25/5/05:G.GALLAWAY:UN OIL-FOR-FOOD IN IRAQ COMMENT(GLW/FWD)



fwd-6-Sep-2005

[AddedNote: The neo-con attack dogs of US Senates seems to be biting
their way towards justice regarding with the UN oil-for-food
scandal. Certainly, when justice is being done, no one will be making
complaints. Then again, US Senate dispensing justice selectively --
only to UN employee and others nationals -- is not JUSTICE. It is
called scapegoating or finger-pointing. Better still, facts must be
properly extracted out of fiction in these allegations.

This investigation on the oil-for-food scandal should widen to include
the mis-approprations of iraqi oils by the United States occupation
forces in aftermath of the fall of Saddam regime in 2003. Otherwise,
no justice is seen to have done.

-- U Ne Oo.]
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GREENLEFT WEEKLY AUSTRALIA, 25-MAY-2005
www.greenleft.org.au

UNITED STATES: British MP blasts pro-war senators

Below is an abridged version of a statement made to the US Senate
permanent committee on investigations on May 17 by left-wing British
MP George Galloway. The senate committee, head by Republican Norm
Coleman, had accused the anti-war MP of receiving vouchers for
millions of barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein's regime.

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.

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...

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 ***-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 US$10 million from the Saddam
regime. And they were all lies...

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 1 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
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.

>From Green Left Weekly, May 25, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

--
http://netipr.org/~uneoo/ (Burma HR Activity)
http://netipr.org/saorg/ (Refugee Rights Activity)
emails: uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx druneoo@xxxxxxxxxxx
POST: Dr U Ne Oo, 18 Shannon Place,Adelaide SA5000,AUSTRALIA

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