Helsinki - An exceptionally bright "fireball" was spotted late on Tuesday slicing through the sky over Finland before exploding over the country's border with Russia, the Finnish Astronomical Association (URSA) said on Wednesday.

The phenomenon was witnessed by dozens of people in the eastern part of the country.

"Our mathematicians have roughly calculated that the (fireball) began its decent over our eastern border and ended in an explosion over the Russian Karelia region," URSA newsletter editor Marko Pekkola said.

Closer calculations will be needed to determine the exact route taken by the "fireball", which was probably an incandescent meteorite, Pekkola added.

No, not GW. We are referring to yesterday's testimony by British MP George Galloway, outspoken critic of the US and British led invasion and occupation of Iraq, now accused of profiting from the Oil for Food programme in what appears clearly to be a smear campaign against a politican who tells tell the truth about the situation in Iraq. Accused, tried, and convicted in the Senate and the US press last week, Galloway came to Washington to clear his name. Of course, he is well aware that the neocons don't care about truth and justice and that nothing he said would make a difference to their findings, therefore he used the opportunity to condemn the disaster in Iraq, the pack of lies from US officials that justified it, as well as coming back repeatedly to the number of Iraqis and Americans who are dead because of those lies.

However, as Mr Galloway was not speaking directly to the American people, the reports of his testimony come filtered through the political agendas of those controlling the news. We see that in the coastal cities, the papers go into more depth on Galloway's remarks, while in the heartland of Homeland Security, those reamrks are mostly edited out and the focus is on his refusal to answer loaded questions with a simple yes or no. Such is the way the red states stay red.

Below we have the transcript of Mr Galloway's opening statement, but first we have a selection of articles from a number of US publications on his appearance.

The Telegraph, the British paper that lost a libel case Galloway brought against it when they published forged documents, and one of the main voices of Zionism in the UK, avoided Galloway's criticisms of US war policy in their report, preferring to focus on Galloway's refusal to directly answer a couple of questions. Galloway was asked by Senator Levin, a Democrat, whether he was troubled that his friend, Jordanian businessman Fawaz Zureikat, may have profited from the Oil for Food programme. Refusing to be drawn into simple yes or no answers that accept the assumptions of the hostile question ("Have you stopped beating your wife?"), Galloway gave a long response on his opposition to the programme, the absurdity of giving .30 a day for food, medicine, education, etc for each Iraqi during the embargo. He also pointed out the absurdity of claiming that the money Mr Zureikat donated to his Mariam's Charity came from the kickbacks when he was a very rich man who did much more business in Iraq and elsewhere, and returned again and again to the fact that the Senate's investigation shows it was American companies who were responsible for more improprieties than everyone else combined, and that these improprieties were done with the knowledge and agreement of the US government.

To the moralist Senators, whose indignation at ignoring UN rulings extends only to certain hand-picked programmes where the US has been able to impose its will (Where was this indignation when Israel ignores condemnation after condemnation or when the Security Council refused to legalise the Bush Reich invasion of Iraq?), Galloway's evasiveness was proof that he was an unreliable witness.

Galloway repeatedly pointed out that the evidence against him was flimsy at best and that if they had had anything concrete, it would have been published. They had nothing concrete.

The New York Times unleashed their neocon reporter Judith Miller, the same reporter who was embedded in Iraq with the fraudster and discredited Chalabi and whose reporting came up for such scathing criticism. She was then transfered to the UN where she has been one of the loudest conspirators in bringing down UN Secretary General Kofi Annan over the Oil for Food scandal. Annan has so far been vindicated of every charge of impropriety.

We ran an article yesterday by Wayne Madsen chronicling Coleman's ties with AIPAC and the neoconservatives. Be clear. The campaign against the British anti-war activist and harsh critic of Bush's poodle Tony Blair, as well as a Frenchman and a Russian, have all the earmarks of a vendetta against those who opposed the US rape and pillage of a country that was no threat to US security. As the Iraq disaster becomes more and more obvious, the Senate is indeed throwing up what Galloway so aptly termed "the mother of all smokescreens".

WASHINGTON - A prominent British politician linked to illegal payments in the Iraqi oil-for-food program told U.S. senators yesterday that their investigation was "the mother of all smokescreens" to divert attention from "the real scandal": U.S. policy in Iraq.

