US Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0210-12.htm

Published on Thursday, February 10, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings More than 200 Fish and Wildlife researchers cite cases where conclusions were reversed to weaken protections and favor business, a survey finds

by Julie Cart   Hitch Your Life to a Shining Gallow Hitchen's Weekly Standard piece, below, on MP Galloway, reinforced my belief in string theory & that life is 13 dimensional & that the Hitch manifests all strings and dimensions of a Boschian [Hieronomus] entity. With indignation pouring out of one side of its mouth, glee does at the other, venoms emantes 'tween its teeth, there is gloating, little self-congratulatory twirls, and dervishilike he hopscotches, forever extricating himself from one trap in the mesh of former positions and party and magazine affiliations, into the uniform mansion of his new found home, The Weakly Standard. His attack on Galloway is marked by innuendo, a few diminuendo tactical concessions, snide jibes, falsehoods, sticking the lie deep, lack of corroboration, pillorying, which jab away with a certain rhythmic frequency as though he had an overly severe case of neurotic sniffles, the sum of which emittances then gathers itself into righteous upheaval to convict Galloway of being ... what the latter called him ... a Popinjay! It's just another Brit school boy tit for tat, or is there more at stake. Is the Hitch-Snitch carrying someone's water while he preens! The sheer loquacity of a piece that tries to nail someone who, at worst, may have committed the crime of being yet another "humanity hyena" indicates that quantity is made to take the place of quality and that there might be more at stake in Hitchen's animus than meets the naked uninformed eye. Who would know of Galloway anyhow if he had not come to face his accusers in the US Senate, the throughly bought, except for the few self-made millionaires, grilling someone who to their immense suprise flew across the Big Pond & did not take it like a duck. Christopher to their defense! We are in the grossest of 18th century comedies at an acidically corrossive level. I don't know Galloway, will not have communicated with him until I send him a copy of my evisceration of Hitchens, long in the brooding. But here are some links to who this Scotsman Laborite, now ex but current "Respect Party" member is: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F70955DA-D1AA-41DF-AC4D-40001BCE0403.htm An interesting speech of his which sounds like that of a North Country Rebel of yore. http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?page=Article&ID=3260 Transcript of Senate Hearing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Galloway http://www.respectcoalition.org/ Galloways new party, since Labor expelled him for opposition to the second Brit invasion of Iraq... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/17/oil.food/ http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C3467B2C-E1E8-4486-9794-67F127908663.htm http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayCiteList&orgId=574&topicId=100010244 As only a very occasional reader of the sheer, undocumented assertions in which the - inadvertently well-named Standard specializes, it would have been unlikely for me to ever come on the piece, unless I checked, as I periodically do, Hitchen's own on-line archive. There is of course far worse bull farting going on at The Weakly, my friend Fritz von Habsburg recently called my attention to a certain Stephen Suleiman Schwartz who denounced Elfriede Jelinek's work while proudly proclaiming that all he new of her work was a film based on one of her books. The Hitch used not to be like that, as a matter of fact , one pleasure one could take in him that he was an assiduous reader; and so I still care for Hitchens literary work, say in the Atlantic, http://www.hitchensweb.com/ his political excrecences, usually to be found at Slate, are another matter & are far more variable in quality, occasionally he exerts himself. However, during the run-up to and excrecences of the "Iraq Unpleasantness" he tended to dash his postings off, just the top of the froth on the cup... and thus in many ways more telling for those who have some notion what the froth will tell. Of course it ought not be held against him that he, too, was charmed by my man of the decade, Akmed Chalabi - after all who wasn't or for that matter who is not! Chalabi for President or at least for head of the U.N. http://slate.msn.com/?id=3944 Since Slate affords each article its own blog, Christopher's articles are trail a veritable acid slew of decimation of some of his work. In other words, in the underground of the web, Christopher must be regarded as a true Vodoo doll that draws a lot of the available furies onto his virtual self. I wonder occasionally why Slate lets him post with such frequency, since his one-sided partialities are fairly unique among that slew of writers. Perhaps Slate's editor has recollections of who the Hitch once was before he drank deeply of the acid cup, if that is the problem, or is it the bottom of the barrel that is surfacing; or perhaps he is Slate's Vodoo doll, the odd man out, the clown, the token curmodoen? Anyhow, meanwhile a fixture if only for the humor of it all. Thus, had it not been that I take a daily peak at Dennis "the mutton" Dutton's http://www.aldaily.com/ I would have missed Hitchen on Gallowsway. An interesting collector of links, lots of trivia and some pieces of substance http://www.aldaily.com/ is funded by The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 23rd St. N.W. Suite 700 Washington, D.C. 20037 editor@chronicle.com Despite this funding, which might imply a certain even-handedness in presenting, when available from web sources, several interesting sides of an issue, our ex-pat Dutton-Mutton, however, uses in matter political his own preferences to excise what does not fit his particularly agenda, sometimes egregriously so. In other words, this is not like the NY Times op-ded page where you can get a fair representation of the different takes on a particular issue. And at http://www.aldaily.com/ we then find not only Hitchens piece but one that is even less revelatory of Galloway, by yet another Brit with an ax to grind, but no links to who this Gallows figure really is outside these apparent charicatures of him. I myself dont know Galloway, only heard him on the late nite Canadian Broadcasting part of Public Radio, defending himself like a good attack dog before the US Senate. If there is an unbought Senator in that body aside the self-made multimilionaires I'd like to know their names I have indicated what I think are Hitchen characteristics in color code: I=nnuendo G=loat K=knife between the ribs R=ighteousness Twit/wit + W P=atrioism D=enigration The Weekly Standard" Unmitigated Galloway From the May 30, 2005 issue: Saddam's favorite MP goes to Washington. by Christopher Hitchens 05/30/2005, Volume 010, Issue 35 EVERY JOURNALIST HAS A LIST of regrets: of stories that might have been. Somewhere [ pray, precisely where??? on that unwashed list of ressentiments] on my personal list is an invitation I received several years ago, from a then-Labour member of parliament named George Galloway. Would I care, he inquired, to join him on a chartered plane to Baghdad? He was hoping to call attention to the sufferings of the Iraqi people under sanctions, and had long been an admirer of my staunch and muscular prose and my commitment to universal justice (I paraphrase only slightly) [ why paraphrase at all? Ah the belittlment. D=enigration] Indeed, in an article in a Communist party [this would have been a matter of pride to Chris once upon a time, now it is used in McCarthyity knife between the ribs fashion, especially to the readers of the Weakly Standard... K=knife 'tween the ribs] newspaper in 2001 he referred to me as "that great British man of letters" and "the greatest polemicist of our age." [ hints of humility, dare not to flatter well-self-assesed me!] No thanks, was my reply. I had my own worries about the sanctions [ which might have been what at the time??], but I had also already been [ we are, after all, an equally if not more important person who has been there and done that] on an officially guided visit to Saddam's Iraq and had decided that the next time I went to that terrorized slum [if that's what Hitch calls the entirety evidently he did not visit the then Falluja or Tikrit & didn't rate the hospitality or the liquor cabinets of the two sons or a ride in their cars or an evening a their harem] it would be with either the Kurdish guerrillas or the U.S. Marines.["Hear hear!" this MP exclaims! Christopher in consummation with the Marines has been described elsewhere, I think in a piece in the Villlage Voice P=atrioism, devastatingly I must say, a rapture of sorts for the twitchy public school boy (I've since fulfilled both ambitions. [but have others left on my plate's desiring, there's a T.E. Lawrence tucked way in there, perversely) Moreover [moreover what? this continuity shift is known as a dirty trick], I knew a bit [just a teensy weenzy bikini bit] about Galloway. He had had to resign as the head of a charity called "War on Want," after repaying some disputed expenses for living the high life in dirt-poor countries. I=nnuendo casting of aspersions at the first opportunity. We leave out however this matter was or was not resolved, but leave it hanging there, what a shit the Hitch is, but was his previous work like that too, say his work on mother teresa, hennery the k of wurstburg on the hudson's involvement in that spurt of democracy that chile back then enjoyed for a while] Indeed, he was a type [although we know "a bit" - indeed a selected bit it was - but evidently not more than that we have now to resort to type casting and damning by type, apparently have no choice since we don't really know the fellow] well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, [I=nnuendo, casting of aspersion on Galloways proletarian origins which he seems to have made the error of not painting over. ]and ostentatiously [non-ostentatiously radical thus would be preferable? don't make a show that might compete with the Hitchens show?? At this point the slow peruser notices that the writer strews adjectives; to think and invect by adjectives is not to think said who??] radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos [old hitch of course is un-ostentatiously un-fond of similar pleasures] and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive.[ yet prolier than though? i like that "prolier", President Bush thus could be described as Bushwackier than though] By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat [examples would of course do wonders to such an indictment ; a bit of a backslapper [well, Galloway is a prole politician after all . can do a thing right by that old nitpicker Christopher Hitchens] , nothing's too good for the working class: what the English call a "wide boy." [the hitch is infested with class among other ressentiment since he of course was accepted by the proles as little as he is now by the marines.]   I will stop here & let the readers use my method for themselves I=nnuendo G=loat K=knife between the ribs R=ighteousness Twit/wit + W P=atrioism D=enigration and just put in an X for a hint...   This was exactly his demeanor when I ran into him last Tuesday on the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue, outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building, where he was due to testify before the subcommittee that has been uncovering the looting of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. His short, cocky frame was enveloped in a thicket of recording equipment X nice image if true, but i want to see a photo before i believe it , and he was holding forth almost uninterrupted until I asked him about his endorsement of Saddam Hussein's payment for suicide-murderers in Israel and the occupied territories. He had evidently been admirably consistent in his attention to my humble work, because he changed tone and said that this was just what he'd expect from a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay." It takes a little more than this to wound your correspondent X hear hear--I could still hold a martini without spilling it when I was "the greatest polemicist of our age" in 2001--but please note that the real thrust is contained in the word "Trotskyist." X = the commie above was the payback Galloway says that the worst day of his entire life was the day the Soviet Union fell. His existence since that dreadful event has involved the pathetic search for an alternative fatherland. X well maybe there is more to what galloway is looking for, or the hitch for that matter, too He has recently written that, "just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq's own Great Leap Forward." I love the word "scale" in that sentence. I also admire the use of the word "plotted." [ Xvery cheap shots there, since there is nothing to shoot at really. everyone knows that badass ex-cis asset saddam modeled himself on stalin, both of them parvenues, selfmade men like so many other during the past century, beverly hillbilies of sorts as it were..] As it happens, I adore the street-fight and soap-box side of political life, [ we'll see about that ] so that when the cluster had moved inside, and when Galloway had taken his seat flanked by his aides and guards Xreally?? , I decided to deny him the 10 minutes of unmolested time that otherwise awaited him before the session began. Denouncing the hearings as a show-trial X accurately it appears if one looks at the record, or a diversion at the very least from u.s. oil interests the previous week, he had claimed that he had written several times to the subcommittee (whose members he has publicly called "lickspittles") asking to be allowed to clear his name, and been ignored. The subcommittee staff denies possessing any record of such an overture. X well since they gave him the time??? makes no sense. Taking a position near where he was sitting, I asked him loudly if he had brought a copy of his letter, or letters. A fresh hose of abuse was turned upon me, but I persisted in asking, and after awhile others joined in--receiving no answer--so at least he didn't get to sit gravely like a volunteer martyr. X since we have not a smidgen from that hose, possibly it wasn't abuse but a valid statement? amerian reporters certainly do not work in the hitchens fashion, indeed his time has come, also on television hardball type shows.. Senators Norm Coleman and Carl Levin then began the proceedings, and staff members went through a meticulous presentation, with documents and boards, showing the paperwork of the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organization and the Iraqi Oil Ministry. These were augmented by testimony from an (unnamed) "senior Saddam regime official," who had vouched for the authenticity of the provenance and the signatures. X alas an unnamed iraqi official and we are in the world of sidney greenstreet The exhibits clearly showed that pro-Saddam political figures in France and Russia, and at