[casi] all UK articles on plagiarised dossier/Radio 4

[Cathy Aitchison <cathy@DELETETHIStwiza.demon.co.uk>]

BBC Radio 4 news bulletins have been carrying reports all day.

In addition to the Today programme there was a long feature on The World
at One - and PM has just reported on it, including a question to a
pundit (sorry, didn't catch his name) as to whether it has ever happened
before - not to the pundit's knowledge (!?).

Cathy Aitchison
-------------
In message <E18h6JQ-00036F-00@coll.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk>, Sanjoy Mahajan
<sanjoy@mrao.cam.ac.uk> writes
>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
>
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--
Cathy Aitchison

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