British legislator George Galloway is one of several foreign politicians who the Senate subcommittee on investigations claimed last week received options to buy discounted Iraqi oil in return for helping Saddam Hussein's regime evade U.N. sanctions.

But Galloway, an outspoken critic of the Iraq sanctions and the U.S.-led invasion of the country, was the only one to travel to Washington to defend himself.

He testified under oath and without immunity, but with harsh language that shook up the usually staid hearing room.

Last week, Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., the subcommittee chairman, released a report charging that Galloway received oil allocations of 20 million barrels from 2000 to 2004, and had a Jordanian associate, Fawaz Zureikat, sell the oil and funnel the revenues through a charity.

The report also said that former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz confirmed that Galloway was on their list of friends to be rewarded.

Galloway said he neither traded oil nor had anyone trade it on his behalf, and questioned the validity of any information extracted from a prisoner facing war crimes charges.

WASHINGTON — A prominent British politician linked to illegal payments in the Iraq oil-for-food program told U.S. senators Tuesday that their investigation was "the mother of all smoke screens" to divert attention from "the real scandal": U.S. policy in Iraq.

British legislator George Galloway is among several foreign politicians whom the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused last week of receiving options to buy discounted Iraqi oil in return for helping Saddam Hussein's regime evade United Nations sanctions. The holders of such options could sell them to oil traders at a profit. Former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and Russian lawmaker Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky were also named. All three have denied wrongdoing.

But Galloway, an outspoken critic of the sanctions on Iraq and the U.S.-led invasion of the country, was the only one who traveled to Washington to defend himself. He testified under oath and without immunity but used harsh language that shook up the typically staid hearing room.

Galloway described the committee chairman, Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman, as a "pro-war, neocon hawk and the lickspittle of George W. Bush" who, he said, sought revenge against anyone who did not support the invasion of Iraq.

"Now, I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," he said, accusing Coleman of not giving him a chance to respond to the charges before circulating the committee's report. "I am here today, but last week you already found me guilty."

Last week, Coleman released a report charging that Galloway had received oil allocations of 20 million barrels from 2000 to 2004 and had a Jordanian associate, Fawaz Zureikat, sell the oil and funnel the revenue through a charity.

The report also says that former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz confirmed that Galloway was on their list of friends to be rewarded.

Galloway denied trading oil or having anyone trade it on his behalf and questioned the validity of any information extracted from a prisoner facing war crimes charges, "knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners," he said.

"Now, you have nothing on me, senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad," he told Coleman.

Asked what he had accomplished at the hearing, Galloway told a reporter he thought he had served as a reminder that the war was wrongheaded.

"Most people think the real villains of the piece in Iraq are not [U.N. Secretary-General] Kofi Annan and [French President Jacques] Chirac but here in Washington and in the White House and in the Republican majority," he said.

After the hearing, Coleman said that "nothing was said today that at all discounted the veracity, the reliability of those documents that were affirmed by senior Iraqi officials."

Both Coleman and Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said it was "simply not credible" that Galloway — who described himself as a "dear friend" of Aziz, one of three Iraqi officials, according to Coleman, who selected the contract recipients — did not know that his partner and the man who funded his campaign against the war was making oil deals with Hussein.

"If in fact he lied to the committee, there will have to be consequences," Coleman said.

The Senate panel had more detailed documentation on other implicated politicians. The report states that Pasqua, now a French senator, was allocated 11 million barrels of oil.

On Monday in Paris, Pasqua repeated his denial that he had received anything in such transactions and pointed out that his name disappeared from the list when his advisor, Bernard Guillet, began receiving allocations in 2000.

"If my name appears in certain Iraqi documents, that can only be the result of fraudulent behavior on the part of certain people who have used my name," he said.

French authorities arrested Guillet in April for money laundering and influence peddling related to the U.N.'s oil-for-food program.

The Senate committee issued a separate report on prominent Russian politicians who allegedly received Iraqi oil rights. President Vladimir V. Putin's former chief of staff, Alexander S. Voloshin, and the presidential council received oil rights worth nearly $3 million in exchange for working to lift U.N. sanctions, the report charges.

