Why would Saddam want to curry Putin's favor by giving money to Zhirinovskiy, who leads an ultranationalist party more famous for its fights in the Duma than for anything else?
:beer:;Originally posted by: NJDevil
haha, thanks for replying to my link where the US government even "condoned" this practice. Of course the UN is at fault, but admitting the US erred similarly puts one of their main points about the ineffectiveness of the UN in jeopardy. If the US knew about this and did nothing, how can we possibly call the UN completely impotent as a result of this, for aren't we just as weak for supporting it.
Again, to reiterate my main points, this was wrong, on both sides. I feel the UN needs some reform, but some are crying for the UN to be butchered by this, and how other nations suck ass because of this, ignoring our own mistakes in the same areas. Didn't we give Saddam weapons (as well as the Iranians) during that bloody conflict in the 80's? How many civilian deaths did US intervention in Latin America and other areas of the world cause? Please don't take this as America bashing, I came to this country when I was 4 years old (1989) and I love it here, but I'm just pointing out the faults that UN-haters hate to recognize.
Please, call for the reform of the UN, and I'll agree with you, but to put ourselves on the high ground in this sort of scenario is completely preposterous.
This is a great nation, but we have made our mistakes, and will continue to do so. Other nations also make mistakes. Are these mistakes so inexcusable that we have to boycott their imports, make fun of their people, etc? I think not, and I feel that most open minded people will agree (at least I hope so).
Just remember that everyone makes mistakes, and until we begin to take action in order to remedy our past errors, we have very little right to expect others to do the same.
May 13, 2005?At a time when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is being investigated for its role in an espionage case involving Larry Franklin, a Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official indicted for passing top secret classified information to two AIPAC officials and possibly the government of Israel, a senator who is bought and paid for by AIPAC?Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota?has decided to change the subject and point to newly elected Respect Party Member of Parliament George Galloway as receiving oil funds from Saddam Hussein.
The charges against Galloway and other politicians around the world were originally based on documents secured from the rubble of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and proffered by the corrupt Ahmad Chalabi?the man who pressured the Bush administration to use discredited "intelligence" about Saddam's mobile chemical and biological weapons laboratories from an alcoholic, congenital liar and mentally unbalanced cousin of one of his associates, an individual code-named "Curveball."
Coleman, with pro-AIPAC Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, is using the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations to rehash charges that foreign and even U.S. officials financially benefited from the United Nations' Oil for Food program. These charges, which later were proven false, first surfaced in the neoconservative controlled London-based Daily Telegraph, owned by the Hollinger Corporation, a company that had financial ties to arch-neoconservative Richard Perle. The charges by both the Daily Telegraph and now Coleman's committee are based on documents as bogus as the Niger yellowcake documents and those proffered by Curveball and Chalabi about Iraq's fantasized weapons of mass destruction. Galloway successfully sued the Telegraph for libel over its baseless Oil for Food allegations against him.
The only new information on which Coleman is basing his allegations are interviews conducted with Iraq's former vice president and deputy prime minister both of whom are in U.S. custody and awaiting war crimes trials led by Iraqi prosecutor Salam Chalabi, a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi and law partner of Marc Zell, the Washington, DC, law partner of Douglas Feith, the person for whom accused spy Larry Franklin worked at the Pentagon while spying for Israel. If ex-Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz are receiving even one-eight the harsh treatment meted out by U.S. troops and Israeli contractors to prisoners at the Abu Ghraib concentration camp, none of their so-called testimonies are worth the paper on which they are printed.
"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 [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. 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."
NBC played this clip:Originally posted by: BBond
This is all far too complicated for the American people. They'll just rely on the sound bites on the nightly "news".
"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.
And then we've "lost" $9.1 billion since March 2003. But, that's not even a drop in the bucket compared to the $3.3 trillion unaccounted for by the Pentagon.Originally posted by: drewshin
The US allowed Iraq to smuggle oil to Turkey, Jordan and Egypt and did so because the US felt it was in the interests of national security to do so, to help prop up these countries.
The estimated amount Saddam received from the oil for food program is estimated to be between 1.7billion and 4.4 billion dollars.
The estimated amount that Saddam received from his oil smuggling operations is estimated to be 13.6 billion dollars. This was allowed to happen until 2003, right before the invasion.
So about 75% of Saddam's money came from oil smuggling operations that we allowed to go on.
At least get the news right - The Democrats smacked around that "Englishman" (who's obviously guilty as sin). Galloway failed to answer any questions satisfactorally, instead relying on rhetorical devices and bluster, which is par for the course for today's new liberal, anti-war faction. Blowhards, the entire lot of 'em.Originally posted by: arsbanned
The U.S. needs reform just as badly as the U.N. I loved how that Englishman smacked those stupid Republicans around today. Nice!
Because little Normie went running out of the Senate looking for his mommy. He ended the session early. He could have continued it and forced Galloway to specifically answer questions. Why didn't he? He had to run off to circle the wagons.Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
At least get the news right - The Democrats smacked around that "Englishman" (who's obviously guilty as sin). Galloway failed to answer any questions satisfactorally, instead relying on rhetorical devices and bluster, which is par for the course for today's new liberal, anti-war faction. Blowhards, the entire lot of 'em.Originally posted by: arsbanned
The U.S. needs reform just as badly as the U.N. I loved how that Englishman smacked those stupid Republicans around today. Nice!
