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British Anti-War Activist and Labour Member accused of being on Saddam's payroll

post #1 of 16
4/22/03 at 2:46pm
Thread Starter 
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$BRQ25XG0ULQ1HQFIQMGCFFWAVCBQ UIV0?xml=/news/2003/04/22/ngall22.xml" target="_blank">From the Telegraph:</a>

Quote:
Galloway was in Saddam's pay, say secret Iraqi documents
By David Blair in Baghdad
(Filed: 22/04/2003)

George Galloway, the Labour backbencher, received money from Saddam Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year, according to Iraqi intelligence documents found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad.

A confidential memorandum sent to Saddam by his spy chief said that Mr Galloway asked an agent of the Mukhabarat secret service for a greater cut of Iraq's exports under the oil for food programme.


George Galloway: 'I have never in my life seen a barrel of oil, let alone owned, bought or sold one'
He also said that Mr Galloway was profiting from food contracts and sought "exceptional" business deals. Mr Galloway has always denied receiving any financial assistance from Baghdad.

Asked to explain the document, he said yesterday: "Maybe it is the product of the same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole Iraq picture. Maybe The Daily Telegraph forged it. Who knows?"

When the letter from the head of the Iraqi intelligence service was read to him, he said: "The truth is I have never met, to the best of my knowledge, any member of Iraqi intelligence. I have never in my life seen a barrel of oil, let alone owned, bought or sold one."

In the papers, which were found in the looted foreign ministry, Iraqi intelligence continually stresses the need for secrecy about Mr Galloway's alleged business links with the regime. One memo says that payments to him must be made under "commercial cover".

For more than a decade, Mr Galloway, MP for Glasgow Kelvin, has been the leading critic of Anglo-American policy towards Iraq, campaigning against sanctions and the war that toppled Saddam.

He led the Mariam Appeal, named after an Iraqi child he flew to Britain for leukaemia treatment. The campaign was the supposed beneficiary of his fund-raising.

But the papers say that, behind the scenes, Mr Galloway was conducting a relationship with Iraqi intelligence. Among documents found in the foreign ministry was a memorandum from the chief of the Mukhabarat to Saddam's office on Jan 3, 2000, marked "Confidential and Personal".

It purported to outline talks between Mr Galloway and an Iraqi spy. During the meeting on Boxing Day 1999, Mr Galloway detailed his campaign plans for the year ahead.

The spy chief wrote that Mr Galloway told the Mukhabarat agent: "He [Galloway] needs continuous financial support from Iraq. He obtained through Mr Tariq Aziz [deputy prime minister] three million barrels of oil every six months, according to the oil for food programme. His share would be only between 10 and 15 cents per barrel."

Iraq's oil sales, administered by the United Nations, were intended to pay for only essential humanitarian supplies. If the memo was accurate, Mr Galloway's share would have amounted to about £375,000 per year.

The documents say that Mr Galloway entered into partnership with a named Iraqi oil broker to sell the oil on the international market.

The memorandum continues: "He [Galloway] also obtained a limited number of food contracts with the ministry of trade. The percentage of its profits does not go above one per cent."

The Iraqi spy chief, whose illegible signature appears at the bottom of the memorandum, says that Mr Galloway asked for more money.

"He suggested to us the following: first, increase his share of oil; second, grant him exceptional commercial and contractual facilities." The spy chief, who is not named, recommends acceptance of the proposals.

Mr Galloway's intermediary in Iraq was Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian. In a letter found in one foreign ministry file, Mr Galloway wrote: "This is to certify that Mr Fawaz A Zureikat is my representative in Baghdad on all matters concerning my work with the Mariam Appeal or the Emergency Committee in Iraq."

The intelligence chief's memorandum describes a meeting with Mr Zureikat in which he said that Mr Galloway's campaigning on behalf of Iraq was putting "his future as a British MP in a circle surrounded by many question marks and doubts".

Mr Zureikat is then quoted as saying: "His projects and future plans for the benefit of the country need financial support to become a motive for him to do more work and, because of the sensitivity of getting money directly from Iraq, it is necessary to grant him oil contracts and special and exceptional commercial opportunities to provide him with an income under commercial cover, without being connected to him directly."

Mr Zureikat is said to have emphasised that the "name of Mr Galloway or his wife should not be mentioned".
<a href="http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/22/ndocs22.xml" target="_blank">Here are the documents in question.</a>
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post #2 of 16
4/22/03 at 2:49pm
Thread Starter 
<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1-655184,00.html" target="_blank">Gallaway's Denial</a>

Quote:
Galloway denial statement in full
A statement by George Galloway MP over allegations that he recieved payments from Saddam Hussein's regime

"This attack is part of a smear campaign, against those who stood against the illegal and bloody war on Iraq and against its occupation by foreign forces. As I am out of the country, writing a book about Iraq, I have not seen the so-called 'documents' the Telegraph - a highly partisan source - claims to have access to.

The idea that such documents have, as if to order, come to light just days after the massive assault on Baghdad, the looting and destruction of its ministries and government buildings, and the chaos in the country must be treated as highly suspect.

