Global Policy Forum

By Brian Whitaker

Large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - which allegedly draws on "intelligence material" - were plagiarised from published academic articles, it emerged yesterday.

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," Mr Powell said. The first sentence of the document - issued by Downing Street - states, somewhat cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material".

But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, was not impressed. "I found it quite startling when I realised 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 Downing Street's website at the end of January, also accidentally 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 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.

Also read read comments by Glen Rangwala, lecturer in politics at Cambridge University who has analyzed the document in revealing detail.

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