The Truth Hurts

Rolling Stone published this entertaining briefing in last month's magazine;

When Senate Republicans claimed that a member of the British Parliament personally profited from the sale of Iraqi oil, the right honorable MP turned the tables on his accusers. Testifying before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on May 17th, George Galloway blasted Republican Sen. Norm Coleman for basing the charges on documents that had already been proved to be forgeries. "You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported," Galloway declared in his blistering rebuttal. "Have a look at the fourteen months you were in charge of Baghdad when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money but the money of the American taxpayer." Galloway observed that he had warned that Iraq possessed no WMDs and had no connection to Al Qaeda. "Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong," he noted. "One hundred thousand people paid with their lives; 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies." The Republicans seemed unaccustomed to being spoken to in such a tone. Sniffed a spokesman for Coleman, "We do things a little differently here in the United States Senate."