APPENDIX A


Intelligence based on Plagiarism: The British “Intelligence” Iraq Dossier
by Glen Rangwala


A close textual analysis of the British Intelligence report quoted by Colin Powell in his UN Address suggests that its UK authors had little access to first-hand intelligence sources and instead based their work on academic papers, which they selectively distorted.


US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his presentation to the Security Council on February 5, sought to reinforce his argument by referring to a British intelligence report.


What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. … I would call my colleagues’ attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed … which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities. (Sec. Colin Powell, United Nations Security Council, 5 February 2003)


Powell was referring to “Iraq Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation”, released barely a few days prior to his historical February 5 address to the UN body.


On 2 February 2003, British Prime Minister Tony Blair released a report allegedly prepared by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) entitled “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation”. The following day, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons on how grateful we should be to receive this information. “It is obviously difficult when we publish intelligence reports, but I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services.”


Yet to me, the document seemed oddly familiar. Checking it against three journal articles published over the past six years, I discovered that most of the Downing Street report—including the entire section detailing the structures of the Iraqi security services— had been lifted straight from the on-line versions of those articles. The writings of three academics, including that of a California-based postgraduate student and primarily using information from 1991, had become caught up in the justification for war.


The authors of the dossier are members of Tony Blair’s Press Relations Office at Whitehall. Britain’s Secret Service (MI6), either was not consulted, or more likely, provided an assessment that did not fit in with the politicians’ argument. In essence, spin was being sold off as intelligence.


The bulk of the 19-page document (pp. 6-16) had been directly copied without acknowledgement from an article in the September 2002 Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis”. The author of the piece is Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He has confirmed to me that his permission was not sought by MI6; in fact, he didn’t even know about the British document until I mentioned it to him.


Two articles from the specialist security magazine, Jane Intelligence Review, were indirectly copied. On-line summaries of articles by Sean Boyne in 1997 and Ken Gause in 2002 were on the GlobalSecurity.org website, and these texts were also amalgamated into the dossier prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Even the typographical errors and anomalous uses of grammar were incorporated into the Downing Street document.

 

For example, Marashi’s had written:

“Saddam appointed, Sabir ‘Abd al-’Aziz al-Duri as head” …

Note the misplaced comma. Thus, on p.13, the British dossier incorporates the same misplaced comma:

“Saddam appointed, Sabir ‘Abd al-’Aziz al-Duri as head” …

The fact that the texts of these three authors are copied directly results in a proliferation of different transliterations (e.g., different spellings of the Ba’th party, depending on which author is being copied).


The only exceptions to these acts of plagiarizing were the tweaking of specific phrases. The reference to how the Iraqi Mukhabarat was “aiding opposition groups” in neighboring states and “monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq” in Marashi’s article turned into a statement in the MI6 Document of how it was “supporting terrorist groups” and “spying on foreign embassies in Iraq”. A mention in Boyne’s article on how the “Fedayeen Saddam” (Saddam’s Self-Sacrificers) was made up of “bullies and country bumpkins” was shorn of its last three words in the dossier: Iraqi country bumpkins, clearly, are not about to launch an attack on the UK, and so have no role in the document’s rhetorical strategy.


Numbers are also increased or are rounded up. So, for example, the section on “Fedayeen Saddam” (pp.15-16) is directly copied from Boyne, almost word for word. The only substantive difference is that Boyne estimates the personnel of the organization to be 18,000-40,000 (Gause similarly estimates 10-40,000). The British dossier instead writes “30,000 to 40,000”. A similar bumping up of figures occurs with the description of the Directorate of Military Intelligence.


Finally, there is one serious substantive mistake in the British text, in that it muddles up Boyne’s description of General Security (al-Amn al-Amm), and places it in its section on p.14 of Military Security (al-Amn al-Askari). The result is complete confusion: it starts on p.14 by relating how Military Security was created in 1992 (in a piece copied from Marashi), then goes onto talk about the movement of its headquarters—in 1990 (in a piece copied from Boyne on the activities of General Security). The result is that it gets the description of the Military Security Service wholly wrong, claiming that its head is Taha al-Ahbabi, whilst really he was head of General Security in 1997 and that Military Security was headed by Thabet Khalil.


