BY ROHAN PEARCE
In his February 5 speech to the United Nations Security Council, US Secretary of State Colin Powell called attention to the "fine paper that United Kingdom distributed yesterday, which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities". Britain's Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair probably may wishes that Powell had not drawn attention to his government's latest "dossier" on Iraq.
Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, revealed that much of Blair's "fine paper" was crudely plagiarised from an article by a student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which was published in the September Middle East Review of International Affairs.
"It's quite striking that even [the original author Ibrahim al] Marashi's typographical errors and anomalous uses of grammar are incorporated into the Downing Street document", Rangwala noted. Much of the rest of the "dossier" was pinched from two articles in Jane's Intelligence Review, including one from 1997!
Rangwala found that the document used verbatim sections of Marashi's article, with the only changes being made to make the information seem more more lurid. "Numbers are increased or are rounded up" and "particular words [are replaced] to make the claim sound stronger".
For example, "the section on 'Fedayeen Saddam' include[s] a reference to how, in Boyne's [one of the plagiarised authors] original text, its personnel are 'recruited from regions loyal to Saddam', referring to their original grouping as 'some 10,000-15,000 bullies and country bumpkins'.
"This becomes in the British government's text a reference to how its personnel are: 'press-ganged from regions known to be loyal to Saddam ... some 10,000-15,000 bullies'. Clearly, a reference to the 'country bumpkins' would not have the rhetorical effect that the British government was aiming for."
Rangwala notes that even though "the information [is] presented as being an accurate statement of the current state of Iraq's security organisations, [it] may not be anything of the sort. Marashi ... has as his primary source the documents captured in 1991 ... His own focus is the activities of Iraq's intelligence agencies in Kuwait, August 1990-January 1991... As a result, the information presented as relevant to how Iraqi agencies are currently engaged with UNMOVIC is 12 years old."
Ironically, a New York Times report filed on February 7 reported that a Blair government spokesperson said that "the document had been published because 'we wanted to show people not only the kind of regime we were dealing with, but also how Saddam Hussein had pursued a policy of deliberate deception."
In reality, the document says more about the "policy of deliberate deception" being pursued by London and Washington in order to justify their plans to conquer oil-rich Iraq.
[Glen Rangwala's commentary on Blair's latest "dossier" is available from the Traprock Peace Centre's web site <http://traprockpeace.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 19, 2003.
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