive speech clearing his name and blasting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq received scant coverage in the U.S. and Canadian media. We provide the highlights below.- ED.

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 having 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 an American and British 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-1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever, and all 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."

As a matter of fact, I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that 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. You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from March 15, 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.

You say in this document-you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source was 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.

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. You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided by the convicted bank robber, 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 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 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, 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. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars? 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 named 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. 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.

One of the most serious mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, a schoolboy howler. 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 while 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 the period of 1992-1993. I never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993. There could not possibly be any documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992 or 1993, because the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

But perhaps you were confusing The Daily Telegraph with The Christian Science Monitor, which did indeed publish on its front page a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee has made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992 and 1993. But these documents were later conceded by The Christian Science Monitor itself to be forgeries. The neocon 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-forgeries concocted and circulated among right-wing newspapers around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

I gave my heart and soul, Senator, 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 whom died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason 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 built 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 of France, who you paint as some kind of corrupt traitor; if the world had listened to the anti-war movement, we would not be in the mess 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 good 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 French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies, with the connivance of your own government.

[Sidebar]

"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, 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies."

[Sidebar]

"If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded; if the world had listened to French President Chirac, whom you try to paint as a traitor; if the world had listened to the anti-war movement, we would not be in the mess we are in today."