Captain's Quarters -

No one had to get a bigger charge out of George Galloway's pending suspension from the UK House of Commons than Norm Coleman. The British Parliament has acted to punish Galloway for his dishonesty in hiding the source of his funding for his Mariam Appeal fund -- Saddam Hussein and Galloway's take in the Oil-For-Food scandal. Galloway's apologists laughed off Senator Coleman's interrogation of Galloway, but the Minnesota Senator gets the last laugh -- and takes it:

The anti-war Respect MP was criticised by the Standards and Privileges Committee for “concealing the true source of Iraqi funding” to a charity he set up and failure to co-operate with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

It backed a finding that there was “strong circumstantial evidence” that his Mariam Appeal received cash from the regime of Saddam Hussein, the payments delivered through the UN’s Oil for Food Programme “with Mr Galloway’s connivance”.

It said that the MP had been “complicit in the concealment of the true source of the funds” and had “damaged the reputation of the House” - and said that he was “clearly irresponsible” in refusing to look into the source of substantial donations to the fund.

In other words, the House of Commons came to the same conclusions as the US Senate, under Coleman's aggressive probe of the UN scam that put billions into Saddam's pockets during the supposed sanctions regime. Galloway got specifically named as a beneficiary of Saddam's generosity at the same time he vociferously defended the tyrant around the world. It was people like Galloway who perpetuated the notion that Saddam had been put in a "box" while taking cash hand over fist to represent a genocidal maniac instead of his constituency.

The Commons subcommittee reached its conclusions based in large part on the efforts of Norm Coleman. Coleman just released the following statement in response:

"I applaud the Committee for its diligence. With the release of the report, the U.K. Parliament becomes the fourth official entity to conclude that Galloway, through his political campaign, received financial support from the Hussein regime and that support was obtained from Oil-for-Food deals,” said Coleman.

Notably, the U.K. report includes a document that provides even further evidence that Galloway was knowledgeable about and participated in nefarious transactions related to the Program. The report has released the minutes of a meeting between Galloway and Saddam Hussein that occurred on August 8, 2002, in which Galloway discusses with Hussein and Tariq Aziz certain Iraqi oil deals – in clear and unmistakable terms. He specifically mentions how certain unidentified problems with oil prices are affecting "our"' income and "our dues."

"This document confirms what we've known all along: Galloway was neck-deep in the Oil-for-Food deals, he kowtowed to Saddam Hussein, and his bombastic denials were nothing more than a web of misleading statements. This report clearly shows he was trying to mislead the Subcommittee in his 2005 testimony and tried to create the impression that he did not benefit in any way from any Iraqi oil deals. The evidence shows that Galloway tried to mislead us when he denied knowing that his Jordanian business agent was doing oil deals with Iraq, when he denied knowing that some deals resulted in donations to his political campaign, the Mariam Appeal, and when he denied communicating with Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz about oil allocations. The evidence also shows that those claims are simply not true. These findings should put to rest any suggestion that Galloway did not know about these oil transactions and that he had no idea his wife and his political campaign were getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in oil money," Coleman said. "In fact, the evidence shows that he solicited such favors from the Hussein regime. As Parliament’s report states, he at best turned a blind eye, and ‘on balance, was likely to have known and been complicit in what was going on.’ He will undoubtedly resort to his old tactics and claim that these are fraudulent documents, but the evidence shows that he is flat wrong. The avalanche of credible evidence against him is just never-ending.”

“In response, Galloway will huff and puff, but he can’t blow away the facts of this report. In fact, the house is falling down around him and he will be suspended from the Parliament because of his transgressions,” Coleman added.

During Senator Coleman's tenure as Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the Subcommittee issued a detailed report in October 2005 that presented bank records establishing that Galloway's wife received roughly $150,000 directly from an Oil-for-Food oil deal. The Subcommittee's report also presented detailed documentation proving that the Mariam Appeal, the political organization Galloway portrayed as a children's charity, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Oil-for-Food transactions. The U.N.'s investigators, the Independent Inquiry Committee, found that Galloway's wife received approximately $120,000 from a different transaction under the Program and that the Mariam Appeal also received massive cash transfers funds from Oil-for-Food transactions.

More recently, the U.K. Charity Commission concluded that the Mariam Appeal improperly received at least $376,000 from Oil-for-Food deals. The Charity Commission also chastised Galloway, along with the other trustees of the Appeal, saying that they "did not properly discharge their duty of care as trustees to the Appeal in respect of these donations," and concluded that, having considered the totality of the evidence before it, that Galloway may also have known of the connection between the Appeal and the Program.

Many people here in the US expressed more admiration for Galloway's ranting in the Senate hearing than for Coleman's determined, measured approach that was designed to get information from Galloway. In the end, obnoxious and corrupt lost out to intelligent and tenacious. Congratulations to Senator Coleman for all of his hard work.