On the face of it, the fact that large sections of a British dossier on Iraqi intelligence were plagiarised from publicly available sources seems like no big deal, any more than the revelation that John Lott participated in Internet debates using a pseudonym. But, as with Lott, the closer you look the worse it gets.

First, the original source was an article in a journal published in Israel. This doesn’t mean it was false, but the concealment of such a fact is clearly more than a failure of academic courtesy.

Second, the material was presented as current intelligence, but reference to the original article shows that most of the primary source material dates back to the first Gulf War.

Third, the source material was altered to make the Iraqis look worse – for example, “monitoring of foreign embassies” was replaced by “spying on foreign embassies”. Given that there was clearly no additional evidence to justify the change, this is fraud, which would have been detected earlier if the material had been properly cited instead of being plagiarised. (Amusingly, despite these ‘improvements’, the cut and paste job reproduced typos from the original).

It appears that this material came from Blair’s spin doctors rather than from British intelligence or the foreign office. But presumably if Blair had any useful intelligence he would not have resorted to this amateurish fraud.

In terms of Powell’s case against Saddam this reinforces the point I made previously. By throwing in a lot of old and bogus arguments, Powell undermined the credibility of the new evidence he was presenting.

Sources: The Guardian and The Telegraph

BTW, I observed previously that Jack Straw had put forward a more convincing case for war than Colin Powell. Obviously this judgement will need to be revised.