[Mb-civic] FW: Article from The Nation about Galloway at the US senate

[Michael Butler]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Bryan Peterson <Bryan.Peterson at LW.com>
Reply-To: Bryan.Peterson at LW.com
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 20:26:50 -0400
To: michael at michaelbutler.com
Subject: Article from The Nation

 

Wow!  Read British Parlimentarian George Galloways arguments against Norm
Coleman!  

Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington
by John Nichols

   Norm Coleman is a fool.

   Not an ideological nut case, not a partisan whack, not even a useful
   idiot -- just a plain old-fashioned, drool-on-his-tie fool.

   The Minnesota Republican senator who took Paul Wellstone's seat after
   one of the most disreputable campaigns in American political history
   has been trying over the past year to make a name for himself by
   blowing the controversy surrounding the United Nations Oil-for-Food
   program into something more than the chronicle of corporate abuse
   that it is. The US media, which thrives on official sound bites, was
   more than willing to lend credence to Coleman's overblown claims
   about wrongdoing in the UN program set up in 1996 to permit Iraq --
   which was then under strict international sanctions -- to buy food,
   medicine and humanitarian supplies with the revenues from regulated
   oil sales. Even as Coleman's claims became more and more fantastic,
   he faced few challenges from the cowering Democrats in Congress.

   But when Coleman started slandering foreign politicians, he exposed
   the dramatic vulnerability of his claims that the supposed scandal
   was much more than a blatant example of US corporations taking
   advantage of their powerful connections in Washington to undermine
   official US policy, harm the national interest and profit off the
   suffering of the poor.

   The Senate investigation that Coleman sought regarding the Oil for
   Food program has already revealed that the Bush Administration
   failed to crack down on widespread abuse of the Oil for Food
   program by US energy companies, and that US oil purchases accounted
   for the majority of the kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein's regime
   in return for sales of inexpensive oil. Indeed, the report
   concludes, "The United States (government) was not only aware of
   Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk
   of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN
   sanctions. On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the
   illicit oil sales."

   Instead of forcing the President, his aides and the executives of
   Bayoil, the Texas oil company that the report shows paid "at least
   $37 million in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime" -- money
   that helped the Iraqi dictator solidify his grip on power -- Coleman
   started to make wild charges about European officials such as British
   parliamentarian George Galloway.

   The problem for Coleman is that Galloway is not a standard-issue
   American politician -- the kind who has nothing to say and says it
   poorly. He is a veteran of the rough-and-tumble politics of Glasgow
   and the equally rough-and-tumble politics of the British Parliament.
   In other words, Galloway comes from places where voters and
   politicians do not suffer fools. And anyone who has ever followed
   British politics knows that George Galloway has beaten every
   political challenge he has faced -- even those posed by British Prime
   Minister Tony Blair.

   Galloway called Coleman's bluff and flew to Washington for a
   remarkable appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
   Investigations. "I am determined now that I am here, to be not the
   accused but the accuser," Galloway announced as he stood outside the
   Capitol Tuesday. "These people are involved in the mother of all
   smokescreens."

   The member of Parliament tore through Coleman's flimsy "evidence,"
   issuing an unequivocal denial that began, "Mr. Chairman, I am not
   now, nor have I ever been an oil trader, and neither has anyone been
   on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought
   one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." He accused
   Coleman of being "remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice" and
   pointed out error after error in the report the senator had
   brandished against him.

   For instance, Galloway noted that he had met Saddam twice -- not the
   "many" times alleged by the report. "As a matter of fact I have met
   Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times that [Secretary of
   Defense] Donald Rumsfeld met him," said the recently re-elected
   British parliamentarian. "The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met
   him to sell him guns."

   For good measure, Galloway used the forum Coleman had foolishly
   provided to deliver a blistering condemnation of Coleman's war.

   "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," Galloway informed the fool on
   Capitol Hill.

   “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; 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 on a
   pack of lies.

   "If the world had listened to [UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan,
   whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to [French]
   President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt
   traitor, if the world had listened to me and the antiwar 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," argued Galloway.

   Then the Brit turned the tables on Coleman and steered the
   committee's attention toward "the real Oil for Food scandal."

   "Have a look at the fourteen months you were in charge of Baghdad,
   the first fourteen 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," Galloway said.

   "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."

   (John Nichols's new book, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of
   American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), was published January
   30. Howard Zinn says, "At exactly the time when we need it most, John
   Nichols gives us a special gift -- a collection of writings,
   speeches, poems and songs from throughout American history -- that
   reminds us that our revulsion to war and empire has a long and noble
   tradition in this country." Frances Moore Lappé calls Against the
   Beast "brilliant! A perfect book for an empire in denial." Against
   the Beast can be found at independent bookstores nationwide and can
   be obtained online by tapping the above reference or at
   www.amazon.com.)


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