Friday, February 07, 2003

This one isn't in any of the US papers that I've seen, but seems to be all over the British press. Apparently, large portions of Britain's Iraq dossier, praised by Colin Powell before the UN, is plagiarized material from what the Telegraph calls "a Californian postgraduate student's outdated thesis... it emerged overnight that much of the document was lifted from a paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi, from Monterey, California - who was researching material relating to the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War and not to the current situation." This article is in every paper across the spectrum, including the left (but not as left as the Guardian)the independent, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London, and the conservative Telegraph.
Because you have to register for the Telgraph, and that's a pain in the ass (only a dork like me is gonna go out of his way to register for news from a paper 2000 miles away whose politics I don't subscribe to), I am going to cut and paste one of my favorite quotes from the article:
Today former Labour minister Glenda Jackson, MP for Hampstead and Highgate, suggested the Government had misled the public.

She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If that was presented to Parliament and the country as being up-to-date intelligence ... and in fact as we now know they simply lifted it from a university thesis, 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."

UPDATE: The New York Times is reporting on this.