The following is an archived copy of a message sent to a Discussion List run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
Views expressed in this archived message are those of the author, not of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
[Main archive index/search] [List information] [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq Homepage]
Here are all the articles so far in the UK press, all from today (7 Feb), in the order included below: 1. Financial Times, `Government document contains errors' (p. 2) 2. Independent, `The Iraq crisis: propaganda - Downing Street accused of dossier plagiarism old articles' (p. 2) 3. Press Association, `No. 10 accused of plagiarising Iraq dossier' 4. Guardian, `UK dossier lifted evidence' (p. 5) I found no articles in the US press, surprise, or anywhere else. If you find any let me know. I've written to the "Democracy Now!" radio programme in America -- the only free speech on the airwaves there -- pointing them to the Channel 4 story. They've interviewed Glen before so maybe again. The FT article skillfully downplays the story. The headline mentions 'errors' rather than plagiarism or even 'lifting' (the Guardian). The lead paragraph says only that `researchers' claim it is a cut-and-paste job, as if it's just one of many opinions on the report. Perhaps the news broke too late last night for UK papers to include a full story (though not an excuse for US papers, who have at least an extra 5 hours). That might explain why the Independent article was so thin, even though of major papers it is the most antiwar. Maybe the Mirror will run a proper article tomorrow. I fear that papers who covered it today, even if badly, will say, "No need to cover it again." And by Sunday the Observer, which is pro-war anyway, will think the story is no longer 'has legs. With enough pressure on them they might change their tune. -Sanjoy ====================================================================== Financial Times (London) 7 February 2003, London Edition, p. 2 Government document contains errors By STEPHEN FIDLER DATELINE: LONDON A government document on Iraq - praised this week by Colin Powell, the US secre tary of state - contains factual errors and has been described by researchers as a "cut-and-paste job". The document was meant to highlight Iraq's efforts to deceive weapons inspectors. But large sections were drawn, without attribution, from three articles on Iraq's security services, one of them published in 1997. In his address to the United Nations on Wednesday, Mr Powell described the document as "a fine paper . .. which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities". Yet in one section, the British document describes the Iraqi military security service as having been established in 1992 - and as having moved to a new headquarters two years earlier in 1990. Glen Rangwala, a politics lecturer at Cambridge University who uncovered the errors, said officials had apparently incorrectly copied part of a document re-lating to one security service in a section devoted to another. The copy of the three papers - Mr Rangwala called it plagiarism - had resulted in different spellings for Arabic names, including the Ba'ath party, Mr Rangwala said. Downing Street stood by the document, which described itself as drawing upon "a number of sources including intelligence material". Downing Street would not say who compiled it. Ibrahim al-Marashi, a research associate at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, California - an author of one of the reports used as a source - said: "I know it's cut-and-paste because they have copied a lot of my mistakes." He said he had rushed the article to the Middle East Review of International Affairs. The document, released to journalists and published on Downing Street's website, also copied most of a diagram Mr al-Marashi said had taken months of research - without attribution or permission. Two other researchers were quoted extensively: 1997 articles by Sean Boyne and a 2002 article by Ken Gause, both of which appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review. Chris Aaron, its editor, said it was not unusual for UK governments to use a combination of publicly available material with some intelligence - but the mistakes raised questions about how carefully it had been compiled. Copyright 2003 The Financial Times Limited ====================================================================== The Independent (London) 7 February 2003, p. 2 THE IRAQ CRISIS: PROPAGANDA - DOWNING STREET ACCUSED OF DOSSIER PLAGIARISM OLD ARTICLES By NIGEL MORRIS POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT THE GOVERNMENT was accused last night of plagiarising sections of an intelligence dossier on Iraq from a postgraduate student. Channel 4 News reported that paragraphs had been lifted from an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last year by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a student from Monterey, California. The analysis, published on the Downing Street website, was called Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment Deception and Intimidation. Glen Rangwala, an academic at Cambridge University, had spotted the student's work because passages containing typographical errors were repeated in the dossier, Channel 4 said. The document was cited by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, in his address to the UN on Wednesday. A Downing Street statement said the report was accurate and that it had not claimed "exclusivity". Copyright 2003 Newspaper Publishing PLC ====================================================================== Press Association 7 February 2003; HOME NEWS NO. 10 ACCUSED OF PLAGIARISING IRAQ DOSSIER By Tim Ross and Andrew Woodcock, PA News Tony Blair was today facing accusations that Downing Street had plagiarised its latest dossier of evidence against Saddam Hussein from out-of-date material. No 10 insisted the dossier released on Monday was "accurate" and had never claimed exclusive authorship. But the Tories said this explanation "utterly failed" to deny or excuse the allegations that the 19-page intelligence document was substantially plagiarised. The dossier was designed to help win over sceptics by outlining Iraq's alleged efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction. It said UN weapons inspectors were outnumbered by 200 to one by Iraqi agents trying to deceive them, and provided "up to date details" of Iraq's security organisations. The Downing Street notice introducing the document said: "Iraq's campaign of obstruction against United Nations weapons inspectors is set out in a new report released by the government". US Secretary of State Colin Powell recommended it to the world in his keynote UN presentation on Wednesday, in which he called the document a "fine paper". But experts dismissed the dossier as largely copied from three different articles, Channel 4 News reported. One article which the programme claimed was a major source for the Downing Street document was written by a postgraduate student, Ibrahim al-Marashi, from Monterey, California. He was researching material relating