Galloway returns fire.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.
Eighteen months and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths further on, the Daily Telegraph has been given a judicial thrashing at the high court, which will have stung more powerfully than any its public schoolboy editors endured in their younger days. Well over seven figures of damages and costs, combined with Mr Justice Eady's damning judgment, must have made the paper's new owners smart at the damage done to the Telegraph's reputation by the old regime of Lord Conrad Black, Barbara Amiel and fox-hunter Charles Moore.
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There is a long tradition in Britain of attempts by governments and media to use false allegations about foreign cash to discredit those who refuse to bend to the powers-that-be, from the Zinoviev letters to the Scargill affair. The Telegraph, a chief cheerleader for the Iraq war, together with the media empire of another foreign press baron, Rupert Murdoch, tried to paint me as a treasonous "enemy of the state", and the anti-war movement as the "enemy within". But the real enemies of the state are the political leaders, pre-eminently the prime minister, who deceived the country into a disastrous military adventure which has devastated a foreign land and disfigured the face of international affairs. And the real enemies within are the pusillanimous poodles in parliament and press who allowed, and are still allowing them, to get away with it.
Guardian UK
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