"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.

“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. 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.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 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.

"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. 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 real Oil-for-Food scandal. 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 Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"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."

Haha! Did you see my post on this? If not, it's hilarious that our headlines are almost identical. "UK politician rips US Senator a new hole" was how I put it. I saw a great article in the Guardian too.

I have a feeling that any UK pol could destroy any US pol. Why? In the UK system the pols have to actually debate, develop arguments and know how to speak. In the US you just need to hire assholes like Rove and pay consultants to make mindless 30 second attack ads.
- twhid 5-18-2005 5:47 pm

twhid's post is here. Gallloway's speech is a really inspiring, succinct putdown of the tools in our government, who ignored pre-Iraq war polls saying Americans only favored war as a unified, UN-backed effort. I'd say they ignored their consciences, too, except they don't have them.

- tom moody 5-18-2005 8:18 pm

A general rule of thumb is that if there's some conivory going on the oil business, there's a Texas oil man somewhere in the mix. Trying to pin something on a Scot is a bit far afield.

I also enjoyed his testimony, but only in written form. Thanks for the audio link.
- mark 5-19-2005 12:47 am

Mark, Yo-ho, good diction is not always good fact -- I imagine!
- Brent Hallard (guest) 5-19-2005 5:40 pm

We watched the whole thing here on CBC. I noticed many years ago that there was a big difference in the rhetorical styles between parliamentary debate and your government's methods of communication. I'm generally not inclined to think that American politicians are stupid (with a few exceptions), so I've always assumed that they were very cynically playing to the lowest common denominator.

Anyway, Galloway's eloquent outrage was an amazing event. As for the remark about good fact, Galloway has already won his day in court in England, based on the same documents the Americans were quoting.

- L.M. 5-20-2005 12:04 am

Counterpunch weighed in Galloway's performance.
- L.M. 5-20-2005 2:53 am

Sorry, I think L. M. you got me wrong.
http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html
The rest is easy.
- Brent Hallard (guest) 5-20-2005 6:39 pm

Goff in the Counterpunch article makes a good point, that it's pathetic to hear Democrat Carl Levin, who voted against Bush's Iraq resolution, stepping in to rehabilitate his pinhead warmonger colleague Norm Coleman after Galloway tore him to shreds. I wonder if we could induce Galloway to move to the States so we could have a real Congress?
- tom moody 5-20-2005 6:46 pm

That link works for me, Brent, I am now a hilarious mood imagining Galloway reciting the Walrus and the Carpenter to the senate with the same intense righteous indignation.
- L.M. 5-20-2005 7:38 pm

Maybe George Galloway and Belinda Stronach will get married and become king and queen of the western world. I'd be a serf in that kingdom. (For those of you south of 49, Belinda just rocked Canada's world with a timely defection from the Conservative party to the Liberal party, literally saving the Liberal government, and leaving her boyfriend—Conservative hot-shot Peter MacKay—in the lurch. Also she's really a hot babe, so of course the papers have been full of misogyny which is appalling and I must confess entertaining as the low-brow libelous journalism made everyone on the right look like a screaming blithering idiot.)
- sally mckay 5-20-2005 11:55 pm