GEORGE GALLOWAY put US Iraq policy on trial in a powerful performance yesterday before a Senate committee that had accused him of being in the pay of Saddam Hussein.

The defiant Respect party MP turned the tables on senators who had accused him of receiving oil allocations from Iraq with a stinging criticism of the war against Iraq to an American television audience that rarely hears such attacks on US policy.

Mr Galloway told the committee’s Republican chairman, Norm Coleman, that he was engaged in “the mother of all smokescreens” to divert attention from US failings.

“I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that the case for invading was a pack of lies,” he said.

He had given warning that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and had no connection to al-Qaeda or the September 11 attacks, and that the Iraqi people would resist invasion, he said. “Senator, in everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 have paid with their lives — 1,600 of them American soldiers, sent to their death on a pack of lies.”

Mr Galloway said he had met Saddam only twice. “I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld (the US Defence Secretary) met him. The difference is that he met him to sell him guns and to give him maps to better target those guns. I met him to try to bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war.”

He accused American multinational companies such as Haliburton of plundering Iraq since the invasion, and claimed that the real sanctions busters had been US companies acting with Washington’s connivance.

Afterwards Mr Coleman described Mr Galloway’s credibility as very suspect and spoke of consequences if he was found to have lied under oath.

Mr Galloway told CNN: “Most of the traffic I’m getting is that the British parliamentary tradition won . . . I came not as the accused but as the accuser.”

The MP flew to Washington at his own expense after the permanent subcommittee on investigations accused him of receiving 20 million barrels of “oil allocations” from Saddam. It suggested that he might have used his anti-sanctions campaign, the Mariam Appeal, to “conceal payments”.

The committee’s charges were based on Iraqi documents and interviews with senior Saddam officials. They named Mr Galloway as the recipient of oil allocations handled by a French company, Aredio Petroleum, and Middle East ASI, a Jordanian company owned by Fawaz Zureikat who contributed £375,000 to the appeal. But the committee could trace no payments to Mr Galloway himself.

Mr Galloway called the charges utterly preposterous, adding: “You have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up since the installation of your puppet government.”

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