Sunday, May 22, 2005

I'm sure some of you were as outraged as I was when CNN, in covering the testimony of Britain's George Galloway, refused to air his damning indictments of the Bush administration. Yet they offered the disingenuous Republican committee chairman Norm Coleman ample opportunity to repeat charges against Galloway which were discredited ages ago. For the truth of the matter, see Scott Ritter's fine piece in the Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5198910-103677,00.htm
l ).

George Galloway, the politician in question, stared down the US Senate subcommittee on homeland security and government affairs, and its notoriously partisan chairman Norm Coleman, and blasted as totally unfounded the committee's allegations that he had profited from oil vouchers in exchange for his anti-war stance. He emerged from the hearing victorious. If only more politicians, British and American alike, were able to display such courage in the face of the atmosphere of neoconservative intimidation prevalent in Washington these days.

Galloway is now the darling of the American left, and has fed punch lines for late-night comics and generated headlines like the New York Post's "Brit fries senators in oil". But mainstream America still seems unable to digest the horrific reality that the MP's testimony underscored: that Senator Coleman's McCarthy-like hearings are but a smoke screen for a crime of horrific proportions.

Wayne Madsen also has a new piece about the Galloway affair ( http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/052105Madsen/05
2105madsen.html ). Previously, I've expressed some reservations whenever I've linked to Madsen's work on vote fraud -- his reports, always interesting, placed far too much reliance on unnamed sources making extreme allegations. (Extreme even by my standards.) But my reservations about Madsen's latest are fewer -- although the piece does tend to become less organized as it goes on. Still, it's at least worth a skim:

For Galloway, it was déjà vu. He had already successfully fended off charges that he accepted oil money from Saddam Hussein and successfully sued the neoconservative-owned Daily Telegraph for libel. Articles in the Telegraph and Christian Science Monitor citing documents from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry implicating Galloway in the Oil-for-Food scandal were later determined to be forgeries.

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq invited Telegraph reporters into the bombed out remains of Iraqi intelligence headquarters. Among the documents "found" by the paper's reporters were those that "revealed" that Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Iraq, funds skimmed from the Oil-for-Food program.

Coleman's committee resurrected the spurious charges against Galloway in its report. Mark L. Greenblatt, the counsel for the committee, relied on new suspicious documents said to have been obtained from the Iraqi Oil Ministry, now run by convicted bank embezzler and disinformation source Ahmad Chalabi.

Never forget that Chalabi's INC ran a shop that specialized in document forgery. As Xymphora points out ( http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/05/norm-colemans-useful-st
upidity.html ), the current fake documents were produced in collaboration with the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Likudnik group based in Washington, DC.

MEMRI is clearly more than it pretends to be, as this expose in the Guardian demonstrates ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,
773258,00.html ):

The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon - are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence.

London mayor Ken Livingston has also discussed MEMRI as (in essence) a Mossad cut-out.

Back in November of 2003, Galloway revealed that four members of the U.N. weapons inspection team were actually Mossad spies ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/207223.stm ). Here, no doubt, is the real reason for the smear campaign against this British MP launched by the spooked-up MEMRI, Chalabi, and Coleman.

Brad Friedman ( http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001407.htm#comments ) reports that Galloway's inflammatory anti-Bush rhetoric was scrubbed from the official website of Coleman's committee. (For the full transcript, try here:
http://www.simplyappalling.blogspot.com/#111672042962319554 .) Those who get this story only from cable news aren't getting the story at all.

Coleman has been compared to Joe McCarthy. In fact, he's worse: He reminds me of those lower-level McCarthy wanna-bes (Myron Fagan comes to mind) who spent much of the 1950s waving around bogus lists filled with the names of political adversaries.