- LONDON (Reuters) - 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.
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- 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.
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- 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, officials admitted whole swathes
were lifted word for word -- grammatical slips and all -- from a student
thesis.
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- 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.
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- "This is the sort of thing that Saddam Hussein himself
issues," fumed opposition Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge.
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- One of Blair's former junior defense ministers, Peter
Kilfoyle, said he was shocked that the government was trying to win over
Britons on such "thin evidence."
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- "It just adds to the general impression that what
we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths, assertions and over-the-top
'spin'," he told BBC radio.
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- INTELLIGENCE IS "THIN"
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- Glen Rangwala, an Iraq specialist at Cambridge University
who analyzed the Downing Street dossier, told Reuters that 11 of its 19
pages were "taken wholesale from academic papers."
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- "If the nature of the intelligence is actually just
Web research, then it rather casts doubt about the plausibility of the
government's earlier claims," said Rangwala, a critic of U.S. and
British policy on Iraq.
-
- Sections in the dossier on Saddam's security apparatus
drew heavily on an article written last year by Ibrahim al-Marashi, an
American postgraduate student of Iraqi descent who works at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies in California.
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- "I was a bit disenchanted because they never cited
my article," Marashi told BBC radio.
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- "... any academic, when you publish anything, the
only thing you ask for in return is that they include a citation of your
work. There are laws and regulations about plagiarism that you would think
the UK Government would abide by," he said.
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- Experts who pored over the document said it also lifted
material from articles published in 1997 and 2002 in Jane's Intelligence
Review.
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- British ministers have privately admitted that gathering
information on Iraq is extremely difficult and intelligence on Baghdad
is "thin."
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- Rangwala said the document was sloppy and appeared to
have been pulled together in a hurry.
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