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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (3947)	2/14/2003 3:24:00 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 15987

Interesting, Alistair...Thanks for taking the time and looking that up.

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (3947)	2/14/2003 1:06:18 PM
From: zonder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15987

You call him a "student" but he is a PhD. research associate at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, California as well as a lecturer at the US Naval Postgraduate School. Well, not just me, but everybody calls him a student, because he is (or was, when he wrote it) one. A postgraduate student. Would it change anything if he were not a student? Would it not remain rather damning that the soi-disant British "intelligence report" was plagiarised from publicly available documents based on 12-year old data? (The author himself says the data in there is outdated. Read below.) uk.news.yahoo.com It claimed to draw upon "a number of sources, including intelligence material". But on Friday, red-faced officials admitted whole swathes were lifted word for word -- grammatical slips and all -- from a student thesis. Outraged politicians jumped on the revelation to accuse Blair of misleading the public and said it cast doubt on the credibility of his whole case against Saddam. "This is the sort of thing that Saddam Hussein himself issues," fumed opposition Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge. One of Blair's former junior defence ministers, Peter Kilfoyle, said he was shocked that the government was trying to win over Britons on such "thin evidence". STUDENT AUTHOR SURPRISED Sections in the dossier on Saddam's security apparatus drew heavily on a 2002 article written by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a 29-year-old U.S. postgraduate student of Iraqi descent who works at California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. His major sources were captured Iraqi intelligence documents from prior to 1991 that are part of Harvard's Iraq Research and Documentation Project, as well as books and public information. Marashi, who has never been to Iraq, told Reuters he was surprised and flattered that his research ended up in a British government dossier -- but could have provided the government with updated information if anyone had asked. Glen Rangwala, an Iraq specialist at Cambridge University who analysed the Downing Street dossier, told Reuters 11 of its 19 pages were "taken wholesale from academic papers". The editor of Jane's Intelligence Review, Chris Aaron, said sections of articles in his magazine published between 1997 and 2002 were also used in the dossier.