Galloway failed to answer any questions satisfactorally, instead relying on rhetorical devices and bluster, which is par for the course for today's new liberal, anti-war faction.
Sure does sound like Bush and his cronies, yet Galloway seems to get a pass in here from those who incessantly slam Bush and Co. for doing the very same thing.Originally posted by: kage69
Galloway failed to answer any questions satisfactorally, instead relying on rhetorical devices and bluster, which is par for the course for today's new liberal, anti-war faction.
Sounds like Bush and Dick in the debates...rhetorical devices and bluster (oh and outright lies) are the hallmark of today's repug, have been since 2001.
We have no problem putting foreign politicians under the microscope, pity we can't seem to do that for a number of politicians on our side of the pond. I think Galloway was right concerning his 'smokescreen' comments.
You mean specific questions such as his relationship with Fawaz Zureikat? Questions which Galloway repeatedly evaded. Riiiight :roll:Originally posted by: conjur
Because little Normie went running out of the Senate looking for his mommy. He ended the session early. He could have continued it and forced Galloway to specifically answer questions. Why didn't he? He had to run off to circle the wagons.Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
At least get the news right - The Democrats smacked around that "Englishman" (who's obviously guilty as sin). Galloway failed to answer any questions satisfactorally, instead relying on rhetorical devices and bluster, which is par for the course for today's new liberal, anti-war faction. Blowhards, the entire lot of 'em.Originally posted by: arsbanned
The U.S. needs reform just as badly as the U.N. I loved how that Englishman smacked those stupid Republicans around today. Nice!
He's also been completely absent from his own thread once we found out the US was the most egregious violator of the Oil-for-Food rules.Originally posted by: Moonbeam
First Caddy starts with: "congressional committee has released documents purporting to contain new evidence....."
Goes on to say: "I just hope that in the end the UN will open up for a full investigation and reform itself due to it's readily apparent corruption."
after, in his own mind he has already convicted and condemned.
And then in the thread where the sodomizing evangelical is flamed for corn-holing his wife all we hear is alleged.
We are chimps, but we sure don't like to know it, so Caddy, teach me how to rationalize.
Sure does sound like Bush and his cronies, yet Galloway seems to get a pass in here from those who incessantly slam Bush and Co. for doing the very same thing.
See. That little ploy is bi-directional. If you want to point out hypocrisy, be prepared to admit it from your ideological side as well.
He just has a thing for Scotty Boy.Originally posted by: kage69
S'funny though, with all the threads we've had covering the pile of appearences, debates, and speeches made by this admin where "they" have evaded a multitude of questions, I can't recall seeing you get excited about that even once! Do you just not care when "we" do it, or is there some latent hatred of limey's in you?
I don't think it's odd at all considering the vehement anti-war stance of this "foreigner." I want to know if the stance was bribed and contrived. Surely you do as well?Originally posted by: kage69
Sure does sound like Bush and his cronies, yet Galloway seems to get a pass in here from those who incessantly slam Bush and Co. for doing the very same thing.
I don't know enough about Galloway's past to give him "a pass," I just think it's odd to lambast him, a foreigner, over the possibility of him lying about a relationship with an Arab that bears a strong resemblance to the relationship some of our politicians have with Israelis. Kindasleazy Rice went up and lied to us all, don't hear many YABAs indignant over that, and she's an actual member of OUR government!
I'm not excited now, so you seem to be a bit mistaken. I don't tend to rant on and on endlessly about certain politicians as certain people in this forum do. Since they love to rant endlessly it's funny they're not doing so now concerning Galloway, or any politician not of the US (and some of those ranters don't even live in the US, so the 'foreigner' excuse doesn't fly).See. That little ploy is bi-directional. If you want to point out hypocrisy, be prepared to admit it from your ideological side as well.
I'm not trying to point out your hypocrisy, that's been done before. I have neither an "idealogical side," nor a "ploy" - I've vented on the dems before many times and harbor little affection for them, they just can't compete with this admin in terms of BS. You can't out-Rove Karl Rove. Your (understandable) dislike for the dems doesn't make them a better example of this behavior than the repugs. Hell, DeLay bests the dems on his own!
S'funny though, with all the threads we've had covering the pile of appearences, debates, and speeches made by this admin where "they" have evaded a multitude of questions, I can't recall seeing you get excited about that even once! Do you just not care when "we" do it, or is there some latent hatred of limey's in you?
I don't think it's odd at all considering the vehement anti-war stance of this "foreigner." I want to know if the stance was bribed and contrived. Surely you do as well?
I'm not excited now, so you seem to be a bit mistaken. I don't tend to rant on and on endlessly about certain politicians as certain people in this forum do. Since they love to rant endlessly it's funny they're not doing so now concerning Galloway, or any politician not of the US (and some of those ranters don't even live in the US, so the 'foreigner' excuse doesn't fly).