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:
-
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.
-
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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