George Galloway’s whirlwind book tour will end Saturday night in
D.C. This sycophant of dictators has done nothing but bluster and
carp and smear since he arrived, but he will leave the country with
his pack of lies baying at his own heels.
I wrote here
about a lie Galloway told under oath when he testified before the
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in May. Since then
the PSI has taken an interest in the matter. In June, the paper in
Galloway’s home district, the East London Advertiser,
reported that “[a]llegations that George Galloway may have misled
senators under oath are now being vigorously investigated by a U.S.
government committee.” This little twist is, of course, in addition
to the overarching investigation of whether Galloway accepted
lucrative oil allocations from Saddam, as laid out in the committee
report (linked here.)
In the meantime several sleuths have been busy fact-checking
Galloway’s song and dance before the PSI, and nailing his feet to
the floor. A brief reconstruction of Gorgeous George’s
disinformation is in order.
Galloway founded a pseudo-charity, which he now claims was purely a political campaign, called
“Mariam Appeal,” which lobbied to lift the sanctions against Iraq.
This is the charity which the PSI was referring to when it
concluded that “some evidence indicates that Galloway appeared to
use a charity for children’s leukemia to conceal payments
associated with at least one such allocation.” The signatory in
these transactions was a Jordanian businessman named Fawaz
Zureikat, who was both president of a company that contracted with
Saddam’s regime for oil allocations, and the chairman of Mariam
Appeal.
Senator Norm Coleman asked Galloway whether he knew Zureikat was
trading oil with Saddam, and Galloway claimed that not only did he
know that, he was quite public about that fact: “Not only did I
know that, but I told everyone about it. I emblazoned it in our
literature, on our Web site…I knew he was a big trader with Iraq,
and I told everybody about it.” This is where blogger and web
developer George Gooding (www.seixon.com) caught him out, using the
Internet Wayback archive to show the Mariam Appeal website said no
such thing. Nor did it even show that Zureikat was MA’s
chairman.
Gooding has since done much more Internet sleuthing to debunk
Galloway’s remarks about emblazoning Zureikat’s name on the Mariam
appeal website. The explanations, though quite technical, are also
quite damning. (Here’s a link to Gooding’s Galloway archive.)
Rob Mackinlay, the British journalist who reported the
Advertiser story above, contacted the British Charity
Commission about Galloway’s literature. Their reply suggests that
Zureikat’s roles as the chairman and as an oil-for-food trader were
hardly “emblazoned” thereon:
We were unable to obtain all the books and records of
the Appeal. Mr Galloway has stated that these were sent to Jordan
in 2001 upon Mr. Zureikat becoming the Appeal’s Chair. We were able
to obtain some of the printed material produced in connection with
the Appeal and have a record of some of the material available on
the Appeal’s website. We have on file an article produced in
connection with the ‘Rebuilding of Baghdad Library’ campaign which
names Mr. Zureikat as a contact for that campaign. The article
states that the campaign was organised by the Mariam Appeal and by
the National Mobilisation Committee for the Defence of Iraq.
We don’t have on file any further material clearly produced by
the Appeal which makes reference to Mr. Zureikat. However, it may
be that the Appeal produced other literature.
Finally, I’ve spent hours running these connections through
Lexis-Nexis and found little evidence that Galloway was ever
forthright in his dealings with the media about his true
relationship to Zureikat, or Zureikat’s dalliances with Saddam’s
oil, until the evidence came to light after Baghdad’s liberation in
2003 and the oil hit the fan.
Various alternate spellings of Zureikat’s name turn up very
murky statements about his role. He’s sometimes listed as a
representative of the National Mobilization Committee on Defense of
Iraq. This account in the Independent is
interesting, because a reporter flew to Baghdad on a Mariam Appeal
charter flight with Galloway, Zureikat, and very few others. The
reporter identified Stuart Halford as being “of Mariam Appeal,” but
somehow never quite made the connection that Zureikat was anything
but a “Jordanian businessman,” let alone MA’s chairman. In fact,
out of hundreds of articles about the Mariam Appeal’s activities,
there was only one pre-war mention of Zureikat as chairman of Mariam
Appeal.
Galloway’s deceptive statements under oath may implicate him
under two federal statutes, one of perjury and one of making a
false statement under oath, either of which carry a penalty of up
to five years in prison. Both charges hinge on a question not only
of the falsehood, but also of the materiality, of his statements.
And misleading the committee about one’s extensive financial
relationship with Saddam’s regime strikes me as quite material to
this investigation. After all, the fact that Galloway was smart
enough to downplay his dealings with Zureikat and Saddam in the
first place is evidence that he knew it wasn’t kosher, and his
attempt on the stand to pretend he was honest about it all along
just makes it look worse.
If Galloway wanted to stop shoveling his anti-American rhetoric
and answer these charges, of course, it would take about five
minutes. All he’d need do is send along a few of those “emblazoned”
brochures that clearly identified Zureikat’s role as chairman and
explained his business dealings with Saddam. But the fact that he
hasn’t bothered to refute these charges suggests that he can’t.
In any case I doubt Galloway will serve any time. He was able to
convince himself that he was helping the Iraqi people even as
Saddam starved them and built palaces with stolen Oil-for-Food
money. He was able to convince himself (or was he?) that Fawaz
Zureikat was a noble benefactor and not a bagman for Baghdad’s
butcher. He was able to convince himself that he was a patriot and
a humanitarian instead of the newest incarnation of Lord Haw Haw,
the Brit who collaborated with the Nazis as their radio spokesman.
With those mind-bending powers of persuasion, beating this rap
could be a snap for him.
On the other hand, a spokesman for Senator Coleman suggests that
the publication of this book Galloway is flogging may have been
premature. “Mr. Galloway has completely failed to rebut any of the
evidence against him,” he told me, though refusing to comment on
the specifics of the continuing investigation. “I hope he left room
at the end for an epilogue.”
