Senate Committee OWNED

[Seshmeister]

I'm not Galloway's biggest fan(he's used to be my MP) but it was still funny to see him completely own the Senate sub-committee on investigations today in particular the Republican chairman.

I don't think the cosy politicians in Washington are used to someone that will call them a bunch of liars and talk for 20 minutes in detail without notes...:)

Check out the video...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4556113.stm


The preamble goes on a bit, you can pick it up around 6 minutes in.

Cheers!

:gulp:

[Redballjets88]

whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo cares?

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by Seshmeister
I'm not Galloway's biggest fan(he's used to be my MP) but it was still funny to see him completely own the Senate sub-committee on investigations today in particular the Republican chairman.

I don't think the cosy politicians in Washington are used to someone that will call them a bunch of liars and talk for 20 minutes in detail without notes...:)

Check out the video...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4556113.stm


The preamble goes on a bit, you can pick it up around 6 minutes in.

Cheers!

:gulp:


This Galloway fellow is lying and you people were simply stupid were having ever electing him to Parliament. Don't be stupid again by believing his silly story. He's a rich man because of the Oil-for-Food Program. OPEN YOUR EYES!!!!

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
This Galloway fellow is lying and you people were simply stupid were having ever electing him to Parliament. Don't be stupid again by believing his silly story. He's a rich man because of the Oil-for-Food Program. OPEN YOUR EYES!!!!

How can you be so certain as to who is lying anymore?

[FORD]

If Norm Coleman opens his mouth, he's lying.

[LoungeMachine]

If KKKarl Rove or Dick Cheney open George's mouth.........




He's lying

[Seshmeister]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
This Galloway fellow is lying and you people were simply stupid were having ever electing him to Parliament. Don't be stupid again by believing his silly story. He's a rich man because of the Oil-for-Food Program. OPEN YOUR EYES!!!!

OPEN YOUR EARS!

Did you even watch that clip. No adverts for your short attention span...

I've said before on here that I don't like the guy.

He's an egomaniac serial adulterer who never did anything for his local constituents and maybe has some low level sleeze in his past. His anti war rhetoric crossed a line that Moore wouldn't even go close to which was in my opinion sedition and gave comfort to the 'enemy'. The fact there is no way we should have been at war is not the point when you get to level of some of his histronics during it.

That said the allegations against him are total bullshit and if you just sit there believing everything that you are being spoon fed then I think you should just stop taking an interest in politics on this forum and just turn up and give them your vote every couple of years like the majoirty of people.

There wasn't a shred of decent evidence presented against him. I think there was maybe a very poor fit up done on him a couple of years ago and it's totally backfired. He's already won a libel action on this in the UK. The documents are a fucking joke. You have these lists of people and orders and then in a completely different font and and size you see Galloway's name. It's so bad it could only have been a cut and paste by an Arab who didn't have an appreciation of English script.

The other 'evidence' against him is from 'evidence' from a couple of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Grahib.

Hello?

Absolutely nothing that ever comes out of Guantanamo or Abu Grahib is evidence. THAT'S WHY WE NEVER USED TO TORTURE PEOPLE!

Do you beilieve in fucking witches? (Fuck maybe you do...:) )

Well the Spanish inquisition proved there were plenty of them casting spells on people in and that's why civilised countries don't do torture.

You want to be sick cunt then that's your bag but there will never be any successful prosecution of anyone based on evidence from the US torture camps in a 'proper' court.

Not until they take over the judiciary too at least.

And even if against the evidence Galloway is guilty. The flawed accusation is that he made a few hundred thousand for a slightly dodgy charity. Even if that was true it's a complete fucking joke compared to the billions that have been stolen by the NeoCon Haliburton rape of Iraq already.

Today was fun because for once those sad grey old men that populate your senate that have spent so long making deals they don't even know why they are there any more got a taste of proper debate.

Kerry was too fucking scared to say half of the facts said by Galloway today about the war.

Bush and his buddies couldn't even if they were in the right because your system allows too many weaklings into the executive.

At least when our politicians are wrong a lot of the time they do it well. Gulianni and Clinton are the only two politicians I've seen from the US in recent times that could get to the top here because they are smart and can think on their feet.

Norm Coleman - what a fucking joke of a man. He's not worthy of a PTA meeting.

Cheers!

:gulp:

[Seshmeister]

Originally posted by Redballjets88
whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo cares?

My plan is to start with the adults and then work my way down...:)

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by FORD
If Norm Coleman opens his mouth, he's lying.


Proof? Because he's a Republican? Because he tossed your Emperor tiny Tom Daschle off his Throne? :D

[FORD]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
Proof? Because he's a Republican? Because he tossed your Emperor tiny Tom Daschle off his Throne? :D

:confused: :confused:

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by FORD
:confused: :confused:

Yeah, my mistake. I was thinking of John Thune. :o

[FORD]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
Yeah, my mistake. I was thinking of John Thune. :o

So you get all the BCE puppets confused too huh?

