The US Senate committee which accused MP George Galloway of receiving oil money from Saddam Hussein has accused him of lying under oath.

Mr Galloway gave evidence to a Washington hearing in May, where he ridiculed its claims.

Now the senators claim they have fresh evidence linking the Respect MP and his wife to Iraq’s oil-for-food programme.

Mr Galloway said: “I did not lie under oath in front of the senate committee.” His wife has previously issued denials.

Mr Galloway told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The specific allegation against me is that I lied under oath in front of a senate committee.

“In this case the remedy is clear – they must charge me with perjury and I am ready to fly to the US today, if necessary, to face such a charge because it is simply false.”

The committee says it has seen bank records linking Mr Galloway and his wife Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad with Iraqi government vouchers.

Chairman Norm Coleman said documents it had uncovered were “the smoking gun”.

Mr Coleman claimed that Mr Galloway had “been anything but straight” with the committee.

But the Bethnal Green and Bow MP launched an attack on senate investigators.

He said: “They have been cavalier with any idea of process and justice so far, but I am still willing to go to the US and I am still willing to face any charge of perjury before the senate committee.”

However, in regards to the claims levelled at his estranged wife, Mr Galloway said he had “absolutely no idea” about her alleged business dealings.

“I am not responsible for my wife,” he said.

The MP, who said he was not in a position to answer questions on her behalf, went on: “I am bemused at the news that I see on the front of the newspapers.”

Mr Galloway appeared before a US Senate committee on 17 May. The former Labour MP travelled to Washington after senators accused him of receiving credit to buy Iraqi oil.

One of the main allegations raised by the senate sub-committee was that Mr Galloway received oil allocations with the assistance of Fawaz Zureikat.

Mr Zureikat, who was chairman of the Mariam Appeal set up by Mr Galloway to help a four-year-old Iraqi girl with leukaemia, has strongly denied making any arrangements linked to oil sales on behalf of the MP.

BBC Washington correspondent Justin Webb said the development meant the senators’ confrontation with Mr Galloway had “reached a new and more serious stage”.

Mr Galloway has always denied funds from the sale of Iraqi oil were funnelled through the Mariam Appeal.

In December, Mr Galloway won £150,000 in libel damages from the Daily Telegraph over its separate claims he had received money from Saddam’s regime. The paper is currently awaiting the result of its appeal against that ruling.
bbc.co.uk

The international Middle East envoy, James Wolfensohn, has accused Israel of behaving as if it has not withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, by blocking its borders and failing to fulfil commitments to allow the movement of Palestinians and goods.

Mr Wolfensohn, the special envoy of the “Quartet” of the US, UN, EU and Russia overseeing the “road map” peace plan, said Israel continued to block the free movement of Palestinians between the strip and Egypt, even though they do not enter Israel. “The government of Israel, with its important security concerns, is loath to relinquish control, almost acting as though there has been no withdrawal, delaying making difficult decisions and preferring to take difficult matters back into slow-moving subcommittees,” he wrote in a letter earlier this month to Quartet members.

Israel has almost entirely sealed off the Gaza Strip since its withdrawal on September 12. Hundreds of Palestinian workers who used to enter Israel each day via the Erez crossing in the north are not now allowed to do so, and the Karni cargo crossing has been closed, except to allow Israelis to import palm leaves for Jewish religious ceremonies earlier this month.

However, Mr Wolfensohn’s principal complaint concerns the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, the only way for most Palestinians to leave and enter the territory. Israel has refused to allow the crossing to reopen, except for periodic humanitarian considerations. “The Israelis have not agreed to accept the EU’s generous offer to consider the role of a third party to supervise the crossing,” he said. Israel is also blocking the implementation of a proposal by Mr Wolfensohn and the World Bank for a temporary system of convoys to move Palestinians and goods lorries between Gaza and the West Bank.
guardian.co.uk

Wolfhensohn. Wolfowitz predecessor at the World Bank. Seems like there’s a big bail-out going on. The rats are jumping off the sinking ship…

The man who was stabbed to death during weekend rioting in Birmingham was set upon by up to 11 armed youths as he walked home from the cinema with his brother, it emerged yesterday.
Isiah Young-Sam, 24, had not been involved in any of the confrontations between the Pakistani and African-Caribbean communities that erupted on Saturday evening, officers from the West Midlands police said.

The victim was, they said, innocently walking home with his younger brother, Zephaniah, and two friends, when three cars pulled up alongside them and launched into a furious attack. Detective Superintendent Dave Mirfield said: “The group was approached by three cars. Those cars contained, we believe, between 10 and 11 men. These men got out of the cars, armed with knives, and attacked Isiah and his friends.”

