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Enough! Feb. 10, 2003 -- PHILADELPHIA (apj.us) -- The Internet is filled with all too much evidence that something is amiss in Washington. What is awry is tough to say, but the world is seeming a little crazier today and American citizens are beginning to ask a serious question: "Can we trust the President of United States or his Cabinet and advisors to tell us the truth?" Until today I've had fun with George W. Bush. I've teased him, called him a dim-wit, and bemoaned the fact that he stole the election for President. I've written that his agenda is filled with payoffs to his campaign donors and I've talked about his Trust, the source of which can be traced back to his family's support of Hitler during World War II. I haven't blamed President Bush, however, mostly because I don't think he is capable, nor was his father capable, of meeting the evil that surrounds him, and is suffocating him with any intellect or grace. Our President is no match for the likes of Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle, who planned this attack on Iraq more than a decade ago. He is no match for Richard Cheney, who went from a professional public trough-lapper to the $100 million man -- seemingly as payment for his role in Desert Storm. He is no match for Colin Powell, who was the military attaché for the disgraced Caspar Weinberger -- one of the main players in the felony committed by Oliver North and his accomplices in the Iran-Contra scandal. He is no match for the insipid but disarmingly grandfather-like Donald Rumsfeld, who yesterday and today treated the genuine concerns of Germany and France as if those concerns emanated from his six-year-old nephew. Bush is no match for any of them, including his father, who was no match for them and those like them either. I wrote this morning that the President would be best served by cleaning house -- ejecting the old dead and totally incompetent wood from his cabinet. Today I find that not only is the dead wood alive and operating -- but that they are continuing to lie, or appear to lie, and are not responding to any good and well-intended questions from the press -- themselves tired of this malarkey and ready for a fight. Our problem, the problem for journalists and opinion writers, is that we don't know what to think, who to trust, and why the White House isn't forthcoming. I do know that it is now widely reported that the British lied - straight-faced -- to the United Nations last week about their findings which "bolstered" Colin Powell's presentation claiming that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and was prepared and capable to use them against the United States, against other nations in the region, against Israel. Now it turns out the British merely copied the report of someone else from the Internet -- of all places -- and "reported it" to the United Nations as if MI5 had gathered it. In fact, Glen Rangwala ( 1 ), Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge University, England wrote on February 5, 2003 that he examined the British government's "dossier" on Iraq in preparation for Colin Powell's U.N. presentation at the United Nations. As reported by the news sources across the globe, the British presentation claimed to reference "a number of sources, including intelligence material" in the first sentence of its first page. The only problem is that the British plagiarized the information from what amounts to a magazine article, lied about it, and changed the information it contained to suit its purpose. The true author of the information was Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Marashi was a guest on CNN this morning, asserting that not only did the British plagiarize his article but misinterpreted its meaning inasmuch as the article could have been used to make the argument NOT to attack Iraq, rather than an argument to invade that nation. As a demonstration of just how far the British, and possibly Secretary of State Powell, will go to pull the wool over our eyes, Prof. Rangwala writes that more than half the document, which provided the foundation for its UN presentation, was plagiarized from an article written in September of 2002 in "Middle East Review of International Affairs" ( 2 ). Rangwala writes "The document claims to draw upon a number of sources, including intelligence material" (p.1, first sentence). Now this is a bit misleading. More precisely, the bulk of the 19-page document (pp.6-16) is directly copied without acknowledgement from an article in last September's Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis". Mr. Marashi, the author, confirmed to Rangwala that the British government did not ask for his permission and that he had known nothing about their plagiarism until Prof Rangwala contacted him. The plagiarism was so poor that it actually copied typographical errors and out-of-the-ordinary uses of grammar For example, on p.13, the British dossier incorporates a misplaced comma:
Likewise, Marashi's piece also states:
The British didn't stop with copying Marashi's work -- they extensively copied other sources including the work of two authors published in Jane's Intelligence Review: Ken Gause (an international security analyst from Alexandria, Virginia), "Can the Iraqi Security Apparatus save Saddam" (November 2002), pp.8-13 and Sean Boyne, "Inside Iraq's Security Network", in 2 parts during 1997. Because the British copied from several sources, even misspellings and transliterations were inconsistent. The British also changed the documents, in the worst display of prevarication I've witnessed in a long time. First they increased and rounded up statistical data. For example one section copied word for word from Jane's estimates that Fedayeen Saddam has 10-40,000 personnel (from two different authors) yet Tony Blair allowed his office to present, to the world, the figure of between 30,000 to 40,000 personnel. The British also change specific words to makes their claims against Iraq stronger. Read what Rangwala found in this regard:
Okay, you say. So they were rushed and had to copy some stuff. But this easily observable lying unearths far more serious problems. First, the document at least hints that the British and the United States really have no independent sources of information on Iraq's internal politics and simply, both nations do Google searches on the Internet that any 12 year old could complete. And one wonders why so much of the world treats what our allies and we are claiming to be "intelligence data." With these revelations, it is difficult for this author to believe anything the Bush Administration has told us about Iraq. Anything. Worse, the information presented and bolstering Colin Powell's multi-media circus may not be accurate at all. For instance, the bulk of the British document came from Mr. Marashi, and the bulk of his information came from documents captured from Iraq in 1991 -- 12 years ago. Here are other remarks from Prof. Rangwala, who I expect to be arrested at any moment by MI5:
If the British lies aren't enough, turn to Secretary Powell's, and Prof. Rangwala's comments on his presentation. They are lengthy -- and revealing -- poking huge holes in twenty-five specific claims made by Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council. Let me add that much of this information was taken from pages published by The Traprock Peace Center in Deerfield, Massachusetts a well known anti-war progressive organization, and the Institute for Public Accuracy, in San Francisco and Washington D.C. It is late days for any of us to independently look at each and every claim contained here, and I cannot tell you that all of it is true -- save for the comments regarding the British theft of others' work. What I can say is that enough is enough. The mainstream media -- rather than apologizing for the incompetence of the Bush cabinet -- had better begin to ask a lot of questions -- and might start with the ones naturally posed above. The American voter might do well to get up from their sofas and the next installment of The Bachelorette or Joe Millionaire, and instead do some research of their own. It might take a little work to separate the wheat form the chaff -- but it appears more and more that The White House is the chaff. Let us distinguish the real from the unreal, the valuable from the relatively valueless. This is what one did literally in the ancient agricultural practice of winnowing, one form of which was to expose, say, wheat to the wind so that the chaff blew away and the grains remained. For the President, who thought it more important to address a gaggle of religious broadcasters -- a group that angers Islamics with their incessant preaching -- the thought appears metaphorically in the Bible, where John the Baptist, speaking of the one "that cometh after me," continues (Matthew 3:12), "Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." President Bush, will you do this for us? Please. (1) Rangwala is author of 'Counter-Dossier II' - Claims and Evaluations of Iraq's Proscribed Weapons and co-author of Counter-Dossier (with Alan Simpson, MP, for Labour Against the War). Dr. Rangwala has also written a First Response to Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN Presentation Concerning Iraq.
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