Coleman. Thune. Rossi. All useless empty suits for the PNAC dominionist fascists.

[bigc]

george galloway eh?

i never thought he'd make such an impression state side.

im far from his biggest fan,but i enjoyed his no holds barred attack.

[Mr Grimsdale]

I'm not a fan of Galloway, or his politics, at all but I have more confidence in what he's saying than the accusations.

[Seshmeister]

Pretty balanced article which shows why so many people start their posts 'I'm not a fan of Galloway'...:)

From the Sunday Times

Focus: Zero to hero

When Gorgeous George socked it to the Americans last week, many cheered him on. But is he really Saddam’s longest standing critic? Well, yes, if you can excuse the sycophancy, he is, writes Nick Fielding


It was showdown time and last week George Galloway, recently elected Respect MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, came out guns blazing. Marching into the Senate in Washington on Tuesday he gave, as promised, “both barrels” to the senators who had accused him of profiting from secret oil deals with Saddam Hussein.

“I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington,” Galloway said, opening fire on Norm Coleman, the former prosecutor who chairs the Senate subcommittee on investigations. “But for a lawyer, you’re remarkably cavalier with any sense of justice.

“I am here today, but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world . . . without any attempt to contact me whatsoever, and you call that justice.”

In a passionate speech Galloway denied he had “many meetings” with Saddam and robustly rejected all allegations that he had traded, benefited or been aware of illegal deals involving Iraqi oil.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld (the US secretary of defence, who met the Iraqi dictator twice in the 1980s). The difference is that 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.”

As for the Iraqi documents brandished by Coleman — several of which purport to show Galloway listed among recipients of lucrative oil allocations from Iraq — the MP told the senator: “You have nothing on me . . . 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.” He went on to rubbish the White House’s conduct of a “disastrous” war in Iraq, to sneer at US treatment of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail and to mock American politicians’ obsession with fundraising.

Galloway was cock-a-hoop and made no secret of it, having in the eyes of his supporters bearded the lion in its den.

Within hours he was on a flight back to London and a rapturous reception at Friends Meeting House in Euston. As 1,000 supporters stomped their feet and chanted “Respect! Respect!” he regaled them with the story of how he had smoked a Cuban cigar, which it is illegal to import to the US, in the Capitol.

“I even blew the smoke at the White House,” he shouted above the cheers. “And I think we blew them away, didn’t you?” Fidel Castro would have been proud.

The following day he appeared on the BBC’s Question Time in Edinburgh, where he stole the show, receiving loud applause for every comment. He would, cried one member of the audience, “make a better prime minister than Tony Blair”.

It was a remarkable recovery of fortune for a man notorious for shaking Saddam’s hand and saluting his “courage, power and indefatigability”. But that is Galloway’s point. Apart from that quote — which he claims has been taken out of context — he says he has been a consistent opponent of Saddam.

“I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas,” he told senators. “I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.”

Is that true? Had the man who told the Iraqi dictator in 1994 “I would like you to know that we are with you until victory, until Jerusalem” been taken out of context? Was he Saddam’s friend or foe?

THE answer lies in documents and cuttings stretching back more than 25 years. They show that Galloway has never hidden his support for leftist foreign causes since he was a young councillor in Dundee in the 1970s. At one time he hoisted the Palestinian flag above the town hall and twinned the city with Nablus on the West Bank.

Being on the left, however, did not mean supporting the Iraqi regime, which in the 1980s became America’s bulwark against the Islamic revolutionaries in neighbouring Iran.

On the contrary, Galloway opposed Saddam’s rise to power and condemned the Iraqi leadership in the 1980s as a “blood-soaked dictatorship” while it was at war with Iran, and he continued to do so into the 1990s.

Hansard, the parliamentary record, shows that when Saddam executed the British-based journalist Farzad Bazoft in March 1990 for alleged espionage, Galloway told the house that “the Iraqi regime has besmirched the name of its people by the judicial murder this morning”.

Months later, during the first Gulf war, he continued to condemn Saddam while opposing the American decision to attack Iraq for the invasion of Kuwait.

He told the Commons on January 17, 1991, after Baghdad had been bombed: “In so far as Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator, does it not follow that his own people are by definition his victims, just as much as the hostages and the people of Kuwait? Does it not give the prime minister a moment’s pause for thought that those are the very people who, as we speak, are being dragged dead and mutilated out of the rubble of the centre of Baghdad?” Two months later he compared his position with that of the Conservative government, which had sold arms to Saddam in the past.

