Gorgeous George Galloway 2

A number of readers (JG) and commenters have written to say that the Senate
only posts prepared statements. Therefore under those terms, Galloway will not
have submitted a statement and there is nothing unusual about it not being on
the Senate Website and I apologize for the dramatic flourish. More
interestingly, commenter

Rick Ballard suggests (I think) that the Senate OFF hearings aren't really
going anywhere. The

Belmont Club post said, "Unless the Oil for Food hearings have come to a
complete dead end, Coleman and Levin's examination of Galloway aren't the
pointless thrashings of Senators at a loss to respond to the devastating wit of
the British MP but tantalizing clues to the direction they wish the
investigations to take," to which Rick Ballard said:

I rarely disagree with your analysis but I see zero evidence that calling
Mr. Galloway in response to his taunting of the committee served any purpose
whatsoever. Look at the lead up to his appearance and you see pure spotlight
politics, if he comes the committee gets ink if he refuses, the committee gets
ink. On top of that add the leak of the minority report to the Guardian prior
to its publication but after the invitation to Galloway and all I see is
Washington politics as usual.

To anyone thinking that the minority report was "innoculation" against
charges that the Senate was ignoring American misdeeds wrt OFF I would ask -
why did the Dem staff spend the majority of 128 pages on transactions that
amounted to far less than 1% of the stolen OFF funds? Sen. Coleman may indeed
be a bright and honorable man but Carl Levin hisses when he speaks and can
slide through grass undetected. The Galloway/Pasqua report is here and the
minority report is

here. Until I see full exploration of the Strong/Desmarais/Paribas links
by this committee I'm afraid that I'm going to regard it as a smokescreen. Don
Kofi is a sottocapo figurehead being set up to take a fall for Mr. Big. The
PowerCorp/Total/Final/Elf connections are where the real trail leads - that
and the material supplier kick backs - not the oil surcharges.

Maybe they are headed for a dead end. It's entirely possible that Rick
Ballard is essentially right about the Senate Committee, that it is hunting with blanks.
In this scenario there are too many places that the Oil For Food scandal
shouldn't go; owing to the extremely sensitive nature of the connections, so
only low-hanging fruit like Kojo Annan, Zhirinovsky and George Galloway are
going to take the heat. Galloway, with a kind of perverted sense of honor, may
have felt the kind of outrage a small timer feels when being made to hold the
bag and lashed out at the Senate investigation because he knows he was low man
on the totem. It would be sad if Rick Ballard were right, though it is entirely
possible. In the case the Oil For Food scandal isn't the road to justice, but
simply a fuzzy glimpse into the corrupt world of international politics in the
last years of the 20th century.