Recommended Reading…
- Say, about that Newsweek story. Would they have had any reason to be suspicious of either of its authors? Why yes, yes, they would. But the right-wing is keeping remarkably quiet about that, because, why, hell, he used to be a screw-up for their side.
- So there’s this British fella called Galloway. The GOP is accusing him of “profiteering from the food-for-oil exchange.” I don’t fully understand it myself, but with this GOP, if you bet on the accusers having an agenda and relying on less-than-credible sources, you’ll usually win big money.
Like maybe because, according to Chris at AmericaBlog, Galloway “was so vocal in his criticism of (new) Labour and their poodle Tony Blair that he was thrown out of the Labour party. (Galloway recently won his seat again in Parliament.)”
But anyway, Mr. Galloway appeared before the senate recently, and had one or two things to say.
What follows is a longer excerpt than I usually like to quote, but, well, read it and tell me which paragraph you’d have left out.
“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….
“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….
“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.”
