CommonDreams: Galloway interview from May 26, transcript online

[evermind]

Published on Saturday, May 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Exclusive May 26 2005 Interview with British MP George Galloway
Interview by Thom Hartmann

Apparently broadcast on AM 620 KPOJ in Portland.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0528-27.htm

Some quotes:

I wish I knew the answer to your first question, why did Tony Blair join it? Certainly, it's been utterly ruinous to his political reputation. He will, he will be followed into the history books and into the grave with this mark of Cain on his forehead. He will be remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush over a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven't yet reached the bottom, I'm afraid.

Your president stole the presidency in Florida using his brother and his brother's close friends to cheat the people of the United States out of their freely elected president who was undoubtedly Al Gore. Even if you only counted the votes that actually made it through the hoops in order to be cast, the president was really Al Gore. And in Ohio, and I've read the stuff that Congressman Conyers is doing and I commend it, it's clear enough on the face of it that there was substantial fraud in that state and thus delivering the Electoral College vote for president Bush.

In our country, the government have vastly inflated the number of people voting by post which, as the courts have found, is wide open to electoral fraud, and electoral fraud there has been. I don't need to deal with the allegations, which are in their thousands. I can just deal with the cases that have already been dealt with. Six new Labour councillors were struck off and thrown out of the council in Birmingham, which is Britain's second city, having been caught red-handed in a room around a table at the dead of night, at midnight, with thousands, and I mean thousands, of other people's ballot papers that they were happily filling in, and they are now facing criminal prosecution as a result. Another new Labour councillor in the town of Blackburn, where the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw represents, and he was a close associate of Jack Straw, and he was a 65 or 67 year old man, has just been sent to prison for three and a half years for having been caught red-handed doing exactly the same thing.

Well I'm afraid I'm an advocate of the great Dr. Johnson, the English man of letters who said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. He didn't mean, of course, the patriotism which is a noble, genuine love for what's best about your country and its beauty and its achievements and so on, but those who wrap themselves in flags and blow the tinny trumpet of patriotism as a means of fooling the people. As a means of getting them to fall in behind the colours and march off to ignoble wars; wars of conquest, wars of aggression, wars for exploitation.

More at the link..

[G_j]

1. nice interview

not hard to imagine the Scottish accent.

"He will be remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush over a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven't yet reached the bottom, I'm afraid."

[leftchick]

2. omg! They scrubbed his testimony from the Senate web site?

~snip~
And these people have all written to me. Many of them have drawn attention to the fact that although for one day, just 24 hours, my testimony was on the web site it has now been wiped off it. And that tells you all you need to know, really, about the quality of the commitment to democracy and open government that these people really have as opposed to the talk that they talk.

Un fucking believable!

:grr:

[Sapphire Blue]

3. Transcript & Video

Transcript: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html

Video & transcript: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8869.htm

[leftchick]

4. double posted

whoopsies

[leftchick]

5. thank you for the links

I wonder what Senator Levin has to say about the scrubbing?

[evermind]

6. Well..

... maybe. I'm not so sure about that, personally. I was visiting the committee site pretty frequently around the time of the hearing, and I never saw anything from Galloway on there.

I think the PDF's on there are not testimony, but written statements submitted prior to the hearing: 1) they don't (or didn't - haven't checked recently) contain Q&A, just opening statements; 2) the Panel 3 statements were up there after the recess before Panel 3 made any statements (has Panel 3 happened yet? I don't even know if the committee has done anything since they abruptly adjourned).

Given what Mr Galloway was due to let loose on the hearing, I can see why he would have avoided pre-submitting his opening statement in written form.

It's also pretty weird for the site to host video of his testimony then try and pretend he didn't make any.

So, I think it's a misperception that what is on there is testimony, per se, and that Galloway had anything scrubbed.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying the committee are in any hurry to publish his testimony - I just think there's no real reason to think that it was "scrubbed". What about the word of Mr. Galloway himself? The quote only claims that the "fact" of scrubbing is something that he's been informed of via email - and there've been a lot of people (not least on this board) pushing that view who might have emailed that to him.

All that just IMHO. I'm not anti-Galloway or anti-DU! Don't shoot me! ;-)