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Lawmakers deny oil for food accusations { May 17 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/international/europe/17cnd-food.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/international/europe/17cnd-food.html
May 17, 2005
British Lawmaker Denies That He Diverted Oil-for-Food Money
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON, May 17 - In an unusual appearance today before a Senate subcommittee, a British lawmaker vehemently denied any role in diverting money from the United Nations oil-for-food program and bitterly condemned the Iraq war, saying that the Bush administration built it around "a pack of lies" and now sought to divert attention with "the mother of all smokescreens."
The member of Parliament, George Galloway, seemed to catch the panel off guard with his intensely delivered denials of accusations that Iraqi officials had given him the right to export 20 million barrels of oil as part of a secret Baghdad initiative to enlist international politicians to support Iraq before the Security Council.
Mr. Galloway is accused of having funneled allocations through a fund he established, the Mariam Appeal, to help a 4-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukemia.
The accusations against Mr. Galloway, and similar ones against Charles Pasqua, a French senator and former interior minister, and Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist Russian lawmaker, are contained in a new report from the permanent investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Mr. Galloway appeared before that subcommittee today.
Mr. Pasqua and Mr. Zhirinovsky have also denied any wrongdoing.
The vitriolic tone used by Mr. Galloway was rare for a witness in a Senate hearing.
Mr. Galloway, a maverick politician ousted from the Labor Party for his fervent opposition to the Iraq war and his blunt criticism of Prime Minister Tony Blair, did not deny that he had had contacts with Iraq but said that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had met more often with Saddam Hussein than he had.
The subcommittee's chairman, Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, seemed a bit taken aback by the intensity of Mr. Galloway's remarks, stumbling over some questions, or demanding "yes" or "no" answers, which the British lawmaker refused to give.
Mr. Coleman, in an opening statement, repeated the panel's accusations against Mr. Galloway. In one transaction, Mr. Coleman said, surcharges of more than $300,000 were paid illegally to the Hussein regime as part of the covert arrangement.
Mr. Galloway called this "preposterous," adding, "I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf."
He sarcastically denied accusations made by a former Iraqi vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan, and by other officials the panel refused to identify. Some of the Iraqi oil documents named Mr. Galloway's charity.
Mr. Coleman later told reporters he did not consider Mr. Galloway "a credible witness."
The United Nations program, which lasted from late 1996 to 2003, was meant to prevent Mr. Hussein from using oil profits for weaponry, while easing the sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War amid charges they had resulted in suffering for the Iraqi people. Accusations of widespread fraud in the program have led to some calls for the resignation of the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.
The unapologetic Mr. Galloway put a dramatic face on a scandal that has been largely bogged down in the arcane details of diverted oil shipments, translated documents, shadowy go-betweens and questionable payments.
"The biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians," he said, "the real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own government."
Mr. Galloway denied having received any money from the scheme.
"What counts is, where's the money, senator?" he said. "Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars? The answer to that is nobody."
As he spoke he fixed an unwavering glare in Mr. Coleman's direction.
One Republican senator, Robert F. Bennett of Utah, defended the philosophy behind the oil-for-food program, and the United States' participation in it.
"The efforts on behalf of the United States to help the people of Iraq have been well placed and should be applauded rather than attacked," he said.
But Mr. Galloway said the accusations seemed politically driven. Those linked by the report to the scandal, Mr. Galloway said, had one thing in common: "They all stood against the policies of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster."
His own position on the war, he said, was clear.
"I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted," he said, still looking at Mr. Coleman. "I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq, which killed a million Iraqis, most of them children."
In reply to a question from the ranking Democrat, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, he said that the matter was academic because "you've already found me guilty, Senator Levin."
Mr. Galloway's aggressive performance was not entirely a surprise. He had promised earlier to open his testimony by saying that "even in Kafka there was the semblance of a trial"; and to reject charges from what he called a "pro-war, Republican lynch mob."
Mr. Levin, along with other Democrats, had earlier criticized United States involvement in the United Nations program as uneven. The United States has been said to have turned a blind eye to oil shipments to two allies, Turkey and Jordan.
"There's a pattern here of erratic and inconsistent enforcement of sanctions on Iraq," Mr. Levin said.
The United States, he said, "looked the other way" while Iraq sold $8 billion in oil to Jordan, Turkey and Syria. "We even permitted Jordanian-chartered ships to load oil illegally and to give them safe passage through the Persian Gulf," he said.
Democrats on the committee said the State Department and the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control had done almost nothing to be sure that American companies enforced United Nations sanctions on Iraq.
The Senate committee's report, one of several ongoing investigations, concluded that oil-purchase rights had been given to Mr. Pasqua and Mr. Galloway because they supported Saddam Hussein, but it included no documentary evidence to prove that either man had personally benefited.
The report also said that Mr. Hussein's government had provided Aleksandr Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, with oil rights worth nearly $3 million in exchange for support to lift United Nations sanctions. Senate investigators said there was no evidence tying Mr. Putin to any such payments, and Russian spokesmen have denied irregularities.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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