It also says that Zhirinovsky, a prominent ultranationalist politician, received rights to buy 75 million barrels of oil.

Zhirinovsky reportedly boasted that his party was responsible for helping lift Russia's sanctions against Iraq. Investigators pointed out that Iraq rewarded Russia with extra allocations after it blocked a U.N. Security Council attempt to tighten sanctions in the spring of 2001.

But Coleman did not directly say that Russia's pro-Iraq policy was a result of the oil awards or that any country had changed its policy because of individuals' reported allocations. "We're just presenting the facts," he said.

Coleman said the subcommittee would hold hearings on U.N. reform in the fall.

May 18, 2005 -- WASHINGTON — British politician George Galloway went eyeball to eyeball with Senate investigators yesterday, calling allegations he took oil bribes from Saddam Hussein a "pack of lies" and labeling the U.N. oil-for-food scandal probe "the mother of all smokescreens."

In an appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that was stunning in its audacity, the anti-war member of Parliament launched a furious counter-assault on President Bush and Republican probers. Galloway claimed the oil-for-food scandal was cooked up to slander anti-war critics.

"You have nothing on me, senator, except my name on lists, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad," Galloway said to the panel's chairman, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.).

"I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice."

Coleman and other senators were caught flat-footed by the ferocity of Galloway's counter-offensive. They cut short the questioning of him and abruptly stopped the hearing.

Coleman said later that despite the theatrics, Galloway gave evasive answers to some questions and was unable to refute the documentary evidence collected by his investigators. He said he would send the committee's report to British authorities.

Galloway demanded to appear before the Coleman committee after it released a report last week detailing evidence it obtained from Iraqi government documents and interviews with Saddam's top aides, including former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yashin Ramadan, now in U.S. custody.

The committee said the new evidence indicates that Galloway received allocations for 20 million barrels of discount Iraqi oil.

The shady deals were allegedly arranged through a mysterious Jordanian businessman and in one case laundered through a charity Galloway created for a 4-year old Iraqi girl with leukemia.

But Galloway counterpunched — calling facts in the report "schoolboy howlers" and challenging the evidence and the credibility of former regime witnesses, especially Ramadan.

"I know he is your prisoner. I believe he is in the Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges punishable by death," Galloway said.

"In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Air Base, in Guantanamo Bay . . . I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances," Galloway added.

Galloway, who was elected to a heavily Muslim district earlier this month despite being kicked out of the Labor Party, also denied he was a Saddam apologist and said he only met the Butcher of Baghdad twice.

"As a matter of fact, I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met with him," Galloway said, referring to meetings the defense secretary had during the Reagan administration.

WASHINGTON - A British MP implicated in the United Nations oil-for-food scandal denied he received vouchers from Saddam Hussein to buy millions of barrels of Iraqi oil.

"I am not now nor have I ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone on my behalf," said George Galloway, who testified at U.S. senate subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas."

The subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs alleged last week that Galloway paid kickbacks to Saddam in exchange for the lucrative allocations. A similar claim has been made against a French senator and several top-ranking Russian politicians.

Galloway rejected the charges that he profited from the program and demanded an apology for what he called a "bizarre, grotesque" senate investigation process.

He complained that it's "a process whereby somebody investigates you without telling you they're investigating you, without ever contacting you, without ever asking you a single question, without a letter or a phone call – any contact at all."

The oil-for-food program was designed to let Iraq sell some of its oil under UN supervision so that revenues could be used to buy food and medical aid for Iraqi citizens.

WASHINGTON -- British lawmaker George Galloway denounced U.S. senators on Tuesday, denying accusations that he profited from the U.N. oil-for-food program and accusing them of unfairly tarnishing his name.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., questioned Galloway's honesty and told reporters, "If in fact he lied to this committee, there will have to be consequences."

Galloway's appearance was an odd spectacle on Capitol Hill: A legislator from a friendly nation, voluntarily testifying under oath, without immunity, at a combative congressional hearing where neither side displayed diplomacy.

"Now, I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you're remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," Galloway told Coleman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigation subcommittee.

