Already the witch-hunt against George Galloway MP is unravelling. A report in today’s Mail on Sunday reveals that the newspaper has uncovered evidence that documents incriminating the MP are forgeries.

The Mail had paid £1500 for documents claiming to show that Galloway received millions of pounds from the Saddam regime. Now the paper admits that the documents it bought were crude forgeries ‘littered with inaccuracies’. These documents have been used in reports by the Christian Science Monitor and given credibility in many other newspapers.

This revelation casts further doubt on the recent Daily Telegraph story which claimed that George Galloway had received £375,000 over several years from the United Nations oil for food programme. That story was based on documents miraculously discovered in a burnt out building in Baghdad by Telegraph reporter David Blair. These documents, written in a crude literary style with an indecipherable signature at the bottom, formed the basis of a campaign by the Telegraph to smear the entire anti-war movement.

A spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition said "there are many in the Blair government who are desperate for these allegations against George Galloway to be true. They hope it will divert attention from the illegality of both the war and the current occupation of Iraq."
George Galloway has been suspended from the Labour Party under rule 28a ‘bringing the party into disrepute’. This suspension was carried out in a totally undemocratic manner. The National Executive Committee has not discussed the suspension and it appears to have been the act of David Triesman, the General Secretary, alone.

Galloway’s crime has been his principled opposition to the war on Iraq. The Stop the War Coalition calls for George Galloway’s suspension from the Labour Party to be lifted immediately and for an independent inquiry into whether there has been collusion between British security services and others against the MP.