least one American oil company, had earned the right to profit from illegal oil-trades, and had sweetened the pot by kicking back a percentage to Saddam's personal palace-building and mass grave-digging fund. X the righteous dig! In several cases, the documents suggested that a man named Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian tycoon, had been intimately involved in these transactions. Galloway's name also X where is his previous appearance/ notice how the "also" is slipped in. you need to watch more than your drink when with the hitch me thinks appears in parentheses on the Zureikat papers--perhaps as an aide-memoire to those processing them--but you must keep in mind that the material does not show transfers directly to Galloway himself; only to Zureikat, his patron and partner and friend. In an analogous way, one cannot accuse Scott Ritter, who made a ferocious documentary attacking the Iraq war, of being in Iraqi pay. X what an analogy to bring, to try to defame ritter who was right about the lack of wombats of mass distraction!! what a sleaze ball, what an utter douche bag the hitch has become... One may be aware, though, that the Iraqi-American businessman who financed that film, Shakir al-Khafaji, has since shown up in the captured Oil-for-Food correspondence. X the old guilt by association. i.e. because my grandfather once met hitler... actually it cost him twelve years in four concentration camps... 6 degrees of proximity is the play in which the hitch douchebag ought to star   After about 90 minutes of this cumulative testimony, Galloway was seated and sworn, and the humiliation began. The humiliation of the deliberative body, I mean. I once sat in the hearing room while a uniformed Oliver North hectored a Senate committee and instructed the legislative branch in its duties, and not since that day have I felt such alarm and frustration and disgust. X we are now drawing yet a different analogous guilt by association while we pride ourselves on having opposed the iran/contra/ nicaragua crimes, committed by a lot of people who reappeared in the hitch's favored bush administration... but that of course we do not go into here... ah what dreadful skeins we get snarled in   Galloway has learned to master the word "neocon" and the acronym "AIPAC," and he insulted the subcommittee for its deference to both of these. He took up much of his time in a demagogic X please prove that it was demagogic... it's essential that this be done...attack on the lie-generated war in Iraq. He announced that he had never traded in a single barrel of oil, and he declared that he had never been a public supporter of the Saddam Hussein regime. As I had guessed he would, he made the most of the anonymity of the "senior Saddam regime official," and protested at not knowing the identity of his accuser. He improved on this by suggesting that the person concerned might now be in a cell in Abu Ghraib. In a small way--an exceedingly small way--this had the paradoxical effect of making me proud to be British. Parliament trains its sons in a hard school of debate and unscripted exchange, and so does the British Labour movement. You get your retaliation in first, you rise to a point of order, you heckle and you watch out for hecklers. X what a dreadful student the hitch is if ever you watch parliamentary proceeding... The torpid majesty of a Senate proceeding does nothing to prepare you for a Galloway, who is in addition a man without embarrassment X the writer of course is! as is the entirety of the weakly standard... no compunctions anywhere who has stayed just on the right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting methods. X the old aspersio-innuendoist as above, reverting to form He has, for example, temporarily won a libel case against the Daily Telegraph in London, which printed similar documents about him that were found in the Oil Ministry just after the fall of Baghdad. The newspaper claimed a public-interest defense, and did not explicitly state that the documents were genuine. Galloway, for his part, carefully did not state that they were false, either. X one prbably need to look into this since the writer certainly is not to be trusted in any shape matter of form The case has now gone to appeal. When estimating the propensity of anyone to take money or gifts, one must also balance the propensity of a regime to offer them. I once had an Iraqi diplomat contact in London, who later became one of Saddam's ministers. After inviting him to dinner one night, I noticed that he had wordlessly left a handsome bag, which contained a small but nice rug, several boxes of Cuban cigars (which I don't smoke), and several bottles of single malt Scotch. X we are going to die of cancer of the esophagus at any event with the ciggies and all that burnt barley scotch... I was at the time a fairly junior editor at a socialist weekly. More recently, I have interviewed a very senior and reliable U.N. arms inspector in Iraq, who was directly offered an enormous bribe by Tariq Aziz himself, and who duly reported the fact to the U.S. government. If the Baathists would risk approaching this particular man, it seems to me, they must have tried it with practically everybody. Quite possibly, though, the Saddam regime decided that Galloway was entirely incorruptible, and would consider such an inducement beneath him. X innuendo to the Nth speculative power this. i can sort of see the hitch as a witness at one of our forthcoming stalinist type show trials... being deposed...   