WHO IS GEORGE GALLOWAY?….Via Instapundit, the Christian Science Monitor has more about George Galloway, the British MP accused of taking money from Saddam Hussein in return for his “vociferous opposition” to U.S. and British plans to invade Iraq.
This is truly a bizarre story. On the one hand, you have this from the Monitor story:
David Blair, the British reporter who first broke the story, told the BBC: “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.”
OK, that sounds reasonable. But on the other hand, Galloway was supposedly paid $10 million, with the most recent payment of $3 million coming in January.
$10 million!
What could possibly have lead the Iraqis to think that a fringe lefty like Galloway had any influence at all, let alone $10 million worth? What’s more, the first of the three large payments is said to have been made in April 2000, well before anyone was talking about attacking Iraq. What was the point of that?
And how did David Blair come across these documents? His story is here, but it raises as many questions as it answers. He just happened to be rummaging through boxes at the Foreign Ministry office in Baghdad while looters were running wild and found this stuff? Everything else was destroyed but these documents mysteriously survived intact?
Very weird. If Galloway ever turns his cell phone back on, perhaps we’ll learn more. In the meantime, at least it’s more interesting than yet another Laci Peterson update.
