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Galloway Dismisses Congress Oil Claims
By Mark Turner and Edward Alden
Financial Times
Wednesday 18 May
2005
George Galloway,
the independent British member of parliament, charged yesterday that a
Senate investigation that alleged he was granted Iraqi oil allocations was a
"smokescreen" aimed at obscuring criticism of the US-led invasion of Iraq.
In blistering
testimony in Washington, he said the committee had no evidence he received
any money from an alleged 20m barrels of oil allocations issued to him,
through his associates, in return for his support for lifting sanctions
against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
"I am not now nor
have I ever been an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf," he
said in testimony under oath before the Senate permanent subcommittee on
investigations. "If you had any letters on me they would have been up there
on a slide-show."
Mr Galloway, who
had earlier warned he came "not as the accused but as the accuser", then
used the Senate committee floor to launch a tirade against US Iraq policy.
"I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies," he said.
"In everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right, and you turned
out to be wrong, and 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1,600 of
them US soldiers.
"You are trying to
divert attention from the crimes you supported."
After the hearing,
Mr Galloway quipped, "I'm a politician that pleads guilty of using events
like these for political purposes."
Committee
investigators said Mr Hussein's chief lieutenant, vice-president Taha Yassin
Ramadan, had told them Mr Galloway was granted allocations "because of his
opinions about Iraq. He wants to lift the embargo against Iraq."
The investigators
said an unidentified senior official of the Iraqi regime had confirmed that
claim as recently as Monday. They said one allocation had been channelled
through Mariam Appeal, a foundation set up by Mr Galloway to aid a
four-year-old Iraqi leukaemia patient. "It appears that George Galloway used
a children's cancer foundation to conceal his oil transaction," said Mark
Greenblatt, the committee's counsel.
But Mr Galloway
said he had never heard of Aredio Petroleum, the company that allegedly
transported the oil assigned to the charity, and cast doubt on the
credibility of testimony by Iraqi officials in US custody. He also said he
had not known if Fawaz Zureikat, a businessman accused of being a go-between
for Mr Galloway and the Iraqi regime, did any oil business - and that he did
not see it was any of his business.
"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.
"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 realise 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 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."
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