UK/IRAQ: The British government was accused yesterday of attempting to mislead Parliament and the public after it emerged that a dossier of evidence against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was largely liftedfrom a Californian postgraduate student's outdated thesis.
Downing Street conceded it had made a mistake in failing to acknowledge that the report had borrowed heavily from a paper by Dr Ibrahim al-Marashi.
The dossier produced by No 10 was designed to help win over sceptics by outlining Iraq's alleged efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction, and was even praised by the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, on Wednesday as a "fine paper".
But the revelation that sections of the dossier were reproduced from Dr al-Marashi's paper seriously undermined the government's stance on Iraq, critics said.
Former Labour minister Mr Peter Kilfoyle said he was "shocked" at the way the dossier had been produced. "It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths, assertions and over-the-top spin," he told BBC Radio 4's The World at One.
"I am shocked that on such thin evidence - a Californian postgraduate thesis - that we should be trying to convince the British people that this is a war worth fighting. It suggests that there is a degree of duplicity taking place which has no place in a modern, open, democratic society."
Former Labour minister Ms Glenda Jackson, MP for Hampstead and Highgate, 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."
The thesis was published in September 2002 but was based on material relating to the 1991 Gulf War.
Downing Street's dossier said UN weapons inspectors were outnumbered by 200 to one by Iraqi agents trying to deceive them, and provided "up-to-date details" of Iraq's security organisations.
Mr Blair's official spokesman rejected Ms Jackson's charge that Downing Street had lied. He added: "The fact that we used some of his (Dr al-Marashi's) work does not throw into question the accuracy of the document as a whole, as he himself acknowledged on Newsnight last night, where he said that in his opinion the document overall was accurate."
Downing Street's concern to protect intelligence sources behind some of the material in the dossier may have been behind its mistake, the spokesman suggested.
Dr al-Marashi was not consulted in advance before his work was used in the dossier. He said: "I was a bit disenchanted because they never cited my article . . . any academic, when you publish anything, the only thing you ask for in return is that they include a citation of your work.
"There are laws and regulations about plagiarism that you would think the UK government would abide by." - (PA)