According to the Daily Telegraph, a Labour MP was receiving money from Saddam Hussein in exchange for his support! Galloway denied the accusation.
This is dynamite (if true.) £375,000 a year is real money. In a way, it’s not surprising. US marines found something like $600 million in cash hidden in one of Saddam’s palaces. It stands to reason that with the kind of cash flow Saddam had, some would be used to bribe various people.
I recall some pundit (Christopher Hitchens IIRC) who claimed that two inspectors working for Hans Blix were taking bribes from the Iraqi government. I bet there are others. Who else will be discovered?
I fail to see how he trashed it. It turns out that Galloway was receiving illegal bribes from Iraq. december speculated that Iraq might have bribed other people too, and recalled a pundit who had suggested a similar thing, but did not specifically accuse anyone. I can’t understand why you think there’s something wrong with that - I don’t suppose you would have been upset at somebody speculating that large-scale corporate crime went deeper than Enron and Arthur Andersen?
Of course, the money the US is paying the “coalition of the willing” from the US$7.6b are not bribes. No sir, the US is incapable of committing crimes by definition.
It refers to the Mariam Campaign, which was apparently set up as a pro-Iraq lobby group.
It isn’t clear who the he referred to in the second paragraph is. It could be Galloway, but because of the subject matter, oil contracts and food contracts, it’s more likely to refer to the people actually funding the Campaign, i.e. Fawaz Abdullah Zureikat or the “named Arab sheikh”.
My point was, that the OP took a perfectly good, possibly/probably factual event, and then crossed into the realm of “perhaps, maybe, I heard, …pundit said,” crap that he usually offers.
A possibly/probably happened, so let’s throw in that B said that C did something to D and E, IIRC, said that his barber’s brother-in-law has a son in Iraq who says that they just found WMD.
Ah yes, that was quite the article. So many lucid points, and such clear, intelligent language. (Note: I do not actually think repeatedly calling somebody a drunk in so many different ways constitutes a good argument.)
**
Idle speculation without any specific accusations. Pretty harmless I’d say. To go back to my earlier analogy, what would you think of the following statement:
“It has been alleged, and there is evidence that, senior managers at Enron and Arthur Andersen engaged in serious coporate wrongdoing. I bet there are other heads of corporations engaging in similar actions.”
Well, as far as I’m aware, the money the US is paying out is a matter of public record.
Find me a case in which the US has paid secret money under “commercial cover” directly to the personal benefit of a foreign politican, and I’ll certainly agree we’re talking bribery here.
And, in a larger sense, perhaps US payments are bribery. “Stop your country’s opium production, or we’ll withhold aid,” is bribery in a sense.
But it’s not the same kind of thing as what’s being alleged here, Urban Ranger. Right?
ISTM that the financial aspects of this allegation should be pretty easy to verify by means of an audit. The question is, will anyone investigate? In the US, lots of members of Congress have fishy financial doings, but they are seldom investigated.
Butcher the English language much, Urban Ranger? “Alleged” does not mean “without basis;” it means an accusation has been made, and the accusation has not yet been proven.
There sure as hell is a basis for the allegation here, hun. It’s called “Iraqi intelligence documents.” That basis may later turn out to be faulty, but a freaking basis exists.
This happened a lot both in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe after the Wall fell; the Telegraph (and a mess of other journalists, I’m sure) are rooting through looted Iraqi government buildings, seeing what they can find strewn about.
Please please please ignore the opinions of Andrew Sullivan, who is merely a tool of Murdoch.
There may be truth in this, there may not be. If there is, then I’ll be utterly disgusted.
Galloway is a prominent anti-war advocate, and also opposed the war in Afghanistan; I doubt he was getting kick-backs from the Taliban, but he was still very vocal about it.
Galloway will be suing the Telegraph for libel, BTW. Anyone who knows about British libel law will know that these trials are fairly stringent, and have caused the downfall of several prominent plaintiffs - he’d therefore have to be pretty sure of his innocence.
He also said the following (I precis from memory of this morning’s radio): “according to the alleged documents, the alleged payments were via the oil-for-food program. Therefore the barrels that were allegedly given to me had to be sold and paid via the UN. Find me the UN cheques with my name on them.”
This may actually turn out to be “the tip of the iceberg” - of disinformation.
Frankly I’m just impressed that december has such rapid knowledge of one British journalist’s allegations against a fairly obscure British politician. I would hardly have thought it was a story with much milage across the pond and I only heard about it on this morning’s news.
Well I have no opinion on the allegations, but I would like to observe that the Arabic document on their web page does not appear to match their translation.
It is hard to tell given the poor scan quality, handwriting and all that, so I will have to sit down to take a closer look, but for example I read the opening line of that letter to be:
“It’s profits [are] 15%, thus I suggest for us [unclear word] - First increase dividends from [unclear, prob. oil].”
I don’t feel like ruining me eyes for nothing at the moment, but perhaps some less overheated speculation is in order until this is cleared up.