Help get Galloway's statement in the Congressional Record

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excised Galloway's devastating testimony from the official record.

Help remind Coleman and Levin that what happened on the 17th really did
happen, and won't go away because they want to play Orwell games. Full
text of Galloway statement follows]

They don't want this in the Congressional Record- Let's help them
remember that George Galloway actually WAS there and DID say these
things:

Fax Phone and email:

Norm Coleman, Chairman of the Committee

Washington Office:
320 Senate Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Main: 202-224-5641
Fax: [phone]
Scheduling: 202-228-1503

Minnesota Office in St. Paul:
2550 University Ave W, Suite 100N
St. Paul, MN 55114
Main: 651-645-0323
Fax: [phone]
Toll Free: 800-642-6041

Minnesota Office in Mankato:
12 Civic Center Plaza
Suite 2167
Mankato, Minnesota 56001
Main: 507-625-6800
Fax: [phone]


Carl Levin, Ranking member
269 Russell Office Building
U.S. Senate
Washington, DC 20510-2202

Phone [phone]
Fax [phone]
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.


"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 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."

[wurzel]

1. How can it not be part of the record?

I know they can add in things they never actually said. But I didn't know they could delete from the record.

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2. Republicans do whatever they want

because they know they can get by with it.I wish to God we could get them out of power. They are abusing it to the max.