Evidence against Iraq manufactured by West
As the US-led coalition for war against Iraq took a dangerous step closer last week when President George W. Bush warned Saddam Hussein "the game is over," serious new questions about the 'evidence' used by Washington to justify its imminent invasion emerged to undermine the credibility of mounting claims by the West against Baghdad.
Britain's Prime Minister and staunch pro-US hawk, Tony Blair, was severely embarrassed on Friday when British television revealed that his office had copied 'evidence' from publicly available academic papers that were included in the special intelligence dossier on Iraq and released to the public last week.
At least 11 of the 19-page dossier had been plagiarised from academic papers, one of which - a 12-year-old paper on the build-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War - was written by California graduate student Ibrahim Marashi and published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. The dossier even repeated the paper's typographical errors.
Other sections of the dossier were copied from Jane's Intelligence Review , and from an article last year by Cambridge University lecturer Glen Rangwala in the Middle East Review of International Affairs . Rangwala told the Reuters news agency he calculated that 11 of the dossier's 19 pages were "taken wholesale from academic papers".
The dossier, entitled Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation , were based on "a number of sources, including intelligence material," its introduction says. The report makes a detailed case that Iraq has tried to conceal its weapons programmes from United Nations inspectors. The report also charts the structure of Iraq's major intelligence organisations.
Some critics also claimed Blair's office had 'doctored' the dossier, which looked like a first-year university student's term paper.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell had cited and praised the British government's dossier during his presentation on Iraq to the UN Security Council last Wednesday.
As the US-led coalition for war against Iraq took a dangerous step closer last week when President George W. Bush warned Saddam Hussein "the game is over," serious new questions about the 'evidence' used by Washington to justify its imminent invasion emerged to undermine the credibility of mounting claims by the West against Baghdad.
Britain's Prime Minister and staunch pro-US hawk, Tony Blair, was severely embarrassed on Friday when British television revealed that his office had copied 'evidence' from publicly available academic papers that were included in the special intelligence dossier on Iraq and released to the public last week.
At least 11 of the 19-page dossier had been plagiarised from academic papers, one of which - a 12-year-old paper on the build-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War - was written by California graduate student Ibrahim Marashi and published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. The dossier even repeated the paper's typographical errors.
Other sections of the dossier were copied from Jane's Intelligence Review , and from an article last year by Cambridge University lecturer Glen Rangwala in the Middle East Review of International Affairs . Rangwala told the Reuters news agency he calculated that 11 of the dossier's 19 pages were "taken wholesale from academic papers".
The dossier, entitled Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation , were based on "a number of sources, including intelligence material," its introduction says. The report makes a detailed case that Iraq has tried to conceal its weapons programmes from United Nations inspectors. The report also charts the structure of Iraq's major intelligence organisations.
Some critics also claimed Blair's office had 'doctored' the dossier, which looked like a first-year university student's term paper.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell had cited and praised the British government's dossier during his presentation on Iraq to the UN Security Council last Wednesday.
Charges levelled
Amidst growing charges by many countries that the US plans to invade Iraq have nothing to do with its war against terrorism, Washington last week, in concert with key allies Britain and Australia, worked desperately to re-link evidence of Baghdad's support of terrorists to its storage of weapons of mass destruction.
The controversy has compounded Blair's difficulties in rallying a skeptical British public behind his strong support for the US and probable military action in Iraq.
While no opinion polls have yet been reported, editorials and politicians outside Blair's circle have generally discounted Powell's UN address and a public relations campaign that Blair had mounted last week.
Australia's Prime Minister John Howard hurriedly visits Bush and Blair this week in dogged support of the US position. Blair however appears to be wavering on unilateral military action by the US without UN backing.
Gap in intelligence
Nonetheless, the revelations have again highlighted a growing rift between intelligence agencies and their governments.
British intelligence agencies and Downing Street have been at odds on whether Saddam's regime has been providing material support to terrorist networks, especially al-Qaeda.
In a further humiliation, as Blair and Powell were strenuously claiming undeniable evidence of links between Baghdad and the terrorist network, British Defence Ministry sources were leaking to the BBC documents suggesting they had found no such proof.
The rift between intelligence services and government also extends to Washington. Senior US analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency have told The New York Times and The Washington Post that they continue to be veiled by the White House over similar 'evidence' of Baghdad's alleged terrorists links.
Most claimed their boss, CIA Director George Tenet, who had sat behind Powell during the UN Security Council presentation last week nodding his head, had been 'cooking the books'.
In a race against time, UN weapons inspection chiefs arrived in Baghdad on the weekend for pivotal talks with the Iraqi government in a bid to elicit its full co-operation under UN Resolution 1441 over its stores of anthrax, nerve gas and other forbidden arms.
Chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix and El Baradei are seeking quick Iraqi concessions on practical matters, such as clearance to fly US U2 reconnaissance planes in support of their inspections.
D-Day soon
Sources say the next crucial stage in the standoff between Iraq and the US is Blix's second report, due on Thursday. Most US analysts say war with Iraq would probably happen within a month, with military planners in the Pentagon now finalising their invasion plans.
But the analysts add Washington isn't holding its breath over the value of any new Iraqi documents handed over to the UN weapons inspectors.
Washington wants final concrete and specific hard evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad's willingness to disarm by Valentine's Day on Friday.
In Berlin, meanwhile, weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported that Germany and France, which are opposed to war, were working on a broad disarmament plan for Iraq designed to avoid armed conflict, including the deployment of UN soldiers throughout the country, reconnaissance flights and a tripling of the number of weapons inspectors.
Der Spiegel said the plan could be presented to the UN Security Council as a resolution, although it was unclear how the two countries or the United Nations would win Saddam's approval for carrying it out.
