| Author | Message | | Guest-c651 | | Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 4:32 am Post subject: Colin Powell Used Plagiarized Student Essay at UN |
| BREAKING: LATEST BRITISH IRAQ DOSSIER HALED BY COLIN POWELL IS ACTUALLY PLAGIARIZED FROM STUDENT ESSAY!
http://www.channel4.com/news/home/z/stories/20030206/dossier.html
Colin Powell is Lying:
http://www.mikehersh.com/Colin_Powell_is_Lying.shtml
http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue3/jv6n3a1.html
Future historians may well record today as the beginning of the endgame in the effort by the powerful few to impose a Mideast war of conquest on the rest of the world. The British Dossier relied upon so heavily by Colin Powell in his speech before the United Nations stands exposed as a fraud, plagiarized from a student's thesis. Far from being a report on the current state of Iraq, much of the material in the plagiarized report was from before the first Gulf War.
In a single stroke, Bush's case for war in Iraq has been shattered. The reliance on a dossier plagiarized from a student destroys the credibility of Colin Powell's entire case. Nobody dares assume that any of the other material presented is as Powell claimed it to be. Are the photos and intercepts real? Are the translations exact? Nobody knows, and only fools dare assume so.
More than credibility, the very fact that the warhawks thought they could pull a fast one like this and get away with it shows a disturbing lack of judgment and common sense, along with the total absence of professional ethics. The mentality of those in power, as revealed by this latest embarrassment, is clearly that of delinquent school children cheating on exams. War is a horrible enough affair without being placed in the hands of moral infants.
The mainstream media polls have been trumpeting that Colin Powell's speech convinced a majority of Americans of the need for war. Not that I trust the accuracy of those media polls, but in hindsight, it is clear that Colin Powell has made total fools of all those who trusted and believed his speech. All those who did answer in the affirmative for war based on Colin's speech look like total idiots, taken in by a con-job using stolen term papers. It will likely be a long time before they will listen to anything Powell, or for that matter the US Government says for a long time to come, without a healthy dose of skepticism.
So, where does that leave Bush and the four horse's asses of the Apocalypse? They still want their war. However, they have lost what Sun Tzu calls the "Moral Law," which causes a people to follow their rulers into war regardless of personal danger. Few Americans will spend their money or their blood in a war to conquer oil because they know such a war is not moral. Bush tried to manufacture Moral Law out of 9-11, then weakened the Moral Law moving to quickly to shift that Moral Law onto Iraq.
With the collapse of Powell's case before the UN, Bush has lost the Moral Law. The American people, who are for the most part a just and fair people, will not support a war to conquer oil. All the military technology in the world cannot win a war if the soldiers who must control the field know they are not fighting a moral war. That's why the USSR lost Afghanistan.
If Bush attempts to invade Iraq without Moral Law, he will lose that war. The population will not willingly pay for it, and soldiers will desert in numbers too great to court-martial and shoot, or at the very least will engage in small sabotages, such as the British sailors who recently threw their mandated vaccines overboard.
That leaves only one possibility; to regain the Moral Law. Of course, the only way to regain the Moral Law is to convince the United States that it is under attack and has no choice but to invade the enemy, in defense, of course. Remember when we were "attacked" with the anthrax letters? Even though the letters inside appeared to come from Arabs, the actual anthrax was from a US biological warfare laboratory. History records many governments that arranged for attacks on their own people to further a political agenda. Such grand deception is as old as Rome.
The talking heads, many on tape delay, are still lauding Colin Powell's performance at the UN and proclaiming his case a convincing one. It is up to YOU to make copies of the following story and see to it that every radio and TV station and newspaper in your area understands that Powell's case was based in part on a stolen student essay, and that far from being a report on Iraq today, contained information from before the first Gulf War. There is a list of media email addresses above. Follow up with PHONE CALLS to your congressmen. Congressional contact info is at www.congress.org.
Get busy! This is the story that could end the war!
My people at FOX have a copy, as do the Donahue producers and most of the NY/NJ major newspapers.
And I've sent it to a few folks in Congress, as well.
