Re: Moo, Moo, A Smoking Gnu*

http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/siteinfo/newsround/iraq.html

GOVERNMENT PLAGIARISES IRAQI "WMD" REPORT The following information was 
circulated on the
internet on the 6 February 2003.It details how the
British Government's report Iraq - Its Infrastructure
Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation released
Monday 3 February 2003 is a wholesale plagiarism of
texts already in the public domain, and that
consequently we must conclude "the UK at least really
does not have any independent sources of information
on Iraq's internal politics - they just draw upon
publicly available data. Thus any further claims to
information based on 'intelligence data' must be
treated with even more scepticism." And secondly that
"the information presented as being an accurate
statement of the current state of Iraq's security
organisations may not be anything of the sort …the
information presented as relevant to how Iraqi
agencies are currently engaged with Unmovic is 12
years old." Report begins:The British government's
latest report on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction,
which claims to draw on "intelligence material", has
been revealed as a wholesale plagiarism of three
articles, one of them by a graduate student in
California. The compiler did not even clean up the
typos or standardize the spelling. The report,
released by the British government last Monday [3 Feb
2003], is entitled Iraq - Its Infrastructure Of
Concealment, Deception And Intimidation. It is
reproduced online at
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7111.asp
(references below to page numbers relate to the
downloadable Word version).The first sentence of the
document claims that it draws "upon a number of
sources, including intelligence material".This is
somewhat misleading.The bulk of the 19-page document
(pp.6-16) is directly copied without acknowledgement
from an article in last September's Middle East Review
of International Affairs entitled "Iraq's Security and
Intelligence Network: A Guide and
Analysis".http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue3/jv6n3a1.html
The author of the piece is Ibrahim al-Marashi, a
postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies. He has confirmed that his
permission was not sought; in fact, he didn't even
know about the British document until Glen Rangwala, a
Cambridge-based Iraq analyst, mentioned it to him.It's
quite striking that even Marashi's typographical
errors and anomolous uses of grammar are incorporated
into the Downing Street document. For example, on
p.13, the British dossier incorporates a misplaced
comma:"Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri
as head"..Likewise, Marashi's piece also
states:"Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri
as head"..The other sources that are extensively
plagiarised in the document are two authors from
Jane's Intelligence Review: Ken Gause (an
international security analyst from Alexandria,
Virginia), "Can the Iraqi Security Apparatus save
Saddam" (November 2002), pp.8-13.Sean Boyne, "Inside
Iraq’s Security Network", in 2 parts during 1997.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).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".Further examples
from the section on "Fedayeen Saddam" include how a
reference to how, in Boyne's 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.'" 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.Finally, there
is one serious substantive mistake in the British
text, in that it muddles up Boyne's description of
General Security (al-Amn al-Amm), and places it in its
section on p.14 of Military Security (al-Amn
al-Askari). The result is complete confusion: it
starts on p.14 by relating how Military Security was
created in 1992 (in a piece copied from Marashi), then
goes onto talk about the movement of its headquarters
- in 1990 (in a piece copied from Boyne on the
activities of General Security). The result is that it
gets the description of the Military Security Service
wholly wrong, claiming that its head is Taha al-Ahbabi
(whilst really he was head of General Security in
1997; Military Security was headed by Thabet
Khalil).Apart from the obvious criticism that the
British government has plagiarised texts without
acknowledgement, passing them off as the work of its
intelligence services, there are two further serious
problems. Firstly, it indicates that the UK at least
really does not have any independent sources of
information on Iraq's internal politics - they just
draw upon publicly available data. Thus any further
claims to information based on "intelligence data"
must be treated with even more scepticism.Secondly,
the information presented as being an accurate
statement of the current state of Iraq's security
organisations may not be anything of the sort. Marashi
- the real and unwitting author of much of the
document - has as his primary source the documents
captured in 1991 for the Iraq Research and
Documentation Project. His own focus is the activities
of Iraq's intelligence agencies in Kuwait, Aug90-Jan91
- this is the subject of his thesis. As a result, the
information presented as relevant to how Iraqi
agencies are currently engaged with Unmovic is 12
years old.For reference, here are a few other summary
comments on the British document.Official authors are
(in Word > Properties) P. Hamill, J. Pratt, A.
Blackshaw, and M. Khan.p.1 is the summary.pp.2-5 are a
repetition of Blix's comments to the Security Council
on the difficulties they were encountering, with
further claims about the activities of al-Mukhabarat.
These are not backed up, eg the claim that car crashes
are organised to prevent the speedy arrival of
inspectors.p.6 is a simplified version of Marashi's
diagram at:
http://cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/pdfs/iraqint.pdfp.7
is copied (top) from Gause (on the Presidential
Secretariat), and (middle and bottom) from Boyne (on
the National Security Council).p.8 is entirely copied
from Boyne (on the National Security Council).p.9 is
copied from Marashi (on al-Mukhabarat), except for the
final section, which is insubstantial.p.10 is entirely
copied from Marashi (on General Security), except for
the final section, which is insubstantial.p.11 is
entirely copied from Marashi (on Special Security),
except for the top section (on General Security),
which is insubstantial.p.12 is entirely copied from
Marashi (on Special Security).p.13 is copied from
Gause (on Special Protection) and Marashi (Military
Intelligence).p.14 is wrongly copied from Boyne (on
Military Security) and from Marashi (on the Special
Republican Guard).p.15 is copied from Gause and Boyne
(on al-Hadi project / project 858).pp.15-16 is copied
from Boyne (on Fedayeen Saddam).A final section, on
the Tribal Chiefs' Bureau, seems to be copied from a
different piece by Cordesman.For more information
please contact Glen Rangwala+44(0)1223 335759 or
gr10009@c...[ends]-------------------
Daniel O'Huiginn09, Queens' College, Cambridge07789
260207 01223

