Galloway Attacks 'an affront to justice and free speech' - Ex-'Mirror' Edito
Bill | 08.05.2003 14:10
Robert Maxwell's former "Daily Mirror" editor, Roy Greenslade, who witch-hunted Scargill in over a decade ago, admits that he was completely wrong and says that the current attacks on Galloway are 'an affront to justice and free speech'.
This campaign is an affront to justice and free speech
The Galloway saga has eerie echoes of the Scargill affair of 1990
Roy Greenslade
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian
A bell rings faintly somewhere in the back of my mind. King Arthur and Gorgeous George. Scargill and Galloway. Both larger-than-life leftwingers, guys who stand out from the crowd, controversial, iconoclastic, with a gift for rhetoric, a talent to amuse, enemies of the status quo.
Galloway is accused of taking funds from a pariah Arab regime. He immediately suspects that the documentary evidence, having fallen so fortuitously into the hands of a newspaper, is forged. Is he the victim of a plot by the secret services?
Now the bell won't stop and it is getting louder, prompting memories of 1990 when I was editor of the Daily Mirror. It accused Scargill of using miners' strike funds - allegedly donated by a pariah Arab regime - to pay off his mortgage. Despite Scargill's vehement denials, I was convinced we had the evidence.
Sue us, Arthur, I said. But look out, you're about to be covered in buckets of manure while you make up your mind. The Libyan money is only the start.
What about the supposed misuse of funds from Soviet miners and money switched through Swiss and Irish banks? What happened to the overflowing bags of cash collected by trades unionists across Britain during the 1984-85 strike? It was open season on the president of the National Union of Mineworkers for weeks afterwards. Papers could, and did, say whatever they liked.
Within two days, the Mirror's owner, Robert Maxwell, was musing to me over whether we had been "used" by the secret services in a plot to discredit Scargill. I later wondered whether the duplicitous Maxwell had been only too happy to oblige. Indeed, was he in on the plot himself?
Clang! Back to 2003 and Galloway issues a blunt denial of the allegation that he has received £375,000 from Saddam Hussein's government. The documents are either forged, doctored or part of a deliberate misuse of his name by someone else, he says, and announces he will sue the Daily Telegraph for libel. OK George, counters the paper, our lawyers will be only too happy to receive the writ and, meanwhile, here are more allegations. Like Scargill before him, the floodgates open and suddenly Galloway is caught in the wash as newspapers compete to drown him in sewage.
The bell is ringing clearly and consistently now. After our Mirror story, Scargill - who refused to sue - was subjected to a whole slew of official investigations to see if there was, after all, any credence to the trial by media. If only he had sued, we told ourselves, then he would have put a stop to the wilder speculative stories. In fact, none of the inquiries laid a hand on Scargill, though his main accuser, the former NUM chief executive, Roger Windsor, was found by a French court to have lied and, in all probability, been guilty of forgery.
But Galloway has sued and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference. Libel writs are not covered by contempt of court rules until the case is due for trial, whereas when people are prosecuted in criminal cases further press coverage is inhibited. He remains fair game for journalists to dig up more alleged filth. It would appear that anyone can say what they like about the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin now. There isn't an instant rebuttal service large or swift enough to cope with the stuff being thrown at him.
Meanwhile, Galloway faces an internal Labour party investigation into whether he has brought the party into disrepute, a charity commission inquiry into his Mariam Appeal fund, and an inquiry by the parliamentary commissioner for standards about whether he correctly registered all his Iraqi sanctions campaign-related interests.
The bell rings once more. One of Scargill's main accusers was his one-time driver who told my Mirror reporters lurid tales of ferrying bags of cash across Britain in twilight runs which ended up in Scargill's headquarters.
This time around, up pops Galloway's former driver - a man who, by his own account, attempted to defraud an insurance company over the hire of Galloway's car - to make claims about being paid in allegedly strange ways.
The similarities between the Scargill and Galloway cases are so pronounced it's impossible not to believe that the next stage in the Galloway saga, even if it takes place long into the future, will eventually end up echoing the Scargill affair.
Last year, after years of mounting concern that I had been wrong about Scargill, I finally apologised to him for the Mirror's accusations. I had come to believe that the cloak-and-dagger tales I had published were untrue and that, just as Maxwell had suggested (probably disingenuously), we had been misled. One key witness changed his mind within a couple of weeks and another was ordered by the French courts to repay a debt to the NUM which he had previously accused Scargill of stealing.
The whole case against Arthur gradually unravelled and gave credence to the belief that we had been duped by a secret service plot. Despite his denials, our chief accuser Windsor was named in parliament as an MI5 agent - and I was doubly convinced when the former head of MI5 said so ambiguously that he "was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine".
