George Galloway’s Lesson in Speaking Truth to Power
by Michael Keefer
www.globalresearch.ca May 2005
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE505B.html George Galloway, the British parliamentarian who was drummed out of Tony Blair’s Labour Party in 2003 for his principled opposition to the American and British aggression against Iraq, and for his unrelenting willingness to publicly call prime-ministerial and presidential lies and war crimes by their proper names, has had copious experience of being libeled and slandered in return.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Galloway spoke out against the deliberate and intentional targeting of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure—of power stations and of water and sewage treatment facilities especially—by the cruise missiles and bomber aircraft of the U.S.-led coalition. He did not hesitate to inform his audiences and his readers (Galloway is a widely published journalist as well as a politician) that under international law attacks of this kind constitute a war crime.
Throughout the 1990s and up until the invasion of Iraq, Galloway spoke out against the United Nations sanctions imposed on Iraq (at the behest of the United States and Britain, principally)—sanctions which were used to prevent the Iraqis from rebuilding their shattered civilian infrastructure, and which as the United Nations itself has documented, resulted in the deaths of something like a million Iraqis, most of them children killed by easily-preventable water-borne diseases. The Oil for Food program was introduced by the United Nations in the mid-1990s, purportedly to reduce the appalling level of civilian suffering and death caused by the sanctions regime—but more plausibly as a means of deflecting rising criticisms of the sanctions. It is worth noting that two successive United Nations administrators of the Oil for Food program, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest against what they both called the genocidal consequences of the continued sanctions. Galloway himself set up a charitable foundation called the Mariam Appeal for the purpose of providing medical assistance to Iraqi children and of publicizing their increasingly desperate plight.
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Senator Coleman, in Galloway’s presence, recited all of the charges against Galloway and others assembled by his Subcommittee, and then invited his witness to be sworn in and to speak. What follows is Galloway’s opening statement, which I have transcribed from the BBC’s video-stream report of the event. Galloway spoke in a deliberate voice, without notes, and with his eyes fixed firmly on the hapless Senator. His remarks began with a mocking historical allusion to the language commonly deployed a half-century ago in another set of investigative hearings, those of the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE505B.html
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