Apart from the obvious criticism that the British government has plagiarized texts without acknowledgement, passing them off as the work of its intelligence services, there are two other serious considerations:

  1. It indicates that the UK at least really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq’s internal politics—they just draw upon publicly available data. Thus any further claims to information based on “intelligence data” must be treated with even more skepticism. The authors state that they drew “upon a number of sources, including intelligence material.” In fact, they copied material from at least three different authors. They plagiarized, directly cutting and pasting or near quoting.
     

  2. The information presented as being an accurate statement of the current state of Iraq’s security organizations is not anything of the sort. Marashi—the real and unwitting author of much of the document has as his primary source the documents captured in 1991 for the Iraq Research and Documentation Project. His focus is the subject of his PhD thesis is on the activities of Iraq’s intelligence agencies in Kuwait from August 1990 to January 1991 prior to the onslaught of the Gulf War. As a result, the information presented as relevant to how Iraqi agencies are currently engaged with Unmovic is 12 years old.

When the document was first released as a Word document, I checked the properties of the text in the File menu. It revealed the authors of the text as P. Hamill, J. Pratt, A. Blackshaw, and M. Khan. Those names were removed within hours from the downloadable file. However, journalists have since checked who these individuals are, and revealed them all to be responsible for the UK government’s press relations. In essence, then, spin was being sold off as intelligence.


The dossier is ordered as follows:

  • p.1 is the summary.

  • pp. 2-5 are, firstly, a repetition of Blix’s comments to the Security Council in January on the difficulties they were encountering. Further claims about the activities of al-Mukhabarat follow. These claims are not backed up, for example the allegation that car crashes are organized to prevent the speedy arrival of inspectors. Some of these claims have since been denied by UNMOVIC head Hans Blix.

  • p. 6 is a simplified version of Marashi’s diagram at: http://cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/pdfs/iraqint.pdf.

  • p. 7 is copied (top) from Gause (on the Presidential Secretariat), and (middle and bottom) from Boyne (on the National Security Council).

  • p. 8 is entirely copied from Boyne (on the National Security Council).

  • p. 9 is copied from Marashi (on al-Mukhabarat), except for the final section, which is insubstantial.

  • p. 10 is entirely copied from Marashi (on General Security), except for the final section, which is insubstantial.

  • p. 11 is entirely copied from Marashi (on Special Security), except for the top section (on General Security), which is insubstantial.

  • p. 12 is entirely copied from Marashi (on Special Security).

  • p. 13 is copied from Gause (on Special Protection) and Marashi (Military Intelligence).

  • p. 14 is wrongly copied from Boyne (on Military Security) and from Marashi (on the Special Republican Guard).

  • p. 15 is copied from Gause and Boyne (on al-Hadi project/project 858).

  • pp. 15-16 is copied from Boyne (on Fedayeen Saddam).

A final section, on the Tribal Chiefs’ Bureau, seems to be copied from Anthony H. Cordesman, “Key Targets in Iraq”, February 1998, http://www.csis.org/stratassessment/reports/iraq_targets.pdf.

 

Why did the UK government put out such a shoddy piece of work? The first dossier dated September 2002 addressed what is purportedly the rationale for military action against Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s alleged production of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The problem was that these claims could be checked: Iraq invited UN inspectors to visit the sites of concern, and they have found nothing to raise suspicions.


With the argument about the large-scale development of prohibited weapons looking increasingly implausible, the US shifted tack. Now the problem was not the immediate threat of Iraq, but Saddam Hussein’s “unique evil”. Ever eager to support the changing US line, the British government responded with a second dossier. This was on human rights in Iraq, and largely about the crimes committed by the Iraqi regime in the 1980s.

 

As human rights organizations said at the time, this was a crass and opportunistic attempt to justify a war on the basis of events that had been committed largely with the compliance of the UK and US at the time. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was hobbled when the story of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein—possibly giving the green light to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons—reappeared on the front pages of US newspapers.


