[lit-ideas] Hitchens Gloats Over Galloway
- From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:55:25 -0400
IF anyone watched the Democracy Now! presentation of the
Hitchens-Galloway debate at Baruch College here in NYC, you'll be
interested in Hitchens' take on the recent news. -EY
extract of http://slate.msn.com/id/2128742/fr/rss/
Calling Galloway's Bluff
The Senate uncovers a smoking gun.
By Christopher Hitchens
Just before my last exchange with George Galloway, which occurred
on the set of Bill Maher's show in Los Angeles in mid-September,
I was approached by a representative of the program and asked if
I planned to repeat my challenge to Galloway on air. That
challenge—would he sign an affidavit saying that he had never
discussed Oil-for-Food monies with Tariq Aziz?—I had already made
on a public stage in New York. Maher's producers had been asked,
obviously by a nervous Galloway, to find out whether I had
brought such an affidavit along with me. I replied that this was
not necessary, since his public denial to me was on the record
and had been broadcast, and since it further confirmed the
apparent perjury that he had committed in front of the U.S.
Senate on May 17, 2005. I added that I wanted no further contact
with Galloway until I could have the opportunity of reviewing his
prison diaries.
That day has now been brought measurably closer by the
publication of the report of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee
on Investigations. This report, which comes with a vast archive
of supporting material, was embargoed until 10 p.m. Monday and
contains the "smoking gun" evidence that Galloway, along with his
wife and his chief business associate, were consistent profiteers
from Saddam Hussein's regime and its criminal exploitation of the
"Oil for Food" program. In particular:
1) Between 1999 and 2003, Galloway personally solicited and
received eight oil "allocations" totaling 23 million barrels,
which went either to him or to a politicized "charity" of his
named the Mariam Appeal.
2) In connection with just one of these allocations,
Galloway's wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received about $150,000 directly.
3) A minimum of $446,000 was directed to the Mariam Appeal,
which campaigned against the very sanctions from which it was
secretly benefiting.
4) Through the connections established by the Galloway and
"Mariam" allocations, the Saddam Hussein regime was enabled to
reap $1,642,000 in kickbacks or "surcharge" payments.
(For a highly readable explanation of how the Oil-for-Food racket
actually worked, see the Adobe Acrobat file on the site
www.hitchensweb.com prepared by my brilliant comrade Michael
Weiss and distributed as a leaflet outside the debate in New York.)
<snip>
For George Galloway, however, the war would seem to be over. The
evidence presented suggests that he lied in court when he sued
the Daily Telegraph in London over similar allegations (and
collected money for that, too). It suggests that he lied to the
Senate under oath. And it suggests that he made a deceptive
statement in the register of interests held by members of the
British House of Commons. All in all, a bad week for him,
especially coming as it does on the heels of the U.N. report on
the murder of Rafik Hariri, which appears to pin the convict's
badge on senior members of the Assad despotism in Damascus,
Galloway's default patron after he lost his main ally in Baghdad.
Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for
insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the
subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who
was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a
mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder
if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the
grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a
pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.
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