[NYTr] Antiwar MP George Galloway Suspended from Parliament

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

[The Brits have a "democracy," too... Just like the USA's. -NYTr]

World Socialist Web Site - Jul 26, 2007
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jul2007/gall-j26.shtml

Britain: Antiwar MP George Galloway suspended from parliament

By Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland

The ejection and suspension of George Galloway MP from the House of
Commons on July 23 is the result of a witch-hunt aimed at intimidating
and silencing all opponents of the Iraq war.

Galloway’s sole crime was to defend himself against allegations
assembled by the Parliamentary Committee on Standards and Privileges,
first launched in 2003, which rehash previous failed attempts to prove
that the antiwar MP was in the pay of Saddam Hussein.

For more than an hour Galloway attempted to refute the committee’s
charges against him, but was prevented from doing so as a result of 17
interjections by the Speaker of the House who ruled out any questioning
of the political motives and legitimacy of the parliamentary equivalent
of a kangaroo court.

All ten members of the committee—three Conservative MPs, five Labour,
one Liberal Democrat and one Plaid Cymru—are political opponents of
Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party for his opposition to
the Iraq war. The overwhelming majority of the committee voted in
favour of the invasion of Iraq, and all five Labour members have
consistently opposed any investigation into how it was launched.

The committee’s inquiry was suspended for more than two years during
Galloway’s successful libel action against the Daily Telegraph for its
own claims that he had personally benefited from the proceeds of the
United Nations oil-for-food programme, through the Mariam Appeal—a
political campaign opposing sanctions against Iraq.

In addition to the Telegraph victory, a Serious Fraud Office
investigation and an inquiry by the Charities Commission found no
evidence of such wrongdoing by Galloway. Also, in Washington, Galloway
had made a devastating rebuttal of similar accusations by a Senate
subcommittee headed by Republican Norm Coleman.

However, the Parliamentary Committee has revived these discredited
allegations, overruling the findings of all previous bodies in order to
once again place Galloway in the frame.

It admits that it could find no evidence that Galloway had personally
benefited from any monies raised by the Mariam Appeal. Yet it asserts
that there was “powerful” circumstantial evidence that “a substantial
part” of donations to the appeal made by its chairman, Jordanian
businessman Fawaz Zureikat, “came from funds accrued via the
oil-for-food programme, from the former Iraqi regime.” Galloway was
accused of “recklessly or negligently, and probably knowingly” allowing
this to take place and so bringing Parliament into disrepute.

Committee repeats Telegraph’s assertions

The inquiry was first convened on the insistence of Conservative MP
Andrew Robathan, following the Daily Telegraph’s publication, in April
2003, of documents purportedly found by its reporter David Blair in the
bombed-out and looted Iraqi foreign ministry building. These documents
were part of a series of “finds” used to assert that Galloway and
others critical of the invasion were Iraqi stooges.

In what Galloway’s lawyer described as “one of the most unequivocally
emphatic judgments,” the libel judge had awarded Galloway £150,000 for
the “seriously defamatory” charges made by the Telegraph against him.
This judgment was subsequently upheld by the Court of Appeal, which
ruled that the newspaper had alleged, “Mr. Galloway took money from the
Iraqi oil-for-food programme for personal gain. That was not a mere
repeat of the documents, which in our view did not, or did not clearly,
make such an allegation ... the thrust of the coverage was that the
Daily Telegraph was saying that Mr. Galloway took money to line his own
pocket.”

The legal issues involved, therefore, were never how the documents were
found, or even their authenticity, but whether what they said was in
fact true and whether they substantiated what the Telegraph had said of
Galloway.

In returning to this issue, the committee determined that it was not
necessary to prove the truth of what was stated in the documents,
instead asserting that the question was whether to believe Galloway or
Blair as to their provenance. It ruled: “The Committee has no doubt
that Mr. Blair’s account is to be preferred to Mr. Galloway’s.”

Stating that the documents “appear ... to be authentic,” it argued that
therefore, “there must in our view be some degree of presumption in
favour of what they say being true.”

The committee stated that its conclusions were based on the “balance of
probabilities.” But a judgment that Blair’s account is more probable
than Galloway’s can only be based on political opinion or prejudice in
the absence of substantive proof, which is precisely what he attempted
to argue.

In another example of clearly political motivation, Galloway pointed
out that the committee’s findings were leaked to Rupert Murdoch’s
Sunday Times two days before by-elections that his Respect party was
contesting.

The most extraordinary development in the investigation was the claim
by its chairman, Sir Philip Mawer, to have received a transcript of an
August 2002 meeting during which Galloway is claimed to have personally
thanked Saddam Hussein and Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz for monies
given to his appeal. Mawer refused to answer Galloway’s question as to
how he came across this document, which the MP denounced as a fraud.
This supposed discovery of a “smoking gun”—after years of
investigations—is fortuitous to say the least, and opens the way for
possible legal proceedings.