The panel is investigating allegations that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein manipulated the $64 billion oil-for-food program to get kickbacks and build international opposition to U.N. sanctions against Iraq set up after Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Galloway is a member of the anti-Iraq war Respect party. He has been an outspoken opponent of both Iraq wars and of U.N. sanctions. Coleman's subcommittee claimed that Galloway received allocations worth 20 million barrels from 2000 to 2003 and funneled proceeds through a fund he established in 1998 to help a 4-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukemia.

Norm Coleman is an idiot.

Not an ideological idiot, not a partisan idiot, but a plain old-fashioned, drool-on-his-tie idiot.

The Minnesota Republican senator who took Paul Wellstone's seat after one of the most disreputable campaigns in American political history, has been trying over the past year to make a name for himself by blowing the controversy surrounding the United Nations Oil-for-Food program into something more than the chronicle of corporate abuse that it is. The U.S. media, which thrives on official soundbites, was more than willing to lend credence to Coleman's overblown claims about wrongdoing in the UN program set up in 1996 to permit Iraq -- which was then under strict international sanctions -- to buy food, medicine and humanitarian supplies with the revenues from regulated oil sales. Even as Coleman's claims became more and more fantastic, he faced few challenges from the cowering Democrats in Congress.

But when Coleman started slandering foreign politicians he exposed the dramatic vulnerability of his claims that the supposed scandal was something more than a blatant example of U.S. corporations taking advantage of their powerful connections in Washington to undermine official U.S. policy, harm the national interest and profit off the suffering of the poor.

The Senate investigation that Coleman sought regarding the Oil-for-Food program has already revealed that the Bush administration failed to crack down on widespread abuse of the oil-for-food program by U.S. energy companies, and that U.S. oil purchases accounted for the majority of the kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein's regime in return for sales of impensive oil. Indeed, the report concludes, "The United States (government) was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions. On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales."

Instead of forcing the president, his aides and the executives of Bayoil, the Texas oil company that the report shows paid "at least $37 million in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime" -- money that helped the Iraqi dictator solidify his grip on power -- Coleman started to make wild charges about European officials such as British parliamentarian George Galloway.

Galloway called Coleman's bluff and flew to Washington for a remarkable appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "I am determined now that I am here, to be not the accused but the accuser," Coleman announced as he stood outside the Capitol Tuesday. "These people are involved in the mother of all smoke screens."

The member of parliament tore through Coleman's flimsy "evidence," issuing an unequivocal denial that began, "Mr Chairman, I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone been on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." He accused Coleman of being "remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice" and pointed out error after error in the report the senator had brandished against him.

For instance, Galloway noted that he had met Saddam twice -- not the "many" times alleged by the report. "As a matter of fact I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times that (Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld met him," said the recently reelected British parliamentarian. "The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns."

For good measure, Galloway used the forum Coleman had foolishly provided to deliver a blistering condemnation of Coleman's war. "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," Galloway informed the fool on Capitol Hill.

"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 (UN Secretary General) Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to (French) 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," argued Galloway.

Then the Brit turned the tables on Coleman and steered the committee's attention toward "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 Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer," Galloway said.

"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."

(John Nichols's new book, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books) was published January 30. Howard Zinn says, "At exactly the when we need it most, John Nichols gives us a special gift--a collection of writings, speeches, poems and songs from thoughout American history--that reminds us that our revulsion to war and empire has a long and noble tradition in this country." Frances Moore Lappe calls Against the Beast, "Brilliant! A perfect book for an empire in denial." Against the Beast can be found at independent bookstores nationwide and can be obtained online by tapping the above reference or at www.amazon.com)

George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption

"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me 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."

Is there any point, now that November's election is behind us, in revisiting the history of the Iraq war? Yes: any path out of the quagmire will be blocked by people who call their opponents weak on national security, and portray themselves as tough guys who will keep America safe. So it's important to understand how the tough guys made America weak.

There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.

Here's a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

(You can read the whole thing at www.downingstreetmemo.com.)

Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo noted, "the case was thin" and Saddam's "W.M.D. capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the world.

But the Iraq war has, instead, demonstrated the limits of American power, and emboldened our potential enemies. Why should Kim Jong Il fear us, when we can't even secure the road from Baghdad to the airport?

