- George Galloway confronted the American senators who
have accused him of accepting oil allocations from Saddam Hussein yesterday
in one of the most extraordinary and ill-tempered exchanges seen on Capitol
Hill.
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- At one point the newly elected MP for Bethnal Green and
Bow was accused of "evasion" and of choosing to ignore the questions
that were being put to him.
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- Mr Galloway vehemently repeated his denials of having
done anything wrong. He launched into a fierce attack on a series of individuals
and institutions, including Sen Norm Coleman, the chairman of the sub-committee
that is investigating him, the Republican party, the Senate, the US and
British governments and unnamed forgers in Baghdad.
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- The session began with the Senate sub-committee adding
new details to the charges against Mr Galloway, which prompted him to volunteer
to travel to Washington. Senate staff said they had checked with former
members of the Saddam regime to confirm their interpretation of Iraqi documents.
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- Mr Galloway told the hearing room packed with 300 people:
"You have nothing on me Ö other than my name on lists."
Many of the lists had been "drawn up after the installation of your
puppet government in Baghdad", he said.
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- In a bass voice rising with indignation to fill the august
chamber, Mr Galloway insisted that he had been "an opponent of Saddam
when British and American governments and businessmen were selling him
guns and gas".
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- "Who paid me hundreds of thousand of dollars?"
he asked. "The answer is nobody."
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- The 15-minute performance came a week after the Senate
sub-committee on investigations issued a report accusing Mr Galloway, Charles
Pasqua, the former French interior minister, and the Russian nationalist
leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky of accepting lucrative oil allocations from
Saddam.
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- The MP, who described himself as "the leader of
the British anti-war movement" when he arrived in Washington, linked
himself to Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, and President
Jacques Chirac of France. If the world had listened to the three of them,
he said, disaster in Iraq would have been averted.
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- Sen Coleman and his Democratic counterpart, Carl Levin,
listened to Mr Galloway's onslaught with weary smiles, at times cupping
their chins in their hands.
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- Their questioning was calm at first. But it soon became
heated when, to their evident irritation, Mr Galloway refused to answer
direct questions.
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- The MP's most difficult moments came at the hands of
Sen Levin. He repeatedly asked whether Mr Galloway would be troubled if
it emerged that his friend, the Jordanian oil trader Fawaz Zureikat, had
paid illegal surcharges to Saddam.
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- Mr Zureikat was a chairman of the Mariam Appeal, founded
by Mr Galloway to help a four-year-old Iraqi girl, Mariam Hamza, who suffered
from leukaemia. It later became known that Mr Zureikat, who had close ties
to the Iraqi regime, had also funded the Mariam Appeal.
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- Mr Galloway at first refused to say that he was troubled
by his friend's alleged illegal actions. Instead he chose to emphasise
the suffering of Iraqi children under UN sanctions.
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- That brought a swift rebuke from Sen Levin, a former
civil rights lawyer.
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- Would he be troubled by that? the professorial senator
asked again. "That is a very simple question."
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- When Mr Galloway appeared to evade the issue again, Sen
Levin interrupted. To laughter, he said: "I know other things trouble
you but can you just give us a straightforward answer?
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- "You give us a long explanation of other things
that trouble you, which is your right. Now I am asking whether [Mr Zureikat's
alleged illegal behaviour] troubles you."
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- The MP said he was troubled by the thought that Mr Zureikat,
whose best man he was, might face prosecution.
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- The hearing had begun with a lengthy explanation from
the sub-committee's investigators of how Saddam perverted the oil-for-food
programme, which was designed to provide food and medicine to Iraq. Mr
Galloway sat silent, sighing occasionally, as the detailed case against
him was laid out.
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- The investigators alleged that many captured Iraqi documents
and interviews with former leaders in the regime showed that Saddam allocated
to Mr Galloway profits from the sale of 20 million barrels of oil, a possible
total of $600,000 to $6 million.
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- Mark Greenblatt, who is in charge of the investigative
team, detailed oil contracts M/9/23, M/11/04 and M/12/14, three of six
contracts that named Mr Galloway as the beneficiary of the oil allocations.
The contracts also named Mr Zureikat and the Mariam Appeal as involved
in the alleged scheme.
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- Mr Greenblatt said: "It appears that George Galloway
used the children's cancer charity foundation to conceal his oil allocations."
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- The investigators disclosed that they had spoken again
to an unnamed senior regime official on Monday to check that references
to oil allocations being granted to Mr Galloway were genuine.
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- The Iraqi was asked: "Does the name George Galloway
[on the oil allocation approval document] mean that this allocation was
granted to George Galloway?" The man said yes. He also authenticated
the oil minister's signature on the allocations.
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- Mr Galloway said he had never seen the documents before
and had been pronounced guilty without being asked for his defence.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?x
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