Posted on 05/18/2005 9:31:29 AM PDT by Blogger_by_trade
Galloway goes in front off the Senate Comittee to clear the air...
"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."
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
You do have a mommy, right?
George Galloway has branded the trial of Saddam Hussein a US sham and said Iraq's new interim authority is a "puppet of the military occupiers".
"It is not the Iraqis that are doing it, it is the Americans," he told Sky.
"Iraq is not a free country. There is a government that has been put in power in Baghdad by the Americans."
Keep digging, George.
What for? Didn't Bush just make it all up? If there weren't any WMDs and everyone knew it, why send the inspectors back in? Really, sir. Get your facts straight.
THREE Godzilla fans on the same ZOT thread?!
Really scary.
But .. Donald Rumsfeld didn't get PAID for his visits and Mr. Galloway did.
"Sir, I salute your courage, your strength." So said fawning then-British Member of Parliament George Galloway to Saddam Hussein on one of his pre-war visits to Iraq to praise Saddam and pick up a check. All together, through a college friend of his Palestinian wife, Galloway, a former MP for a constituency in his native Glasgow, is thought to have persuaded Iraq's erstwhile president to siphon around £375,000 ($700,000) per year out of the oil for food program -- to keep him in custom designer suits, nice cars and a driver. He denies these charges.
He was still going back to Iraq for meetings with Tariq Aziz and Saddam as late as December 2003, although Saddam is reputed to have been wearying of these trips to profess solidarity and inquire about his balance.
http://tinyurl.com/bshwg
Shouldn't you have another hobby? Braiding your nose hair?
I have my bootleg copy of FINAL WARS on the way next week. Shhh! ;o)
A US Senate committee published evidence from Iraqi documents and interviews with Iraqi officials that the former Labour MP, re-elected to Parliament for his Respect party, received allocations for millions of barrels of oil.
Taha Yassin Ramadan, the ousted Vice-President of Iraq, told Senate investigators last month that Mr Galloway had been granted the oil allocations because of his opinions about Iraq and because he wanted to lift the embargo against the country. Another Saddam-era official told US Treasury Department officials in 2003 that a British MP, identified as Mr Galloway, “benefited tremendously from the illegal trade of oil by Iraq”.
“Despite Galloway’s denials, the evidence obtained by the sub-committee, including Hussein-era documents from the Ministry of Oil and testimony from senior Hussein officials, shows that Iraq granted George Galloway allocations for millions of barrels of oil under the Oil-for-Food programme,” the report said. “Moreover, some evidence indicates that Galloway appeared to use a charity for children’s leukaemia to conceal payments associated with at least one such allocation.”
snip
The staff report by the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee of Investigations emphasised that its findings were based on documents that had no relation to the “seemingly forged documents” used in the Daily Telegraph piece, noting that the panel was relying on Iraqi Oil Ministry documents from 2001.
“The Daily Telegraph documents reportedly included allegations that Galloway was on the payroll of the Hussein regime, receiving a salary or direct payments,” it said. “In contrast, the evidence examined by the sub-committee indicates that Galloway was granted oil allocations that would have to be monetised through complex oil transactions.”
snip
One transaction in 2001 was described in a letter by the Iraqi state oil marketing organisation as having been signed with “Aredio Petroleum Company (Fawaz Zuraiqat — Mariam’s Appeal)”.
The report said: “This document indicates that Galloway may have used the charitable organisation to conceal payments from the oil allocation he had received from the Hussein regime.”
The appeal was the charity Mr Galloway founded to help Mariam Hamze, a four-year-old Iraqi leukaemia victim, to receive treatment in Britain and which later began lobbying against UN sanctions on Iraq.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1607720,00.html
Oh, rub my nose in it, why don'cha?
I just did another search on Amazon and there's still no listing for a release.
Blogger_by_Trade
...hmmmm...
Sounds like you need to find a new line of work boy. Being a zot target doesn't pay well.
The report is based in part on subcommittee interviews with key players in the OFF scam including former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, and the person referred to in the report as "Senior Hussein Regime Official No. 1."
The press release accurately summarizes the gist of the report. As to the magnitude of the transactions, the report states: "In light of the fact that most allocations consisted of millions of barrels of oil, such commissions were quite lucrative, reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars per allocation."
The report diplomatically buries one of its most interesting revelations in footnote 5. According to footnote 5, "Terrorist individuals and entities who received [OFF] allocations include the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Abbas and the Mujahedeen-e Khalq".
The report notes that the arm of the Iraqi goverment that managed the sale of Iraqi crude oil under the OFF program was the State Oil Marketing Organization, commonly called SOMA. An anonymous Husssein regime official is cited in the report as observing that inside SOMA, the OFF program was nicknamed the "Saddam Bribery System."
LOL!
18 - 24 December 2003
British MP George Galloway -- "Saddam's friend" according to his critics -- was probably the first to break the news of the ousted Iraqi president's capture on Sunday. The lounge of the Egyptian Press Syndicate's fourth floor was packed with hundreds of Arab and international anti-war activists, including Galloway, participants at the Second Cairo Conference.
Galloway had taken the microphone. "The prisoner is Saddam," he said, "he's been paraded on the TV screens and he's been virtually humiliated. His enemies are having a good laugh but it won't be the last laugh," at which point applause filled the hall.
Speaking to the Weekly, Galloway voiced faith in the Iraqi resistance. "It's not controlled by the strings of a man on the run near Tikrit," he said. "The capture of Saddam will not lead to the collapse of the resistance." The British MP argued that there are more important questions to worry about. "The men in Washington and London are preparing for a second Sykes- Pico. Is the Arab world ready for another 100 years of injustice? This is the question for the Arab world to answer."
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