On May 17, the Honourable George Galloway, MP, gave a blustery
and animated performance in front of the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations. Pundits conceded he ran rhetorical
circles around the plodding, staid Senators who couldn’t quite
catch him out on his relationship to the Oil-for-Food Scandal. But
the Senate tortoises may yet have the last laugh. Mr. Galloway
seems to have told a big, fat whopper under oath, and a tech-savvy
blogger has dug up some proof.
During the hearing (which, though not released by the Senate,
has been transcribed
here), Senator Norm Coleman pressed Mr. Galloway about his
links to Saddam crony, Oil-for-Food beneficiary, and super-rich
businessman Fawaz Zureikat, who was a major donor to Mr. Galloway’s
Mariam Appeal charity. Did Galloway know Zureikat was trading oil
for Saddam? Mr. Galloway responded that
Not only did I know that, but I told everyone about it.
I emblazoned it in our literature, on our Web site,
precisely so that people like you could not later credibly question
my bona fides in that regard. So I did better than that. I never
asked him if he was trading in oil. I knew he was a big trader with
Iraq, and I told everybody about it.
On his website? Well, the Mariam Appeal site
(www.Mariamappeal.com) is long gone, the domain name snapped up by
Internet squatters, so we’ll just have to take Mr. Galloway’s word
for it, right?
Not quite. There’s this nifty thing called the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine (here), which takes “snapshots” of websites over
time. It works a little like Google’s vast searchable cache,
sending out an automated “webcrawler” that remembers the HTML code
of the sites it encounters. Brand-new blogger George Gooding at
Seixon.com
used it to find the snapshots of the old Mariam Appeal site and
verify whether Zureikat’s identity was, in fact, emblazoned
thereon.
Gooding’s report says of the July 2001 snapshot “…at
this point in time, there is absolutely no mention of Mr. Zureikat
or any other donors to the organization at all.” Zureikat does make
an appearance on the Mariam Appeal site, however. He was named as a
contact within the National Mobilization
Committee on Defense of Iraq (NMCDI) for the “Rebuilding Baghdad
Library” book drive. There is no mention made of his business
relationship with Iraq. (This page was not there on April 1, 2001,
but was there on a subsequent snapshot taken the next day. So we
know when Zureikat’s name was added to Mariam Appeal’s site.)
However, there also exists a contemporaneous list of donors. (You have to follow a couple of
links to reach this list from the main page.) And at no time do the
snapshots of this list of “Founder Members and Supporters” include
the name of Fawaz Zureikat.
So when Mr. Galloway told Senator Coleman that Zureikat…
“donated money to our campaign, which we publicly brandished
on all of our literature, along with the other donors to the
campaign.”
…Mr. Galloway was not telling the truth, at least about his
website. This was no mere oversight, because on April 2, 2001, the
Mariam Appeal site already had “emblazoned” Mr. Zureikat’s
involvement as a representative, but not as a donor. A visitor to
the site would infer that Zureikat was actually a beneficiary of
the Miriam Appeal’s books and donations, rather than a
375,000-pound donor.
Actually, Mr. Zureikat was more than just a contact person for
Mariam Appeal. And he was more than just a major donor. In “late
2000 or early 2001,” according to Mr. Galloway’s testimony, Mr.
Zureikat became Mariam Appeal’s chairman. Funny, isn’t it,
how that doesn’t show up on the site?
WHY SHOULD WE CARE about Mr. Galloway’s website said about Mr., er,
Chairman Zureikat? Because by identifying Mr. Zureikat as a
beneficiary of, rather than a donor to, the Mariam Appeal’s
charity, it looks like Galloway knew how shady his true
relationship with Zureikat was, so he tried to disguise it.
But when confronted about this by Senator Coleman, Mr. Galloway
switched his story again, claiming that he had been completely open
all along. George Gooding, the blogger, suspects that Galloway may
have underestimated the long memory of the Internet and figured
that this prevarication would pass undetected.
If this was an oversight on Mr. Galloway’s part, it’s a huge
one. Didn’t he anticipate questions about his relationship with
Zureikat, and prepare for his testimony on that subject very
carefully? If not, and his testimony is mistaken about this, why
should we trust him to remember whether or not he has ever received
an oil contract from Saddam Hussein?
In any case, when you don’t know the answer to a potentially
incriminating question a Senator has just asked you, you don’t just
make up a story. You say, “I don’t know at this point, Senator, but
I’ll be happy to find that out for you and send you a written
response to that question.” Mr. Galloway, always careful with his
words, later used this very tactic during his testimony when
confronted with a memorandum connecting him to Zureikat.
If it was not an oversight, neither was his statement
meaningless, Clintonian meaning-of-is-is bafflegab. This was a
bald-faced bray about how open he had been about his links to
Zureikat — an openness that history disconfirms.
It is too early to throw around the “P-word” about Galloway’s
testimony. But it’s fair to say that his veracity is now at issue,
and Senator Coleman’s committee now has a new angle to pursue. The
Senators were tittered at for letting Mr. Galloway off his leash.
But instead, they may have given him just enough lead to trip
himself up.