Regardless of whether Galloway is the victim of a similar plot, there is one obvious difference between him and Scargill. He was supported by his union (after an initial wobble) and went on running the NUM. Galloway has been abandoned by his party which has suspended him.
Wilting under the media pressure, Labour has chosen to throw Galloway overboard. He must sink or swim without the aid of the party he has belonged to for 35 years and represented in parliament since 1987. Worse is the mealy-mouthed reasoning behind the party's decision.
We are asked to believe that the suspension is due to Galloway's anti-war remarks on television. According to Labour's general secretary, David Triesman, a party inquiry will concentrate on his references to Tony Blair and President George Bush as "wolves" for invading Iraq.
Apart from the obvious point that, in suspending Galloway before an inquiry, the rules of British justice about being innocent until proven guilty are being ignored, there is a more profound concern.
Galloway, unlike previous party miscreants, is being traduced for nothing more than stating an opinion. Labour is trampling on the rights of one of its own MPs to speak his mind at a crucial moment. Moreover, given the huge anti-war demonstrations and consistent anti-war poll majorities until the fighting began, he was clearly expressing the views of a major proportion of the public.
That bell rings again. Scargill was effectively marginalised after 1990. Is the Labour movement prepared to allow Galloway to suffer the same fate?
· Roy Greenslade is professor of journalism at City University and the Guardian's media commentator
roy.greenslade@guardian.co.uk
The Galloway saga has eerie echoes of the Scargill affair of 1990
Roy Greenslade
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian
A bell rings faintly somewhere in the back of my mind. King Arthur and Gorgeous George. Scargill and Galloway. Both larger-than-life leftwingers, guys who stand out from the crowd, controversial, iconoclastic, with a gift for rhetoric, a talent to amuse, enemies of the status quo.
Galloway is accused of taking funds from a pariah Arab regime. He immediately suspects that the documentary evidence, having fallen so fortuitously into the hands of a newspaper, is forged. Is he the victim of a plot by the secret services?
Now the bell won't stop and it is getting louder, prompting memories of 1990 when I was editor of the Daily Mirror. It accused Scargill of using miners' strike funds - allegedly donated by a pariah Arab regime - to pay off his mortgage. Despite Scargill's vehement denials, I was convinced we had the evidence.
Sue us, Arthur, I said. But look out, you're about to be covered in buckets of manure while you make up your mind. The Libyan money is only the start.
What about the supposed misuse of funds from Soviet miners and money switched through Swiss and Irish banks? What happened to the overflowing bags of cash collected by trades unionists across Britain during the 1984-85 strike? It was open season on the president of the National Union of Mineworkers for weeks afterwards. Papers could, and did, say whatever they liked.
Within two days, the Mirror's owner, Robert Maxwell, was musing to me over whether we had been "used" by the secret services in a plot to discredit Scargill. I later wondered whether the duplicitous Maxwell had been only too happy to oblige. Indeed, was he in on the plot himself?
Clang! Back to 2003 and Galloway issues a blunt denial of the allegation that he has received £375,000 from Saddam Hussein's government. The documents are either forged, doctored or part of a deliberate misuse of his name by someone else, he says, and announces he will sue the Daily Telegraph for libel. OK George, counters the paper, our lawyers will be only too happy to receive the writ and, meanwhile, here are more allegations. Like Scargill before him, the floodgates open and suddenly Galloway is caught in the wash as newspapers compete to drown him in sewage.
The bell is ringing clearly and consistently now. After our Mirror story, Scargill - who refused to sue - was subjected to a whole slew of official investigations to see if there was, after all, any credence to the trial by media. If only he had sued, we told ourselves, then he would have put a stop to the wilder speculative stories. In fact, none of the inquiries laid a hand on Scargill, though his main accuser, the former NUM chief executive, Roger Windsor, was found by a French court to have lied and, in all probability, been guilty of forgery.
But Galloway has sued and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference. Libel writs are not covered by contempt of court rules until the case is due for trial, whereas when people are prosecuted in criminal cases further press coverage is inhibited. He remains fair game for journalists to dig up more alleged filth. It would appear that anyone can say what they like about the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin now. There isn't an instant rebuttal service large or swift enough to cope with the stuff being thrown at him.
Meanwhile, Galloway faces an internal Labour party investigation into whether he has brought the party into disrepute, a charity commission inquiry into his Mariam Appeal fund, and an inquiry by the parliamentary commissioner for standards about whether he correctly registered all his Iraqi sanctions campaign-related interests.
The bell rings once more. One of Scargill's main accusers was his one-time driver who told my Mirror reporters lurid tales of ferrying bags of cash across Britain in twilight runs which ended up in Scargill's headquarters.
