The following documents were found in the Iraqi foreign ministry by David Blair of The Daily Telegraph. The first, from the head of the intelligence service to Saddam Hussein, contains what it says are details of George Galloway MP's financial dealings with the regime and his contacts with Iraqi agents. The second, written a month later by the then foreign minister Tariq Aziz, circulates Mr Galloway's "work programme" for 2000. The "programme" was not among the documents found.
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.
George Galloway's Jordanian intermediary has a family history of loyalty to Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, according to his Iraqi intelligence profile.
Fawaz Abdullah Zureikat, 53, would clearly be an ideal choice to conduct any business dealings with the Iraqi regime.
His "Mukhabarat" profile, attached to the intelligence chief's memorandum to Saddam's office on Mr Galloway, refers to him warmly as a "sympathiser with Iraq".
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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."
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Doesn't surprise me.
George Galloway was, to a certain extent, an unpopular and unbelievable figure before his comments during the war. Surely nobody would bother trying to smear him. Where's the gain?
"Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa! Let's get the hell out of here already! Screw history!" - Professor Farnsworth
Hang the Bastard! Hang him High! hoist his body to the sky! It's a s nice as a day can be! Won't you come to the hanging with me?
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little." -George Carlin (1937-2008)
"Have some of you Americans actually seen Football? Of course there are 0-0 draws but that doesn't make them any less exciting." -Dr Roberts, with quite possibly the dumbest thing ever said in 10 years of SDNet.
