|
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.
--- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.449 / Virus Database: 251 - Release Date: 1/27/2003 |
