Large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq -- which allegedly draws on "intelligence material" -- were plagiarized from published academic articles, it emerged Thursday. The dossier, entitled "Iraq -- its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation," won high praise from the US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN Security Council on Wednesday.
"I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed ... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities," Powell said.
The first sentence of the document -- issued by the British government -- states, somewhat cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material."
But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, England, was not impressed. "I found it quite startling when I realized that I'd read most of it before," he said yesterday.
Four of the report's 19 pages appear to have been copied, with only minor editing and a few insertions, from the Internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi that appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September.
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 the government's Web site at the end of January, also accidentally named four government officials who had worked on it: P Hamill, J Pratt, A Blackshaw and M Khan. It was reposted on Feb. 3 with the first three names deleted.
"Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," 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 government officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves quirks from its original sources. One sentence in 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 the British government's report contains the same misplaced comma.
A government 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."
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