The liar and the plagiarist
February 11th, 2003
Almost immediately after the globally televised speech of US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell before the United Nations on February 5 (February 6 in Manila), President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced that the Powell speech had convinced her that Iraq is indeed hiding weapons of mass destruction and has links with the terrorist network al-Qaeda.
If Mrs. Arroyo was indeed thus convinced, it was a case of the faithful’s being converted. It was also a case of relying on someone (Powell) whose presentation was based on several unsubstantiated assertions—and quite a few lies.
Some of Powell’s claims he also tried to support by citing a “fine paper” (Powell’s words) issued by the British government—a supposed dossier on Iraq, 11 of whose 19 pages turned out to have been lifted without credit from other sources, some published more than 10 years ago and containing outdated information.
Although she made it a point to look like a new convert to the US’s planned war of aggression against Iraq, Mrs. Arroyo did not really need the Powell speech to be convinced.
Just three days before (February 3 in Manila) Mrs. Arroyo had already called on the United Nations to use force against Iraq, upon which she also heaped the responsibility of avoiding a conflict that will almost certainly cost it several hundred thousand casualties.
“The UN should be ready to act with dispatch and force when required. Otherwise it would lose its credibility as a force for peace,” Mrs. Arroyo said shortly after she arrived from Kuwait and a not-quite-coincidental meeting with the US Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki.
She then blamed Iraq for the crisis, in the tradition of the blame-the-victim tendency of her administration.
“By its actions, it is rapidly losing its opportunity to resolve the matter through peaceful means,” Mrs. Arroyo said (and with a straight face too).
In so many words and on previous occasions, Mrs. Arroyo had declared unequivocal support for a US attack on Iraq, provoking demonstrations from peace groups and prompting the Catholic Church hierarchy to admonish her for obeying Bush rather than the Pope. The Pope has described the planned US war on Iraq, which the United States is vainly trying to justify, as immoral.
Although she has claimed to be a faithful daughter of the Church, Mrs. Arroyo pointedly ignored the Church’s admonition, as well as the crystal-clear demands of Philippine national interest—all 1.5 million of them.
Instead she flew to Kuwait, apparently to firm up the tendency of the country’s 1.5 million overseas workers in the Middle East not to return to the Philippines even should war break out, and despite the consequent risks to their lives.
Returning two days later, elated at the news that the Philippine government would not need to spend nonexistent funds on repatriating OFWs, she issued her statement “chastising” the UN for its supposed inaction and blaming Iraq for the crisis, in an echo of the US position that even the proadministration media could not help noticing. That statement was followed by the “I am convinced ” announcement.
Military and intelligence analysts as well as experts on Iraqi and Middle East affairs have since examined the Powell presentation (which was complete with slides and tapes of alleged conversations between Iraqi military officials). Unlike Mrs. Arroyo, most of them are not convinced. On the contrary, some regard it as a clear argument against war.
One of the earliest to react to the Powell speech was Dr. Glenn Rangwala, a lecturer (professor) in politics and a specialist on Iraqi affairs at Britain’s Cambridge University. Dr. Rangwala found that many of Powell’s assertions were unsubstantiated, and others were attributed to sources that did not make such claims.
Dr. Rangwala pointed out, among many other lies, that “Powell attributes various claims to sources that do not, it seems, make these claims.”
Powell claimed that “by 1998 UN experts agreed that the Iraqis had perfected drying techniques for their biological weapons programs. . . We know from Iraq’s past ad- missions that it has successfully weaponized not only anthrax, but also other biological agents including botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin. Saddam Hussein has . . . the wherewithal to develop smallpox.”
“Firstly, ” says Dr. Rangwala, the UN never [underscoring supplied] concluded that Iraq had perfected drying techniques, merely that there was experimentation with Bacillus thuringiensis spores in 1989.
Secondly, Iraq did not admit to having successfully weaponized ricin: it only admits to attempting field trials using 155mm artillery shells in November 1990.
“Finally, the claim about smallpox seems inapposite (false): unless Iraq had been able to preserve live smallpox virus from the early 1970s, it must have imported it: the only known stocks are in Russia and the United States, and there is no indication these stocks have been compromised. ”
In short, Powell—whose presentation “convinced” Mrs. Arroyo that Iraq is a danger to the world—lied.
Others point out other “liberties taken with the facts”: for example, on the supposed link between Iraq and the terrorist network Ansar al-Islam.
The British journalist Luke Harding, for example, revealed February 9 after a visit to the camp of that group (described by Powell as “a terrorist chemicals and poisons factory”) that it is “nothing of the kind.”
Writing for the (UK) Observer newspaper, Harding said the compound was “more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere—only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.”
While describing Ansar al-Islam as indeed a “terrorist group,” Harding points out that it is a small one which operates in areas of Iraq beyond the control of Saddam Hussein’s government.
“But last Wednesday (in his February 5 UN speech), Powell suggested that the 500-strong band of Ansar fighters had links with both al-Qaeda and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. They were, he hinted, a global menace—and more than that they were the elusive link between Osama bin Laden and Iraq.
“This [Powell’s claim] is clearly little more than cheap hyperbole, ” concludes Harding.
On the other hand, more than half of the British document cited by Powell as a “fine paper” lifted entire sections from a 12-year-old doctoral dissertation as well as from Jane’s Intelligence Review, both publicly available.
The 19-page British dossier is titled “Iraq—Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation.” The report argues that Iraq has tried to conceal its weapons programs from UN inspectors, and contains charts detailing the structures of Iraq’s major intelligence organizations.
The same Dr. Rangwala of Cambridge University said that about 11 of the dossier’s 19 pages had been plagiarized “wholesale from academic papers.”
The dossier used, but did not credit, excerpts from a 12-year-old paper by a California graduate student, Ibrahim Marashi, which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. The dossier did not even correct, but instead reproduced the typographical and grammatical errors in the original Marashi paper.
Other sections were copied from Jane’s Intelligence Review, a widely available source of information on the intelligence services of various nations.
Question: How strong is a case for war that requires the secretary of State of the world’s most powerful country to lie, and for its 52nd state, the United Kingdom, to plagiarize?
Next question: What does that make of those “convinced” by such poisoned sources?
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, February 11, 2003)