The World Socialist Web Site noted at the time of Galloway’s appearance
before the US Senate, “he will not be forgiven, either for his antiwar
stance or his public humiliation of Coleman and [Democrat Senator Carl]
Levin....

“When asked whether Galloway had violated his oath to tell the truth
before the committee, Coleman said, ‘If in fact he lied to this
committee, there will have to be consequences.’

“Under US law, lying to Congress can result in a year in prison.”

Sure enough, immediately following the publication of Mawer’s report, a
spokesman for Senator Coleman said that he had drawn the attention of
US law enforcement agencies to it. The spokesman told the Telegraph,
“Senator Coleman takes misleading testimony very seriously and
encourages these law enforcement agencies to review all of the evidence
at hand, including the new evidence revealed in the report.”

Parliament’s record on political funding

In his speech to Parliament prior to his expulsion, Galloway was forced
to repeatedly insist on his right to respond to the charges against him
by raising the political motives of his accusers. If prevented from
doing so, he said, “It will not be possible for me to make the case
that I have been treated unjustly.” Whereas he had been accused of
being dishonourable by the committee, he could not question its
honourable intentions.

He ridiculed the committee’s pretensions to impartiality and the right
of parties who had supported the Iraq war to sit in judgment against
him. He noted that Mawer had said “six times in his report, that, in
the course of a four-year investigation described by the Committee as
being of unprecedented length and complexity, he had found no evidence
of any personal gain by me.”

Querying the claim that he should have checked the exact origins of all
donations made to his appeal, Galloway noted, “Being lectured by the
current House of Commons on the funding of political campaigns is like
being accused of having bad taste by Donald Trump or being accused of
slouching by the hunchback of Notre Dame. This House stands in utter
ill repute on the question of the funding of political campaigns.”

Referring to the year-long police investigation into allegations that
Labour had sold peerages in return for loans, he continued, “This
Parliament is stuffed full of political parties who were in turn
stuffed full of secret loans and donations from millionaires or
billionaires. None of the parties here ... ever asked the millionaires
and billionaires who gave and lent them money where they got the money
from....”

“It is a question of a committee of politicians criticising me for
political fundraising when they themselves are responsible for
political fundraising on a gigantic scale, from the most dubious of
sources, in which they never applied to themselves the standards that
they seek to apply to me in this report.”

Later, he pointed out that the instigator of the parliamentary inquiry,
Robathan, had been a member of INDICT, a pro-sanctions campaign group
run by Labour’s Ann Clwyd and funded by the US government.

Following Galloway’s ejection for “disorderly conduct,” Parliament
agreed to the committee’s ruling that he be suspended for 18 days for
bringing Parliament into disrepute, without even a vote being taken.

Hostility to popular antiwar sentiment

The World Socialist Web Site has no brief for Galloway, whose
soliciting of finances from various bourgeois Arab regimes flows from
his opportunist politics. However, he is being targeted not because of
his political failings, but because of his close association with the
antiwar movement.

The charge of bringing Parliament into disrepute is made by a body that
voted for war and has ever since blocked all attempts to censure those
guilty of war crimes, such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who
lied to the British people to justify launching a war of aggression—the
very charge on which leading Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg.

Whatever protestations are occasionally made on the floor, by its
actions Parliament is also culpable in all the atrocities associated
with the occupation—the tens of thousands who have been killed and
maimed; the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere;
internment without trial in Guantánamo and the rendition flights of the
CIA.

It is Galloway’s accusers who should themselves stand accused—of
sociocide, the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.
Instead, they presume to stand in judgment of someone who opposed this
criminal course.

Parliament’s hostility towards Galloway gives vent to the hatred of the
political class, not merely to one of its number it considers to have
broken ranks, but to the millions of working people who took to the
streets in an attempt to prevent the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Galloway’s presence in the Commons is a constant reminder of this mass
popular sentiment, which it is determined to expunge.

His ejection and suspension is a graphic demonstration of how
Parliament has been sealed off as an avenue through which to oppose the
Iraq occupation and the pro-business offensive being mounted against
jobs, social conditions and civil liberties.

During the parliamentary debate, not one of the erstwhile Labour lefts
spoke out in Galloway’s defence—a measure of their readiness to go
along with whatever is necessary in order to protect the government
from criticism. Moreover, not a single newspaper considered it
necessary to oppose Galloway’s suspension as an infringement of
democratic rights. In fact, the unprecedented scenes in parliament were
barely reported. This must be taken as a stark warning of the need to
develop a mass extra-parliamentary movement of the working class, in
opposition to all the official political parties.