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.