Re: Powell's Exquisite Evidence: Internet Plagiarism

What is equally amazing is the alacrity with which the plagiarism has been
uncovered!  Eternal vigilance has perhaps never been more important or as
productive as it is today.  The more the hypocrisy is unveiled, the more it
becomes apparent, to me, what the issue is really all about.  It is not a
question of getting France or Germany behind the Bush warmaking project.
Neither France nor Germany - or Britain for that matter, though at least in
supporting the US, Blair is frank about supporting imperial designs - has
any 'moral' standing.  In their moment of 'great' history-making, they
followed policies of blood and iron in forwarding imperial projects.
Perhaps this is what really lies behind the confidence of the Bush
administration, a confidence that comes from the knowledge that the European
powers in the past flouted all norms of sovereignty as and when they wished,
in relation to geographical spaces in the Third World.  Now that the US,
following the collapse of the Soviet Empire, has become the sole superpower-
on howsoever weak the grounds on which its power role is based - why not
exercise the imperial baggage that accompanies that role when it lasts?
This role is based on (a) asserting that only the US and its allies
(including Israel) are capable of acting responsibly when the question
pertains to weapons of mass destruction, despite overwhelming evidence to
the contrary, and using a humanist rhetoric (liberation of the oppressed in
Iraq) to build a moral justification for that assertion; (b) following on
that assertion by seeking to destroy all other non-Western spaces where
weapons of mass destruction may possibly reside (North Korea is only the
first of many that may be singled out; what about India and Pakistan?)
thereby ensuring that the US and its allies have the virtual monopoly of the
means of violence; and (c) using the monopoly over the means of coercion to
renegotiate the declining US power in a global political economy dominated
by the newly emerging center of capital accumulation in East Asia.
In short, I would argue that it is the very awareness of the emergence of
East Asia as the locus of capital accumulation that is pushing the US to
re-assert its global role as imperial policeman with all the weapons of mass
destruction at its command to terrorize the rest of the world into
submission to its role. It is, I argue, a resort to the long-familiar
returns to protection, for which there will be increasing returns for a
while.  But these returns will be realized only in relation to the scale of
the operations.  It will not be adequate to just take over Iraq.   And the
language and the discourse employed will continue to utilise Enlightenment
humanism - the non-West is not mature enough to understand the implications
of having weapons of destruction, the West alone does so, perhaps these
weapons need to be deployed in the interests of the minority of the global
population against the majority of the world population.
In this insanity there is ofcourse a tremendous underestimation of the
response of the global multitudes, as well as of the growing experience of
hopelessness and frustration in an unimaginably uncontrollable world that
has no faith in the virtues of that Western humanism and military humanism
that Saskia Sassen and Bob Hebert in different and related ways, among so
many others, seek to remind us of.  Ganesh.

Elson Boles wrote:

> Dossier, cited by Powell, called "a sham"
>
> The Nation, February 24 2003 Issue
>
> [The upshot of this article:  So-called "British intelligence,"
> presented by Powell at his UN presentation to make his case for war
> against Iraq was in fact plagiarized from an article on the internet,
> while additional material came straight from a US magazine, Jane's
> Intelligence Review!]
>
> Speaking to the United Nations on Wednesday, in an address that was
> broadly portrayed as a case for war with Iraq, Secretary of State Colin
> Powell argued that, "Iraq today is actively using its considerable
> intelligence capabilities to hide its illicit activities."
>
> To support that claim, Powell said, "I would call my colleagues
> attention to the fine paper that United Kingdom distributed yesterday,
> which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."
>
> It turns out, however, that much of that "fine paper" – a dossier
> distributed by the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair under the
> title, "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and
> Intimidation" – was not a fresh accounting of information based on new
> "intelligence" about Iraqi attempts to thwart UN weapons inspections.
> Rather, the document has been exposed by Britain's ITN television
> network as a cut-and-paste collection of previously published academic
> articles, some of which were based on dated material.
>
> Substantial portions of the report that Powell used to support his
> critique of Iraq were lifted from an article written by a postgraduate
> student who works not in Baghdad but in Monterey, California, and who
> based much of his research on materials left in Kuwait more than a dozen
> years ago by Iraqi security services.
>
> ITN's Channel 4 News (http://www.channel4.com/news/) revealed Thursday
> night that at least four of the government report's 19 pages had been
> copied from an internet version of an article by the California
> researcher, Ibrahim al-Marashi, which appeared in September, 2002, in an
> academic journal, the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
> According to al-Marashi, he was not contacted by the British government
> regarding his research or his sources.
> The portions of the government document taken from al-Marashi's article
> appear to have been grabbed in what Britain's Guardian newspaper
> describes in Friday morning's editions as "a sham" and "an electronic
> cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall (Blair government) officials." So
> sweeping was the plagiarism that, according to British journalists who
> reviewed the materials, typographical errors – including a misplaced
> comma -- that appeared in al-Marashi's article were reproduced in the
> official dossier that was posted on Blair's 10 Downing Street website.
>
> To the extent that changes were made, they appear to have been inserted
> to increase the shock value of the information. Though he said that most
> of the information that was swiped from his article was reproduced
> accurately, al-Marashi told BBC's Newsnight program that the British
> dossier included "cosmetic changes." For instance, he noted, "I said
> that (Iraqi intelligence operatives) support organizations in what Iraq
> considers hostile regimes, whereas the UK document refers to it as
> 'supporting terrorist organizations in hostile regimes'."
>
> In addition to the sections taken from al-Marashi's article, according
> to the Guardian, "The content of six more pages (of the dossier) 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."
>
> Blair aides scrambled on Thursday evening to cover their tracks. "We
> said that it draws on a number of sources, including intelligence. It
> speaks for itself," a Downing Street spokesperson said of the report.
> Appearing on the BBC last night, Blair said he still believes he is
> right to argue that Iraq poses a clear danger to the world. "I may be
> wrong, but I do believe it," the prime minister said at one point.
>
> Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, suggested
> that a measure of skepticism might be appropriate. Rangwala discovered
> the similarities between the academic articles and the Downing Street
> dossier. That happened when he sat down to read the official dossier
> this week. "I found it quite startling when I realized that I'd read
> most of it before," he told a television interviewer.
>
> "Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services,"
> 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."
>
>
>
> Elson Boles
> Assistant Professor
> Dept. of Sociology
> Saginaw Valley State University
> University Center
> Saginaw MI, 48710