On Sat, 08 Feb 2003 11:39:36 -0800, John Leonard <leonardjp@earthlink.net> wrote:

> LARGE PARTS OF UK IRAQ DOSSIER USED BY POWELL ARE 12 YEARS OLD! -
> (Please Pass this message on to your networks - Thanks!)
>
> The US mainstream media is still running the "Terror Alert" as non-stop news. 
> Why now? Because the rest of the world has learned that Colin Powell's 
> pitch to the UN was based on fraud! Far from an up-to-date intelligence 
> assessment, the Blair dossier was a patchwork of plagiarized student 
> essays about Iraq 12 years ago, before it was smashed in the first Gulf 
> War.
>
> The administration is terrified this story will get out to the American people. 
> With each leak in their strategy of terrorizing the public, they turn up 
> the volume and jam the airwaves with more bogus terror. This time "Orange 
> Alert" is the distraction and smoke screen.
>
> Please get this story of deception before the eyes of everyone around 
> you, especially friends and neighbors who are not getting their news from 
> the internet. You must work quickly. Bush has no more fake cards to play, 
> and the signs are for an immediate plunge into war immediately, maybe on Monday, 
> before his "justification" for mass bombardment and conquest unravels 
> further.
>
> Bush Sr. faked the evidence of massive tank maneuvers and mass murder of Kuwaiti 
> babies to push us into the Gulf war (see the infamous "incubator babies" 
> story[1]). How deep we have sunk into the mire of militarism in 12 years! 
> Now the trumpery is not to repel an army, but to unleash the power of 
> Hiroshima on the innocent civilians of Baghdad.
>
> Next, the fraudmasters can create new "evidence." No doubt, the American invader 
> will bring biochem weapons back to Iraq once again, will plant and "find" 
> them, as the retroactive "pretext" for the mass destruction in the center 
> of the cradle of our civilization.
>
> We must not let them get that far.
>
> 2/8/03 THE SMOKING GNU*: The people who plagiarized the contents of the dossier 
> didn't even check their spelling, let alone the facts! http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/
>
> [1] Exposed by John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harper's Magazine, in his book 
> "Second Front." See lecture transcript at  
> http://www.independent.org/tii/content/events/f_macarth.html


--
Michael Pugliese

"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to 
each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that 
we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted 
at each other, as if we were in a madhouse."
-Tolstoy