Downing St admits blunder on Iraq dossier
Plagiarism row casts shadow over No 10's case against
Saddam
Michael White, Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday February 8, 2003
The Guardian
Downing Street yesterday apologised for its failure to
acknowledge that much of its latest dossier on Iraq was lifted
from academic sources, as the affair threatened to further
undermine confidence in the government's case for disarming
Saddam Hussein.
MPs and anti-war groups were quick to protest that other
features of Whitehall's information campaign are suspect at a
time when MI6 and other intelligence agencies are privately
complaining at the way No 10 has been over-egging intelligence
material on Iraq.
It emerged yesterday that the dossier issued last week - later
found to include a plagiarised section written by an American
PhD student - was compiled by mid-level officials in Alastair
Campbell's Downing Street communications department with
only cursory approval from intelligence or even Foreign Office
sources.
Though it now appears to have been a journalistic cut and paste
job rather than high-grade intelligence analysis, the dossier
ended up being cited approvingly on worldwide TV by the US
secretary of state, Colin Powell, when he addressed the UN
security council on Wednesday.
Downing Street yesterday toughed it out, insisting that what
mattered was that the facts contained in the document were
"solid" and helped make the case Tony Blair rammed home on
BBC Newsnight. But the middle section of the dossier, which
describes the feared Iraqi intelligence network, was taken, much
of it verbatim, from the research of Dr Ibrahim al-Marashi without
his knowledge or permission.
"In retrospect we should have acknowledged [this]. The fact that
we used some of his work does not throw into question the
accuracy of the document as a whole, as he himself
acknowledged on Newsnight last night, where he said that in his
opinion the document overall was accurate," the No 10
spokesman conceded. "We all have lessons to learn," he
added. The four officials originally named on the website version
of the 19-page dossier include Alison Blackshaw, Mr Campbell's
senior assistant, and Murtaza Khan, described as a news editor
on the busy Downing Street website.
Professor Michael Clark, director of the International Policy
Institute at King's College London, said presenting such
intelligence material "invalidates the veracity" of the rest of the
document. The shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram,
called for a cabinet minister to oversee government information
on Iraq.
Even before the latest row some Whitehall officials were
protesting that MI6 and other intelligence material was being
used selectively by Downing Street. A well-placed source made
it clear that the dossier had been the work of Downing Street
and the Coalition Information Centre, the body set up after
September 11 to put the US-British case on the war against
terrorism. The source dismissed a key section of the dossier as
full of "silly errors".
Glenda Jackson, the Labour former minister, was one of several
MPs to protest that the government was misleading parliament
and the public. "And of course to mislead is a parliamentary
euphemism for lying," Ms Jackson told Radio 4's Today
programme.
Dr al-Marashi expressed "surprise" at the lack of a credit for his
work, as did other authors whose research was quickly
identified. One anti-war group, Voices in the Wilderness,
identified a passage from No 10's September dossier directly
traceable to Saddam Secrets, a book by Tim Trevan published
in 1999.
The Middle East Review of International Affairs, from which Dr
al-Marashi's work was lifted, is based in Israel, which makes it a
suspect source to even moderate Arab opinion, and another
reason why the origin of the information should have been listed.
In Whitehall one official who regularly sees MI6 reports said that
Britain's knowledge about Iraq until recently had been very poor.
But another claimed there has been a recent transformation:
"What has happened in the last nine months is that there is now
strong intelligence coming through."
Disturbing reports
The government has issued three reports in the past six months,
trying to establish a case for action against Iraq. Each one has
drawn progressively more criticism.
September The 50-page dossier Iraq's Weapons of Mass
Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government relied
heavily on input from the Foreign Office and MI6.
The material was damning, but most of it turned out to be years
old. British journalists in Baghdad visited several "facilities of
concern" highlighted in the report and found nothing sinister. UN
weapons inspectors later visited the same sites and uncovered
nothing.
December The 23-page Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human
Rights Abuses provided a horrifying account of abuses but was
widely criticised by human rights groups, MPs and others for
recycling old information.
At the launch, the Foreign Office had on the platform an Iraqi
exile who had been jailed by President Saddam for 11 years.
Later, he disclosed that handcuffs he had worn had been made
in Britain.
January 30 Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception
and Intimidation, was a Downing Street production. The first
sentence of the report said it was based on a number of
sources, including intelligence material, but it turned out that
much of it was lifted from academic sources. Glen Rangwala, an
academic who blew the whistle on the dossier, said yesterday:
"It really does cast doubt on the credibility of the intelligence
that has been put to us."