Anyone listening to George Galloway vs the Senate Committee

Its still going on.

and, if you're lucky, Six Feet Under.

I found myself cheering him on. A big, honest, brave Scottish man takes on the might of the, for the most part, corrupt, immoral scum of the US senate and slowly, articulately and meticulously exposes them, and their idea of justice for what it is. His skillful unravelling of the claims against him made me proud to be British, proud to have opposed a war based on greed and proud to continue to oppose that war which has seen over 100,000 die with no end to the death and suffering imminent (for those who wish to go into the old spiel about the evil of the Hussain dictatorship, don't bother eh? we all know what Saddam was and what he would be if he were still in power although he'd be far less if the Americans hadn't helped him for so long)

And the combined might of the British and American governments, not to mention the popular press of both nations have once again failed to pin anything on Mr Galloway. I wonder why they hate him so much? I wonder why they have thus far failed to pin ANYTHING on him?

Seems American justice, as well as being able to justify mass murder, can also convict a man in his absence using lies and tenuous links...well GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Respect? you're damned right!

Sorry about the ranting nature of this message, guess I'm one of those "Commies" people are always going on about! 20000 of which have recently voted Mr Galloway into Parliament!

He's Scottish and he's a man and that's as far as it goes

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38186000/jpg/_38186253_galloway300.jpg

'Saucy Brit Berates Congress, U.S.'

He is a good orator, and very good at attacking. It's a shame he's such a venal opportunist.

Not really sure Dom, but i'm sure the American Government could make it appear that way to most of their people if they wanted to!

And what the hell does that have to do with today's Senate hearing anyway?

A man was accused of something he didn't do by a deeply corrupt military regime (The U.S.) Man goes in front of Senate, man refutes alligations.

No...I said I admire his bravery and honesty.

I never said that...please don't tell lies and say I did!

game recognize game though

Oh I know the quote all right Dada...The Senate used it against him as an opening gambit of their hearing.

>>He might as well have said Saddam was a big, honest and brave Iraqi, when it comes down to it. -- Dadaismus (dadaismu...), May 17th, 2005.

But he didn't...He said he admired Saddam Hussain's "courage, strength and indefatigability"!!!!!

Published on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 by the Times Online (UK)

Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement
George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption

"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 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."

What I want to know is, why do so many people see him as such a threat that they will go to such lengths to smear him?

Cos this 'asshole' has the guts and the articulacy to come over to your fucked up country and tell it like it is.

MAB = islamists
SWP = pro-dprk stalinists

there are plenty of reasons for voting for gallowing, or against oona king. some are better than others.

As for the testimony, Norm got spanked. Hard. And good for Galloway, saying what he did in that setting.

Cathy, you are correct regarding the demographics of BG&B, but 40% of a parliamentary constituency is about 40,000 people. So less than half of those muslims are self idetifying islamists, or at least conservatively islamic, could elect an MP. by and large Galloway was elected by a twisted alliance of SWP activists from who knows where and conservative muslims. The votes of less conservative muslims, went elsewhere.

Are there more opposite ideaologies than conservative islam and trotkyism?

onimo -- it's murky. some *real* anti-democracy conservatives went against galloway i think.

"Roy Greenslade's famous talent for cool analysis deserted him in his apologia for George Galloway (No need for balance, May 13). He claims that Galloway is not being given a fair crack of the whip by the media. What nonsense. Mr Galloway is a clever bully, brutal in his criticism of others but so thin-skinned that he resorts instantly to the libel laws to cow his own critics.
Whatever the truth about his relationship to the Oil for Food programme, much more important is that Galloway was for many years the most diligent propagandist of one of the most fascistic of modern leaders.
In 1994 Mr Galloway stood before Saddam Hussein and said: "Your excellency, Mr President, I greet you in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq and continue to oppose the war by economic means, which is aimed to strangle the life out of the great people of Iraq ... I greet you too in the name of the Palestinian people ... I thought the president would appreciate to know that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem." (The Times, January 20 1994.)
In 1994, Saddam was already well known (inter alia) for having gassed the Kurds, murdered thousands of his political opponents, practised brutal ethnic cleansing on the Marsh Arabs, attempted to expunge a member of the UN and kidnapped hundreds of Kuwaiti citizens (all later found to be murdered).
Saddam killed more Muslims than any other leader alive. Yet for years Galloway lobbied for Saddam. And now he has the effrontery to pose as a defender of Muslims. That is Mr Galloway's offence and I suggest to Mr Greenslade that it is a very good reason for people to dislike and to criticise him."

As for the Senate hearing, no, they didn't really lay a glove on Galloway, though they did quickly see his usual noisome bluster for what it really was: "The mother of all smokescreens"
The thing is he was put under oath, and now everything he said will be used against him.
Galloway got a better grilling outside. Reporters were asking him to give back the kick backs that should have gone to Iraqi children.

The reason for the george galloway ire, I think, is that those who can clearly see that he is at least a big a jackass as Tony Blair is that vast swathes of the population have been taken in, by his smiles, and populist veneer.

Whatever he's done it doesn't compare to what certain parts of the USA as a nation has done collectively over the last few years and his speech showed them up to be not just evil, but stupid.

Galloway represents the logical outcome of the premise that my enemy's enemy must be my friend. US Imperialism is the Great Satan and anyone who resists it must be on the side of the angels, even Saddam. In this sense his election was perfectly logical: the majority voted for the candidate who most clearly hated what they themselves hated. They viewed Galloway through the same kind of rose tinted spectacles as he viewed Saddam: they were clear that he wanted to destroy what they wanted to destroy, so they weren't minded to examine his unpleasant character too closely.

I find it hard to be sympathetic to King. She had a choice between representing her constituents and furthering her career by toadying to Blair. She cynically chose the latter. There's a poetic justice that this backfired, although I suspect Blair may yet find a way to reward her loyalty.

frankie, is this you speaking here, or are you channelling galloway's less intelligent supporters? it's only 'logical' if you actually think bush is worse than saddam, i guess.

A lot of people in the world DO think that, and who are you to question THEIR 'logic'?

You'd prefer it if everyone could conveniently agree with each other here?

I would call GWB or his pals a fanny or fannies, to his or their face or faces, maybe, but not SH, to his face, when he was in iraq. I think some of GG's actions are quite understandable.

-- N_RQ (bl0cke...), May 18th, 2005 12:15 PM. (later) (link)

What was he there for when praising Saddam? To argue for rights for the Kurds or Iraqi Jews? No, to present Saddam with a pennant from Palestinian youth and to congratulate him on the fact that Palestinians were naming their children after him. Then there were his description of Saddam as a quietly spoken, diffident fan of Churchill. This is all of a piece with his admiration for other tyrannical dictatorships including Castro ("not really a dictator") and the military dictatorships in Pakistan ("democracy isn't appropriate in for third world countries, it's a means not an end")

I have no strong opinions either way on Galloway, bar that I feel he is an effective, passionate orator. I remain to be convinced about his motives, but performances such as these go suggest he is on my side on the issues, and is at the least a maverick underdog attacking complacent American politicians, who have had it too easy - they never have to face this level of public rebuttal or argument.

worth a read,its pretty interesting,and might explain galloways "support" for the regime

btw anon snarkster, not liking galloway or saddam != supporting 'The Right' ffs.