[continued from previous message] 
  
 hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. 
 And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced 
 them today. 
  
 "Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio 
 Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this 
 company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never 
 paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that 
 Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal 
 Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I 
 daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never 
 met me or ever paid me a penny. 
  
 "Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official 
 that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't 
 you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this 
 senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed 
 yesterday actually is? 
  
 "Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of 
 documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of 
 the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, 
 that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in 
 time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a 
 subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last 
 year. 
  
 "You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 
 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The 
 Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you 
 were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's 
 documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq 
 until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no 
 documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the 
 Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time. 
  
 "And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that 
 your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents 
 when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph 
 documents deal with exactly the same period. 
  
 "But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the 
 Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed 
 publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to 
 the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents 
 which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the 
 Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries. 
  
 "Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, 
 senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the 
 Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of 
 their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these 
 documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they 
 were all lies. 
  
 "In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against 
 me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be 
 forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set 
 of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be 
 forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful 
 about it. 
  
 "The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities 
 with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these 
 forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing 
 newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of 
 the fall of the Iraqi regime. 
  
 "Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you 
 promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing 
 of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most 
 of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were 
 Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis 
 with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop 
 you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I 
 told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies. 
  
 I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons 
 of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq 
 had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, 
 that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the 
 world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a 
 British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of 
 Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the 
 beginning. 
  
 "Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and 
 you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 
 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. 
  
 If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if 
 the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some 
 kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war 
 movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. 
 Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert 
 attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions 
 of dollars of Iraq's wealth. 
  
 "Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 
 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months 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. 
  
 "Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping 
 out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows 
 where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military 
 commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or 
 weighing it. 
  
 "Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, 
 revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest 
 sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French 
 politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the 
 connivance of your own Government." 
  
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