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Besides the explosive civil war in Iraq, and an erratic economy at
home, Bush foreign policy is juggling new unpredictable issues. The British MP
is not alone in protesting what many think is a intentional distraction from
the US’ culpability in the UN Oil for Food investigations. He is volatile
enough, and admits to using the situation, so that the Bush2 administration may
wish it had never gone down this path. The Cuban exile Posada, while now in US custody, may prove just as
tricky: I heard that when captured he revoked his plea for amnesty. The White
House will be hard pressed to grant leniency to this former CIA operative
without exposing itself to claims of hypocrisy on treatment of terrorists. This
will be interesting; I don’t think for a moment that we know half of this story
yet. KwC World Opinion Watch
Big Day for Bush Foes By Jefferson Morley,
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer, Thursday, May 19, 2005; 8:30 AM Tuesday was a very good
day for two of the fiercest foreign critics of the Bush administration,
according to the international online media. George Galloway, antiwar member of the British House of
Commons, and Cuban President Fidel Castro, veteran antagonist of the United States,
both succeeded in turning the tables on Washington. Galloway transformed a
congressional hearing about the U.N. oil-for-food scandal into a fierce attack
on the Bush administration's Iraq policies. On the same day, Castro relished
the spectacle of U.S. law enforcement officers carrying out his long-standing
demand to arrest accused airline bomber Luis Posada Carriles. Both men, say
commentators overseas, successfully put Washington on the defensive over apparent
contradictions in America's war on terrorism. The British press, not
always friendly to the controversial maverick MP Galloway, almost unanimously
declared him the winner in his confrontation with Sen. Norm Coleman (Minn.), a
Republican critic of the United Nations.
Galloway, said the centrist Financial Times, "stole the show." The hearing "had
been presented as an opportunity for the committee to interrogate Mr. Galloway
over his alleged involvement in Iraq's oil-for-food programme and his alleged
support for Saddam Hussein. The investigators had even offered to send airline
tickets to ensure his attendance," the FT reported. "But in the event
it was Mr. Galloway who was on the offensive - and it was Mr. Coleman's
credibility that was called into question." Virtually every
British news site quoted Galloway's riposte to the committee's published
allegation that he had met "many times" with Hussein. "As a
matter of fact," Galloway said according to the Times of London's transcript, "I met Saddam Hussein exactly the
same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald
Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target
those guns." Galloway was referring
to two trips that Rumsfeld made to Iraq in 1983 and 1984. As a special U.S.
envoy, Rumsfeld offered financial and military incentives to Hussein to
reestablish diplomatic relations with the United States at a time when U.S.
officials regarded Iran -- with whom Iraq was engaged in a devastating war --
as a greater threat. (A telling difference
between the British and American press: The Washington Post, New York Times and
Los Angeles Times chose not to mention the Rumsfeld line in their coverage.
Rumsfeld's friendly overtures to Hussein 20 years ago have been reported
before.) The Guardian said
"the culture clash between Mr. Galloway's bruising style
and the soporific gentility of Senate proceedings could hardly have been more
pronounced and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the
audience." Along the way,
Galloway managed to evade some of the toughest questions, as the Daily Telegraph pointed out. When asked about his foundation for Iraqi children, Galloway
admitted that Fawaz Zureikat, a businessman who had been involved in oil
dealings with the Iraqi regime, had given him �370,000. Galloway said he never
asked Zureikat where the money came from. And now the BBC is reporting that
British charity regulators are interested in seeing the Senate committee's
evidence on Galloway. But "the bottom
line," said The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill, is that Coleman was unable "to
provide any evidence in the form of bank accounts or any other pieces of paper
to show that Mr. Galloway had received any money from Saddam, Mr. Zureikat or
anyone else linked to Iraq." "It would have to
be an odd judge who did not score this transatlantic clash in Mr. Galloway's favour," said the
liberal Independent. A Win for Castro Castro scored an even more concrete
victory when U.S. immigration agents arrested the 77-year old Luis Posada in
Miami. As I reported last month, the Cuban leader had launched a propaganda
campaign demanding Posada's arrest in connection with the bombing
of a Cuban civilian airliner in 1976 that killed all 73 people on board. The arrest
came just hours after Castro denounced Posada as a "bloodthirsty exponent"
of "imperialist terrorism" in a speech to a large
demonstration in Havana. U.S. government
documents unearthed by the National Security Archive, a private nonprofit group in Washington,
show that Posada,
a one-time asset of the Central Intelligence Agency, had reportedly participated in the planning of
the airline attack in Venezuela. El Universal, a leading Venezuelan daily, reported in
its English-language edition that the government of President Hugo Chavez,
Castro's leading ally, has already filed a request for Posada's extradition.
The paper's Spanish-language edition described Posada as a " papa
caliente" -- a hot potato -- for Washington. The arrest, said Agence
France Press in a report published by South Africa's Mail and Guardian and
other news sites, puts the Bush White House "on the horns of
dilemma." "On
the one hand they don't want to hand Posada Carriles over to antagonist
countries, either Cuba or Venezuela," said Dan Erickson, a Cuba
expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. "But obviously it's not acceptable to just let him
remain free in Miami." For William Rogers,
former U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs under
Presidents Nixon and Ford, the costs of not extraditing Posada "are not trivial." A refusal to extradite him
"will be interpreted throughout the hemisphere as US acceptance of
terrorism as long as the terrorist act was directed against a regime we don't
like," said Rogers, writing in the bulletin of Inter-American
Dialogue. Which is Castro's
point exactly. Indeed, George
Galloway could have been speaking for the Cuban leader when he emerged
triumphant from his Capitol Hill showdown and told reporters, "I'm a politician that pleads guilty to using events
like these for political purposes." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2003/12/18/AR2005033001685_2.html Also see Cuban charged with entering US
illegally http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/19/AR2005051900353.html |
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