Galloway threatens to sue Telegraph

Ciar Byrne
Tuesday April 22, 2003


Galloway: 'smear campaign'

Labour MP George Galloway today vowed to sue the Daily Telegraph for libel over its explosive front page story alleging that he was in the pay of Saddam Hussein.

The Telegraph's Baghdad correspondent, David Blair, discovered a confidential memorandum in the looted office of the Iraqi foreign minister that purported to show that Mr Galloway received a share of oil earnings from the toppled dictator's regime worth £375,000 a year.

However, Mr Galloway strenuously denied the claims and said the evidence was fabricated as part of a smear campaign against him.

"I will be suing for libel, without any equivocation. The Daily Telegraph produces no evidence for the serious allegations that they make other than a document, which they say popped into their hands in a search through a cruise missile and smoke blackened building," Mr Galloway told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned a barrel of oil, bought or sold a barrel of oil... What I can tell you is that I have never had any such conversation with anyone that was described apparently in these documents which the Daily Telegraph have miraculously had in their hands. Therefore somebody somewhere has fabricated them.

"I expected a witch-hunt, which has been going on now for some weeks... a kind of hate campaign being built up, and so I have been expecting that atmosphere of witch-hunt to continue, but I am surprised at the allegations in the Daily Telegraph this morning," he added.

However, Blair told Today he was convinced the document implicating Mr Galloway was genuine.

"Nobody steered me in that direction at all. We just went and purely by chance we stumbled across this room which had these files in it, and again purely by chance we came across these files which carried the label Britain. And it was two days before we had actually gone through the contents and found this document.

"I find it very hard to believe that this document is not authentic. I think it would require an enormous amount of imagination to believe that someone went to the trouble of composing a forged document in Arabic and then planting it in a file of patently authentic documents and burying it in a darkened room on the off-chance that a British journalist might happen upon it and might bother to translate it. That strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable."

The editor of the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore, told Today he stood by the newspaper's story.

"The state of documents in any ministry in Iraq is not in apple pie order, but your listeners heard David Blair, our correspondent who found the document, describe the situation, and that seems to be a strong prima facie case that these are genuine documents.

"When you find a document of this sort, what you need to establish is the prima facie case for its validity, and then you get the other side of the story, you get the person in question to put his side. That is what we have done. I would think that would be perfectly conventional journalistic behaviour."

The memo, which the Telegraph claims was sent to Saddam by the head of the Iraqi intelligence service, said Mr Galloway had asked for a greater cut of Iraq's exports under the oil for food programme and that he was profiting from food contracts.

Moore argued that the memo suggested Mr Galloway had received money.

"What the memo says is that he got a lot but he is asking for more. It says that he has already obtained money through the oil for food programme, and he has also obtained what it calls a limited number of food contracts with the ministry of trade. The percentage of profits does not go above 1%