“There are those of us, such as myself,” he said, “who have been Saddam Hussein’s bitter opponents for as long as he has been in power in Baghdad. There are people, such as myself, who have marched, petitioned, written, railed and ranted at the dictatorship in Baghdad, and it is bitterly difficult for us to see the attitude of those Conservative members who did not want to hear what we were saying and who wanted to say little and do even less about the bestialities that were committed by the dictatorship in Baghdad.

“For them the dictatorship was merely a bloody good customer.”

He was still railing against the dictatorship two years later, telling the Commons on December 13, 1993: “For the record, I am a founder member of the campaign against oppression and for democratic rights in Iraq. I was marching, petitioning and picketing for democracy and against dictatorship there long before this and other governments were converted to opposition to the regime in Baghdad. I stand in second place to no one in my opposition to the bestialities of that regime.”

Barely a month later, however, on January 18, 1994, he made a speech of such stunning sycophancy towards Saddam during a visit to Baghdad that it has since overshadowed all his talk of the dictator’s “bestialities”.

Having shaken the dictator’s hand, Galloway began: “Your excellency, Mr President. I greet you in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq . . . I greet you, too, in the name of the Palestinian people. (He then spoke at length about his visit to the Palestinians.) I thought the president would appreciate knowing that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam . . .”

He went on to demand an end to United Nations sanctions on Iraq and concluded not just with stirring praise for Saddam but also an anti-Israeli rallying cry: “So, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds (until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem).”

In the furore back home he was severely reprimanded by Labour party chiefs. He claimed his speech had been “misrepresented”.

“In so far as an infelicity of language helped people caricature my stance, of course I regret that,” he later said. “Only an idiot has no regrets. I am not an idiot.”

Yet on his return to London, Galloway reported that Saddam was a “gentle and shy man” who loved Britain. He told Channel 4 that the dictator was “stable, rational, logical .. . . a man we can do business with”.

He tried to explain: “I could come back and conform to the stereotype of dictators. I could have said he had a brutish handshake, but he didn’t. I could have said he was bombastic and loved the sound of his own voice, but that was not true. I believe in telling the truth as I find it. Which is not to say he’s not a brutal dictator. He is a brutal dictator.”

He continued to condemn Saddam as a dictator and a tyrant, but summed up his point of view in 1998 when he told the Commons: “If it means Saddam is a tyrant, I am the last person who needs to be told about that. But how many executions has he carried out? Has he executed 567,000 children or killed more than 1m people, which is the number that United Nations officials say have been killed by sanctions? I very much doubt it, but even if he had, is his river of blood an excuse for us to create our own?” In 2002, with the second Gulf war on the horizon, he explained his position to The Sunday Times in the rhetoric of anti-Americanism: “My opposition to American imperialism is greater than my opposition to this or that tinpot dictator with whom American imperialism from time to time falls out.”

Later that year he paid another visit to Saddam, this time meeting the dictator in his underground bunker. They shared Quality Street chocolates and observations about London buses and Winston Churchill. The reaction in London was swift. In parliament, Ben Bradshaw, the junior minister, called him “not just an apologist, but a mouthpiece for the Iraqi regime over the years”.

After Galloway referred to President George W Bush and Tony Blair as “wolves” on the eve of war in March 2003 and called for British troops to disobey “illegal” orders, he was expelled from the Labour party.

His revenge came when he snatched Bethnal Green & Bow from Labour. Indeed, after his astonishing assault on the Senate, Galloway has gone from zero to hero in a matter of weeks.

He is even being lined up for a lucrative lecture tour of America, with fees going to his Respect party.

A friend says he has become a “thinner Michael Moore”, a reference to the left-wing documentary film-maker who has been one of Bush’s strongest critics over the war in Iraq.

DESPITE those signs of success, however, the maverick MP still has his problems. His personal life is in tatters following the announcement by Amineh Abu Zayyad, his Palestinian second wife, that she is seeking a divorce. He is the sole MP of a tiny party that is likely to make no progress in parliament.

The Daily Telegraph, against which he won a libel action, is pursuing an appeal against that judgment.

Also, an unanswered question from the Senate hearings and other inquiries still has to be settled: the source of funds for The Mariam Appeal, set up by Galloway to help Iraqis and a child with leukaemia.

It has been alleged that whether or not Galloway personally benefited from Iraqi oil deals — and he has always denied he “received a penny” — he turned a blind eye to the source of contributions to the appeal. One big donor was Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian who did most of his business with Saddam’s regime. Last week Zureikat said: “All the business I did — and oil trading was just a small part of it — was entirely legal.” But the Charity Commission has announced that it is to reopen its inquiry into The Mariam Appeal. One point made by the Senate investigators was that if the source of funds to Galloway’s organisation was in any way tainted by coming from Saddam’s regime, the MP ought to return it. Galloway indicated last week he was unconcerned by such questions — a curious if not cavalier attitude for a man who was so blunt in accusing the senators of lacking public integrity.