At this point, the echoes of Vietnam are unmistakable. Reports from the recent offensive near the Syrian border sound just like those from a 1960's search-and-destroy mission, body count and all. Stories filed by reporters actually with the troops suggest that the insurgents, forewarned, mostly melted away, accepting battle only where and when they chose.

Meanwhile, America's strategic position is steadily deteriorating.

Next year, reports Jane's Defense Industry, the United States will spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the Pentagon now admits that our military is having severe trouble attracting recruits, and would have difficulty dealing with potential foes - those that, unlike Saddam's Iraq, might pose a real threat.

In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.

So what's the plan?

The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January's election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn't.

Yet it's very hard to discuss getting out. Even most of those who vehemently opposed the war say that we have to stay on in Iraq now that we're there.

In effect, America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we're there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people's patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.

But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them? And every year that the war goes on, our military gets weaker.

So we need to get beyond the clichés - please, no more "pottery barn principles" or "staying the course." I'm not advocating an immediate pullout, but we have to tell the Iraqi government that our stay is time-limited, and that it has to find a way to take care of itself. The point is that something has to give. We either need a much bigger army - which means a draft - or we need to find a way out of Iraq.

As the death toll of troops mounts in Iraq and Afghanistan, America's military recruiting figures have plummeted to an all-time low. Thousands of US servicemen and women are now refusing to serve their country. Andrew Buncombe reports

Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.

Last January, these memories became too much for this veteran of the war in Iraq. Informed his unit was about to return, he told his commanders he wanted out and applied to be considered a conscientious objector. The Army refused and charged him with desertion. Last week, his case - which carries a penalty of up to seven years' imprisonment - started before a military judge at Fort Stewart in Georgia.

"If I am sincere in what I say and there's consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it," Sgt Benderman said. "If I have to go to prison because I don't want to kill anybody, so be it."

The case of Sgt Benderman and those of others like him has focused attention on the thousands of US troops who have gone Awol (Absent Without Leave) since the start of President George Bush's so-called war on terror. The most recent Pentagon figures suggest there are 5,133 troops missing from duty. Of these 2,376 are sought by the Army, 1,410 by the Navy, 1,297 by the Marines and 50 by the Air Force. Some have been missing for decades.

But campaigners say the true figure could be far higher. Staff who run a volunteer hotline to help desperate soldiers and recruits who want to get out, say the number of calls has increased by 50 per cent since 9/11. Last year alone, the GI Rights Hotline took more than 30,000 calls. At present, the hotline gets 3,000 calls a month and the volunteers say that by the time a soldier or recruit dials the help-line they have almost always made up their mind to get out by one means or another.

"People are calling us because there is a real problem," said Robert Dove, a Quaker who works in the Boston office of the American Friends Service Committee, one of several volunteer groups that have operated the hotline since 1995. "We do not profess to be lawyers or therapists but we do provide both types of support."

The people calling the hotline range from veterans such as Sgt Benderman to recruits such as Jeremiah Adler, an idealistic 18-year-old from Portland, Oregon, who joined the Army believing he could help change its culture. Within days of arriving for his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he realised he had made a mistake and said the Army simply wanted to turn him into a "ruthless, cold-blooded killer".

Mr Adler begged to be sent home and even pretended to be gay to be discharged. Eventually, he and another recruit fled in the night and rang the hotline, which advised him to turn himself in to avoid court-martial. He will now be given an "other than honourable discharge".

From southern Germany where he is on holiday before starting college in the autumn, Mr Adler told The Independent: "It was obviously a horrible experience but now I'm glad I went through it. I was expecting to meet a whole lot of different types of people; some had noble reasons. I also met a lot of people who [wanted] to kill Arabs." In one letter home to his family, Mr Adler wrote that when he arrived he was horrified by the things he heard other recruits talking about, things that in civilian life would result in someone being treated as an outcast. In another letter he said he could hear other recruits crying at night. "You can hear people trying to make sure no one hears them cry under their covers," he wrote.

Mr Adler now provides advice to other recruits who have decided the military is not for them. "When people contact me I tell them go Awol; it's the quickest way to get out," he said. "I was told I would be facing 20 years hard labour at Fort Leavenworth [military prison] because that is what the sergeant will tell you. I learnt that was not the case."

