Investigations into the U.N. Oil for Food scandal continue to unroll slowly, and methodically implicate scurrilous political figures around the world. This week's target is George Galloway, bombastic British MP and longtime abettor of leftist thugs and dictators. The U.S. Senate has the goods on him at last.
An anti-war British lawmaker gave false testimony to Congress when he denied receiving U.N. oil-for-food allocations from deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a Senate investigative panel said Monday.Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., chairman of the subcommittee, and his investigators presented evidence that they say shows British lawmaker George Galloway's political organization and his wife received nearly $600,000 from the oil allocations.
Congressional investigators said Galloway could face charges of perjury, making false statements and obstructing a congressional proceeding, with each charge carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Wretchard at Belmont Club compares carefully the nature of Galloway's flamboyant performance when called to testify before Coleman's committee, here and here.
Christopher Hitchens, who has engaged in a long series of public debates with Galloway, sums up where things stand.
This most probably means that what we now know is a fraction of what there is to be known. But what has been established is breathtaking enough. A member of the British Parliament was in receipt of serious money originating from a homicidal dictatorship. That money was supposed to have been used to ameliorate the suffering of Iraqis living under sanctions. It was instead diverted to the purposes of enriching Saddam's toadies and of helping them propagandize in favor of the regime whose crimes and aggressions had necessitated the sanctions and created the suffering in the first place. This is something more than mere "corruption." It is the cynical theft of food and medicine from the desperate to pay for the palaces of a psychopath.[T]his is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.
Related:
• U.S. Senate - full report (PDF)
• U.S. Senate - Oil for Influence - May 2005 hearing
• Hitchens-Galloway debate - Video (Real)