May 13, 2005—At a time when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is being investigated for its role in an espionage case involving Larry Franklin, a Pentagon and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official indicted for passing top secret classified information to two AIPAC officials and possibly the government of Israel, a senator who is bought and paid for by AIPAC—Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota—has decided to change the subject and point to newly elected Respect Party Member of Parliament George Galloway as receiving oil funds from Saddam Hussein.

The charges against Galloway and other politicians around the world were originally based on documents secured from the rubble of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and proffered by the corrupt Ahmad Chalabi—the man who pressured the Bush administration to use discredited "intelligence" about Saddam's mobile chemical and biological weapons laboratories from an alcoholic, congenital liar and mentally unbalanced cousin of one of his associates, an individual code-named "Curveball."

Coleman, with pro-AIPAC Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, is using the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations to rehash charges that foreign and even U.S. officials financially benefited from the United Nations' Oil for Food program. These charges, which later were proven false, first surfaced in the neoconservative controlled London-based Daily Telegraph, owned by the Hollinger Corporation, a company that had financial ties to arch-neoconservative Richard Perle. The charges by both the Daily Telegraph and now Coleman's committee are based on documents as bogus as the Niger yellowcake documents and those proffered by Curveball and Chalabi about Iraq's fantasized weapons of mass destruction. Galloway successfully sued the Telegraph for libel over its baseless Oil for Food allegations against him.

The only new information on which Coleman is basing his allegations are interviews conducted with Iraq's former vice president and deputy prime minister both of whom are in U.S. custody and awaiting war crimes trials led by Iraqi prosecutor Salam Chalabi, a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi and law partner of Marc Zell, the Washington, DC, law partner of Douglas Feith, the person for whom accused spy Larry Franklin worked at the Pentagon while spying for Israel. If ex-Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz are receiving even one-eight the harsh treatment meted out by U.S. troops and Israeli contractors to prisoners at the Abu Ghraib concentration camp, none of their so-called testimonies are worth the paper on which they are printed.

Coleman charges that Galloway received up to 20 million barrels of oil allocations between 2000 and 2003 from Saddam's government. Galloway rightly charges that Coleman and other committee members are "lickspittle Republicans" acting in the servitude of Bush and his cronies. In addition to the statements of the imprisoned Saddam Hussein officials, Coleman is also basing his new allegations based on documents retrieved from the Iraqi Oil Ministry from convicted embezzler, con man, and neocon puppet, Ahmad Chalabi.

What has Coleman's panties in a twist is the fact that in the recent British elections, Galloway, who was expelled from the Labor Party for his anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush politics, made easy work of his Labor Party opponent and Tony Blair sycophant, Oona King, an African-Jewish daughter of—ironically—an African-American draft evader from the Vietnam War. King was one of Tony Blair's most ardent supporters for his decision to join Bush in a genocidal war against Iraq. For that, she earned the support of the international neoconservative network of influence holders and peddlers that can, according to a senior Bush administration official, create their own reality because of their ownership of much of the international media. However, King also earned the enmity of her large Muslim constituency in East London's Bethnal Green and Bow district. They rejected King and threw their political weight behind Galloway.

There is little doubt that the neocons in the British Labor Party are working hand-in-glove with people like Coleman and his neocon friends and political supporters in AIPAC to punish Galloway and make it hard for him to use his reinstated House of Commons platform to launch expected fierce broadsides against Blair and other pro-Iraq War Laborites, most notably Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defense Secretary John Reid, and former Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon. The neocons also want to deal a blow to the anti-war Respect Party, which gave Labor a run for its money in a number of other hotly contested constituencies in Britain.

Coleman, who also sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used his Oil for Food charges against Galloway, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, and an unnamed former French foreign minister to bolster the nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the UN. The Bolton affair has revealed even more proof that a shadow intelligence network has operated within the U.S. government.

Bolton had on his staff a "special adviser" named Matthew Freedman who pulled down a $110,000 per annum salary. Freedman is also a lobbyist who represents "private clients." He refused to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who those clients were. However, it has been discovered that Freedman, a long time GOP operative like Bolton, is tied to the same oil industry network that once used Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as agents of influence.

While working for the GOP-connected public relations firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly (BMS&K) and the PBN Company, Freedman counted Chevron, Bechtel, Shell, and the governments of Nigeria and Kazakhstan as clients. Freedman also represented Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Philippine President Salvador Laurel. According to The Washington Times, Laurel sought the assistance of the George H. W. Bush administration to oust President Corazon Aquino in a military coup.

Other espionage charges have swirled around Bolton. The State Department's Bureau of Near East Affairs reported that Bolton met with Mossad officials in Israel without obtaining country clearance from the bureau. During a trip to the United States, former Mossad official Uzi Arad was questioned by FBI agents about his connections to Larry Franklin. FBI officials were also interested in an Israeli Embassy official named Naor Gilon, the chief of political affairs and widely believed a major Mossad asset at the Washington diplomatic post. The FBI possesses videotaped surveillance tape of Gilon having a luncheon meeting with two AIPAC officials and Franklin at a Washington hotel.

Bolton is also under suspicion for his ties to Taiwan. Before joining the Bush administration, Bolton was on the payroll of the government of Taiwan, advocating UN membership for the breakaway island nation. Like Bolton's secret trips to Israel, Britain, and other nations, Donald Keyser, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and a colleague of Bolton, made secret trips to Taiwan. He was arrested by the FBI in September 2004 after he was witnessed passing classified documents to Taiwanese agents in Washington.

There is ample evidence of a major foreign intelligence penetration of the United States State and Defense Departments, as well as U.S. intelligence agencies, involving Franklin, AIPAC officials, Mossad agents, and leading individuals in the neoconservative network operating from inside the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. Congress, and think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hudson Institute. Bolton is a central figure in this cabal.

The focus of the U.S. investigatory apparatus should not be on George Galloway and his newly-enfranchised East London supporters, but should be on the dark sinews that bind together anti-democratic intelligence functionaries in Washington, Jerusalem, and London. In addition, with his possible links to illegal espionage and influence peddling, in addition to other serious charges surrounding John Bolton, now is not the time for the U.S. Senate to be confirming a person who could be the most damaging U.S. government employee for national security since the Cold War days of John Walker, Ronald Pelton, and Jonathan Pollard.

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1305Madsen/051305madsen.html


Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based journalist and nationally distributed columnist.



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