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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (8753)	2/16/2003 1:15:39 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

The plagiarized material came from Sept. 2002 Middle East Review of International Affairs and from various issues 1997 - 2002 issues of Jane's Defense Weekly. meria.idc.ac.il British Government Plagiarizes MERIA Journal: Our Response As some of you may have heard, a major scandal which has received global media coverage erupted over the British government’s plagiarism of a MERIA Journal article. In brief, the story is as follows. Ibrahim al-Marashi wrote a fine article in our September 2002 issue entitled, “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis,” which looked at that country’s secret police and other such forces in detail. He used captured Iraqi documents from the 1991 Kuwait war but updated it to cover later developments, power shifts, and personnel changes among these agencies. (For other works using these archives in MERIA Journal, see Robert Rabil, "Operation "Operation Termination of Traitors": Iraq's Anti-Kurdish Campaign"MJ Vol.6, No.3 (September, 2002) and Robert G. Rabil, "The Iraqi Opposition's Evolution: From Conflict to Unity?" MJ Vol. 6, No. 4 (December 2002). On February 3, 2003, the British government released a report, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation" which was said to be based on high-level British intelligence and diplomatic sources. It was produced under the approval of Prime Minister Tony Blair and was highly praised by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The problem was that most of the report was taken word-for-word from Marashi’s MERIA Journal and other articles. A MERIA reader noticed this and alerted the British press. The story has since been covered by all the British television, radio, and print media as well as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and wire services. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office has apologized to Mr. Marashi but not to MERIA Journal for this plagiarism. The fact is that the report was a good one. The information was correct and highly useful. If I may be permitted a humorous note, perhaps the world and the Middle East would be a better place if more governments used MERIA articles to explain current developments and inform their people. We are pleased that the high quality of MERIA Journal’s articles has made them so valuable to our readers, who now number almost 20,000 people around the world, including many government officials, as well as diplomats, journalists, scholars, and students. As noted on the masthead of each issue and all our publications, however, we do appreciate being given credit. The fact is that the articles by Mr. Marashi and our other authors are highly accurate, insightful, original, and extremely timely. This was our goal when we began seven years ago and the many letters we receive from readers tell us that we are in general achieving this objective. We hope these events will inspire more people to read MERIA. Look for MERIA next month, to see new articles by both Rabil and al-Marashi: Robert Rabil, "The Making of Saddam’s Executioners: A Manual of Oppression by Procedure" and Ibrahim al-Marashi, "How Iraq conceals its Weapons of Mass Destruction." For a free subscription, of course, one need only write gloria@idc.ac.il and to see all MERIA Journal articles--including those not yet republished as statements of British policy--visit meria.idc.ac.il. Don't you recall I'm the one who posted the piece comparing the British dossier to Al-Marashi's article.