PUTTING THINGS STRAIGHT
By Peter Fredson
May 18, 2005
For the past 4 ½ years, under the Bush administration, we have been lied to daily. Everything is twisted to suit a neocon True Believer agenda. There are few naysayers on the National Scene as the media are largely owned, operated and controlled by neocon True Believers. The Republican Party has been sold, lock, stock, and barrel to the Extreme Right Wing Christians, with the result that Congress has become a branch of the Executive Office.
A look at the voting record shows nearly 100% of Republicans vote for everything George Bush has ever proposed. No Republican has stood up to him and challenged him on his lies and incompetence to run the US although a few have differed with him on single issues they usually end up voting for whatever stupidity he proposes. And Bush has reciprocated by not vetoing a single bill in his entire terms in office.
Today the Judicial system is on the verge of becoming an adjunct of the Oval Office. Despite protestations of the President that he will not inflict his religion on anyone, we know he lies like a drunken cowboy in a Laredo saloon. He wants only True Believer Christians who favor his neocon strategy to take office for life. Bush wants to install zealots who will push Charismatic Christianity voodoo on as much of the world as his reach can embrace. And this will be the death of democracy as we have known it for 200 years.
But yesterday I listened to a Senate hearing and for the first time felt a stirring of hope that the deceptions of Bush and company were being discussed in public.
Despite most Senate hearings, where every Republican senator lavishly praises Bush's leadership, competence and character, and shouts down witnesses, this one varied the usual routine. Someone actually, in public, strongly criticized the entire Bush policy, and stared down or out shouted the usual Republican "questioner."
British Member of Parliament George Galloway appeared voluntarily before the Senate panel to face Republican chairman, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who fully intended to skewer him and roast him alive. Instead Galloway reversed the script and skewered the entire Bush administration. Here are a few excerpts from Galloway's testimony:
"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."
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives -- 1,600 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."
Galloway condemned Coleman's war: "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."
"If the world had listened to (UN Secretary General) Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to (French) 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. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth."
"Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer," Galloway said.
"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where. Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it. Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. 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."
"Senator, this is the mother of all smoke-screens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported."
Coleman, a former district attorney, told Galloway that "senior Iraqi officials have confirmed that you, in fact, received oil allocations and that the documents that identify you as an allocation recipient are valid."
But, Galloway challenged that accusation, saying: "Now, I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you're remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice."
"I am not now or ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf,"
"If you had any evidence of that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today."
Regardless of who sold oil to whom, or who profited thereby, Galloway brought up the solid fact that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been playing footsie with Saddam Hussein: . "As a matter of fact I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times that Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns."
Bush has been trying to foist off John Bolton on the country as a leading diplomat, and brushes aside any talk of Bolton being irascible, bullying, and blistering. He says he loves "straight talk." Well, here is his chance to put someone in a diplomatic office that lets the chips fall where they may. He should nominate George Galloway. (Oh, sorry I forgot he is British.) In his Senate hearing he sounded like a good American patriot in the Harry Truman tradition, one of the first in years to stand up and crucify the Republican savior.
(As an aside, British politicians are quite skilled in debate, and should not be considered as patsies by American politicians. They, too, can play rough.)