Bush 'turned blind eye to Iraq deals'

George Galloway arrived in Washington today to rebuff accusations that he profited from Iraqi oil sales as a Senate investigation found that the US government turned a blind eye to millions of dollars of sanctions busting.

The Bush administration knew about the illegal oil sales and kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime but did nothing about them, according to a report from Democrats on a Senate committee.

The report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52 per cent of kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil under the UN's food for oil programme - more than the rest of the world put together.

The scale of the shipments is understood to dwarf those alleged to have been made by UN staff and European politicians such as Galloway and the former French minister Charles Pasqua.

Mr Galloway, the newlyelected MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, has demanded an apology from the Senate subcommittee-which has named him as a beneficiary of Iraqi oil allocations. Mr Galloway, who overturned a 10,000 majority to win the seat for the anti-war Respect party, arrived in Washington yesterday and immediately demanded an apology from the subcommittee for what he called their "schoolboy dossier" against him. He said: "It was full of holes, full of falsehoods and full of value judgments that are apparently only shared here in Washington.

"I have no expectation of justice. I come not as the accused but as the accuser. I am going to show just how absurd this report is."

The new report accuses the Bush government of failing to take action against a Texas oil company which facilitated payments of "at least $37 million in illegal surcharges to the Hussein regime".

It also states that the State Department and the US military agreed to the shipment of nearly eight million barrels of oil bought by Jordan outside the Oil For Food programme.

It was not clear whether the Democrats' report would be accepted by the Republicans on the committee. The Pentagon declined to comment.