SUCH SPECULATION TO ONE SIDE, the subcommittee and its staff had a tranche of information on Galloway, and on his record for truthfulness. It would have been a simple matter for them to call him out on a number of things. First of all, and easiest, he had dared to state under oath that he had not been a defender of the Saddam regime. This, from the man who visited Baghdad after the first Gulf war and, addressing Saddam, said: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." X source please... How's that for lickspittling? And even if you make allowances for emotional public moments, you can't argue with Galloway's own autobiography, blush-makingly entitled I'm Not the Only One, which was published last spring and from which I offer the following extracts: The state of Kuwait is "clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole, stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion." (Kuwait existed long before Iraq had even been named. X well the brits named iraq and drew all the lines) "In my experience none of the Ba'ath leaders have displayed any hostility to Jews." The post-Gulf war massacres of Kurds and Shia in 1991 were part of "a civil war that involved massive violence on both sides." Asked about Saddam's palaces after one of his many fraternal visits, he remarked, "Our own head of state has a fair bit of real estate herself." Her Majesty the Queen and her awful brood may take up a lot of room, but it's hardly comparable to one palace per province, built during a time of famine. Discussing Saddam's direct payments to the families of suicide-murderers--the very question he had refused to answer when I asked him--he once again lapsed into accidental accuracy, as with the Stalin comparison, and said that "as the martyred know, he put Iraq's money where his mouth was." That's true enough: It was indeed Iraq's money, if a bit more than Saddam's mouth. At the hearing, also, Galloway was half-correct in yelling at the subcommittee that he had been a critic of Saddam Hussein when Donald Rumsfeld was still making friendly visits to Baghdad. X the above indictment would seem to be undercut by this...   Here, a brief excursion into the aridities of left history may elucidate more than the Galloway phenomenon. There came a time, in the late 1970s, when the Iraqi Communist party realized the horrific mistake it had made in joining the Baath party's Revolutionary Command Council. The Communists in Baghdad, as I can testify from personal experience and interviews at the time, began to protest--too late--at the unbelievable cruelty of Saddam's purge of the army and the state: a prelude to his seizure of total power in a full-blown fascist coup. The consequence of this, in Britain, was the setting-up of a group named CARDRI: the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq. Many democratic socialists and liberals supported this organization, but there was no doubting that its letterhead and its active staff were Communist volunteers. And Galloway joined it. At the time, it is at least half true to say, the United States distinctly preferred Saddam's Iraq to Khomeini's Iran, and acted accordingly. X the hitch, as compared to no end of neo-cons, what with his history, and memory, though downplaying the u.s. installation of the baath regime under kennedy, does not dare to entirely ignore it, and so gains the advantage of partial truthfulness at least... Thus a leftist could attack Saddam for being, among other things, an American client. We ought not to forget the shame of American policy at that time, because the preference for Saddam outlived the war with Iran, and continued into the postwar Anfal campaign to exterminate the Kurds. In today's "antiwar" movement, you may still hear the echoes of that filthy compromise, in the pseudo-ironic jibe that "we" used to be Saddam's ally. But mark the sequel. It must have been in full knowledge, then, of that repression, and that genocide, and of the invasion of Kuwait and all that ensued from it, that George Galloway shifted his position and became an outright partisan of the Iraqi Baath. There can be only two explanations for this, and they do not by any means exclude one another. The first explanation, which would apply to many leftists of different stripes, is that anti-Americanism simply trumps everything, and that once Saddam Hussein became an official enemy of Washington the whole case was altered. Given what Galloway has said at other times, in defense of Slobodan Milosevic for example, it is fair to assume that he would have taken such a position for nothing: without, in other words, the hope of remuneration. There