Jeremy Hinzman, 26, a reservist with the 82nd Airborne Division who served in Afghan-istan, decided to go Awol after his unit was ordered to Iraq. He took his wife and child and fled to Canada, hoping to be welcomed, as were the 50,000 or so young Americans who sought refuge north of the border to avoid the Vietnam war.

But in March he was refused refugee status by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. Mr Hinzman, who is appealing the decision, told the hearing: "We were told that we would be going to Iraq to jack up some terrorists. We were told it was a new kind of war, that these were evil people and they had to be dealt with ... We were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists ... to foster an attitude of hatred that gets your blood boiling."

Campaigners say recruits who decide they want to leave the military are the most vulnerable to pressure from sergeants and officers who try to force them to stay. Some are told they will go to jail, others are told they will never be able to get a job if they receive a "less than honourable discharge", they say. They also face intense peer pressure and abuse, as they try to get out and after they manage to do so.

Campaigners have also drawn attention to the often scurrilous tactics used by US military recruiters, who for three months have failed to meet their targets for recruits. After several cases where recruiters had illegally covered up recruits' criminal and medical records, threatened one prospect with jail for failing to meet an appointment and provided another with laxatives to help him lose weight and pass a physical, the Pentagon is halting all recruiting on 20 May for a day of retraining.

Senior commanders have said the present recruiting environment - with the war in Iraq having cost the lives of more than 1,600 servicemen and women and the economy able to offer other jobs - is their most difficult. Despite this, the Pentagon insists it is committed to finding recruits in a fair and transparent process. Colonel Joseph Curtin, an Army spokesman, said the retraining day would give recruiters time to "focus on how they can do a very tough mission without violating good order and discipline".

JE McNeil, who heads the Centre for Conscience and War in Washington DC, a Christian group whose members also staff the GI Rights Hotline, said many troops she spoke with had been lied to by recruiters. "I had an 18-year-old who was told he did not have to serve in Iraq. 'I was told I'd get a job where I would not be sent', he told me," said Ms McNeill, a lawyer. "He was recruited to be an military policeman. They are the people they are sending to Iraq. People all the time are told [by recruiters] 'I can get you a job where you will not have to go to war'."

Campaigners say that despite pressure on unhappy recruits exerted in the barracks and the insults they will likely face, if a recruit follows the correct legal procedure they can usually get out of the military. One of the biggest hurdles for those who want out is obtaining the correct information on how best to proceed. Usually, the advice to those on the run is to turn themselves in. After 30 days of being Awol a serviceman is considered a deserter, and a warrant is issued for his arrest. At that point, he can be returned to his unit, court-martialled or given jail time or - and this is more often than not the outcome for recruits - they will be given a non-judicial punishment and an less-than-honourable discharge. Volunteers say usually the military is more inclined to let go those who have had the least training and are the least specialised. But an experienced Air Force pilot, for instance, in whom the military has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, could face a much more difficult time in getting out. "The most important thing we do is listen and not lie," Ms McNeil said. "Sometimes I tell people there is nothing they can do. I don't enjoy saying it but some times that is it."

Kevin Benderman is anything but a raw recruit. He joined the US Army in 1987, served in the Gulf War and received an honourable discharge in 1991. He rejoined in 2000 and served during the invasion of Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division. He says what he saw there left him morally opposed to returning to war applied to be a CO. The military says that on 10 January he failed to show up when his unit was to ship out.

Last week, at Fort Stewart, a military judge started a so-called Article 32 hearing to decide whether there is sufficient evidence for a full court-martial of Sgt Benderman. The proceedings recommence on 26 May. Sgt Benderman's wife, Monica, who had been heavily involved in organising his defence, said: "A lot of what they are saying about Kevin is not true. He never went Awol and was never a deserter. He is staying strong. I am proud of him. He has had a lot thrown at him over the past three days. If you consider what he has gone through he is doing very well. If people cannot see he is genuine, then they are not looking at him."

The Pentagon says it does not keep records of how many try to desert each year. A spokeswoman, Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke, said the running rally had declined since 9/11 from 8,396 to the present total of 5,133. She added: "The vast majority of those who desert do so because they have committed some criminal act, not for political or conscientious objector purposes."

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