[wordup] Interview with George Galloway by Thom Hartmann on KPOJ

[Adam Shand]

You can get a transcript of George Galloway's complete stricken  
testimony at the US Senate here:

http://simplyappalling.blogspot.com/2005/05/complete-testimony-of- 
george-galloway.html

Adam.

Via: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00367.htm
From: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0528-27.htm

Published on Saturday, May 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Interview with British MP George Galloway
Interview by Thom Hartmann
[Thom Hartmann] George Galloway!

[Thom Hartmann] Thom Hartmann here with you on AM 620 KPOJ in  
Portland and we're also going to record this and play it on our  
national program. Thanks so much, Mr. Galloway for being with us today.

[George Galloway] You're most welcome.

[Thom Hartmann] First of all, my apologies if I have your title  
wrong. I'm calling you mister. Is that how?

[George Galloway] Mister, mister's more than adequate.

[Thom Hartmann] OK. I'm wondering, what is your opinion on the  
legality of Guantanamo Bay and what do you think of the construction  
of a death chamber there, which was reported by the BBC yesterday?

[George Galloway] Well, it's an utterly illegal process which is  
being followed. People are being taken, in some cases from third  
countries. One of the British citizens, for example, was taken from  
the Gambia. Others have been taken from Pakistan. Others still from,  
from Afghanistan. They're taken by force, drugs forcibly injected  
into them, hooded, chained, and taken to a cage in the tropics where  
by all accounts they're being kept in conditions that you wouldn't  
keep a dog in in your country or mine. And if you did, you'd be,  
you'd be had up for cruelty by the authorities.

And then there's very clear evidence of systematic torture. There's  
the desecration of the Koran which may or may not have happened,  
depending on which edition of Newsweek you are prepared to believe.  
This is a big scar on the face of the United States. And it seems to  
me that too few citizens of the United States have fastened on to the  
fact that the protestations by your president and your government of  
being interested in human rights and democracy and freedom are quite  
negated by the very existence of Guantanamo Bay.

But of course, that's not the end of it. Bagram Air Base is exactly  
the same kind of place. Abu Ghraib prison, well we perhaps, on a  
family show, shouldn't probe too deeply into the disgusting  
obscenities that were going on there. And, it turns out, that where  
the United States itself is not prepared to physically torture  
people, it merely subcontracts out the task; sending people to the  
likes of Uzbekistan and Egypt and other prison states where less  
squeamish governments will torture people for the United States and  
give the U.S. the testimony they get as a result. Which, of course,  
it goes without saying, is almost never of any use because anyone  
will say anything under torture.

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah.

[George Galloway] And all sorts of wild goose chases are no doubt  
embarked upon as a result of all this. So I'm afraid Guantanamo is a  
blot on the landscape and the fact that the United States occupies it  
in Cuba without Cuba's agreement is just the icing on the cake.

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah. George Galloway, Member of Parliament in the,  
in Great Britain, of the House of Commons. Why do you believe that  
Tony Blair decided to join president Bush in waging war when, as has  
recently emerged with this Downing Street memo, he knew that the case  
was flimsy, and do you think that either Blair or Bush or people in  
their administration should be prosecuted on any, on any level for  
this activity?

[George Galloway] Well, first of all I am sure that they will not be  
prosecuted, because it is only losers that are prosecuted. In the  
international system that we have there's no chance of the likes of  
Henry Kissinger, for example, the greatest living war criminal in the  
world today with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and  
Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor or in many other places on  
his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars. That's  
for the tin pot tyrants, the tiny tyrants like Milosevic; they get  
sent there. The big tyrants never face justice.