See you in the chats. We're taking this country back from der Fuhrer Bush and his jackbooted minions......... | |  | | Guest-c651 | | | | Guest-3e40 | | Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 9:24 am Post subject: |
| | Oh much too busy to spread this one around, Im off to help my lad write his homework on Greenland and its links to Al Queada, he wrote it out in rough last night, and sent it to the foreign and commonwealth office just to check where Greenland is, they wrote back asking for a full copy of his prepared draft....... | | | | Anglo Thug | | Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 10:07 am Post subject: |
| Shhhhh! We don't want this getting out!
_________________
Please sign the petition to prosecute War Criminal Tony Blair | | | | Guest-c651 | | Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 11:52 am Post subject: |
| UK'S BLAIR UNDER FIRE FOR PLAGIARIZED IRAQ DOSSIER
Dominic Evans, Reuters, 2/7/03
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=586&e=3&cid=586&u=/nm/20030207/wl_nm/iraq_britain_dossier_dc
London - British Prime Minister Tony Blair was accused Friday of playing
the same propaganda games as Saddam Hussein after chunks of an
"intelligence" dossier on Iraq turned out to have been plagiarized from
academic papers.
The dossier, published this week on a government Web site, said Iraq had
mounted a massive campaign to deceive and intimidate U.N. inspectors
hunting for banned weapons.
The latest in a series of British documents focusing on the alleged threat
from Saddam and rallying support for a possible U.S.-led war, it was
praised by Secretary of State Colin Powell in the U.N. Security Council
Wednesday.
It claimed to draw upon "a number of sources, including intelligence
material." But Friday, red-faced officials admitted whole swathes were
lifted word for word -- grammatical slips and all -- from a student thesis.
Outraged politicians jumped on the revelation to accuse Blair of misleading
the public and said it cast doubt on the credibility of his whole case
against Saddam…
SEE ALSO:
IRAQ SHOWS OFF MISSILE SITE TO REBUT U.S. CHARGES
Reuters, 2/7/03
BAGHDAD - Iraq took international journalists to a missile engine testing
site north of Baghdad on Friday in an attempt to rebut U.S. charges that it
was developing long-range missiles in violation of a U.N. ban.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, during a presentation to the U.N.
Security Council on Wednesday, produced a satellite picture of two engine
test stands at Falluja. One of the stands, Powell said, was designed to
test engines of missiles with a range of 1,200 km (750 miles).
Under U.N. resolutions, Iraq is allowed to have missiles with a maximum
range of 150 km (95 miles). Iraq's Information Ministry took journalists to
the site, run by the government's Al Rafah company.
Ali Jassem, an official at the site, said the facility was the first
visited by U.N. weapons inspectors when they resumed work in Iraq on
November 27.
"The inspectors visited this site and searched it. They found that
everything inside falls under permitted activities," Jassem said.
He said the inspectors had returned to the site several times since, the
last of which was on February 4, a day before Powell's presentation…
---
KURDS PUZZLED BY REPORT OF TERROR CAMP
C. J. Chivers, New York Times, 2/6/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/international/middleeast/06ANSA.html
ERBIL, Iraq - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's assertion today that
Islamic extremists were operating a poisons training camp and factory in
northern Iraq appeared to surprise Kurdish officials, who greeted the claim
with a mix of satisfaction and confusion.
The officials were pleased to hear an American effort to discredit their
Islamist enemies, and to sense momentum toward war to unseat Saddam
Hussein. But some also wondered if the intelligence Mr. Powell presented to
the United Nations Security Council was imprecise…
One senior Kurdish official, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
who is familiar with the intelligence on Ansar, said he had not heard of
the laboratory Mr. Powell displayed.
"I don't know anything about this compound," he said.
Kurds also questioned whether Mr. Powell was mistaken, or had mislabeled
the photograph. Khurmal, the village named on the photo, is controlled not
by Ansar al-Islam but by Komala Islami Kurdistan, a more moderate Islamic
group…
---
WAR AND WISDOM
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, 2/7/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/07/opinion/07KRIS.html
President Bush and Colin Powell have adroitly shown that Iraq is hiding
weapons, that Saddam Hussein is a lying scoundrel and that Iraqi officials
should be less chatty on the telephone.