And so the US focus changed again. Now the problem was primarily phrased in terms of the ineffectiveness of weapons inspections in the absence of Iraq’s full cooperation. On the face of it, this is an implausible argument: a key role of inspections is to deter through its monitoring activities any attempt by Iraq to reconstruct its industries to produce these weapons. In present circumstances, Iraq may be able to hide a few vials and canisters of agents that have largely decomposed, but it cannot develop the means to threaten the outside world.


However, as Secretary of State Powell made clear that his statement to the Security Council of 5 February would concentrate on this theme, Mr Blair may have sensed that his government needed to produce something quickly to substantiate the US position.


The case for war on Iraq has largely been made on the back of information that politicians claim to be presenting from the intelligence services. In this case, the intelligence services either were not consulted even though the information was sourced to them; or, possibly more likely, they provided an assessment that did not fit in with the politicians’ argument. Downing Street, in trying to pander to the US stance without the argumentative means to do so, resorted to petty plagiarism.

 

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APPENDIX B

 


The Financial Interests behind the World Trade Center Lease


On October 17, 2000, eleven months before 9/11, Blackstone Real Estate Advisors, of The Blackstone Group, L.P, purchased, from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, the participating mortgage secured by World Trade Center, Building 7.1


On April 26, 2001 the Port Authority leased the WTC for 99 years to Silverstein Properties and Westfield America Inc.
The transaction was authorized by Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg.


This transfer from the New York and New Jersey Port Authority was tantamount to the privatization of the WTC Complex. The official press release described it as “the richest real estate prize in New York City history”. The retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America Inc.2


On 24 July 2001, 6 weeks prior to 9/11, Silverstein took control of the lease of the WTC following the Port Authority decision of April 26, 2001.


Silverstein and Frank Lowy, CEO of Westefield Inc. took control of the 10.6 million-square-foot WTC complex. “Lowy leased the shopping concourse called the Mall at the WTC, which comprised about 427,000 square feet of retail space.”3


Explicitly included in the agreement was that Silverstein and Westfield “were given the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed”.4


In this transaction, Silverstein signed a rental contract for the WTC over 99 years amounting to 3,2 billion dollars in installments to be made to the Port Authority: 800 million covered fees including a down payment of the order of 100 million dollars. Of this amount, Silverstein put in 14 million dollars of his own money. The annual payment on the lease was of the order of 115 million dollars.5


In the wake of the WTC attacks, Silverstein sued for some $7.1 billion in insurance money, double the amount of the value of the 99 year lease.6

 


WTC Financial Interests


Silverstein Properties Inc. is a Manhattan-based real estate development and investment firm that owns, manages, and has developed more than 20 million square feet of office, residential and retail space.


Westfield America, Inc. is controlled by the Australian based Lowy family with major interests in shopping centres. The CEO of Westfield is Australian businessman Frank Lowy.


The Blackstone Group, a private investment bank with offices in New York and London, was founded in 1985 by its Chairman, Peter G. Peterson, and its President and CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman. In addition to its Real Estate activities, the Blackstone Group’s core businesses include Mergers and Acquisitions Advisory, Restructuring and Reorganization Advisory, Private Equity Investing, Private Mezzanine Investing, and Liquid Alternative Asset Investing.7


Blackstone chairman Peter G. Peterson is also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Chairman of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His partner Stephen A. Schwarzman is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Peter G. Peterson is also named in widow Ellen Mariani’s civil RICO suit filed against George W. Bush, et al.


Kissinger McLarty Associates—Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm—has a “strategic alliance” with the Blackstone Group “which is designed to help provide financial advisory services to corporations seeking high-level strategic advice.” 8

 


Notes

1. Business Wire, 17 October 2000.
2. See Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker, 20 May 2002.
3. C. Bollyn, “Did Rupert Murdoch Have Prior Knowledge of 9/11?” Centre for Research on Globalization, www.globalresearch.ca, 20 October 2003.
4. Goldberger, op. cit.
5. Associated Press, 22 November 2003. See also Die Welt, Berlin, Oct 11, 2001.
6. Alison Frankel, The American Lawyer, Sept 3 2002.
7. Business Wire, op. cit.
8. The Blackstone Group website at http://www.blackstone.com

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