Yesterday it emerged that Mr Young-Sam, described as a gentle and deeply religious man who read the Bible each day, was oblivious to the febrile atmosphere that had developed in the Lozells area of Birmingham on Saturday. He and his brother had spent the late afternoon and early evening in the cinema. Afterwards they caught a bus from the city centre and were just a few hundred metres from home when they were set upon. Mr Young-Sam, an IT analyst at Birmingham city council, was taken to hospital but was dead on arrival. Yesterday, as riot police returned to the troubled streets of Lozells, his family paid tribute to a man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tensions were also raised further by a second murder, the shooting of a man in Newtown, less than a mile away from the scene of Saturday’s disturbance.
guardian.co.uk

…The human toll for the U.S. military in the Iraq war is not limited to the… 2,000 [as of this morning] troops deaths since the March 2003 invasion. More than 15,220 also have been wounded in combat, including more than 7,100 injured too badly to return to duty, the Pentagon said. Thousands more have been hurt in incidents unrelated to combat.
commondreams.org

…Aubrey de Grey…the 42-year-old English biogerontologist has made his name by claiming that some people alive right now could live for 1,000 years or longer. Maybe much longer. Growing old is not, in his view, an inevitable consequence of the human condition; rather, it is the result of accumulated damage at the cellular and molecular levels that medical advances will soon be able to prevent — or even reverse — allowing people to go on living pretty much indefinitely. We’ll still have to worry about angry bears and falling pianos, but aging, the biggest killer of all, will cease to be a threat. Death, as we know it, will die.
chronicle.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. prison population, already the largest in the world, grew by 1.9 percent in 2004, leaving federal jails at 40 percent over capacity, according to Justice Department figures released on Sunday.

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Inmates in federal, state, local and other prisons totaled nearly 2.3 million at the end of last year, the government said. The 1.9 percent increase was lower than the average annual growth rate of 3.2 percent during the last decade.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, there are more people behind bars in the United States than in any other country.

China had the second-largest prison population with 1.5 million prisoners, according to statistics updated in April and cited by King’s College. The total U.S. population is about 296 million, while China’s is 1.3 billion.

The Justice Department said the U.S. incarceration rate hit 486 sentenced inmates per 100,000 last year, up 18 percent from 411 a decade ago.

The five states with the highest incarceration rates last year were all in the South, led by Louisiana with 816 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 state residents. The five states with the lowest rates were all in the North, with Maine experiencing 148 sentenced inmates per 100,000 state residents in 2004, according to the Justice Department figures.

The U.S. prison population continued to grow last year even though reports of violent crime during 2004 were at the lowest level since the government began compiling statistics 32 years ago, according to a government report released in September.
news.yahoo.com

10/21/05 “The Island” — — The US and its allies had a bull in a court room on Wednesday. They may have expected Saddam Hussein to stomach all the humble pie they were going to dish out in what could be described as a show trial. They were mistaken.

His reaction was a display of resilience, hubris and contempt. He defied the presiding judge’s order to identify himself. Being an Iraqi, said he, the judge knew him well. He disputed the term the judge used to describe him—‘former President of Iraq’. He insisted that he was still the President of Iraq and challenged the legality of the court which was trying him.

According to his lawyers, the offences he is said to have committed were within the bounds of the then Iraqi law and, as such, he cannot be tried under a set of new laws given retrospective effect.

Before Wednesday’s trial, Saddam had been subjected to a media trial. The western media had not only tried him but already handed down their verdict: He must be hanged!

Sadly, those media gurus who pontificate to their counterparts in the so-called developing world about neutrality, impartiality, justice and fair play, have thrown those principles to the four winds and taken up the bludgeon of partiality to make a pulp of the Iraqi despot. Some of them have lent themselves to their governments as shock troops.

Nay, it is not being argued that Saddam is an angel. He and his men belong to the same matrix as monsters like Ivan the Terrible and his black clad and black horse mounted oprichniki who dealt death and devastation to the innocent.

But his crimes could have been avoided and tens of thousands of innocent lives saved, hadn’t the West sponsored his oppressive regime and aided and abetted his crimes.

The reason given for the second invasion of Iraq, was that Saddam had in his possession Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and this charge later turned out to be false. And the show trial appears to be the fig leaf with which the US-led allies are trying to cover their nudity.