to the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War and not to the current situation, it was alleged. Channel 4 News reported that Glen Rangwala, an academic at Cambridge University, spotted that large chunks of the student's paper had been copied to form parts of the No 10 dossier, called, Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment Deception and Intimidation. Dr Rangwala, a lecturer in politics, told the programme: "The British Government's dossier is 19 pages long and most of pages 6 to 16 are copied directly from that document word for word, even the grammatical errors and typographical mistakes." The programme said one six-paragraph section of the Downing Street document that detailed Saddam's special security organisation had been lifted from the student's article. A Downing Street spokesman said: "The report was put together by a range of government officials. "As the report itself makes clear, it was drawn from 'a number of sources including intelligence material'. "It does not identify or credit any sources, but nor does it claim any exclusivity of authorship. "We consider the text as published to be accurate." But international affairs expert Dan Plesch, from the Royal United Services Institute in London, told Channel 4 News that the alleged plagiarism was "scandalous". "This document is clearly presented to the British public as the product of British intelligence and it clearly is nothing of the kind." He said it was "dressed up as the best MI6 and our other international partners can produce on Saddam". "The word 'scandalous' is, I think, greatly overused in our political life but it certainly applies to this." Shadow defence secretary Bernard Jenkin said: "The Government's reaction to the Channel 4 News report utterly fails to explain, deny or excuse the allegations made in the programme. "This 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? "The Channel 4 report clearly suggests that the intelligence has been embroidered from other sources. Who is the author and who gave their approval? "We need a clear assurance that the Government's published information is based on the best available sources and is not just spin." Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell added: "This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons. The dossier may not amount to much but this is a considerable embarrassment for a Government trying still to make a case for war." Mr Al-Marashi told the BBC2 Newsnight programme: "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. "This appears to be obsolete academic analysis dressed up as the best MI6 and our other international partners can produce on Saddam. "The word 'scandalous' is, I think, greatly overused in our political life but it certainly applies to this. "Clearly, one has to ask about the veracity of other documents and other material the Government has produced. "One has to ask who in Government knew what the original source materials were and whether some officials in Downing Street were led to believe by other officials that they were actually being presented with official material. "We've heard various remarks about MI6 being reluctant to take part in Government propaganda. One has to ask whether in fact the intelligence services refused to provide this sort of material or the material they produced didn't make the Government's case and there was a last minute scurrying to produce something else." Dr Rangwala, lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, told the programme: "Many of the words and phrases I recalled from another context, so I searched around the articles I had read about Iraq's military and security organisations and realised that large sections of the Government's dossier were actually copied. "The British Government's dossier is 19 pages long and most of pages 6 to 16 are copied directly from that document word for word, even the grammatical errors and typographical mistakes." The article, from the Middle East Review of International Affairs, was written by Ibrahim al-Marashi based on information obtained at the time of the first Gulf War. Dr Rangwala said: "The information he was using is 12 years old and he acknowledges this in his article. The British Government, when it transplants that information into its own dossier, does not make that acknowledgement. "So it is presented as current information about Iraq, when really the information it is using is 12 years old." Shadow defence secretary Bernard Jenkin said: "Having seen the Channel 4 News report, we are deeply concerned about the issues raised and we are making immediate enquiries with ministers to clarify the situation." Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell added: "This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons. The dossier may not amount to much but this is a considerable embarrassment for a Government trying still to make a case for war." Mr Jenkin added: "The Government's reaction to the Channel 4 News report utterly fails to explain, deny or excuse the allegations made in the programme. "This 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? "The Channel 4 report clearly suggests that the intelligence has been embroidered from other sources. Who is the author and who gave their approval? "We need a clear assurance that the Government's published information is based on the best available sources and is not just spin." Mr Al-Marashi told the BBC2 Newsnight programme: "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. "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 four million 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." Copyright 2003 The Press Association Limited ====================================================================== The Guardian (London) 7 February 2003, p. 5 UK dossier lifted evidence By Brian Whitaker Large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - which allegedly draws on "intelligence material" - were plagiarised from published academic articles, it emerged yesterday. The dossier, entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation, won high praise from the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday. "I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed . . . which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities," Mr Powell said. The first sentence of the document - issued by Downing Street - states, somewhat cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material". But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, was not impressed. "I found it quite startling when I realised that I'd read most of it before," he said yesterday. Four of the report's 19 pages appear to have been copied, with only minor editing and a few insertions, from the internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi that appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September. 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 accidentally 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 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. Copyright 2003 Guardian Newspapers Limited _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk