February 07, 2003

                    MI6 'intelligence' lifted from
                    lecturer's article
                    By Elaine Monaghan in Washington and Rosemary Bennett
 

                    COLIN POWELL’S much-vaunted case for war against Iraq
                    suffered a setback yesterday when it emerged that chunks of
                    British “intelligence” that he invoked were copied verbatim from
                    an old article by a young academic.

                    “I was flattered at first, then surprised that they didn’t cite me,”
                    said Ibrahim al-Marashi, 29, an Iraqi-American who lectures on
                    the country that his parents fled in 1968. “I’ll be more sceptical
                    of any British intelligence I read in future,” he said in a
                    telephone interview. “It was a case of cut and paste. They
                    even left in my mistakes.”

                    The academic said that he became aware of the connection
                    with an article he wrote for the September edition of the
                    Middle East Review of International Affairs only when a
                    colleague from Cambridge University e-mailed him after General
                    Powell’s presentation at the United Nations.

                    He said he was not surprised by what the Secretary of State
                    had to say about Iraq trying to conceal its weapons
                    programmes because he had worked on a project at Harvard
                    University classifying captured Iraqi documents and he had
                    read 300,000 of them. “By no means did this invalidate Powell’s
                    presentation,” he said, defending the US case for war.

                    Mr al-Marashi’s family have all left Iraq, or he would have been
                    worried about the exposure of his name. He works at the
                    Centre for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of
                    International Studies in California, where he focuses on the
                    spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and
                    missile technologies in the Middle East.

                    His only complaint was that the British Government was “not
                    playing by academic rules”. Perhaps that showed a healthy
                    shift in intelligence practices away from “an antiquated notion”
                    that public source material is not worthwhile. “Hopefully it
                    marks a change in attitude,” he said.

                    The British Government also lifted several paragraphs that Mr
                    al-Marashi carefully attributed to a book published in 1999 by
                    Scott Ritter, the former chief UN weapons inspector, who is
                    vehemently opposed to war against Iraq.

                    Mr al-Marashi confirmed a Channel 4 account concerning six
                    paragraphs on Saddam’s Special Security Organisation which
                    contained the exact same wording as his paper. It contained
                    straight lifts from the text. He wrote: “The head of military
                    intelligence generally did not have to be a relative of Saddam’s
                    immediate family, nor a Tikriti. Saddam appointed, Sabir Abd
                    Al-Aziz Al-Duri as head . . .”

                    The Downing Street version kept the misplaced comma after
                    “appointed”: “Saddam appointed, Sabir ’Abd al-’Aziz al-Duri as
                    head during the 1991 Gulf War.”

                    The accusations are not only embarrassing for Tony Blair but
                    also for the White House. “This document is clearly presented
                    to the British public as a product of British intelligence and it is
                    clearly nothing of the kind,” Dan Plesch, a senior research
                    fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said. “This
                    appears to be obsolete academic analysis dressed up and
                    presented as the best MI6 and our international partners can
                    produce on Saddam.”

                    A Downing Street spokesman dismissed the allegations and
                    said that he stood by the dossier. “As the report itself made
                    clear, it was drawn from a number of sources, including
                    intelligence material,” the 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.”