An enemy of the state

An enemy of the state

George Galloway
Friday December 3, 2004
The Guardian

When the 17th-century republican Algernon Sidney spoke on Tower Hill before his beheading on false charges almost exactly 321 years ago, he observed that "the whole matter is reduced to the papers said to have been found in my closet by the King's officers". In the days after Baghdad fell to US forces last April, all manner of closets spilled forth papers - remarkably often to the Telegraph group of newspapers. In quick succession, their reporters claimed to have found, in a series of burning buildings, documents linking Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden, tales of French and Russian perfidy, and the papers they used to smear me as being in the pay of the Iraqi regime.

Like the paperwork on which the case for the war itself was built, these all turned out to be bunkum, bogus or doctored. A Daily Telegraph reporter, Philip Smucker, came up with his own documents for the US Christian Science Monitor, making similar claims. The Mail on Sunday purchased still more documentation, putting my supposed "earnings" from Saddam and his family into a £20m-plus stratosphere. Both were shown to be forgeries. One by one these assaults by the pro-war media foundered on a large and immovable rock - none of them was true....