British MP George Galloway has appeared in front of the American Senate Sub-Committee that has accused him of being Saddam Hussein's stooge and taking oil vouchers as payment for his services. The question is, is he being fitted up the yanks? I personally don't like the bloke but to me it seems pretty obvious that the answer to that is yes.
He asked the Senate Sub-Committee if he could be interviewed by them as part of their investigations bt they ignored him. They've never asked him a single question relating to the investigation but have still released an official report saying that he was doing dodgy deals with Saddam Hussein.
They claim that Galloway met Hussein many times - he says he met him twice, the same number as Donald Rumsfeld. He says the difference is, Rumsfeld was selling him weapons and maps when he met him whereas he was trying to convince him to allow weapons inspectors into the country.
They also say he owns a company which received the money from the oil. He says that the only company he owns is his own small company to receive payments for newspaper articles he writes.
He also made a very good point the other day. Do you not think that if he suddenly because a billionaire oil dealer, the British Secret Service might have noticed?
Galloway produced a dosier containing statememnts and quotes from 1990 onwards where he has strongly criticised the Iraqi dictatorship. He told one senator he was protesting outside the Iraqi Embassy when he was an anti-Vietnam War protestor.
The full video of his testimony is on the BBC News website. I would link to the clip itself but you can't do that on the BBC News website for some reason.
The "evidence" is pretty ropey but his defence seems to be pretty solid. Personally, I am inclined to agree with him that the whole investigation is just a smokescreen to cover up the fact that they've just discovered the extent to which American companies, with the conivence of the US government, repeatedly broke US sponsored sanctions against Iraq. Like I said, I don't like the bloke myself but to me it seems obvious they're using him as a scapegoat.
The Queen has read out Tory Bleugh's carefully written speech, I wonder how much of it she agrees with? Anyway, that's another matter.
One thing that I find interesting is the reform of child contact, something that is important to me as you will know from my previous posts. It appears that the government have resisted the attempts of Fathers 4 Justice (F4J) and on the face of it they appear to be proposing a marginally better system although only time will tell.
On the old English front things aren't quite so rosy. In the whole Queens Speech England was mentioned a total of ... 0 times. That's right, the biggest and most populouse part of the United Kingdom had no mention whatsoever in the whole speech which sets out the governments plans for the next 4-5 years. The only hope for those people fighting the blatant and rampant discrimination of English people by the government is the mention of an Equality Bill which will establish a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights.
Finally, the House of Lords is coming under the spotlight again with the government formally announcing their plans for an elected House of Lords as part of a Constitutional Reform Bill. Not content with removing the hereditary peers (unchosen by the government) for a system where the government gets to appoint their own cronies, they now want to have them elected so they are virtually guaranteed of a majority in the House of Lords. This isn't democracy, it's a shamocracy.