This time around, up pops Galloway's former driver - a man who, by his own account, attempted to defraud an insurance company over the hire of Galloway's car - to make claims about being paid in allegedly strange ways.
The similarities between the Scargill and Galloway cases are so pronounced it's impossible not to believe that the next stage in the Galloway saga, even if it takes place long into the future, will eventually end up echoing the Scargill affair.
Last year, after years of mounting concern that I had been wrong about Scargill, I finally apologised to him for the Mirror's accusations. I had come to believe that the cloak-and-dagger tales I had published were untrue and that, just as Maxwell had suggested (probably disingenuously), we had been misled. One key witness changed his mind within a couple of weeks and another was ordered by the French courts to repay a debt to the NUM which he had previously accused Scargill of stealing.
The whole case against Arthur gradually unravelled and gave credence to the belief that we had been duped by a secret service plot. Despite his denials, our chief accuser Windsor was named in parliament as an MI5 agent - and I was doubly convinced when the former head of MI5 said so ambiguously that he "was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine".
Regardless of whether Galloway is the victim of a similar plot, there is one obvious difference between him and Scargill. He was supported by his union (after an initial wobble) and went on running the NUM. Galloway has been abandoned by his party which has suspended him.
Wilting under the media pressure, Labour has chosen to throw Galloway overboard. He must sink or swim without the aid of the party he has belonged to for 35 years and represented in parliament since 1987. Worse is the mealy-mouthed reasoning behind the party's decision.
We are asked to believe that the suspension is due to Galloway's anti-war remarks on television. According to Labour's general secretary, David Triesman, a party inquiry will concentrate on his references to Tony Blair and President George Bush as "wolves" for invading Iraq.
Apart from the obvious point that, in suspending Galloway before an inquiry, the rules of British justice about being innocent until proven guilty are being ignored, there is a more profound concern.
Galloway, unlike previous party miscreants, is being traduced for nothing more than stating an opinion. Labour is trampling on the rights of one of its own MPs to speak his mind at a crucial moment. Moreover, given the huge anti-war demonstrations and consistent anti-war poll majorities until the fighting began, he was clearly expressing the views of a major proportion of the public.
That bell rings again. Scargill was effectively marginalised after 1990. Is the Labour movement prepared to allow Galloway to suffer the same fate?
· Roy Greenslade is professor of journalism at City University and the Guardian's media commentator
roy.greenslade@guardian.co.uk
Bill
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The problem with these documents
09.05.2003 07:55
The problem with these documents is that they are being provided by the U.S. military to a few reporters working for a very suspect newspaper, London's Daily Telegraph (affectionately known as the Daily Torygraph" by those who understand the paper's right-wing slant). The Telegraph's April 27 Sunday edition reported that its correspondent in Baghdad, Inigo Gilmore, had been invited into the intelligence headquarters by U.S. troops and miraculously "found" amid the rubble a document indicating that Iraq invited Osama bin Laden to visit Iraq in March 1998. Gilmore also reported that the CIA had been through the building several times before he found the document. Gilmore added that the CIA must have "missed" the document in their prior searches, an astounding claim since the CIA must have been intimately familiar with the building from their previous intelligence links with the Mukhabarat dating from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Moreover, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including Britain's MI-6, have refuted claims of a link between bin Laden and Iraq.
Gilmore also made it a point to declare he was not providing propaganda for the United States, a strange statement by someone who claims to be a seasoned Middle East correspondent. However, it is highly possible he was providing the propaganda for the benefit of a non-government actor, the neo-conservative movement, which uses the Pentagon as a base of operations, and employs deception and perception management tactics to push its sinister agenda.
The U.S. has been quite active in inviting Telegraph reporters into the Iraqi intelligence headquarters. Other documents "found" by the paper's reporters "revealed" Russian intelligence had passed intercepts of Tony Blair's phone conversations to Iraqi intelligence, that German intelligence offered to assist Iraqi intelligence in the lead up to the war, that France provided Iraq with the contents of US-French diplomatic exchanges, and that anti-war and anti-Bush Labor Party Member of Parliament George Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Iraq, which were skimmed from the country's oil-for-food program.
Galloway immediately smelled the rat of a disinformation campaign when he responded to the Telegraph about the "found" document. "Maybe it's the product of the same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole Iraq picture . . . It would not be the Iraqi regime that was forging it. It would be people like you [Telegraph journalists] and the Government whose policies you have supported," Galloway said.
