See original article containing short transcript here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html
May 18, 2005:
- Galloway vs. the US Senate: transcript of statement

See related article from the day before: [ local copy ]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616104,00.html
May 17, 2005:
- Galloway attacks Senate for 'mother of all smokescreens'

- See photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein on 12/20/83 in Baghdad, Iraq (whose meetings with Saddam are referred to by Galloway in his speech).
CAPTION: "Current U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (L) and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on 20 December 1983 in Baghdad, Iraq. Rumsfeld met with Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in his capacity as an envoy for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan."
(I located this photo here: http://electroniciraq.net/news/1969.shtml)

May 17, 2005 George Galloway's Statement to US Senate

"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 Defense
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 realize 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 [Mark Greenblatt, legal 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.

[ Click here to start the short video, which matches transcript below... ]
3 min 56 sec / 3,739 KB (about 4 MB)
Note that your browser will download the entire video first before displaying it. If you have a fast broadband connection, this will only be a matter of seconds. For a phone connection, it will be a lot longer.

It's 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 Halliburton 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."

© 2005 Times Newspapers

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