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An enemy of the state
George Galloway

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.

Over several days and dozens of articles, the Telegraph tried comprehensively to discredit me and the wider anti-war movement. As Neil Darbyshire, the paper's executive editor, said to explain why the paper rushed into print: "The Iraq war was at a volatile stage and Mr Galloway was unceasing in his opposition". And when they couldn't stand their story up they sought refuge in the coward's defence that they had never suggested the lurid claims they published had been true - but merely "neutral reportage" in the public interest. Even a blind man in a hurry could see that, in the words of Mr Justice Eady, "the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described".

But as most British people now believe, the entire case for the war was based on falsehoods and lies. From the forged papers showing Iraq buying nuclear materials from Niger to the pulp fiction of the Campbell-Scarlett dossiers, one of the grossest deceptions in modern history has been practised upon us. ...