George Galloway, the newly elected Member of Parliament from the Respect Party, who ran against Blair and the Iraq war, has come to the U.S. to testify before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation. The hearing is to begin at 9:30 am EST and will probably be shown on CSpan. According to CNN, Galloway is the last witness scheduled to appear.

Galloway was the first MP to call Blair a liar and was ejected from the Labor Party.

In December of last year Galloway won a libel suit against The Telegraph to the tune of £150,000. According to the BBC,

The judge said the allegations were "seriously defamatory" of Mr Galloway.

He said readers of the Telegraph claims may have understood them to mean:

• Mr Galloway had been in Saddam's pay, secretly receiving about £375,000 a year.
• He diverted monies from the oil-for-food programme, thus depriving the Iraqi people of food and medicines.
• He probably used the Mariam Appeal, a campaign Mr Galloway launched to raise money for an Iraqi girl with leukaemia, as a front for personal enrichment.
• What he had done was tantamount to treason.

Mr Justice Eady said: "It was the defendants' primary case that their coverage was no more than 'neutral reportage' of documents discovered by a reporter in the badly-damaged foreign ministry in Baghdad, but the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described."

Telegraph foreign correspondent David Blair had earlier told the judge how he had found the documents inside the Iraqi foreign ministry.

The Senate committee holding hearings is chaired by Republican Norm Coleman, who is attempting to reimplicate Galloway.

Jim Lehrer of the PBS NewsHour gave Galloway's response saying,

He scoffed at the allegations today:

Galloway: The truth is that I have never bought nor sold a drop of oil from Iraq, or sold or bought a drop of oil to anybody. And if I had I'd be a very rich man. And the person who made me rich would already be in the public domain.

This hearing should be fun. Galloway is not likely to put up with Republican grandstanding and has voluntarily come to the U.S. to appear.

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Correction: I originally stated that The Telegraph was "a Murdoch paper." It's not.

Follow-up post
George Galloway: An item you may have missed (5/18/05)