Caught red-handed
A scandal over the sources of a British government dossier on Iraq is more than an embarrassment, it's a disturbing look into the British intelligence apparatus
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CITY OF GLORY, CITY OF PAIN: Baghdad, once a cosmopolitan metropolis, still maintains a fair share of its lustre. Crowded, bustling, still alive, Baghdad awaits a possible rain of fire should the US lead a war on Iraq
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In its efforts to drum up support for war in Iraq, the British government has released regular dossiers detailing various aspects of the Iraq leadership and its brutal control. But the effect of these reports has worked contrary to their purpose. The biggest stir kicked up about the last report, issued in December and detailing human rights abuses under Saddam Hussein, actually came from Amnesty International (AI). The group released statements making it clear that the generous quoting of old AI reports -- readily available to anyone with Internet access -- was not appreciated. The same reports, AI was at pains to note, were wilfully ignored when Hussein was still in the good books of Britain and the US.
The latest report, issued on 30 January, focusses on the security structure in Iraq and aims to expose the efforts of these security organs to hamper international efforts to disarm Iraq of its "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). US Secretary of State Colin Powell drew attention to the 19-page report in his address to the UN Security Council last week, indicating that the "fine paper" describes "in exquisite detail" Iraq's obfuscation with regard to its weapons programmes. But the same day it was revealed that the report, which claims at the outset to draw upon "a number of sources, including intelligence material", was largely copied from previously published works that were never credited.
Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University and a prominent anti-war activist, spotted the extensive use of a report published in the September issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis". He noted that large swathes of the article, which was written by an Iraqi American academic at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, were well preserved in the dossier, including at least one punctuation error. Other parts of the report were taken from articles published in an Israeli online journal and online summaries of articles from the British military magazine Jane's Intelligence Review, which were posted on the Web site globalsecurity.org.
Rangwala, who works with the Cambridge-based humanitarian group Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI) and helps run the media watchdog Arab Media Watch, which monitors how the British press covers Arab issues, told Al-Ahram Weekly that as a close analyst of the Iraq situation, he'd read the previous reports on Iraq's security and intelligence services. "There are only a few worthwhile articles on the topic in English, and so when the British dossier was issued, I was expecting to find new information," Rangwala said. "By contrast, I was quite surprised that I found that I knew everything already in it -- even their wording sounded similar. That led me to look back at the earlier articles, and I found that the text was lifted from them."
The bulk of the dossier is taken from the thesis of postgraduate student Ibrahim Al-Marashi, who was not even aware of the report until he was contacted by Rangwala. Now besieged by calls from reporters, Al-Marashi told the Weekly that he was "both surprised and flattered that my report was being utilised by the UK government". And yet, an unwitting consequence of the scandal is that Blair critics eager to cast doubt on the report have made light of the sources used -- as if to say that because the works are publicly available, they are not thoroughly trustworthy. "I believe my work has been questioned," Al-Marashi said. "But I stand by it... The piece I wrote was thoroughly researched and is as up-to-date as I could possibly make it."
Although much of the material used in the report is quite old, the sources used are certainly credible. Rangwala agrees, but adds a caveat. "Al-Marashi clearly has a good grasp of that information, but he does not have direct sources within Iraq today. As a result, it's difficult to see how one could assume that this information, interesting though it may be for historical reasons, is relevant in understanding if and how Iraq's security services are obstructing the work of weapons inspectors some 12 years later."
"The Iraqi documents are 12 years old," concedes Al-Marashi. "But I did use articles from Iraq, the Iraqi opposition and other analytical works that were more current." Asked if he felt that analysts like himself working on Iraq could have put together a far more comprehensive report, Al-Marashi doesn't hesitate. "Without a doubt, I could have provided a more comprehensive, more current report, that would have been up-to-date as of 5 February 2003." He added that what the British government has done with this report "has almost undermined their credibility for justifying a war".
Deeply embarrassed by the media furore surrounding the revelations, the British government was forced this week to concede that it had plagiarised the sources cited by Rangwala, but maintained the import of the dossier remained intact. "The fact that we used some of [Al-Marashi's] work does not throw into question the accuracy of the document as a whole," a spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said last Friday. But the story has gathered a momentum of its own, and it has come to light that the dossier was assembled by junior government staff.
While critics of the Blair government and its unwavering support of the US in a war on Iraq have seized the scandal as proof that the US and UK are grasping at thin evidence to prop up war plans, the most disturbing outcome of the fiasco is that it has become clear how weak intelligence on Iraq and the region actually is. While the sources used are in fact credible, much of the information is quite old. Al- Marashi, whose thesis is actually about Iraqi intelligence activity in Kuwait ahead of the Gulf War, used as his primary sources documents seized by the Iraq Research and Documentation Project in 1991. One of the Jane's articles used, "Inside Iraq's Security Network", by Sean Boyne, was published in 1997. Yet the dossier claims to offer "up-to-date details of Iraq's network of intelligence and security organisations". With the US and UK repeatedly stressing that they have solid intelligence that Iraq is concealing WMD, the exposing of the latest Iraq dossier makes this claim even more difficult to hold up against a failure by UN weapons inspectors in Iraq to produce the elusive "smoking gun".
"This is the third dossier put out by the [British] government," says Rangwala, noting that the first, issued last September, was the most thorough. The dossier detailed allegations about Iraq's facilities for producing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. "The problem was that these claims could be checked. Every site mentioned in that dossier has been visited repeatedly by UN weapons inspectors, and they've found nothing to raise suspicions."
The September dossier was followed up by the ill- received human rights dossier, which Rangwala denounces as "a crass and opportunistic attempt to justify a war on the basis of events that had been committed largely with the compliance of the UK and US at the time -- including members of the present US administration".
The latest dossier, now bogged down in scandal, was obviously a rush job -- something to "chime in", as Rangwala puts it, with Powell's statement to the Security Council last Wednesday. "Given that the core of the dossier -- pages six to 16 of a 19- page report -- are plagiarised, either the British intelligence services were not consulted, or they didn't have any information about the current situation in Iraq," says Rangwala. "Either way, it casts serious doubt upon the claims we've heard from Prime Minister Blair about what he knows from intelligence sources. ... Given this record, it would be difficult to trust his claims to have further intelligence about Iraq's weapons, and, so, difficult to accept his case for war."
Reporting by Nyier Abdou
