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[Tyrone Slothrop]

This post from TAPPED (internal links omitted) adds some fairly crucial context:

THE INVENTIONS OF THE TELEGRAPH. There's a story behind today's news about George Galloway, the Scottish MP and left-wing Labour backbencher who received close to 130,000 pounds as the result of a libel suit he brought against Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

In a nutshell, the background to the story is this: Galloway has long challenged the West’s hard-line approach to Iraq; before the war he was one of the left’s foremost critics of the sanctions regime against Iraq, which he opposed on humanitarian grounds. He’s also visited Iraq on a few occasions. In April 2003, Telegraph reporter David Blair claimed to have found documents in the rubble of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry which proved what the right-wing British commentariat had long suspected: that Galloway was on Saddam Hussein’s payroll. On April 22, the Telegraph ran with the story, as did the Christian Science Monitor three days later, citing a separate set of documents that made the same Galloway-Hussein connection. After the stories ran, Galloway threatened a libel suit. The Monitor put the documents through a rigorous series of forensic tests and decided that they were fake.

On June 22, 2003, the Monitor retracted their story and explained how they obtained the documents in a lengthy front-page spread. The Monitor's retraction is worth a read as it offers a fascinating insight into the cryptic, if lucrative, underground market of forgeries that were distrubuted to reporters as pro-war propaganda. (I'm inclined to see the hand of the once-powerful Iraqi National Congress in this particular peddling. As Knight-Ridder’s list of INC-planted stories indicated, lying and forgery was a key part of that group's media strategy before the war.)

For its part, the Telegraph never backed off its story and did not put the documents through the same rigorous testing as the Monitor. The Telegraph continues to stand by its reporting and its decision to run with the story.

At this point, I think it's useful to take a step back and review the Telegraph’s journalistic methods immediately following the fall of Baghdad, which seemed to depend a great deal on good luck and happenstance. At the time, they had at least two investigative reporters on the ground, Inigo Gilmore and David Blair, who seemed to be dispatched to different bombed-out government buildings. At the Foreign Ministry, Blair found the Galloway scoop amidst the rubble. A few days later across town, his collegue Gilmore happened across some incredible (literally) documents in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service. As Gilmore reported on April 27, 2003, these documents apparently provided definitive proof of a Hussein–al-Qaeda link formalized in a May 1998 meeting.

Months later, the Telegraph’s Con Coughlin reported on documents he obtained which seemed to prove that Mohammed Atta and Hussein were in league prior to September 11. The scoop ran in the paper last December under the headline, "TERRORIST BEHIND SEPTEMBER 11 STRIKE WAS TRAINED BY SADDAM," and William Safire cited it in his column the following day. Of course, this document was also deemed a fake, as Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported in Newsweek.

One might wonder why this right-wing rag of a paper is so incapable of admitting its own faults. Its own reporting on the Galloway libel decision is revealing:

• Telegraph Group Ltd had denied libel, claiming the articles were responsible journalism and that it was in the public interest for it to publish the contents of the documents.

In the public interest or to serve ideological ends? You decide.