was another faction, however, that was, relatively speaking, nonpolitical. During the imposition of international U.N. sanctions on Iraq, and the creation of the Oil-for-Food system, it swiftly became known to a class of middlemen that lavish pickings were to be had by anyone who could boast an insider contact in Baghdad. This much is well known and has been solidly established, by the Volcker report and by the Senate subcommittee. During the material time, George Galloway received hard-to-get visas for Iraq on multiple occasions, and admits to at least two personal meetings with Saddam Hussein and more than ten with his "dear friend" Tariq Aziz. But as far as is known by me, he confined his activity on these occasions to pro-regime propaganda, with Iraqi crowds often turned out by the authorities to applaud him, and provide a useful platform in both parliament and the press back home. However, his friend and business partner, Fawaz Zureikat, didn't concern himself so much with ideological questions (though he did try to set up a broadcasting service for Saddam). He was, as Galloway happily testified, involved in a vast range of deals in Baghdad. But Galloway's admitted knowledge of this somehow does not extend to Zureikat's involvement in any Oil-for-Food transactions, which are now prima facie established in black and white by the subcommittee's report. Galloway, indeed, has arranged to be adequately uninformed about this for some time now: It is two years since he promised the BBC that he would establish and make known the facts about his Zureikat connection. Here then are these facts, as we know them without his help. In 1998, Galloway founded something, easily confused with a charity, known as the Mariam Appeal. The ostensible aim of the appeal was to provide treatment in Britain for a 4-year-old Iraqi girl named Mariam Hamza, who suffered from leukemia. An announced secondary aim was to campaign against the sanctions then in force, and still a third, somewhat occluded, aim was to state that Mariam Hamza and many others like her had contracted cancer from the use of depleted-uranium shells by American forces in the first Gulf war. X sounds good on the face of it A letter exists, on House of Commons writing paper, signed by Galloway and appointing Fawaz Zureikat as his personal representative in Iraq, on any and all matters connected to the Mariam Appeal. Although it was briefly claimed by one of its officers that the Appeal raised most of its money from ordinary citizens, Galloway has since testified that the bulk of the revenue came from the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and from a Saudi prince. He has also conceded that Zureikat was a very generous donor. The remainder of the funding is somewhat opaque, since the British Charity Commissioners, who monitor such things, began an investigation in 2003. This investigation was inconclusive. The commissioners were able to determine that the Mariam Appeal, which had used much of its revenue for political campaigning, had not but ought to have been legally registered as a charity. They were not able to determine much beyond this, because it was then announced that the account books of the Appeal had been removed, first to Amman, Jordan, and then to Baghdad. This is the first charity or proto-charity in history to have disposed of its records in that way. \ TO THIS DAY, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the senators, that he has "never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." As a Clintonian defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly declines to answer. X really We are therefore invited by him to assume X the casting of aspersions and introing of innuendoes is now perpetrated by the victim himself. a new one on me. if the hitch had dispensed with all the whirlygigging and focused just on what is really known he might have provided a story with an open end.... that, having earlier acquired a justified X conclusionary reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of "charities," he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal. Even if the matter of subornation and bribery had never arisen, X hitchens as prosecutorial provider of innuendoes, convictor and executioner all in one.... it takes ones breath away... there would remain the crucial question of Iraq itself. It was said during the time of sanctions on that long-suffering country that the embargo was killing, or had killed, as many as a million people, many of them infants. Give credit to the accusers here. Some of the gravamen of the charge must be true. Add the parasitic regime to the sanctions, over 12 years, and it is clear that the suffering of average Iraqis must have been inordinate. \ There are only two ways this suffering could have been relieved. Either the sanctions could have been lifted, as Galloway and others demanded, or the regime could have been removed. The first policy, if followed without conditions, would have untied the hands of Saddam. The second policy would have had the dual effect of ending sanctions and terminating a hideous and lawless one-man rule. But when the second policy was proposed, the streets filled with people who absolutely opposed it. Saying farewell to the regime was, evidently, too high a price to pay for relief from sanctions. Let me phrase this another way: Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam! This is repellent enough in itself. X hitch i think has a fine either/or point as long as one entirely ignores why the war was fought and the alternatives that existed, which he fails to present or denigrates, i.e. scott ritter..   