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.