From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Thu May 19 2005 - 23:48:33 BST
Platt stated May 19th 2005:
>Hi Anthony,
>
>Thanks for the illuminating excerpt from Galloway's testimony to the
>Senate inquiry into the Food for Oil scandal. You forgot to mention that
>Galloway didn't give straight answers to the questions put to him, nor
>that the Senate had documents indicating his involvement in that scandal.
Platt,
Thanks for your interest with George Galloway and his recent hearing at the
Senate.
To put you in the picture, there's been a systematic attempt by the British
Establishment recently to discredit Galloway basically because he was an
anti-war politician. First, the London Daily Telegraph conveniently "found"
some documents in Baghdad “proving” that Galloway was “in the pay” of Saddam
Hussein. Of course, when it was realised in December 2004 that these
documents had a very dubious heritage, the Telegraph were ordered by a
British Court to pay Galloway damages of £150,000 and his costs of £600,000.
Moreover, because their case was so weak, the Judge didn’t even give the
Telegraph leave to appeal.
As far as the questions in the Senate were concerned Galloway just gave a
full account of the issues behind the questions rather than a simple yes or
no which would have been uninformative. And regarding the documents that
the Senate have, if Fox News had actually allowed their viewers to hear
Galloway, they would have heard him state the following:
“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 [or] 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.”
Ant McWatt comments:
Not that I’m a great adherent of conspiracy theories but what the hell is
happening when forged documents are appearing both in the United States and
the UK concerning the various parties (such as anti-war politicians, the
United Nations, the French government and Vatican) who were against the
Iraqi invasion?
Platt stated May 19th 2005:
>Free speech doesn't require a megaphone be given to every crackpot who
>wants to destroy what we fight to preserve and promote around the world.
Well, that’s a bit of a harsh indictment on Norm Coleman. ;-) And, anyway,
don’t you think people in a democracy should be allowed to make their own
minds up about who is talking like a crackpot and who isn’t? What gives a
big mouth reporter on Fox News the right to censor parts of an important
Senate hearing? Hasn't it crossed your mind that Fox News were possibly
trying to hide something? Wake up and smell the coffee!
>Apparently Galloway is not in favor of establishing democracy over tyranny
>in Iraq or anywhere else.
I think he is. However, I think – like any reasonable person – he’s against
illegal wars and the imposition of puppet governments such as the one
presently installed in Iraq.
>Good thing he wasn't in charge at the beginning of Word War II. Like
>Chamberlain, he would have capitulated to Hitler in a Munich minute.
Hitler was a real threat to world democracy. Though Hussein was a despot
and a dictator he was no real threat to us in the West. Galloway was
concerned primarily with the children in Iraq who were first starved to
death by international sanctions and then killed by the US-UK invasion and
occupation.
>Just so you know the other side of the story -- for a fair and balanced
>view. :-)
Well, is there an alternative in the MOQ to the view that killing innocent
children needlessly is immoral? I don’t think Struan Hellier would even
have tried that on.
Best wishes,
Anthony.
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