Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) the GOP chair of a senate sub-committee "investigating" the UN oil-for-food program wasn’t up to the task of interrogating British Member of Parliament George Galloway Tuesday (May 17). The Republican Senate leadership had intended to use Galloway to extend their party’s floundering attack on the UN for supposed corruption surrounding the oil-for-food program that governed the sanctions regime over Iraq in the years leading up to Bush’s war in March 2003.
Galloway a staunch opponent of the US-led war on Iraq had been accused by the Republicans and the pro-war elements in his country of opposing the war only because he had financial connections to the Saddam Hussein regime.
Republican Senators attempted to publicize the so-called scandal in the UN as away to divert attention from collapsing support for Bush’s war, the administration’s credibility problems and international horror at the administration’s torture policy that led to the Abu Ghraib atrocities, the attacks on civilian targets in Fallujah, Najaf and other Iraqi cities, as well as Bush’s faltering domestic agenda.
It blew up in their faces when they asked George Galloway to testify this week. Republicans and their doting "news" channel FOX tried desperately to hang corruption around Galloway’s neck even before his appearance. Using forged documents and other sources widely regarded as discredited, FOX and the Republicans pronounced Galloway guilty.
Norm Coleman is a lawyer by profession, but his performance Tuesday could have had anyone guessing. Galloway’s stern and forthright responses to Coleman’s blundering questions bludgeoned the outmatched senator from Minnesota into withering silence. By the end of Coleman’s time, he was quietly examining his notes looking for a real question and seemed to be wishing he hadn’t agreed to try to take on the much more able senior parliamentarian.
Watch the full testimony(47 min, but worth it)
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