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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1308 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on April 22, 2003 and belongs in the politics category. The previous post was Nina Simone, and the next post is EMI takes the plunge.

Gorgeous George

Can my MP, George Gal­loway, really have been in the employ of Saddam Hus­sein? The Tele­graph pur­port­edly found doc­u­ments on the floor of the Iraqi Foregn Min­istry that reveal his collusion:

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… 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.

Gal­loway intends to sue; The Tele­graph remains adamant that the doc­u­ments are genuine.

If this is a smear, it’s a sophis­ti­cated one. If true, I’m stunned. Galloway’s overly chummy rela­tion­ship with Hus­sein has always been sus­pect, but it’s hard to believe he would take back­han­ders. We shall see.

Updates (in chrono­log­i­cal order)

  1. Gal­loway on Today [RealAudio]
  2. Galloway’s state­ment on Tele­graph claims
  3. Guardian - Labour holds fire on Gal­loway inquiry
  4. Tele­graph - Memo From Saddam: We Can’t Afford to Pay Gal­loway More
  5. Guardian - Gal­loway: others may have taken money
  6. This is get­ting silly: The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor claim evi­dence of $10 mil­lion paid to Gal­loway by Saddam Hussein.

Posted at 11am on 22/04/03 by Jack Mottram to the politics category.
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  1. i find it rather fishy that this jour­nal­ist chap was freely rum­mag­ing around iraqi intel­li­gence doc­u­ments, don’t you?

    Posted by Donna at 5pm on 22.04.03

  2. I’m find­ing it rather inter­est­ing that they’re pre­pared to accept the verac­ity of Iraqi ministers’ doc­u­ments when it comes to George Gal­loway, but not when it comes to, oh, say, weapons of mass destruction.

    Posted by Leon at 6pm on 22.04.03

  3. I’m sit­ting on the fence for this one: I cannot believe that Gal­loway, for all his faults, would do this. And, let’s face it, Gal­loway must be under pretty heavy sur­veil­lance from the author­i­ties, and you’d think that they’d spot hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds flow­ing out of Iraq into his bank accounts. But then the Tele­graph must be pretty cer­tain that their case will stand up in court and if, as they claim, the paper came across the doc­u­ments by chance in a bombed-​out build­ing, you wonder why they would have been placed there if faked… after that you get into wild spec­u­la­tion - the Iraqis gen­er­at­ing the docs for future black­mail pur­poses to keep George on side? MI6 smear in col­lu­sion with The Tele­graph? Aliens?

    Posted by Jack at 2pm on 23.04.03

  4. he makes me laugh when he says IN-DEF-AT-IG-ABILITY…

    Posted by brat at 11pm on 24.04.03

  5. Think the most likely expla­na­tion is that some­one in Iraq has been using George’s name to scam this money and he know’s noth­ing about it. One of the Guardian’s sources in Bagh­dad said as much the other day, and claimed to have known this has been going on for years.

    Posted by pabulum at 12pm on 26.04.03

  6. I guess that must be it, that or a full-​on MI6 stitch-​up - even The Sun’s edi­to­r­ial on this cast doubt on The Telegraph’s sources, and they’ve been call­ing George a commie scum­bag trai­tor for years now…

    Posted by Jack at 4pm on 26.04.03

  7. Con­grat­u­la­tions George!
    Well done in Amer­ica. They deserve every­thing you have thrown at them. How dare they accuse you in public with­out the right to reply.
    THEY must think you are too dan­ger­ous to deal with in a proper court so they will attempt to dis­credit you with any means at all.
    You were very impres­sive. YOU remind me of what a Labour MP used to stand for before Tony Blair.

    Posted by colette at 9pm on 18.05.05

  8. George Gal­loway may have escaped this time but he will be caught out in the end, I don’t trust him one little bit, he’s a nasty piece of work, I think all the vio­lence, threats and van­dals etc stired up by him and his so called ‘Respect’ party (ironic name con­sid­er­ing it was the one thing his party did not show through­out the entire Elec­tion) was com­plet­ley dis­gust­ing. There are alot of con­stituen­cys in the coun­try that have strong muslim pop­u­la­tions and no vio­lence or van­dal­ism was reported there. George is bad news through and through, the sooner he dis­ap­pears the better!

    Posted by Galloway hater at 11am on 14.10.05

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