But they did not demonstrate that the solution is to invade Iraq.
If you've seen kids torn apart by machine-gun fire, you know that war
should be only a last resort. And we're not there yet. We still have a
better option: containment.
That's why in the Pentagon, civilian leaders are gung-ho but many in
uniform are leery. Former generals like Norman Schwarzkopf, Anthony Zinni
and Wesley Clark have all expressed concern about the rush to war.
"Candidly, I have gotten somewhat nervous at some of the pronouncements
Rumsfeld has made," General Schwarzkopf told The Washington Post, adding:
"I think it is very important for us to wait and see what the inspectors
come up with..."
As for General Zinni, he said of the hawks: "I'm not sure which planet they
live on, because it isn't the one that I travel." In an October speech to
the Middle East Institute in Washington, he added: "[If] we intend to solve
this through violent action, we're on the wrong course. First of all, I
don't see that that's necessary. Second of all, I think that war and
violence are a very last resort."
---
CRIES OF DESPERATION
Jill Nelson, MSNBC, 2/7/03
http://msnbc.com/news/869613.asp?0cv=CB20
Imagine a country ruled by a leader whose rise to power occurred under
deeply questionable circumstances. Imagine that this country appointed
itself the world's policeman, threatening another nation with a massive
military invasion if that nation did not accede to his demands.
The ruler of this country had few allies, and some of those he did have
were either threatened or bribed into supporting his demands. He ignored
the needs of his own people - millions of whom lived in poverty, had no
work or health care and little hope. But the ruler ignored the domestic
crisis and cries of his own people, and simply beat the drums of war louder
to drown out the voices of dissent.
Welcome to George W. Bush's America, 2003... | | | | Guest-c651 | | Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 12:11 pm Post subject: News of Bogus UK Intelligence Report Sweeping the Planet |
| Subj: "News of Bogus UK Intelligence Report Sweeping the Planet"
Date: 2/7/03 7:51:38 AM Pacific Standard Time
(Why aren't the American media reporting this?)
<< Worse, the Iraq described by the graduate student is not the Iraq of 2003 but the Iraq of 1991. . . . The official British document even cut and pasted whole verbatim segments of the research paper . . . and presented the findings as the result of intense work by British intelligence services. . . . U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell both praised and quoted that same British report in his presentation at the United Nations yesterday. >>
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/020603_plagiarized.html
Britain's Intelligence Dossier on Iraq
was Plagiarized from a Grad Student
News of Bogus UK Intelligence Report Sweeping the Planet
Revelation May Speed Up Iraqi Invasion
by Michael C. Ruppert
Feb. 6, 2003, 2230 hrs, PST, (FTW) - A story is sweeping the world tonight and it says a great deal about those who are forcing the world into a war it does not want. The famed dossier presented by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to his Parliament was plagiarized from two articles and a September 2002 research paper submitted by a graduate student. Worse, the Iraq described by the graduate student is not the Iraq of 2003 but the Iraq of 1991. So glaring was the theft of intellectual property that the official British document even cut and pasted whole verbatim segments of the research paper, including grammatical errors, and presented the findings as the result of intense work by British intelligence services.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell both praised and quoted that same British report in his presentation at the United Nations yesterday.
It is important that readers see and understand the enormity of this violation of public trust for themselves. The story was first broken by Britain's Channel 4 today and it is appearing in more papers and web sites by the hour. The following links lead directly to the Channel 4 story, to the British "intelligence" report and to the original student paper.
What was also disclosed was that certain portions of the academic report were altered by the PM Tony Blair to make them more inflammatory. In one cited instance Blair changed "aiding opposition groups" to "supporting terrorists."
The Channel 4 story is at:
http://www.channel4.com/news/home/z/stories/20030206/dossier.html
The Official UK intelligence report is at:
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7111.asp
The original student research paper is located at: http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue3/jv6n3a1.html
In the context of merely preventing or slowing a war with Iraq this would be earth shattering news. But in a world that is slowly beginning to feel the pressure of and admit the reality of dwindling global oil supplies the fallout from the story may actually accelerate hostilities. British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be, by tomorrow, facing monumental challenges in both Parliament and from British public opinion that is overwhelmingly opposed to an Iraqi invasion. The event could be enough to topple his government and cause new elections which might well result in a new government that is not mind-melded with the Bush administration.
