War and lies???

[speyfly]

Here is an interesting report that has just come into the light...

As Bush beats the drums of war louder and louder, consider this:

News agencies in the UK are now reporting that some of the secret "intelligence" that Colin Powell presented to the UN yesterday in favor of invading Iraq was based on outdated, public and plagiarised data. Most notably, some the information was actually pulled word-for-word from a paper written by a graduate student in California that was published in Sept 2002 and cited data more than 12 years old.

Even more disturbing, those who plagiarised the grad student's paper decided to change just a few words to make its assessment of the Iraq threat more urgent and imminent.
If some of the information presented by Powell can be so easily discredited, what faith should we place in any of it?

Answer: None.

We are being lied to. This administration takes us all for fools, and will stop at nothing to wage its imperialistic war for oil.

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."

[ 02-08-2003, 08:21 AM: Message edited by: speyfly ]

[skein]

Both sides are lying to us, Speyfly. That's the only thing we know for sure.

I have enough respect for the Security Council and the rest of the UN to think they won't blindly rely on Powell's speech nor the Guardian's reporters.

Tight lines....

Skein

[The Fishing Geek]

Who published this article, speyfly?

[speyfly]

Geek, I found it on another BB and after doing a little reseach I found it to be true.

[speyfly]

Here is one link Geek.
Click here

[speyfly]

Here is some more from the NY Times. Enjoy!

February 8, 2003

Britain Admits That Much of Its Report on Iraq Came From
Magazines

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, Feb. 7 — The British government admitted today that
large sections of its most recent report on Iraq, praised
by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as "a fine paper" in
his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, had been
lifted from magazines and academic journals.

But while acknowledging that the 19-page report was indeed
a "pull-together of a variety of sources," a spokesman for
Prime Minister Tony Blair defended it as "solid" and
"accurate."

The document, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment,
Deception and Intimidation," was posted on No. 10 Downing
Street's Web site on Monday. It was depicted as an
up-to-date and unsettling assessment by the British
intelligence services of Iraq's security apparatus and its
efforts to hide its activities from weapons inspectors and
to resist international efforts to force it to disarm.

But much of the material actually came, sometimes verbatim,
from several nonsecret published articles, according to
critics of the government's policy who have studied the
documents. These include an article published in the Middle
East Review of International Affairs in September 2002, as
well as three articles from Jane's Intelligence Review, two
of them published in the summer of 1997 and one in November
2002.

In some cases, the critics said, parts of the articles — or
of summaries posted on the Internet — were paraphrased in
the report. In other cases, they were plagiarized — to the
extent that even spelling and punctuation errors in the
originals were reproduced.

The Blair government did not deny that any of this had
happened. But its spokesman insisted today that the
government believed "the text as published to be accurate"
and that the document had been published because "we wanted
to show people not only the kind of regime we were dealing
with, but also how Saddam Hussein had pursued a policy of
deliberate deception."

He added: "In retrospect, we should, to clear up any
confusion, have acknowledged which bits came from public
sources and which bits came from other sources." He said
the document had been written by government officials and
drawn from "a number of sources, including intelligence
sources."

"The overall objective was to give the full picture without
compromising intelligence sources," he said.

But critics of the government said that not only did the
document appear to have been largely cut and pasted
together, but also that the articles it relied on were
based on information that is, by now, obsolete.

For instance, the second section of the three-part report,
which is described on the Downing Street Web site as
providing "up-to-date details of Iraq's network of
intelligence and security," was drawn in large part from
"Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: a Guide," an
article about the activities of Iraqi intelligence in
Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, which appeared in the Middle East
Review of International Affairs last September. Its author
was Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the
Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.

Mr. Marashi told Channel 4 News, which first reported the
plagiarism charges, that his research had been drawn
primarily from two huge sets of documents: "one taken from
Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq — around four million
documents — as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi
security services in Kuwait." He also said that while he
had no reason to doubt the truth of anything he had written
and believed the government report to be accurate, no one
had asked permission or informed him about using his work.

"I am surprised, flattered as well, that this information
got used in a U.K. government dossier," Mr. Marashi said in
an interview with Reuters. "Had they consulted me, I could
have provided them with more updated information."

Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge
University who has compared the British report with the
articles it used as sources, said that in some cases, the
authors apparently changed phrases from the original
articles to make the case against Iraq seem more extreme.

For instance, Dr. Rangwala said, a section on the
Mukhabarat, the Iraqi directorate of general intelligence,
appeared to have been lifted verbatim from Mr. Marashi's
article, except for a few tweaks. Where Mr. Marashi
mentions that the Mukhabarat's responsibilities include
"monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq," the government
document speaks of "spying on foreign embassies in Iraq."
Mr. Marashi's description of the Mukhabarat's role in
"aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes" becomes
"supporting terrorist organizations in hostile regimes."

Critics of the British and American policy toward Iraq said
the report showed how little concrete evidence the two
governments actually have against Iraq, as well as how poor
their intelligence sources were.

"Both governments seem so desperate to create a pretext to
attack Iraq that they are willing to say anything," said
Nathaniel Hurd, a consultant on Iraq and a critic of the
American position. "This U.K. dossier, which deceptively
uses outdated material and plagiarizes, is just the latest
example of official dishonesty."

Opposition politicians here attacked the report as the
deceptive work of a bumbling government clutching at straws
as it tries to make a case for war.

"This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught
stealing the spoons," said Menzies Campbell, the foreign
affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats. "The dossier
may not amount to much, but this is a considerable
embarrassment for a government trying still to make a case
for war."

Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative Party's shadow defense
secretary, said the government had not satisfactorily
addressed the concerns raised by the disclosures.

"The government's reaction utterly fails to explain, deny
or excuse the allegations," Mr. Jenkin said. "The document
has been cited by the prime minister and Colin Powell as
the basis for a possible war. Who is responsible for such
an incredible failure of judgment?"

[thankful]

Now if only the people of Iraq can squawk and call foul like the given right we have in the U.S.A. (God bless her), I wonder if the situation as it stands now would be different?

[GutZ]

Has Sadaam seen this? He has been claiming all along the very same thing!

[Lured In]

Personal Opinion/Editorial

An abstract and review of the above documents.

Written by me.

"It was recently made known that, in fact some of the data used to support Colin Powell's presentation to the UN was researched from public sources. The public sources were apparently accurate and not necessarily new information , do in fact support the case that Saddam Hussein remains a threat. At the very least they provide historical documentation of Saddam's disregard for previous UN resolutions.

The British group responsible for producing this consolidated document (including the public sources) apparently failed to include a literary significant bibliography citing which pieces of data came from which source. From a literary standpoint this could be considered plagerism. From a security standpoint, the facts remain and also provide a level of protection for other sources that may have been exposed if they were cited in a bibliography.

In summation this means that the British used all sources possible to assemble solid and reliable data on Iraq and failed to write a bibliography."

In other news...

For immediate release:

"Newspaper reporters run out of things to write!

Apparently liberal media members are at a loss when it comes to finding stimulating and informative topics to write about. This has most recently become evident over the large uprising regarding a lack of a bibliography in a British security document. This shocking literary oversight seems to negate the fact that the information provided in the document is accurate and supports the fact that Saddam is a threat to the free world."


Give me a break. What's next, "Federal Punctuation: the misuse of colon's and semi-colons in government documents." :shocked: