British Lawmaker Scolds Senators on Iraq

WASHINGTON, May 17 - In an appearance that seemed to catch a Senate committee off-guard, George Galloway, a maverick British member of Parliament, denied as "utterly preposterous" on Tuesday the committee's charges that Saddam Hussein's government had given him the rights to buy 20 million barrels of oil to sell at a profit.

Mr. Galloway also used the committee's invitation to testify under oath to turn the tables on his accusers, charging that the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had "found me guilty" without having given him an opportunity to defend himself against allegations he had profited from the United Nations oil-for-food program.

"I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf," he said. "The real sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians," he continued, but "your own companies with the connivance of your own government."

A flamboyant orator and skilled debater, he also attacked United Nations sanctions against Iraq, the program, and, above all, the American-led war to topple Mr. Hussein. The administration, he said, had based its invasion of Iraq on a "pack of lies" and was now trying to justify its actions with charges regarding the oil-for-food program and other allegations, which he called "the mother of all smoke screens."

His aggressive posture and tone seemed to flummox Norm Coleman of Minnesota, the first-term senator who heads the Senate panel. But after the hearing, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate subcommittee, joined his Republican counterpart in describing Mr. Galloway's dramatic testimony as good political theater, but "not credible."

Yet Mr. Galloway, accustomed to the rancorous debate of the House of Commons, more than held his own before the committee. He defended himself against corruption charges inside the Senate chamber with a diatribe against President Bush's war policies, and after the hearing in the Senate corridor, with an attack on reporters from "neocon" publications, several of whose questions, like those of the senators, he refused to address.

Before Mr. Galloway appeared, Mr. Coleman released stacks of Iraqi documents that he said showed that Mr. Hussein had used grants of oil to reward Russian, French and other politicians and political entities to build support for his government and for getting sanctions on Iraq lifted.

He said the panel's bipartisan reports had concluded that a major focus of the campaign was Russia, one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. He said that oil allocations had been granted to members of the Russian Presidential Council, a group that advises President Vladimir V. Putin, as well as to Aleksandr S. Voloshin, who headed the council; the Russian Foreign Ministry; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the right-wing politician; and "numerous political entities within Russia."

In total, he said, Russian politicians and political entities had received 30 percent of Iraq's special oil allocations.

Mr. Zhirinovsky, Charles Pasqua, a French senator and former interior minister, and others charged with having been granted such allocations in the Senate reports, have denied having received such allocations.

In his opening statement, Senator Coleman repeated his panel's charge that in one transaction involving Mr. Galloway "surcharges of more than $300,000 were paid to the Hussein regime."

Mr. Galloway was recently re-elected to Parliament after being ousted from the Labor Party because of his vitriolic opposition to the Iraq war and attacks on Prime Minister Tony Blair. He said he had met with former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz many times, but met Mr. Hussein only twice - as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had.

Mr. Coleman, who supports the war in Iraq, and Mr. Levin, who opposed it, both refused to debate Mr. Galloway on the war. Instead, they pressed him about several Iraqi oil records that listed as recipients of oil rights either him or his appointed representative, a Jordanian businessman named Fawaz Zureikat, the head of Mr. Galloway's cancer charity, Mariam's Appeal, and a contributor to Mr. Galloway's political campaign. He could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Mariam's Appeal, and several companies associated with Mr. Zureikat, are listed on records that the committee says document allocations worth 20 million barrels of oil from 2000 to 2003. The panel's investigators have indicated that Mr. Galloway used the charity to conceal oil payments. But the committee has produced no documents that show that Mr. Galloway or his charity actually received money.

The committee did release a "To Whom it May Concern" letter in which Mr. Galloway identifies Mr. Zureikat as "my representative in Baghdad" on all matters concerning his charity and emergency assistance committee. And Mr. Galloway confirmed on Tuesday that Mr. Zureikat was his associate who had done a lot of business in Iraq under Mr. Hussein.

But he resisted answering the senators' questions about whether he knew Mr. Zureikat had traded in oil and was listed as having paid surcharges, or kickbacks, to Mr. Hussein's government on some of those allocations. When Mr. Levin pressed whether he was "troubled" by the fact that kickbacks had been paid on what was supposed to be a United Nations assistance program, Mr. Galloway said he had not known of the payments until he read about them in the press and that he was not troubled by them. Political fund-raising, he told the panel, was "messy."

Pressed about the documents, Mr. Galloway suggested that they might be forgeries, and said that the people who had confirmed their authenticity were Hussein-era officials who would soon be tried for war crimes by what he called Iraq's American "puppet" government.

After the hearing, Senator Coleman said that "it strains any concept of reasonableness for him to assert that he didn't know, or wouldn't answer the question, whether his named representative in Iraq was involved in trading for oil.

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