I wish I knew the answer to your first question, why did Tony Blair  
join it? Certainly, it's been utterly ruinous to his political  
reputation. He will, he will be followed into the history books and  
into the grave with this mark of Cain on his forehead. He will be  
remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush  
over a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven't yet  
reached the bottom, I'm afraid. All I can say from my own  
conversations with Mr. Blair, man to man, are that I think that both  
him and George W. Bush are possessed of a kind of messianic belief  
that somebody, God perhaps, gave them the job of shouldering the  
white man's burden, which is the world. That someone gave them the  
right to step outside of international law; go anywhere, do anything,  
pay any price in other people's blood, to reshape the world in their  
image; in the image that they want to see. And I think that both men  
will be damned in history. Both men have made their respective  
countries the two most hated countries in the world. They have  
endangered the lives and safety of our citizens. They have damaged  
our economic and cultural and social interests, and they should face  
prosecution, but never will.

[Thom Hartmann] Mr. Galloway, you called for a police inquiry into  
ballot fraud and ghost voting in Bethnal Green and Bow. In America,  
now, we just have this, just recently released, Congressman John  
Conyers went to Ohio and held hearings, 13 or 12 members of Congress,  
several weeks of hearings under oath, and determined that there was  
considerable election fraud in this last election where George Bush  
became president. And of course we know now that, in fact it was  
first reported on the BBC - Americans didn't know it but, but folks  
in the UK knew - within weeks of the 2000 election, that George  
Bush's brother Jeb and Kathleen Harris in Florida had conspired to  
remove the names of thousands of legally registered, tens of  
thousands of legally registered African Americans - largely  
Democratic voters - from the rolls there in Florida. What do you  
think is the solution to making elections, both in the United States  
and the United Kingdom, and around the world for that matter, open,  
fair and accurate?

[George Galloway] Well, you know, we're used to sending observers to  
third world countries and former banana republics to observe their  
elections. But the British election recently, and your election just  
a little more distantly, and the one in 2000 for that matter, really,  
if they had been observed by third world observers would have been  
declared bogus and deeply flawed.

Your president stole the presidency in Florida using his brother and  
his brother's close friends to cheat the people of the United States  
out of their freely elected president who was undoubtedly Al Gore.  
Even if you only counted the votes that actually made it through the  
hoops in order to be cast, the president was really Al Gore. And in  
Ohio, and I've read the stuff that Congressman Conyers is doing and I  
commend it, it's clear enough on the face of it that there was  
substantial fraud in that state and thus delivering the Electoral  
College vote for president Bush.

In our country, the government have vastly inflated the number of  
people voting by post which, as the courts have found, is wide open  
to electoral fraud, and electoral fraud there has been. I don't need  
to deal with the allegations, which are in their thousands. I can  
just deal with the cases that have already been dealt with. Six new  
Labour councillors were struck off and thrown out of the council in  
Birmingham, which is Britain's second city, having been caught red- 
handed in a room around a table at the dead of night, at midnight,  
with thousands, and I mean thousands, of other people's ballot papers  
that they were happily filling in, and they are now facing criminal  
prosecution as a result. Another new Labour councillor in the town of  
Blackburn, where the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw represents, and he  
was a close associate of Jack Straw, and he was a 65 or 67 year old  
man, has just been sent to prison for three and a half years for  
having been caught red-handed doing exactly the same thing.

When you add the thousands of allegations that there now are of voter  
fraud in the last election then I've called for the police to move in  
en masse, because we are heading down the road towards a kind of  
corruption that we never thought we'd see. Perhaps it's an innate  
sense of democratic superiority on our part. We use to think that  
that kind of ballot-rigging and voter fraud was something that  
happened in other countries, not in the mother of democracies, Great  
Britain.

[Thom Hartmann] Now this was a vote by mail problems that you had in  
the UK. Here in Oregon, we have the only vote by mail system in the  
state and I think we always thought that it was impregnable. It was,  
it was immune to this sort of thing.

[George Galloway] Well, yours may be, yours may be. Ours is very far  
from that. And when the electoral rolls are in the state that they  
are in... In my own constituency, for example, there were no less  
than 14 voters registered in one flat in Brick Lane, which is a  
heavily Asian, Bengali area, a Bangladeshi area in my constituency,  
and when we went there, not only were there not 14 voters living  
there, which would have been odd in any case given the size of the  
apartments, but there were no voters living there. Indeed, there was  
no one living there, it was utterly derelict. Now, somebody  
registered them and many hundreds, maybe even thousands of others for  
votes that they would cast by post who simply didn't exist. And of  
course, the scam is that someone picks up the ballot papers when they  
are posted out by the authority, fills them in and returns them.

