The propaganda campaign for an invasion of Iraq received an embarrassing, if minor, setback when it was reported by Britain's Channel 4 on February 6 (www.channel4.com/news/home/z/stories/20030206/dossier.html) that large portions of a new British government "dossier" were indeed plagiarized from a Monterey, California graduate student's Ph.D. thesis.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell praised it in his presentation before the United Nations Security Council on Iraq's alleged hiding of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The British government published another "new dossier" the day before Powell's presentation and it gives the reader the impression of being an up-to-date intelligence document about the Iraqi government's intelligence and security apparatus and its alleged hiding of WMD's from UN weapons inspectors.

However, it turns out that the "new dossier" made for familiar reading for Cambridge academic Glen Ranwala, who pointed out the British government's plagiarism to Channel 4. The article in question is by Ibrahim al-Marashi and was published in September in an obscure academic journal called the Middle East Review of International Affairs.

Marashi's article is a dull, academic overview of the Iraqi government's intelligence and security apparatus that has nothing to do with the current situation in Iraq.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of Marashi's article deals with the pre-1991 Gulf War period of Iraqi history. Ironically, most of the information in the public domain about Saddam Hussein's intelligence and security apparatus was brought to the world by the Kurdish resistance forces in Northern Iraq who were sold out by George Bush, Sr. in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. "The militia of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) seized the confidential files in these buildings looking for information on the Iraqi government spies in their own organization," writes Marashi. "After Iraqi Republican Guards brutally suppressed the insurrection, the retreating Kurds took about four million documents totaling about ten million pages with them. Makiya and Peter Galbraith were instrumental in arranging the transfer of most of these Iraqi government documents to the United States for study."

The accusations of plagiarism stand when one reads Karashi's article side-by-side with the British government's "new dossier." For example, the better part of six whole paragraphs from Karashi's article, under the section about the Special Security Agency, or "Al-Amn Al-Khas," are basically copied and pasted into the British government's "new dossier" without any attribution to the original source. According to Channel 4, the British government even republished verbatim grammatical errors made in Karashi's article. See for yourself. Karashi's article can be read on the Internet at: http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue3/jv6n3a1.html . The British Government's "new dossier" on Iraq's alleged hiding of WMD's can be read on the Internet at: www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7111.asp.

This is just one more example of how empty all the rhetoric about the main rationale for Washington and London's Iraq invasion plans are. All the feeble attempts to make Iraq look like a military juggernaut would actually be amusing if the US and UK weren't planning dropping up to 800 cruise missiles on Baghdad alone within 48 hours (See the Sydney Morning Herald: www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/25/1042911596206.html).