Official documents have been a dime a dozen these past few months. Their provenance has frequently been treated cavalierly by those who have found them useful in their cause. The forgeries documenting Niger’s sale of uranium yellow-cake to Iraq are a case in point. Now official documents have come to light showing, so the Daily Telegraph claims, that British Labour MP George Galloway not only took an annual 375,000 pounds from Saddam Hussein but that Saddam also sought to shield Galloway from detection. Saddam, in short, cared.
Galloway made no secret of his feelings over the Iraq war and toward the leader of his party, Tony Blair. In the pages of Arab News, he spoke of a “frankly racist propaganda myth” put about by Downing Street spin-doctors, and lambasted the British government’s policies. He also led anti-war demonstrations in the UK and made himself unpleasant to his own party leadership in any way he knew how. Thus no one ever doubted that retribution would follow, and it has come swiftly.
The documents the Daily Telegraph says it has unearthed point to Galloway’s guilt with a directness that is not usually found in the murky world of 21st century corruption. But Britain’s libel laws are so famously sweeping that they have created an atmosphere where nobody believes in smoke without fire anymore. Once a story is published, its subject might as well have been convicted in a court of law, so stringent are the rules, so punitive the damages should a newspaper be found to have been wrong.
Galloway is known for a flamboyant lifestyle many find incompatible with the socialist roots of Labour politics. Moreover, politicians do take money all the time, and few in Britain have forgotten the revelations of sleaze that hounded the last Conservative government out of office.
On the other hand, some in Britain have called attention to previous newspaper stories which involved the intelligence services and whose victims were exonerated years, sometimes decades, later. Intelligence services are much of a muchness around the world, and they do set people up, they do forge documents, they do serve their masters — whether American, Israeli or Iraqi — with excessive zeal. That amid the looting and bombing in Baghdad the memo pointing incontrovertibly to Galloway’s guilt should have miraculously survived at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry — when even the weapons of mass destruction could not be found — is another piece of spectacular “good luck.”
There are grounds for speculation all round. But whoever is moved to speculate about the case has already bought into the peculiarly skewed perspective that the media gives us on the world. From this perspective, there are two takes on the story. One is that Galloway’s opinions only make sense if he stands to benefit from them financially. The other is that these documents have come to light because someone had it in for the poor man, someone who stood to gain from exposing him.
Most of us prefer to believe in conspiracy theories rather than more innocent explantions. Our instinct is to doubt that any man could say what he says because he believes it, or that any newspaper publishes what it publishes out of concern for the truth.
There has been precious little in the recent past to discourage such cynicism.