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah. George Galloway, Member of Parliament, Member  
of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom. What lessons have you  
learned, if I can change the topic just for a moment to economics,  
and then if you have another moment,

[George Galloway] Of course.

[Thom Hartmann] I'd like to get back to the loss of freedoms in the  
wake of 9/11, but I'm curious about privatization in the UK. It's all  
the rage in the United States. I was over there when you were  
privatizing your railroads, could you speak to the citizens of  
America about the dangers of privatization, please?

[George Galloway] Well, what a way to run a railroad! That's what  
most people in the country are saying now, and how's this for a  
turnaround? British Rail, which was owned by the state, which was a  
nationalized railway, was probably the least loved institution in the  
United Kingdom when Mrs. Thatcher privatized it. Now, fully 80% of  
the people of the country, 80, eight zero percent of the people of  
the country want the railways taken back into public ownership  
because they realize now that we're paying three times the subsidy to  
the private owners of the privatized railways that we were paying to  
the nationalized railways and we've got a dirtier, more dangerous,  
and more expensive service as a result. It takes longer now to go  
from London to Birmingham on the train than it does to go from where  
I'm sitting in the House of Commons to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and  
it's only 110 miles from London to Birmingham. We've had a whole  
series of railway disasters caused by people cutting corners to save  
costs, to make more profits. We've had delays that would make your  
hair stand on end; people in the depths of winter being delayed 5, 7  
hours on railway journeys, and we have rolling stock which has not  
improved since the public sector days. All that's happening is that  
we're giving huge state subsidies to private owners who are putting  
it in their pockets.

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah.

[George Galloway] Now, we are the only country in the whole world  
that privatized our Air Traffic Control space; even the United States  
did not do that.

[Thom Hartmann] We're talking about it here.

[George Galloway] Yes, you're talking about it. Mr. Blair was ahead  
of you. He was ahead of Mrs. Thatcher, who wouldn't have dreamt of  
any such reckless measure. And we've now handed over control of our  
Air Traffic Control space to people whose primary responsibility,  
who's very legal and fiduciary duty is to use their investment to  
make a profit for their shareholders. That's got to be legally their  
first priority; to make a profit for their shareholders.

Now, just like an equally deadly privatization, though it doesn't  
sound like it, it might sound banal, when we privatized the cleaning  
services in hospitals, we immediately passed on to companies a duty  
not primarily to keep the hospitals clean, but primarily to make a  
profit for their shareholders. The result has been an explosion, a  
veritable explosion, in re-infection rates; so-called MRSA which is a  
kind of super bug mutant, which is actually killing 10,000 people a  
year in Britain. And there are many hospitals, including the one in  
my own constituency, miscalled the Royal London Hospital, though  
you'd never find a member of the royal family in it, I can assure  
you, where you're as likely to come out sick as you are to come out  
cured because of the state of the cleaning services in the hospitals.  
And that's directly linked to the privatization of that service.

So I say to the people of the United States that the rest of the  
world is falling out of love with privatization. Some things are too  
important to be left to the private sector. And just as some things  
are too important or specialized to be left to the public sector,  
nobody's saying that every cafe or fish and chip shop on the corner  
should be owned by the state - that would be absurd. But there are  
some things like Air Traffic Control, like national railway networks,  
like the cleaning of hospitals, like the teaching of our children in  
schools which are too important to be left to people who are doing it  
for profit.

[Thom Hartmann] Well said, and in fact, Senator Bill Frist, the  
fellow who's leading the United States Senate now, his family fortune  
was built on hospitals, previously public hospitals being made  
private, and we're seeing the consequences of that in the United  
States with exploding health care costs and other problems.

