Showdown in Washington: British MP versus the US Senate Sub-Committee
"Galloway may have used the charitable organisation to conceal payments from the oil allocation he had received from the Hussein regime." "George’s defence will simply be that these allegations are a tissue of lies. There is no evidence whatsoever that he benefited from selling Iraqi oil. The only evidence against him is that someone has typed his name on bits of paper. "This is an old story without a shred of truth to it. There is no connection between me or my company and George Galloway and he certainly did not receive any money or benefits from me. Our link is the Mariam Appeal and anti-sanctions activities. And like Mr Galloway I have never been approached by this committee to tell them the truth and put an end to these slanderous allegations." Galloway was particularly angry that the committee had published its allegations without giving him any chance to study its evidence or interviewing him first. He will also accuse the senators of being manipulated by US intelligence, since its main Iraqi witnesses, including former Iraqi ministers, are all in US custody. An article by Wayne Madsen, commented: "Coleman, with pro-AIPAC Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, is using the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations to rehash charges that foreign and even U.S. officials financially benefited from the United Nations' Oil for Food program. Galloway successfully sued the Telegraph for libel over its baseless Oil for Food allegations against him.
British Member of Parliament George Galloway arrives in Washington DC for his date with Norm Coleman, US Jewish Republican Chairman of the US Senate Sub-committee investigating the Iraqi Oil-For-Food scandal.
Coleman, last week accused Galloway, the newly-elected member for Bethnal Green and Bow, of profiting from illegal oil contracts.
Galloway vehemently denies the claims and in typically robust style declared he would fly to the US to confront the senators on their own turf.
The American media can hardly wait.
It’s not often a foreign politician strays into the Senate bearpit, where presidents have been humbled.
What makes it pure theatre is that Galloway has volunteered to be skewered by the 13-man committee, live on TV.
The understated grandeur of Room 562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill could be where Coleman reputation as a fearless investigator is cemented.
Galloway seems convinced that he will have his day if not in court, then before the world’s press, to finally clear his name of the allegations that have dogged him ever since Saddam’s regime fell two years ago.
It is a gamble which he likens to Daniel entering the Lions’ Den with, he hopes, a similar outcome, but it is also an opportunity for his detractors to prove his guilt.
Iraqi Oil-For-Food Scandal
During Saddam Hussein's time, Iraq was forbidden to sell its rich reserves of oil on the international market following the sanctions imposed by the United Nations after the first conflict.
But with the sanctions taking their toll on the Iraqi population, which was facing a humanitarian disaster, UN officials came up with a plan whereby the country could sell limited oil supplies to buy food and medicines for its sick and starving people.
The regime was alleged to have siphoned off more than £1 billion of the proceeds to both prop up the government and buy influence among foreign politicians or journalists who showed their support for the end of the crippling sanctions.
UN officials seconded to the programme were tasked with ensuring that only legitimate oil traders received the lucrative contracts to sell Iraqi oil.
In reality, a secret unit within the Oil Ministry, headed by a vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, diverted supplies to regime supporters.
According to the US Senate investigators last week, Ramadan’s committee had full freedom to decide which companies and individuals were to be illicitly given the contracts, in the form of oil "vouchers."
Each voucher, for up to 10 million barrels, was made out in the name of a company but internal ministry documents - recovered after the 2003 Iraq war - also reveal the names of supposed individual recipients in brackets.
The recipients are believed to have both enriched themselves and passed some of the handsome profits back to the Saddam regime. All this could be done, according to earlier Senate reports, without any of the recipients ever being in contact with a barrel of oil.
A US Senate report states that Saddam regime, instead of granting allocations to traditional oil purchasers, gave priority to foreign officials, journalists, and even terrorist entities, "to engender international support for the Hussein regime and against the UN’s sanctions".
Accusation Against Galloway
The US Senate investigation accused Galloway, an anti-sanctions campaigner, as one of the recipients both individually and through a company owned by Fawaz Zureikat, a wealthy Jordanian businessman. Zureikat met Galloway through his Palestinian wife on one of his trips to Iraq in the 1990s.
