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U.K. dossier anything but a scoop?

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON FEB. 7. The British Government was facing embarrassment today after it was confirmed that large chunks of its latest `intelligence' dossier on Iraq, which incidentally the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, singled out for praise in his U.N. speech on Wednesday, were lifted from a paper by a young Iraqi-American academic.

Downing Street was accused of `plagiarism' and compromising its own credibility by putting out a "cut-and-paste'' version of a paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi, which appeared in the September 2002 issue of the Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs. Even the punctuation errors in the original article were not corrected when Downing Street included it in its report without any acknowledgement. More embarrassingly, some of the information in the article is said to be many years old whereas the dossier was portrayed as the latest evidence of Iraqi `deception' and `intimidation'. Gen. Powell was so taken in by it that he quoted it in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council saying: "I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.''

A leading British defence expert dismissed the dossier as "obsolete academic analysis'' dressed up as intelligence. "This document is clearly presented to the British public as the product of British intelligence — and it clearly is nothing of the kind,'' Dan Plesch of the Royal United Services Institute was widely quoted as saying. An amused Mr. Marashi, speaking to the British media from America, said the article was lifted without his knowledge. Nor was it credited to him. "I'll be more sceptical of any British intelligence I read in future,'' he said.

The disclosure, first highlighted by Channel 4, was seized by critics to accuse the Government of trying to `con' the public in a desperate bid to win support for its campaign against Iraq. "This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons,'' the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell, said.

Downing Street, however, dismissed the controversy as media frenzy and said it was made clear in the dossier that it was "drawn from a number of sources, including intelligence material.'' "It does not identify or credit any sources but neither does it claim exclusivity of authorship. We consider a text, as published, as accurate,'' a spokesman said.

The disclosure came as the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was grilled over his Iraq policy by a sceptical public on a special BBC programme on Thursday night. He had a difficult time making a case for military action against Iraq but insisted that he was doing the right thing and would stand by it even if he was the "last man'' left. He indicated that the Anglo-U.S. campaign against states which are suspected to have weapons of mass destruction or links with terrorists would not end with Iraq.

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