What counts is where's the money, senator? Who paid me money, senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars? The senate report claimed Mr Galloway and Charles Pasqua, the former French interior minister, were given potentially lucrative oil allocations as a reward for their support in calling for sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime to be loosened.
Mr Pasqua also denies the claims. Mr Galloway told the senators they had made a "schoolboy howler" in dating their evidence against him to almost a decade earlier than the Daily Telegraph and a period from when the UN oil for food programme - the centre of the investigation - was not even in existence.
The MP, elected to parliament on May 5 on an anti-war ticket in the former seat of Oona King, a Tony Blair loyalist, said the Christian Science Monitor, which used documents from the same period had retracted its story and admitted the documents were fake.
Mr Coleman looked as if he had not been spoken to like that since his father caught him cheating on high school homework. Yesterday, 12 hours after Mr Galloway left town, the legislative cultural gap was again in evidence as normal business resumed on the Senate floor.
The topic could not have been more important or more venomous - a row over judicial filibusters that threatens to overturn years of tradition, and bring the chamber's business to a virtual halt. But Bill Frist and Harry Reid, the Senate majority and minority leaders, droned on as if they were introducing an amendment on the Highway Financing Bill. As usual, the cameras remained fixed on the speaker.
By convention, panning shots are banned, for the simple reason that these important gentlemen would be seen delivering their Philippics to rows of empty benches. But then again, that is how America likes its formal politics; sedate, dignified, eschewing the sort of personal attack delivered by Mr Galloway.
Long, long ago, in the World Cup in Uruguay, the unfancied US scored a victory over an all-conquering England football team. The performance on Capitol Hill of Mr Galloway although he is anything but a Sassenach might be seen as some belated revenge for that humiliation. But, if truth be told, the political shock was little more noticed here - and is likely to have as little enduring impact - than that never-to-be forgotten sporting upset half a century ago.
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Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? Want an ad-free experience? View offers. 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. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met.
If he said what he said, then he is wrong. 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.
I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. Not a thin dime. 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.
I had never set foot in Iraq until late in — never in my life. There could not possibly be documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in , , for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period. 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 , These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.
And they were all lies. Nothing at all fanciful about it. 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, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. 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.
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. 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. This is a " Pay as You Feel " website. This blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers — many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
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