Wednesday, October 26, 2005

WHY THE SANCTIONS NEVER WORKED

With all the talk about Haliburton and war profiteering, why does the "peace" profiteering get so little ink?

This report, which comes with a vast archive of supporting material, was embargoed until 10 p.m. Monday and contains the "smoking gun" evidence that Galloway, along with his wife and his chief business associate, were consistent profiteers from Saddam Hussein's regime and its criminal exploitation of the "Oil for Food" program. In particular:


1) Between 1999 and 2003, Galloway personally solicited and received eight oil "allocations" totaling 23 million barrels, which went either to him or to a politicized "charity" of his named the Mariam Appeal.

2) In connection with just one of these allocations, Galloway's wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received about $150,000 directly.

3) A minimum of $446,000 was directed to the Mariam Appeal, which campaigned against the very sanctions from which it was secretly benefiting.

4) Through the connections established by the Galloway and "Mariam" allocations, the Saddam Hussein regime was enabled to reap $1,642,000 in kickbacks or "surcharge" payments.

(For a highly readable explanation of how the Oil-for-Food racket actually worked, see the Adobe Acrobat file on the site http://www.hitchensweb.com/ prepared by my brilliant comrade Michael Weiss and distributed as a leaflet outside the debate in New York.)


It's much more profitable to do business with the mob chieftons than go to war with them. If war does come, you can attach yourself to the anti-war movment and be seen as an idealist although you're just a profiteering cynic.

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