This is especially so in the light of the widespread deception and forgery deployed already by those bent upon war on Iraq, for example in the so-called 'Dossier' and in the forged documents, now discredited, appearing to show Iraqi purchases of Uranium from Niger.

Without having seen the Telegraph's documents, from the way they have been described to me I can state that they bear all the hallmarks of having been either forged or doctored and are designed to discredit those who stood against the war.

Insofar as the contents of these documents have been described to me, I would make the following points:

1. To the best of my knowledge, I have never met an officer of the Iraqi intelligence.

2. Given that I have had access over the years to Iraq's political leadership, most often the deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, I would have absolutely no reason to be meeting with an official of Iraqi intelligence.

3. I have never solicited nor received money from Iraq for our campaign against war and sanctions.

4. I have never seen a barrel of oil, never owned one, never bought one, never sold one.

5. The campaign which I fought over many years was funded by only three significant sources, ie, donors of more than, say, three thousand pounds. These were the pro-western governments of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and the Jordanian businessman Fawaz Zeurekat, who took over responsibility for the Mariam Appeal some time ago. Of these three sources, by far the most significant was the government of the UAE which donated in excess of half a million pounds to the Mariam Appeal.

6. I have never been a signatory or trustee of the Mariam Appeal. I was its founder.

7. Any interests I had in relation to the Mariam Appeal are registered in the House of Commons Register of Members' Interests."
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post #3 of 16
4/22/03 at 2:52pm
Thread Starter 
<a href="http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,941141,00.html" target="_blank">The Response</a>

Quote:
Galloway threatens to sue Telegraph

Ciar Byrne
Tuesday April 22, 2003

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%.

"This is all a memo of a meeting with Mr Galloway which took place on Boxing Day 1999, and what the memo says is that Mr Galloway wants more than that."

Galloway denied any such meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer had ever taken place, adding, "Mr Moore is in big trouble with his front page exclusive today".

"I have never in my life to my knowledge ever met an Iraqi intelligence agent, and given my access, as is well known, to the very top leadership in Iraq on the political side, why would I conceivably wish to have such a conversation with an agent?

"The only thing extremely clear about this story is that it is clearly false, and will be demonstrated in the courts of law as false.

"It is really very straightforward. If I had sold oil under the oil for food programme and sold food to Iraq under the oil for food programme, the cheques would have been written by the United Nations in New York.

"So all we will have to do is check with the UN whether they have ever written me any cheques, when they wrote them and where the money went. And no such thing ever happened."

Mr Galloway is often jokingly referred to as the "MP for Baghdad Central" after campaigning for more than a decade against Anglo-American policy towards Iraq and the sanctions imposed on Saddam's regime.

He came under fire from the Sun during the Iraqi conflict when he described Tony Blair and George Bush as "wolves" over their military intervention.

The MP for Glasgow Kelvin responded by accusing the Sun of "cancerous racist pornographic propaganda".

Today he dismissed the Telegraph's story as part of the same "smear campaign" against him.

"This attack is part of a smear campaign against those who stood against the illegal and bloody war on Iraq and against its occupation by foreign forces," he said.

"As I am out of the country, writing a book about Iraq, I have not seen the so-called 'documents' the Telegraph - a highly partisan source - claims to have access to.

"The idea that such documents have, as if to order, come to light just days after the massive assault on Baghdad, the looting and destruction of its ministries and government buildings, and the chaos in the country must be treated as highly suspect.

"This is especially so in the light of the widespread deception and forgery deployed already by those bent upon war on Iraq, for example in the so-called 'Dossier' and in the forged documents, now discredited, appearing to show Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger.

"Without having seen the Telegraph's documents, from the way they have been described to me I can state that they bear all the hallmarks of having been either forged or doctored and are designed to discredit those who stood against the war."
&lt;Credit to Andrew Sullivan for laying all this out.&gt;
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post #4 of 16
4/22/03 at 2:57pm
Thread Starter 
Any Liverpudlians want to take a crack at this? Does this accusation make sense in light of the man's actions? Was he obviously corrupt ala Robert Torricelli? Isn't this a dreadfully serious accusation to make and/or could this cripple the Telegraph if it turns out to be false?
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post #5 of 16
4/22/03 at 3:23pm
The Daily Telegraph is one of the most trenchant right-wing newspapers in the UK. To put it in perspective for US folk, it's a tabloid for the middle class, pandering shamelessly to a mythical image of a pastoral, idyllic England that never really existed. It's one of those papers that prints exactly what it's readers expect to see, so they can tut and shake their heads at how this country has fallen apart since we let the darkies in.

Galloway is a prominent left-wing politician who said some pretty inflammatory stuff in the lead-up to the war, and was branded a traitor for doing so. I'm not an expert on the man, but it does seem pretty far-fetched that he'd have business links with Iraq. And it's mightily convenient that these incriminating documents were found by a reporter who works for one of the papers most vocally opposed to him.

On the other hand, while our tabloid press has all the morals of a snake, faking documents like this? That would take brass balls the size of Buckingham Palace.
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post #6 of 16
4/22/03 at 3:33pm
A little off-topic, but...