The Bush administration, faced with its own embarrassment over the issue, cannot wage a successful war without England. The first thought that came to my mind when I saw the story was that George W. Bush must pre-empt this story and make it moot to save not only Blair but himself as well. The only way to do that is to have the war begin before the justified outrage of the electorate which has been treated with utter contempt can make itself felt.
I noticed tonight that the Associated Press and Yahoo news had reported that the 101st Air Assault Division based at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky - the Army's premier "door kickers" - had been given their deployment orders for the Gulf this afternoon. As I have previously reported, the 101st, along with units like the 75th Rangers can be deployed and operational within 96 hours, anywhere in the world. When the 101st heads out you know the war is going to start very soon.
These are incredibly dangerous times, made more so because there is no turning back for the Bush administration. This story is incredible proof of the cynicism, dishonesty and callousness of the tyrants pushing the world toward destruction. And Iraq is merely the first stop on a sequential plan for control of the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. I encourage all who read the information contained in these links to spread it far and wide and also, by whatever means at their disposal, to tell the mainstream press, members of congress and the White House itself that we will not follow; we will not obey; and we will not kill on the orders of those who lie to us and who demonstrate the integrity of thieves and intellectual cowards.
This might be our last chance before the bombs start falling, before young American men and many innocent Iraqi civilians are reduced to blood and ash. | | | | Guest-400c | | Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 8:23 pm Post subject: Blair Acknowledges Flaws in Iraq Dossier |
| washingtonpost.com
Blair Acknowledges Flaws in Iraq Dossier
Britain Took Some Material That Powell Cited at U.N. From 12-Year-Old Academic Papers By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 8, 2003; Page A15 LONDON, Feb. 7 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman today conceded that his office copied material from three academic papers into special intelligence dossier on Iraq that was released to the public this week. The spokesman said the information was used without attribution but insisted it was accurate.
Critics of the government began attacking the dossier's credibility after British television news reported that sections of something the government had presented as a compendium of its own material, including sensitive spy data, were actually taken from publicly available academic papers.
The dossier was cited and praised by U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during his presentation on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday. "It's embarrassing for the prime minister and for poor old Colin Powell," said Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies. The controversy has compounded Blair's difficulties in rallying a skeptical British public behind his strong support for the United States and possible military action in Iraq. While no opinion polls have yet been reported, editorials and politicians outside Blair's circle have generally discounted Powell's U.N. address and a public relations campaign that Blair mounted this week.
The incident also opened a rare window on what seems to be a dispute about Iraq between the prime minister's office and British intelligence services. The spy agencies have been much more cautious than Blair in their assessment of Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction and links with the al Qaeda terror network.
The dossier "was clearly prepared by someone in Downing Street and it's obviously part of the prime minister's propaganda campaign," said Heyman. "The intelligence services were not involved -- I've had two people phoning me today to say, 'Look, we had nothing to with it.'"
The 19-page dossier, entitled "Iraq -- Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation," was based on "a number of sources, including intelligence material," its introduction says. The report makes a detailed case that Iraq has tried to conceal its weapons programs from U.N. inspectors. The report also charts the structure of Iraq's major intelligence organizations.
It used, without credit, excerpts from a 12-year-old paper on the buildup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War written by California graduate student Ibrahim Marashi and published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. The dossier even repeated the paper's typographical errors.
Other sections were copied from Jane's Intelligence Review, and from an article last fall by Cambridge University lecturer Glen Rangwala in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. Rangwala told the Reuters news agency he calculated that 11 of the dossier's 19 pages were "taken wholesale from academic papers."
A Downing Street spokesman who briefed reporters today, and who insisted on anonymity, said the dossier's purpose was to "show people not only the kind of regime we were dealing with but also how Saddam Hussein had pursued a policy of deliberate deception."
The spokesman said the first and third sections of the document were based largely on intelligence material, while the second was based in part on Marashi's work, "which, in retrospect, we should have acknowledged."
