Caught Red-Handed

We have followed, from time to time, the loathesome career of George Galloway, formerly Saddam Hussein’s chief shill in the West, more recently a defender of terrorists, hero to Western leftists, and cat impersonator. His downward spiral continues: this morning, a Parliamentary committee released a report recommending that Galloway be suspended from Parliament for a month for concealing the fact that his “Mariam appeal,” an alleged charity, was funded in part by Saddam Hussein. Galloway, true to form, tried to obscure the issue at hand by claiming that he deserves to be awarded a medal, not suspended from the House of Commons.
The report is available here. This represents, I believe, the fourth official inquiry that has found misconduct of some kind on Galloway’s part in connection with Saddam’s oil-for-food program.
There hasn’t really been any doubt for some time about the fact that Galloway took money from Saddam in return for defending the tyrant; money from oil-for-food kickbacks has been traced not just to the Mariam Appeal, but to Galloway’s wife’s bank accounts. But the most interesting aspect of the Parliamentary committee’s report is that it appended a translation of the minutes of a meeting between Galloway and Saddam Hussein in 2002. At its conclusion, the transcript contains an exchange in which Galloway acknowledges that he has performed services for Saddam and has been paid for those services, but notes that his payments have been delayed and reduced by pressures which the oil-for-food program was then under.
The Parliamentary committee worked closely with Norm Coleman’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations; Norm deserves a great deal of credit for focusing attention on Galloway’s misdeeds and sharing documentary evidence that it accumulated with the Parliamentary committee and others. This latest revelation ought to silence Galloway’s defenders once and for all, but given their historic obliviousness to evidence, it probably won’t.
UPDATE: Here is the key language from Galloway’s meeting with Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz in August 2002:

Finally, may I say that our work has been going on for years and I believe that Your Excellency is aware of the results which we have achieved. Mr Tariq Aziz has helped us with his contacts and has used his influence to facilitate our job and facilitate the mechanism by which we have been able to obtain the funding necessary to finance our activities. But, we are now suffering from the problem of the price of oil which has resulted in a reduction in our income and delay in receiving our dues.

I don’t see any way to understand those statements other than as an acknowledgement that Galloway was on Saddam’s payroll.
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