The most serious charge against Saddam is the massacre of about 140 Shite villagers over an alleged assassination attempt in 1982. In the same year, the US, it should be recalled, removed Iraq from the list of states sponsoring terrorism! And within two years of the massacre the US restored diplomatic relations with Iraq.

Saddam used chemical weapons on both Iraqis and Iranians. The US and its allies could have nipped those attacks in the bud. Sadly, their hypocrisy wouldn’t allow them to do so. The US was the only country that voted against a UN Security Council statement in 1986 condemning the mustard gas attacks by Iraq on the Iranian forces! The US also allowed its companies to export chemicals to Iraq, which used them on humans. All chemical attacks by Saddam on the Kurds under the Anfal campaign, which left over 150,000 Kurds dead, over 1,000 Kurdish villages destroyed and about 300,000 Kurds displaced had the blessings of the West. The crop spraying helicopters used in these attacks came from the US! These massacres had no impact on the trade that Iraq had with the West. Instead, it increased! Today, we hear the West condemning those crimes against the Kurds!

The West gave the world a scare by proclaiming that Saddam was about to acquire nukes. But who helped him with his projects? He got uranium from Portugal, France and Italy and assistance for centrifuge enrichment came from Germany. The US Senate during one of its inquiries in 1995 stumbled on a startling fact: The United States had during the Iran-Iraq war, provided Saddam with samples of all the strains of germs used for making biological weapons!
informationclearinghouse.info

The special relationship between Britain and the US went south yesterday, as Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, took the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, to visit her Alabama birthplace, to draw a parallel between America’s civil rights struggle and its current ambitions to spread democracy abroad.

Ms Rice presented the trip as a new form of US diplomacy, bringing foreign counterparts to see America beyond the usual diplomatic circuit in Washington and New York. Mr Straw was the first to be invited. US and British officials rejected suggestions in the British press that the trip was aimed at burnishing Ms Rice’s credentials as a future presidential candidate.
guardian.co.uk

Nato agreed to send up to 1,000 soldiers to boost Pakistan’s overwhelmed relief effort last night as alarm grew over how to cope with a disaster now considered among the most difficult faced by the modern world.

Two weeks after an earthquake ripped across northern Pakistan an epic tragedy is unfolding. About 15,000 mountain settlements have yet to receive aid; international relief is chaotic and underfunded; and hundreds of thousands of survivors are at risk as the bitter Himalayan winter approaches.

President Pervez Musharraf yesterday described as “totally inadequate” the $600m (about £340m) in aid pledged by the international community. He estimated reconstruction costs at $5bn. But immediate worries centre on the 3.3 million people made homeless by the quake.

With three weeks before temperatures plummet and snow starts to fall, everything they need for survival – tents, medical care and helicopter transport – is in short supply. But much of the outside world, it seems, is unaware of the scale of the emergency. By last night UN members had funded just over a quarter of the UN’s $312m aid appeal. Frustration at the slow response turned to anger.

In Muzaffarabad, the Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, announced a $150m donation – the single largest yet – and asked why other countries were not doing more.

“By the end of 2004 the world had put one trillion US dollars into weapons. We have to ask how much the world has put aside for this disaster in Pakistan,” he said, after a helicopter tour of the devastation.

Mr Erdogan was the first foreign leader to visit the earthquake zone.

Several UN officials said privately they were unhappy with the response of their headquarters in New York. “They don’t understand what we’re dealing with here,” said one. “This is our biggest relief operation ever. It’s unprecedented in scale.”
guardian.co.uk

George Bush called last night for the UN security council to take up urgently the question of Syrian involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, saying the international community had to hold Damascus accountable.
Mr Bush asked Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, to call the meeting of council foreign ministers, after a UN report implicated senior Syrian officials in the February 14 murder in Beirut. “There must be some way to assure accountability,” said Ms Rice, adding that the international community would have “no real credibility” if it failed to take punitive action.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, travelling with Ms Rice in Alabama said the meeting “should take place as soon as possible”.

“You cannot leave a report like this … on the table,” he said. “Otherwise the international community whole influence and effectiveness is in question. If we act swiftly, we act resolutely, we act together, we can show that the international community is standing up for justice.”

Syria responded angrily to the report, which concluded that the bomb that killed Hariri “could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security official(s)”.

“I think the report is far from professional and will not lead us to the truth,” Syria’s information minister, Mehdi Dakhlallah, told al-Jazeera television. Syria’s ambassador to the US, Imad Moustapha, said the accusations “will only help fuel anti-American sentiment around the world”.
guardian.co.uk