[George Galloway] Yes. Well we say here - it might be a little unfair  
- we say here that if you fall down in the United States, the  
ambulance man must feel for your wallet before he feels for your pulse.

[Thom Hartmann] Yes, and to some extent it actually is true. My last  
question for you is sort of a two part here. I know you have to get  
back to the work you're doing and I very much appreciate you spending  
your time with us, sir.

[George Galloway] You're welcome.

[Thom Hartmann] First of all, Senator Norman Coleman, whose committee  
you testified before and to whom you spoke the week before last, as I  
recall, or last week - recently. There are reports, which I've been  
unable to absolutely confirm, but apparently, from the searches of  
the senate web site, it looks like your testimony has disappeared  
from the record.

[George Galloway] That's right.

[Thom Hartmann] Do you know about that, and what are your thoughts on  
that?

[George Galloway] It has been. It has been. It has been airbrushed  
from the, from the record. And in a way, if you saw the testimony,  
you'll know why. Because what I managed to do, and I thank God for  
the breath that he gave me to do it, was blow away the smokescreen  
that these people are trying to throw up to divert attention from the  
very real crimes, high crimes and misdemeanors that they themselves  
are responsible for. And I've had, and I'm not exaggerating this,  
more than 12,000 emails from the United States. 12,000 emails, and  
it's not easy in the United States to find out the email address of a  
British parliamentarian.

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah.

[George Galloway] And these people have all written to me. Many of  
them have drawn attention to the fact that although for one day, just  
24 hours, my testimony was on the web site it has now been wiped off  
it. And that tells you all you need to know, really, about the  
quality of the commitment to democracy and open government that these  
people really have as opposed to the talk that they talk.

[Thom Hartmann] Well, and finally, with regard to democracy, what do  
you see the problem with the new laws we're debating, enhancing  
actually the so-called Patriot Act here in the United States. I know  
you have these kinds of things going on in the UK, the curtailment of  
freedoms, the loss of liberties in the wake of 9/11. I'm assuming  
that you've probably seen the Power of Nightmares, the BBC  
documentary which nobody in the United States has seen. Do you think  
that these changes are necessary or useful? What's your, what's your  
opinion of this?

[George Galloway] Well I'm afraid I'm an advocate of the great Dr.  
Johnson, the English man of letters who said that patriotism was the  
last refuge of the scoundrel. He didn't mean, of course, the  
patriotism which is a noble, genuine love for what's best about your  
country and its beauty and its achievements and so on, but those who  
wrap themselves in flags and blow the tinny trumpet of patriotism as  
a means of fooling the people. As a means of getting them to fall in  
behind the colours and march off to ignoble wars; wars of conquest,  
wars of aggression, wars for exploitation.

And that's what I think this Patriot Act is all about. It's about  
fooling the American people into believing that if you just arm the  
state with enough fly swats you'll be able to whack away all the  
beasts that are coming your way. But the truth is, these mosquitoes  
are coming out of a swamp; a very real swamp of grievance, of  
bitterness and hatred at our injustice and at the policies that we  
are following. And unless we drain that swamp by reversing the  
policies of injustice that have germinated this threat then it  
doesn't matter how many Patriot Acts you pass, it doesn't matter how  
many fly swats you hand out, how many mosquito nets you wrap yourself  
in, you're not going to be able to stop them hurting us again.

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah. Well said. Mr. George Galloway, thank you so  
much for sharing your time with us today.

[George Galloway] You're welcome. Any time.

[Thom Hartmann] I do appreciate it. I truly appreciate it.

[George Galloway] Thanks.

[Thom Hartmann] Thank you very much for being here on the Thom  
Hartmann program.

[George Galloway] Bye

Thom Hartmann is a nationally syndicated talk show host and the award- 
winning, best-selling author of 14 books. www.thomhartmann.com George  
Galloway is a British Member of Parliament who just won re-election,  
and recently took on U.S. Senator Norm Coleman.