Dossiergate!

British Government plagiarises document

In what is regarded as behaviour common to lazy students, it appears our government has been copying other people’s documents and passing it off as their own, MAB learned this morning.

Last week, they released their third ‘dossier’ on the Iraq situation entitled “"Iraq - Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation". The document claimed to draw "upon a number of sources, including intelligence material"

This has been found to be misleading, as the bulk of the 19 page dossier 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". It was written by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student from Monterey in California.

The document was copied even down to the typographical mistakes. For example, the British dossier incorporates a misplaced comma: "Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri as head".

The affair is a blow and embarrassment to the UK and US drive to war on Iraq. Even Colin Powell heralded the document at the showdown in the UN yesterday.

Anas Altikriti, spokesperson for MAB commented that “This discovery makes a mockery of Bush and Blair’s attempts at providing a reason for war. It seems they have made a decision about what they want to do and are getting increasingly frustrated at not being able to find their pretext”.

Channel 4 have subsequently taken up this story as their lead on the 7 o’clock bulletin. Read their report here. Encourage other media to take up this further undermining of the proposed war on Iraq.