Arab News recently interviewed George Galloway, the British MP at the center of allegations of financial involvement with Saddam Hussein’s regime. These are based largely on documents allegedly discovered by a reporter for the Daily Telegraph in a burned-out building in Baghdad. They purport to support accusations of a relationship involving millions of dollars. Galloway has strenuously denied involvement and maintains the documents are forgeries. He is currently suing the Telegraph as well as two other papers. This is the second and concluding part of the interview.
LONDON, 18 June 2003 — Never one to stand quietly by when he believed in an issue, Galloway was often at odds with his party and government. Haitham Rashid Wihaib, a former official in Saddam’s regime, now living in exile in London, said: “Galloway was the type of person that Saddam wanted. He thought it was a great achievement to have Galloway stand up in the House of Commons, attack sanctions and accuse the British government of killing children.”
In an interview with Jeremy Paxman on “Newsnight”, Galloway emphasized that the Mariam Appeal, which he founded to cure an Iraqi girl of leukemia, was “a political campaign and always has been.” Focusing on ordinary Iraqis to highlight what he saw as the crippling policy of UN sanctions, Galloway took a calculated risk.
He sees the claims of a terrorist threat from Iraq as a pretext. “Iraq was not involved in terrorism. What we have done has boosted terrorism in the region and the world. The one man who wanted this to happen even more than George Bush was Osama Bin Laden.”
Regime change he sees as another insupportable argument. “We cannot allow two self-appointed countries to decide which regimes are to be changed. The war in my opinion was without justification, was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. It was a blunder because it was against our own interests and for the re-election of (President) Bush and the enrichment of his corporate friends.”
The WMD threat and the potential of their delivery “within 45 minutes” as Tony Blair announced in his dossier on Iraq drew sharp comment from Galloway “WMD? We don’t even need to waste breath talking about it — it’s a busted flush of an argument. Nobody any longer believes it.”
Asked why Blair keeps going along with George Bush, Galloway was forthcoming.
“In a one-to-one in No. 10 [Downing Street.] he [Blair] said the special relationship is the overarching British foreign policy, and that it allows us — and I quote him directly now — ‘to punch above our weight’ in international affairs.
“I think that is entirely wrong. Britain, which he said he was going to make the heart of Europe, has become a cancer. It’s seen as a Trojan horse in Europe — a ramp for American interests.”
Galloway believes he sees the beginning of the end for Tony Blair. “Not this month or this year — but the writing is on the wall. It’s all downhill for Blair now, and there will be a point where he will decide to make an elegant transition out of the job. Trust was his only asset. That trust is now destroyed. He will go to his grave condemned for this.”
Galloway is a constant thorn in the side of the body politic, but he voices no regrets.
“I feel absolutely vindicated. I regret nothing of what I have done and I received nothing for doing it. I gave my political life’s blood for Iraq as I gave it before for the Palestinians. I cannot say things I do not believe or stay quiet about things I believe in. I chose my course a long time ago, the Arab camp, and I am still in it.”
Just after the fall of Baghdad, Galloway was very much seen as part of the Arab camp when the Daily Telegraph published allegations that documents had been found (ironically, by a Mr. Blair) in a gutted and still burning building. They indicated that he had been taking enormous sums of money from Saddam Hussein.
“The documents were found on the Saturday and, by their own account, translated by Sunday and published on Monday,” said Galloway. “This chronology demonstrates that no attempt was made to establish the veracity of what was in the documents.”
Currently, Galloway is suing the newspaper for libel. The Telegraph’s defense is that of “qualified privilege.”
“They are saying: ‘We never said that these documents are true, we are only saying that we found them and that they deserved to be brought to the public’s attention,’” Galloway explained.
The defense of qualified privilege is defeated if malice can be shown, and he is now concentrating on headlines, caricatures, and, crucially, the leader columns that accompany the stories. He believes these show overwhelming malice and tells the reader the Telegraph was saying that the documents were true. “I have been on five pages of a broadsheet, assailed, traduced, smeared by a paper that now says it doesn’t intend to justify the story. They admit that they have no evidence that one single word in these documents was true and have declared in advance that they don’t intend to.”
The situation was almost immediately compounded. Two days after the Telegraph allegations, a journalist who works for the Telegraph, Philip Smuker, wrote a story on the front page of the Christian Science Monitor that said Galloway had received $10 million, starting in June 1992 and finishing on Jan 14, 2003 from Saddam Hussein’s son Qusai, whom Galloway says he has never met.
Two weeks later, the Mail on Sunday bought documents for £1,500 from the same person who produced the Christian Science documents — a Gen. Salah Abdel Rasool, allegedly of the Republican Guard.
The newspaper brought the Christian Science documents and their own documents to London, where they were examined by Dr. Audrey Giles, former head of the Questioned Documents Section of the Metropolitan Police and a retired section chief from MI6, who had examined thousands of Iraqi documents taken in 1991. A third expert, an Iraqi defector, who says he is a former head of Protocol of Saddam Hussein, examined them as well. They said that both sets of documents were “crude forgeries.”
“There is a market for forged documents about me in Baghdad and it’s not commercially driven. If the Christian Science Monitor didn’t pay for the documents as they tell me, then it’s clearly a political conspiracy. Two of the three have been unmasked, though the forgers have yet to be identified,” said Galloway. “You don’t have to be Einstein to work out who might have an interest in doing it.”
He rather observed that “the Daily Telegraph is owned by Barbara Amiel — Gen. Sharon’s speech writer — her husband Lord Black and on the Board of Directors sit Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher.”
He does not believe that British intelligence were involved. “I believe that the ‘Brylcreem Boys’ on the Thames (MI5 and MI6) would have done a better job. They would not have had me on [Saddam’s] payroll 11 months before I ever went there, nor had me picking up cash and traveling across international frontiers with it, nor had me in Iraq when I was demonstrably here in Parliament.”
Galloway regards the whole issue surrounding the apparently flimsy excuses for going to war as “Blair’s Watergate.” Although he doesn’t believe that this was a war for oil, that certainly was one of the motives.
“I believe it’s about oil, about Israel, about re-ordering the Middle East, a new Sykes-Picot plan because the previous Sykes-Picot had become unstable.” A major motive, he believes is fear. “The fear of Islamism, the fear of Bin Ladenism, the fear of instability in the region were some of the primary driving motives behind the war.”
“Above all, I believe it’s about this project for ‘the new American Century.’ They do not intend that any country or group of countries will ever again be able to challenge American domination of the world.”
All of these reasons combined. “Iraq was not attacked because it was dangerous, but because it was not. If Iraq had been dangerous, it would not have been attacked. In the same way, North Korea is dangerous and has not nor will it be attacked.”
“If Blair, as I believe and as Claire Short has said, secretly agreed with Bush last September that Iraq was to be invaded in March and lied his way through the TUC, the Labour Party and Parliament, the UN, the International Security Council and the country, then he should be in prison, never mind out of power.”
Politics, often controversial, will continue to be his life. “It was taken in with mother’s milk — I never had any doubt that I would have a political life. Even if I am no longer in Parliament, I will still be in politics.”
