British govt insist Iraq dossier solid
- NDTV Correspondent
Saturday, February 8, 2003 (London):
British government's embarrassment over its Iraq "intelligence" dossier deepened with the disclosure that key sections were cobbled together by junior communications unit staff, but a spokesman of Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted last night that the document was "solid".
Officials also admitted that chunks of the document - praised by US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday for its "exquisite detail" - were copied word-for-word from an article by a 29-year-old Californian academic.
The sentences were lifted from an article by Ibrahim al-Marishi, an Iraqi-American, in the September edition of Middle East Review of International Affairs.
He, in turn, sources his information to a 1999 book by the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who opposes US President Bush's Iraq policy.
Tony Blair's spokesman accepted that it may have been wiser properly to source the material used in the report and said the internet version might be amended to acknowledge its origins.
"It was a pull-together of a variety of sources. 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.
Refusing to say who had been responsible for alleged plagiarism, the spokesman said the dossier was "accurate" and that the government had never claimed exclusive authorship.
He said "the document was solid. The overall objective was to give the full picture without comprising intelligence sources."
Shadow defence secretary Bernard Jenkin said the Tories were deeply concerned by the programme's report.
"The government's reaction utterly fails to explain, deny or excuse the allegations made in it," he said.
"This document has been cited by the Prime Minister Tony Blair and US Secretary of State Colin Powell as the basis for a possible war. Who is responsible for such an incredible failure of judgement?"
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said "this is intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons. The dossier may not amount to much but this is a considerable embarrassment for a government trying still to make a case for war."
Al Marashi told the BBC Two Newsnight programme last night the government document was still accurate despite "a few minor cosmetic changes". "The only inaccuracies in the UK document were that they maybe inflated some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies.
"The primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two set 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."
Former Labour minister Glenda Jackson, MP, was angry about the alleged plagiarism.
She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If that was presented to Parliament and the country as being up-to-date intelligence, albeit collected from a variety of sources but by British intelligence agents... it is another example of how the government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament on the issue of a possible war with Iraq.
"And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying." (PTI)
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