George Galloway today accused US senators of manufacturing "the mother of all smokescreens" as he defended himself from charges that he profited from Iraqi oil sales.

The anti-war Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, in east London, told the Senate subcommittee it had made a "schoolboy howler" in its investigation of illegal Iraqi oil sales. He said it was attempting to divert attention from the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

In a defiant performance on Capitol Hill, Mr Galloway said senators had confused the dating of evidence against him and relied too much on the testimony of a former Iraqi vice president held prisoner in Abu Ghraib.

"I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," he told Senator Norm Coleman, the Republican subcommittee chairman.

"I am here today - but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever having written to me or telephoned me, without any contact with me whatsoever - and you call that justice."

Mr Galloway's testimony rested on two key points: that the documents naming him in the senate report were the same documents the Daily Telegraph had relied upon in a story he later successfully sued over, and that the subcommittee had no evidence he had made the financial gains from Iraqi oil that it alleged.

"What counts is not the names on the paper. What counts is where's the money, senator? Who paid me money, senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars?

"The answer to that is nobody - and if you had anybody who paid me a penny, you would have produced them here today."

The senate report claimed Mr Galloway and Charles Pasqua, the former French interior minister, were given potentially lucrative oil allocations as a reward for their support in calling for sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime to be loosened. Mr Pasqua also denies the claims.

Mr Galloway told the senators they had made a "schoolboy howler" in dating their evidence against him to almost a decade earlier than the Daily Telegraph and a period from 1992-93 when the UN oil for food programme - the centre of the investigation - was not even in existence.

The MP, elected to parliament on May 5 on an anti-war ticket in the former seat of Oona King, a Tony Blair loyalist, said the Christian Science Monitor, which used documents from the same period had retracted its story and admitted the documents were fake.

"It is a proven fact these forged documents existed and were being circulated among rightwing newspapers," Mr Galloway told Sen Coleman.

"You have nothing on me, senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad," he said.

One of the main allegations in the senate report is that Mr Galloway received oil allocations with the help of Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian businessman and chairman of the Mariam appeal set up by the MP to help a 4-year-old Iraqi girl with leukaemia.

The allegations of oil trading links between the two men - denied by both parties - formed the bulk of the questioning of Mr Galloway after he had finished his opening statement.

He told the senators: "I can assure you Mr Zureikat never gave me a penny from an oil deal, a cake deal, a bread deal or from any other deal."

When not defending himself against the senate report's allegations, Mr Galloway attacked the morality of the post-Gulf war sanctions on Iraq and the wisdom of the 2003 US-led invasion.

He described the sub-committee's claims as the "mother of all smokescreens", intended to divert attention from the "crimes" committed in the invasion of Iraq.

"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 deaths on a pack of lies," Mr Galloway told Sen Coleman.

He insisted he had been a longer-standing opponent of Saddam Hussein than anyone questioning him.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when the British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas," he told the subcommittee.

"I have a better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do."