"The fact that we had used some of his work did not throw into question the accuracy of the document as a whole," the spokesman said. He did not discuss the other two articles.
"This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons," Menzies Campbell, a member of Parliament, told the BBC today. He is foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrat Party. "The dossier may not amount to much, but this is a considerable embarrassment for a government trying still to make a case for war."
In another apparent example of feuding between Downing Street and the British intelligence world, sources in the Defense Ministry earlier this week leaked to the BBC a classified assessment by a British intelligence agency that there were no current links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda. The report appeared to contradict Blair's claims that Baghdad was giving shelter to al Qaeda operatives.
Speaking with a BBC interviewer Thursday evening, Blair acknowledged the defense intelligence report's conclusion that Iraq, a secular Arab nationalist state, and al Qaeda, an Islamic fundamentalist movement, were not linked. | | | | Guest-400c | | Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 8:47 pm Post subject: Analyst Finds Work Plagiarized in British Dossier |
| http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-plagiarism8feb08,1,1204126.story
Analyst Finds Work Plagiarized in British Dossier
Intelligence findings on Iraq relied heavily on a published piece by a California researcher.
By John Johnson
Times Staff Writer
February 8 2003
MONTEREY, Calif. -- Embarrassed British officials acknowledged Friday that large portions of an intelligence dossier on Iraq's obstruction of weapons inspections were copied from published sources, including an article by a researcher at an obscure government think tank here.
The dossier was posted this week on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Web site and was cited Wednesday by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his presentation of evidence to the U.N. Security Council.
No one likes to be a victim of plagiarism. But Ibrahim Marashi had to acknowledge Friday that having his work pinched by the prime minister had brought him a measure of fame and notoriety he had never known.
"I wouldn't characterize my feeling as angry. More like disappointed," said Marashi, a lecturer at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. But yes, he said, rushing from interviews with CNN to sit-downs with British TV, he couldn't help feeling flattered to have his work borrowed by Blair.
Although Blair's team said the information was based on intelligence and offered "up-to-date details" of Saddam Hussein's security apparatus, part of it was actually Marashi's uncredited work from an article he wrote for the September issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. Titled "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis," the article examined the five security agencies that keep Hussein in power.
Wire service reports from London said a spokesman for Blair took responsibility for the oversight.
"In retrospect, we should have acknowledged" that sections of the dossier came from Marashi's writing, the spokesman said.
Several paragraphs are identical in the two documents, and others are only slightly different. Jane's Intelligence Review said sections of its articles also were in the dossier.
Political opponents said that Blair had misled the public and that the development cast doubt on the credibility of his case against Hussein.
Britain said its dossier was based on "a number of sources." Assertions from sources other than Marashi include that Baghdad had bugged the weapons inspectors and had hidden documents in Iraqi hospitals, mosques and homes.
The media attention thrust into the limelight the 29-year-old descendant of immigrants who fled Iraq in 1968, when Hussein's Baath Party came to power. Marashi grew up in California and was educated at UCLA, Georgetown and Oxford. Besides lecturing at the postgraduate school, he is a research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, also in Monterey.
Marashi's article is a fairly dry analysis of the Mukhabarat, the security apparatus that he says has helped Hussein survive "two costly wars plus numerous internal insurrections, coup attempts and crippling international sanctions."
The agencies examined were Special Security, General Security, General Intelligence, Military Intelligence and Military Security.
All play a role, according to Marashi, in "procuring and concealing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." His own lengthy footnotes include references to documents seized during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Kurdish rebels seized 10 million pages of documents, while 300,000 more documents were abandoned in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi soldiers. Some of those papers have been made public over the last decade.
In an interview, Marashi didn't hide his own political leanings. "I want a regime change in Iraq," he said.
As for Blair's borrowing from his analysis, he said no one from the British government has yet attempted to contact him to apologize. | | | | Alpha | | | | Guest-98a3 | | Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2003 12:14 am Post subject: Britain Admits Much Report on Iraq Came From Magazines |
| While reading the following, keep in mind that the New York Times has a pro-Israel bias as well:
http://www.nytimes.com/ads/amex_popunder10103.html
INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT
Britain Admits That Much of Its Report on Iraq Came From Magazines
By SARAH LYALL
ONDON, Feb. 7 ? The British government admitted today that large sections of its most recent report on Iraq, praised by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as "a fine paper" in his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, had been lifted from magazines and academic journals.
