Government plagiarized magazines

last updated 8 January 2015

London

The British government was embarrassed last week by the revelation that the “secret spy dossier” it released to demonstrate Iraq’s history of deception was mostly copied from an American postgraduate’s thesis. Some of the dossier was cribbed from articles in Jane’s Intelligence Review, and the rest from a paper by U.S. scholar Ibrahim al-Marashi, based on evidence from 1991. British spin doctors merely revved up the language a bit, changing “opposition groups” to “terrorist organizations,” and “monitoring foreign embassies” to “spying.” None of the material was actually secret, prompting the London Observer to ask, “Does this mean that the government is starved of decent intelligence?”