Dodgy Dossier
"Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation"
On 3 February 2003, as the drums of war on Iraq were rising in tempo and volume, the British Government of Tony Blair released a document entitled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation". The document was claimed by the Blair government to be based on high-level British intelligence and diplomatic sources and to demonstrate that Iraq posed a serious threat to the UK. It was quoted by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on 15th February 2010. The problem was that the majority of it was a word for word copy of an article written by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a US based undergraduate and published the previous September in The Middle East Review of International Affairs MERIA [1]. The rest was a mish-mash of plagiarisms from other openly available internet articles.
