] Feb. 6, 2003, 2230 hrs, PST, (FTW) - A story is sweeping
] the world tonight and it says a great deal about those
] who are forcing the world into a war it does not want. The
] famed dossier presented by British Prime Minister Tony Blair
] to his Parliament was plagiarized from two articles and a
] September 2002 research paper submitted by a graduate
] student. Worse, the Iraq described by the graduate student
] is not the Iraq of 2003 but the Iraq of 1991.

This is a very interesting story. From what I can tell, the central claim is accurate. Britain plagiarized large sections of the student's report in their report. The students report was compiled from open sources (the intelligence kind not the computer kind :). The link here is a good one, because it provides both reports. You can do your own comparisons.

I'm not sure what to make of this politically. I'd like to see what other people on MemeStreams have to say.

The link here makes the claim that the student's report is about the Iraq of 1991. That certainly would be a smoking gun, but it doesn't appear to be accurate. The student's report mentions that there are very few open sources on Iraq. A large number of documents were release in 1991, and these are used as one of the reference sources for the article, but there are many other reference sources, the majority of which are relatively recent.

Furthermore, Britain ought to be using open sources, and one could imagine that they are careful to keep open source intel and closed source intel separate, and for a public report they would rely completely upon open sources. So one can imagine how this text might have crept into their report. It doesn't mean the information in the student's analysis is bad.

On the other hand, it does appear that the author of the British report took some amount of journalistic liberty with the student's words in an attempt to make things sound more dramatic. Furthermore, Britain should have attributed their sources. Both of these things are certainly dishonest. Whether or not they amount to a smoking gun on the war issue, I'm just not sure. What do YOU think?

Britain's Intelligence Dossier on Iraq was Plagiarized from a Grad Student