After all the media hype about Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “powerful, dramatic, overwhelming” presentation to the UN Security Council on Iraq’s evil ways, plans, and weapons of mass destruction, or as CNN puts it “the turning point in the standoff with Iraq,” it turns out a major portion of that report was written by a California college student named Ibrahim al-Marashi and funneled through England.
Evidently, this came to light on Friday, February 8, with entire paragraphs used in Powell’s presentation lifted word for word from Mr. Marashi’s thesis, syntax and spelling errors included.
The Weekend Australian claimed that the report: “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation, and posted on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s website, contained large chunks lifted from other sources … copied from three articles, including one in Jane’s Intelligence Review and another by graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi of Monterey, California, that appeared last September in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.” Also, pointing out that the dossier was “based on old information.”
At 1:14 (GMT) Friday afternoon, BBC tried to play down allegations by announcing that; “A dossier of evidence against Iraq is ‘solid,’ Downing Street has insisted after allegations that it included plagiarised material that was 12 years out of date.”
It’s causing quite a stir in Britain since most of the people there are already against a war in Iraq and are challenging Blair’s leadership. The BBC goes on to ask: “This 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?”
Marashi himself says: “This is wholesale deception. How can the British public trust the Government if it is up to these sort of tricks? People will treat any other information they publish with a lot of scepticism from now on.”
It was already impossible to separate which data Secretary Powell presented Wednesday was the evidence President Bush claims to have had in his pocket for months, but now it looks like we should be questioning the sources and dates for all of the data presented. Marashi admits that most of his information came from Jordanian, Kurdish, and documents left in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War and his thesis was about Iraq in 1991.
It also begs the question of precisely where the powerful intelligence forces of the CIA, FBI, NSA, or the most heavily funded spy network in the world has been. Is this the data our president hesitated to release because it might “compromise” operatives and intelligence gathering methods?
It is interesting to note that while we might as well hang it up when it comes to enlisting the support of the rest of the world where this news is spreading like wildfire, this news is virtually absent in America. On Saturday, February 8, the Chicago Tribune ran the story on page 11 of its final “North Edition” and the New York Times ran it on page 9, but that’s it. No other major paper mentioned it.
Meanwhile, over the weekend CNN and Fox News treated us to a series of biographies of Colin Powell and praise of his UN speech plus the booga-booga increase to “orange” of our terrorist alert status.
Saturday News Samples
London’s Independent (one of many)
Weekend Australian
Scottish Daily Record
Jerusalem Post
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