UK war dossier a sham, say experts
British 'intelligence' lifted from academic articles
Michael
White and Brian Whitaker
Friday February 7, 2003
The
Guardian
Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international
embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British
government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on
"intelligence material" - were taken from published academic
articles, some of them several years old.
Amid
charges of "scandalous" plagiarism on the night when Tony Blair
attempted to rally support for the US-led campaign against Saddam
Hussein, Whitehall's dismay was compounded by the knowledge that
the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US
secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN
security council on Wednesday.
Citing the British dossier, entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of
concealment, deception and intimidation in front of a worldwide
television audience Mr Powell said: "I would call my colleagues'
attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom
distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi
deception activities."
But
on Channel 4 News last night it was revealed that four of the
report's 19 pages had been copied - with only minor editing and a
few insertions - from the internet version of an article by
Ibrahim al-Marashi which appeared in the Middle East Review of
International Affairs last September.
Though that was not the only textual embarrassment No 10 seemed
determined to tough it out last night.
Dismissing the gathering controversy as the latest example of
media obsession with spin, officials insisted it in no way
undermines the underlying truth of the dossier, whose contents
had been re-checked with British intelligence sources. "The
important thing is that it is accurate," said one source.
What
Whitehall may not grasp is the horror with which unacknowledged
borrowing of material - the crime of plagiarism - is regarded in
American academic and media circles, even though successive US
governments have a poor record of misleading their own citizens
on foreign policy issues at least since the Vietnam war. On a
special edi tion of BBC Newsnight, filmed before a critical
audience last night, Mr Blair stressed that he was willing to
forgo popularity to warn voters of the dangers of weapons of mass
destruction: "I may be wrong, but I do believe it."
With
trust a critical element in the battle to woo a sceptical public
the first sentence of the No 10 document merely states, somewhat
cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including
intelligence material".
But
Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University,
told Channel 4: "I found it quite startling when I realised that
I'd read most of it before."
The
content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean
Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review
in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged.
The
document, as posted on Downing Street's website at the end of
January, also acci dentally named four Whitehall officials who
had worked on it: P Hamill, J Pratt, A Blackshaw and M Khan. It
was reposted on February 3 with the first three names deleted.
"Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence
services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really
does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's
internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data."
Evidence of an electronic cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall
officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves textual
quirks from its original sources. One sentence in Dr Marashi's
article includes a misplaced comma in referring to Iraq's head of
military intelligence during the 1991 Gulf war. The same sentence
in Downing Street's report contains the same misplaced comma.
A
Downing Street spokesman declined to say why the report's public
sources had not been acknowledged. "We said that it draws on a
number of sources, including intelligence. It speaks for itself."
Dr
Marashi, a research associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation
Studies in Monterey, California, said no one had contacted him
before lifting the material.
But
on the regular edition of Newsnight he later gave some comfort to
No 10. "In my opinion, the UK document overall is accurate even
though there are a few minor cosmetic changes. The only
inaccuracies in the UK document were that they maybe inflated
some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies," he said.
Explaining the more journalistic changes inserted into his work
by Whitehall he added: "Being an academic paper, I tried to
soften the language.
"For
example, in one of my documents, I said that they support
organisations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the
UK document refers to it as 'supporting terrorist organisations
in hostile regimes'.
"The
primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two
sets of documents, one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of
Iraq - around 4m documents - as well as 300,000 documents left by
Iraqi security services in Kuwait. After that, I have been
following events in the Iraqi security services for the last 10
years."
Iraq's decision last night to let weapons inspectors interview
one of its scientists for the first time without government
"minders" signalled that Baghdad may be bending under
international pressure.
But diplomats
will be trying to determine over the next few days whether it is
a token gesture or a real shift away from what they describe as
Iraq's "catch us if you can" approach to inspections. Hours
before the announcement, a Foreign Office source in London
signalled that this was the kind of change of heart that Iraq
would have to make to avoid war.
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