But while acknowledging that the 19-page report was indeed a "pull-together of a variety of sources," a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair defended it as "solid" and "accurate."
The document, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation," was posted on No. 10 Downing Street's Web site on Monday. It was depicted as an up-to-date and unsettling assessment by the British intelligence services of Iraq's security apparatus and its efforts to hide its activities from weapons inspectors and to resist international efforts to force it to disarm.
But much of the material actually came, sometimes verbatim, from several nonsecret published articles, according to critics of the government's policy who have studied the documents. These include an article published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs in September 2002, as well as three articles from Jane's Intelligence Review, two of them published in the summer of 1997 and one in November 2002.
In some cases, the critics said, parts of the articles ? or of summaries posted on the Internet ? were paraphrased in the report. In other cases, they were plagiarized ? to the extent that even spelling and punctuation errors in the originals were reproduced.
The Blair government did not deny that any of this had happened. But its spokesman insisted today that the government believed "the text as published to be accurate" and that the document had been published because "we wanted to show people not only the kind of regime we were dealing with, but also how Saddam Hussein had pursued a policy of deliberate deception."
He added: "In retrospect, we should, to clear up any confusion, have acknowledged which bits came from public sources and which bits came from other sources." He said the document had been written by government officials and drawn from "a number of sources, including intelligence sources."
"The overall objective was to give the full picture without compromising intelligence sources," he said.
But critics of the government said that not only did the document appear to have been largely cut and pasted together, but also that the articles it relied on were based on information that is, by now, obsolete.
For instance, the second section of the three-part report, which is described on the Downing Street Web site as providing "up-to-date details of Iraq's network of intelligence and security," was drawn in large part from "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: a Guide," an article about the activities of Iraqi intelligence in Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September. Its author was Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.
Mr. Marashi told Channel 4 News, which first reported the plagiarism charges, that his research had been drawn primarily from two huge sets of documents: "one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq ? around four million documents ? as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi security services in Kuwait." He also said that while he had no reason to doubt the truth of anything he had written and believed the government report to be accurate, no one had asked permission or informed him about using his work.
"I am surprised, flattered as well, that this information got used in a U.K. government dossier," Mr. Marashi said in an interview with Reuters. "Had they consulted me, I could have provided them with more updated information."
Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University who has compared the British report with the articles it used as sources, said that in some cases, the authors apparently changed phrases from the original articles to make the case against Iraq seem more extreme.
For instance, Dr. Rangwala said, a section on the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi directorate of general intelligence, appeared to have been lifted verbatim from Mr. Marashi's article, except for a few tweaks. Where Mr. Marashi mentions that the Mukhabarat's responsibilities include "monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq," the government document speaks of "spying on foreign embassies in Iraq." Mr. Marashi's description of the Mukhabarat's role in "aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes" becomes "supporting terrorist organizations in hostile regimes."
Critics of the British and American policy toward Iraq said the report showed how little concrete evidence the two governments actually have against Iraq, as well as how poor their intelligence sources were.
"Both governments seem so desperate to create a pretext to attack Iraq that they are willing to say anything," said Nathaniel Hurd, a consultant on Iraq and a critic of the American position. "This U.K. dossier, which deceptively uses outdated material and plagiarizes, is just the latest example of official dishonesty."
Opposition politicians here attacked the report as the deceptive work of a bumbling government clutching at straws as it tries to make a case for war.
"This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons," said Menzies Campbell, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats. "The dossier may not amount to much, but this is a considerable embarrassment for a government trying still to make a case for war."
Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative Party's shadow defense secretary, said the government had not satisfactorily addressed the concerns raised by the disclosures.
"The government's reaction utterly fails to explain, deny or excuse the allegations," Mr. Jenkin said. "The document has been cited by the prime minister and Colin Powell as the basis for a possible war. Who is responsible for such an incredible failure of judgment?" | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
