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Thu, 06 Feb 2003 Government plagiarised Iraq allegations from student essay A rather interesting press release from CASI, the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, is circulating in the UK today and really bears reading. In particular, it looks as if the British government's dossier on Iraq, "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation", cites as "intelligence material" -- and indeed uses for the bulk of its contents -- text copied (without permission) from a paper in last September's Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis" written by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Even his typos and grammatical errors found their way into the Downing Street dossier. It gets better: CASI alleges that the two other main sources in the paper were plagiarised from Jane's Intelligence Review by Downing Street: Ken Gause "Can the Iraqi Security Apparatus save Saddam" (November 2002), pp.8-13, and Sean Boyne, "Inside Iraq's Security Network", in 2 parts during 1997. As CASI remark in their press release, "None of the sources are acknowledged, leading the reader to believe that the information is a result of direct investigative work, rather than simply copied from pre-existing internet sources. The fact that the texts of these three authors are copied directly results in a proliferation of different transliterations (eg different spellings of Ba'th, depending on which author is being copied)." CASI continue in their report: "There are two types of changes incorporated into the British document. Firstly, numbers are increased or are rounded up. So, for example, the section on "Fedayeen Saddam" (pp.15-16) is directly copied from Boyne, almost word for word. The only substantive difference is that Boyne estimates the personnel of the organisation to be 18,000-40,000 (Gause similarly estimates 10-40,000). The British dossier instead writes "30,000 to 40,000". A similar bumping up of figures occurs with the description of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. The second type of change in the British dossier is that it replaces particular words to make the claim sound stronger. So, for example, most of p.9 on the functions of the Mukhabarat is copied directly from Marashi's article, except that when Marashi writes of its role in: 'monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq' this becomes in the British dossier: 'spying on foreign embassies in Iraq'. Similarly, on that same page, whilst Marashi writes of the Mukhabarat: 'aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes' - the British dossier renders this as: 'supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes'." NOTE: The government says this is an accurate reflection of the current situation in Iraq. But Marashi used as his primary source documents captured in 1991 for the Iraq Research and Documentation Project, and his own research focus is Iraqi intelligence agencies in Kuwait, August 1990 to January 1991. Thus, information presented in the government dossier as relevant is actually twelve years out of date and refers to the situation in another country -- besides being plagiarized and, arguably, done so in criminal violation of the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act (1988). [ Link (CASI Thanks, Chris!) ] [ Discuss Iraq invasion ] posted at: 11:27 | path: /wartime | permanent link to this entry

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