Jerusalem Post

Feb. 8, 2003
Blair admits intelligence dossier was plagiarized from Israeli Web site
By DOUGLAS DAVIS
LONDON

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced into an embarrassing apology on
Friday after much of a 19-page "intelligence-led dossier" on Iraq that he
released last week was shown to have been lifted from a paper published by
an Israeli-based Internet journal.

The dossier, published by Downing Street last Monday, won high praise from
US Secretary of State Colin Powell when he addressed the UN Security Council
and a global television audience the following day. Powell lauded Britain's
"fine paper...which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception
activities."

But faces in Downing Street turned bright red when Britain's Channel 4
television station revealed that substantial portions of the dossier were,
in fact, copied from an article by California-based scholar Dr Ibrahim
al-Marashi and published last September by the Middle East Review of
International Affairs (MERIA).

The highly-respected journal, which has a direct circulation of some 10,000
Internet subscribers, is edited by Middle East specialist and Jerusalem Post
columnist Barry Rubin.

Blair's officials initially attempted to brazen out the obvious plagiarism
in the dossier, which was entitled "Iraq - Its infrastructure of
concealment, deception and intimidation."
"As the report itself made clear, it was drawn from a number of sources,
including intelligence material," a Downing Street spokesman said. "It does
not identify or credit any sources but neither does it claim exclusivity of
authorship. We consider a text, as published, as accurate."

When it became clear, however, that this disingenuous statement would not
dispel the affair, Downing Street beat a hasty retreat.

The dossier was removed from the prime minister's Web site on Friday
afternoon and Blair's official spokesman admitted: "In retrospect we should
have acknowledged [its source]." However, he insisted the thrust of the
document was accurate and that other sections had been based on up-to-date
intelligence material. "Failure to acknowledge does not disprove the central
reality on the ground in Iraq," said the spokesman.

A politics lecturer at Cambridge University, Dr Glen Rangwala, who was first
to spot the striking similarity between the Blair dossier and the MERIA
original, told Channel 4 he found it "quite startling" when he realized he
had read most of the "intelligence" dossier before.

"Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," he
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."

Rangwala told the program that of the 19 pages, most of pages six to 16 were
copied directly from Marashi's paper, "even the grammatical errors and
typographical mistakes."

In the original paper Marashi acknowledged that he was using 12-year-old
information, said Rangwala, but "the British Government, when it transplants
that information into its own dossier, does not make that acknowledgement."

Marashi, a 29-year-old Iraqi-American whose parents fled Iraq in 1968, is a
research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey,
California.

When he learned that his material had formed the basis for a supposedly
British intelligence dossier he said he was "flattered at first, then
surprised that they didn't cite me... It was a case of cut and paste. They
even left in my mistakes."