It is amazing that the U.S. military would be so open about letting favored journalists walk freely about the Mukhabarat building when the Pentagon has clamped tight security on the Iraqi Oil Ministry. The reason for this is obvious. While the Mukhabarat building can be salted with phony intelligence documents, the Oil Ministry is likely rife with documents showing the links between Saddam Hussein and Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton. The company signed more than $73 million in contracts with Saddam's government when Cheney was its chief executive officer. The contracts, negotiated with two Halliburton subsidiaries—Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co.—were part of the UN oil-for-food program, ironically the same program which figures prominently in the charges against Galloway. But unlike the charges against Galloway, the reports about Cheney's links to Saddam Hussein's oil industry originated with relatively more mainstream media sources, including ABC News, The Washington Post, and The Texas Observer.
Gilmore told the BBC that he noticed that on the Mukhabarat documents he discovered, some information that was "erased." The erasures were apparently made with a combination of black marker ink and correction fluid. He said he scraped away at the paper with a razor and miraculously found the name bin Laden in three places. The standard procedure for redacting a classified document is to only use a black indelible marker to mask classified information. However, the proper procedure for trying to read through such markings is not to scrape away the ink as if the document were a instant lottery ticket. Toner print often bleeds through the indelible marker ink. If one holds up such a sheet of paper at a 45 degree angle and under a bright phosphorescent light, the lettering under the ink can be "read" because the lettering almost appears to be "raised." If a razor blade were used to scrape away the markings, the indelible ink and the toner ink would be obliterated. Gilmore's claims appear to be spurious.
It was not long before the Iraqi-al Qaeda "smoking gun" document was reported around the world. America's right-wing propaganda channel, Fox News, featured the "found" document on its lead story on its Fox Sunday News program. Fox anchorman Tony Snow asked the ethically-tainted Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi about the document. Chalabi responded, saying the document provided enough information that Saddam Hussein was knowledgeable about the September 11 attacks on the United States, a canard that has been rejected by intelligence agencies around the world. However, for those who forged or doctored the document it was mission accomplished.
To understand the process in disseminating such propaganda masked as news, it is important to understand the relationship between The Daily Telegraph and its parent company, the Hollinger Corporation, which is owned by British subject and former Canadian Conrad Black. Hollinger. Like Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Hollinger is a mega-media company that spins right-wing propaganda around the world through 379 newspapers, including the Jerusalem Post. Tom Rose, the publisher of the Jerusalem Post, is a major supporter of Ariel Sharon's Likud Party and is a favorite guest on the right-wing talk shows on Clear Channel radio stations, including that of G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy. Clear Channel, headquartered in Dallas, is owned by close Bush supporters and one-time business partners. To add to the spider's web, one of Rose's Jerusalem Post directors is Richard Perle, a member of Donald Rumsfeld's advisory board.
The "smoking gun" document on Galloway was further played up on Fox News Sunday. William Kristol, an ally of Perle and a dean of the neo-conservatives, and Fox's Brit Hume, a right-wing ideologue who masquerades as a reporter, said the documents implicating Galloway in accepting money from Saddam Hussein was the "tip of the iceberg." They then suggested that French President Jacques Chirac, other Western politicians, and Arab journalists working for such networks as Al Jazeera, would soon be "outed" by further Iraqi intelligence documents. For good mesaure, Fox also announced that Galloway may have given classified satellite imagery to al Qaeda. As is so often the case, the Fox News panelists provided no evidence for their slanderous claims.
Welcome to the new digital and satellite age McCarthyism. Phony documents are "dropped" into the hands of a right-wing London newspaper owned by Conrad Black. They are amplified by Black's other holdings, including the Jerusalem Post and Chicago Sun-Times. The story is then picked up by the worldwide television outlets of News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, and General Electric and echoed on the right-wing radio talk shows of Clear Channel and Viacom. Political careers are damaged or destroyed. There is no right of rebuttal for the accused. They are guilty as charged by a whipped up public that gets its information from the Orwellian telescreens of the corporate media.
The media operating in concert with political vermin to whip up popular opinion to stamp out criticism is nothing new. It was practiced by Joseph Goebbels quite effectively in Nazi Germany.
It was a British-born actor named Peter Finch who so eloquently and prophetically warned us about the sorry state of today's media. In Paddy Chayefsky's excellent movie, "Network," Finch plays UBS TV news anchormen Howard Beale. When UBS's entertainment division decides to fire Beale because of low ratings, he begins to rant and rave on the air. He is then given his own television entertainment show, "The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves." The most famous scene in the movie is when Beale exhorts his viewers to go their windows and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore." We should all be mad as hell about the propaganda in the newspapers and on the airwaves; George Bush and Tony Blair; Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black; Clear Channel and Viacom; the neo-conservative think tank bottom feeders; Rumsfeld and his circle of Pentagon ghouls such as Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Newt Gingrich; and the religious fundamentalists who give aid and succor to America's war machine. To paraphrase Howard Beale, "We should not take them anymore!"
Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based investigative journalist and columnist. He is a co-author of the forthcoming book, "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II."
Madsen