Dan, I'm not real familiar with the political slants of British papers. I know the Gaurdian is pretty left and the Telegraphy is right. What is the most... centered of the English papers? Just wondering.
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post #7 of 16
4/22/03 at 3:49pm
Just how many government officials out there who opposed the war had their fingers in the Iraqi oil honey pot?
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post #8 of 16
4/22/03 at 4:35pm
Quote:
Nighttrap38:
Just how many government officials out there who opposed the war had their fingers in the Iraqi oil honey pot?
uh....I'd guess 18
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post #9 of 16
4/22/03 at 4:35pm
Someone should compare it to the ones who were for the war and are putting their fingers in the honey pot.
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post #10 of 16
4/23/03 at 7:21am
You can always rely on The Poster Formerly Known As Beef Sarky to add something valuable to the discussion.
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post #11 of 16
4/23/03 at 7:24am
Quote:
Al Manheim:
A little off-topic, but...

Dan, I'm not real familiar with the political slants of British papers. I know the Gaurdian is pretty left and the Telegraphy is right. What is the most... centered of the English papers? Just wondering.
Difficult to say. Our press is pretty partisan. The tabloids don't bother to hide it, the broadsheets try and be more subtle. I haven't read it for a long time, but The Independent was launched to be a non-partisan paper, although it does tend to the left more than the right - in my opinion. We definitely have more right wing papers than left wing though. The Mirror and The Guardian are the only truly left-wing papers. All the others range from polite conservatism to borderline rabid fascism.
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post #12 of 16
4/23/03 at 10:11am
Quote:
Al Manheim:
A little off-topic, but...

Dan, I'm not real familiar with the political slants of British papers. I know the Gaurdian is pretty left and the Telegraphy is right. What is the most... centered of the English papers? Just wondering.
The Sunday Sport.
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post #13 of 16
4/25/03 at 3:00pm
Thread Starter 
<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0425/p01s04-woiq.htm" target="_blank">Uh oh.</a>

Quote:
Newly found Iraqi files raise heat on British MP
Documents indicate payments of more than $10 million for support of Labour Party official.

BAGHDAD - A fresh set of documents uncovered in a Baghdad house used by Saddam Hussein's son Qusay to hide top-secret files detail multimillion dollar payments to an outspoken British member of parliament, George Galloway.

...

The most recent - and possibly most revealing - documents were obtained earlier this week by the Monitor. The papers include direct orders from the Hussein regime to issue Mr. Galloway six individual payments, starting in July 1992 and ending in January 2003.

The payments point to a concerted effort by the regime to use its oil wealth to win friends in the Western world who could promote Iraqi interests first by lifting sanctions against Iraq and later in blocking war plans.

The leadership of Hussein's special security section and accountants of the President's secretive Republican Guard signed the papers and authorized payments totaling more than $10 million.

The three most recent payment authorizations, beginning on April 4, 2000, and ending on January 14, 2003 are for $3 million each. All three authorizations include statements that show the Iraqi leadership's strong political motivation in paying Galloway for his vociferous opposition to US and British plans to invade Iraq.

The Jan. 14, 2003, document, written on Republican Guard stationary with its Iraqi eagle and "Trust in Allah," calls for the "Manager of the security department, in the name of President Saddam Hussein, to order a gratuity to be issued to Mr. George Galloway of British nationality in the amount of three million dollars only."

The document states that the money is in return for "his courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq, like Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient people...."

The document is signed left to right by four people, including Gen. Saif Adeen Flaya al-Hassan, Col. Shawki Abed Ahmed, and what the Iraqi general who first discovered the documents says is the signature of Qusay. The same exact signatures are also found on a vast array of documents from the offices of the president's youngest son. The final authorization appears to be that of Qusay, who notes the accounting department should "issue the check and deliver to Mr. George Galloway," adding, "Do this fast and inform me."

...

The most recent documents obtained by the Monitor suggest that payoffs may well have been made by checks in lump sums. The Iraqi general, who is familiar with financial dealings of Hussein's inner circle, said that checks of several million dollars could have easily been cashed in a bank on the ground floor of one of the President's most important palaces in Baghdad.
How many others were on the payroll? This cannot be an isolated incident.
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post #14 of 16
4/25/03 at 3:05pm
So he was getting money from a special interest group? A group trying to stop sanctions on their country. I think we'd have problems if we punished all politicos who took money from special interest groups.

Still, if he had dealings with members of the Hussein family, he has problems.
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post #15 of 16
4/25/03 at 3:09pm
Quote:
Burke is Down in the Zero:
A fresh set of documents
This is probably the most accurate statement in the piece.

I find it hard to believe Hussein would pay ten million dollars to one individual in some sort of undercover effort to prevent the West from attacking. Doesn't really seem to fit his modus operandi.
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post #16 of 16
4/25/03 at 3:20pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Guttenberg Fan Club:
So he was getting money from a special interest group? A group trying to stop sanctions on their country. I think we'd have problems if we punished all politicos who took money from special interest groups.

Still, if he had dealings with members of the Hussein family, he has problems.
At least in this country, you have to disclose where you get political contributions over a certain amount. I think the British public would have been very interested to know that this guy was getting under the table money from Saddam, if the accusations are true.
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