Zureikat became chairman and financial supporter of the "Mariam appeal" set up by Galloway to get medical treatment in Scotland for a 5-year-old Iraqi girl with leukaemia, Mariam Hamza, while at the same time highlighting the effect the UN sanctions were having on medical supplies in Iraq.
The Mariam Appeal paid for Galloway to make five visits to Iraq, two to America and one each to Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Belgium and Romania, as it diverted down a more political route.
Coleman’s senate investigators now believe that both Galloway and Zureikat were involved in the oil-for-food scam and were using the humanitarian appeal as a cover for their activities.
Their report states:
The Evidence Against Galloway
The Zureikat connection emerged last January when a Baghad newspaper reported a list of 270 alleged recipients of oil vouchers, based on oil ministry documents. It is these documents on which the Senate allegations against Galloway are based, along with information extracted from Ramadan and other Iraqi officials.
Galloway Denies Charges
Galloway is insistent that the allegations in the Senate report are false and that neither he nor anyone else on his behalf has ever traded in oil.
His spokesman said:
A lot of this seems to be based on the word of Ramadan and other senior officials who have been held by the Americans for a long time.
These are the people who, we were told, were lying over weapons of mass destruction. Now we are told that we ought to believe them.
This is nothing more than a stitch-up, which is why George is going to the Senate to appear before the committee on Tuesday."
Certainly, no-one as yet has been able to make the accusations stick.
The key allegations against Galloway are not new and first surfaced in the Daily Telegraph in April, 2003, following the fall of Baghdad.
Documents recovered by one of the newspaper’s reporters from a looted office block claimed the MP had personally profited from Iraqi oil deals during the oil-for-food programme. Galloway sued the Telegraph for libel and in December won his High Court case resoundingly with a £150,000 damages award. The newspaper group is currently appealing against the verdict.
Zureikat has also denied the allegations. He issued a statement:
Norm Coleman
Norm Coleman, who is Jewish, is part of a band of Republican hawks that has UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in its sights after his declaration last year that the war against Iraq was illegal.
By picking off the smaller players, the committee hopes it will uncover a bigger picture of complicity that will lead to the very top of the UN.
George Galloway
These charges, which later were proven false, first surfaced in the neoconservative controlled London-based Daily Telegraph, owned by the Hollinger Corporation, a company that had financial ties to arch-neoconservative Richard Perle.
The charges by both the Daily Telegraph and now Coleman's committee are based on documents as bogus as the Niger yellowcake documents and those proffered by Curveball and Chalabi about Iraq's fantasized weapons of mass destruction.
What has Coleman's panties in a twist is the fact that in the recent British elections, Galloway, who was expelled from the Labor Party for his anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush politics, made easy work of his Labor Party opponent and Tony Blair sycophant, Oona King, an African-Jewish daughter of—ironically—an African-American draft evader from the Vietnam War.
King was one of Tony Blair's most ardent supporters for his decision to join Bush in a genocidal war against Iraq. For that, she earned the support of the international neoconservative network of influence holders and peddlers that can, according to a senior Bush administration official, create their own reality because of their ownership of much of the international media.
However, King also earned the enmity of her large Muslim constituency in East London's Bethnal Green and Bow district. They rejected King and threw their political weight behind Galloway. "
By 26 he was the youngest ever chairman of the Scottish Labour Party and in 1987 defeated the Liberal-SDP MP Roy Jenkins in Glasgow Hillhead.
He was expelled from Labour in October 2003 in the wake of his comments on the second Iraq war.
Last December, he won £150,000 in libel damages from the Daily Telegraph over stories claiming he received money from Saddam’s regime.
Galloway’s remarkable career then took another twist at this month’s election when he won a shock victory for the seat of Bethnal Green and Bow for his new-found party, Respect. Galloway defeated sitting Labour candidate Oona King to capture the supposedly safe Labour seat of Bethnal Green and Bow for his anti-war party, Respect.
When the result was declared, Galloway called for Tony Blair to be sacked. Addressing Tony Blair, he said: "This defeat is for Iraq. All the people you have killed, all the lies you have told have come back to haunt you."
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