If the Saddam regime was cheating its terrified people of food and medicine in order to finance its own propaganda, that would perhaps be in character. But if it were to be discovered that any third parties had profited from the persistence of "sanctions plus regime," prolonging the agony and misery thanks to personal connections, then one would have to become quite judgmental. The bad faith of a majority of the left is instanced by four things (apart, that is, from mass demonstrations in favor of prolonging the life of a fascist government X this of course is a lie, ). First, the antiwar forces never asked the Iraqi left what it wanted, because they would have heard very clearly that their comrades wanted the overthrow of Saddam. (President Jalal Talabani's party, for example, is a member in good standing of the Socialist International.) This is a betrayal of what used to be called internationalism. Second, the left decided to scab and blackleg on the Kurds, whose struggle is the oldest cause of the left in the Middle East. X true enough, originally gassed and strafed by airmarshal harris under churchill... Third, many leftists and liberals stressed the cost of the Iraq intervention as against the cost of domestic expenditure, when if they had been looking for zero-sum comparisons they might have been expected to cite waste in certain military programs, or perhaps the cost of the "war on drugs." This, then, was mere cynicism. Fourth, and as mentioned, their humanitarian talk about the sanctions turned out to be the most inexpensive hypocrisy. George Galloway--having been rightly expelled by the British Labour party for calling for "jihad" against British troops, X really that was the reason?? and having since then hailed the nihilism and sadism and sectarianism that goes by the lazy name of the Iraqi "insurgency" or, in his circles, "resistance"--ran for election in a new seat in East London and was successful in unseating the Labour incumbent. His party calls itself RESPECT, which stands for "Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community, Trade Unionism." (So that really ought to be RESPECTU, except that it would then sound less like an Aretha Franklin song and more like an organ of the Romanian state under Ceausescu.) The defeated incumbent, Oona King, is of mixed African and Jewish heritage, and had to endure an appalling whispering campaign, based on her sex and her combined ethnicities. Who knows who started this torrent of abuse? Galloway certainly has, once again, remained adequately uninformed about it. His chief appeal was to the militant Islamist element among Asian immigrants who live in large numbers in his district, and his main organizational muscle was provided by a depraved sub-Leninist sect called the Socialist Workers party. The servants of the one god finally meet the votaries of the one-party state. Perfect. To this most opportunist of alliances, add some Tory and Liberal Democrat "tactical voters" whose hatred of Tony Blair eclipses everything else. Perhaps I may be allowed a closing moment of sentiment here? To the left, the old East End of London was once near-sacred ground. It was here in 1936 that a massive demonstration of longshoremen, artisans, and Jewish refugees and migrants made a human wall and drove back a determined attempt by Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts to mount a march of intimidation. The event is still remembered locally as "The Battle of Cable Street." That part of London, in fact, was one of the few place in Europe where the attempt to raise the emblems of fascism was defeated by force. And now, on the same turf, there struts a little popinjay X hee's the popinjay for the popinjay at the beginning who defends dictatorship abroad and who trades on religious sectarianism at home. Within a month of his triumph in a British election, he has flown to Washington and spat full in the face of the Senate. A megaphone media in London, and a hysterical fan-club of fundamentalists and political thugs, saw to it that he returned as a conquering hero and all-round celeb. If only the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, could manifest anything like the same resolve and determination. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor at the New School in New York. His new book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. © Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

 “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” THOMAS THE JEFF OF SON