Thursday, May 19, 2005

fromBlanton's and Ashton's - Reality-based and lovin' it: UK MP George Galloway

The following is a photograph of UK MP George Galloway in his meeting with Saddam Hussein.



Oh, wait a minute. That's not George Galloway. I can't quite...let me get my glasses...looks like...naw, couldn't be, but it looks just like...Donald Rumsfeld with Saddam Hussein!

Oh my stars and garters. But isn't the Senate investigating UK MP George Galloway because he met with Saddam Hussein? And that's Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein. And Hussein is a bad man who tried to kill President Horse Fluffer's daddy and gassed his own people, right? Right? And George Galloway met with Hussein to try to get him to let Hans Blix and the UN inspectors back into Iraq, but Donald Rumsfeld met with Hussein to sell him weapons to kill Iranians. So why is the Senate investigating George Galloway and not Donald Rumsfeld.

Politics is so confusing.

From George Galloway's testimony before the Senate:


'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. '


No, on second thought, there's nothing confusing about that at all.

Read the transcripts of Galloway's testimony. It's spectacular.

No, I have to quote this section. I didn't see this quoted on US web sites yesterday and it is so exquisite that I have to quote it. This Galloway guy gets better and better the more you read the transcripts.



'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.'


I just gave up smoking, but after reading the transcript, I feel like I need a cigarette.


UPDATE: After being shown up for a complete ass, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman (R) said Galloway's credibility was "very suspect". That is one of the funniest things he could have said. Could anybody have been a bigger idiot in all of this than Coleman? I now dub Senator Norman Coleman, MN-R, "The Black Knight" because of his resemblance to the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.


I don't know the full story on Galloway, but by ghod he sure talks a good talk. Hurray for him for standing up to that jerk Coleman who couldn't find his own ass with both hands and a road map. Idiot would be high praise of his intellectual ability.

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