jetblack Posted February 9, 2003 quote: BRITISH IRAQ DOSSIER EXPOSED The British Government has been forced to defend its recently released 'Iraq dossier' against revelations that much of the content is plagiarised. Downing Street admits parts of the document, which aims to show that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, were directly copied from an American student's thesis. US troops rehearsing for war in the Kuwaiti desert today. As they did so, the leaders of America and Britain are still trying to sell that war to a sceptical world. The British dossier on Iraq was meant to be part of a campaign of persuasion and as such, it was lavishly praised by the US Secretary of State at the UN. COLIN POWELL, US SECRETARY OF STATE: I will call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the UK distributed yesterday which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities. The British Government dossier is supposed to be about Iraqi deception and concealment. It says it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material." Well actually, what it largely draws on is a thesis written by a Californian postgraduate student called Ibrahim al Marashi, which was itself based on material from 12 years ago. Now the British dossier copies entire pages of the thesis word for word, complete with grammatical and typing mistakes. Now some bits are changed but only to beef them up into more dramatic language so that for example, Iraqi 'monitoring' is changed to 'spying' and "opposition groups" become "terrorist organisations". Well, a statement today from Downing Street says it's sorry. "We should...have acknowledged which bits came from public sources and which bits came from other sources." As for the student himself, he's accused the government of plagiarism. IBRAHIM AL MARASHI, MONTEREY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES: When you publish anything, though, the only thing you ask for in return is that you include a citation of your work, and that's the basis of any academic work. If there's laws and regulations about plagiarism and so forth, that you'd think the UK Government would abide by. GLENDA JACKSON, MP: Presumably they wanted everyone to believe that it had been compiled by British intelligence sources. If that was indeed their intention, then clearly in my opinion, it was an attempt to mislead the British public and the British Parliament and of course the word 'mislead' is the parliamentary euphemism for 'lying'. As troops in the Gulf were being inoculated today, British Government officials told us privately they are embarrassed and feel they've ended up scoring an own goal. http://www.theworldnews.com.au/trans.html?...ranscript=18185 *applauds* Oh well done. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
