British Government Serious Plagiarism

Can you trust the British Government after the revelation of plagiarism yesterday?

  • No, and i didn’t trust them before that either
  • No, but i did before
  • Yes, that ducument was irrelevant
0 voters

How embarrassing!!

The british government is now stealing 12 years-old academic works and claiming to be a serious dossie put together by their intelligence on the present situation in Iraq to try to persuade the nation to go to war! What the f***k is this?!
They are lying and that false document proves that! We can send people to kill and die after that… is just too pathetic. Tony Blair is playing with our lives, with the lives of many civilians and militaries.

I can’t believe people aren’t on the streets calling for his resignation…

Haha, I can’t believe you really want John Prescott as your Priministrer!!! Give me Tony any day! :evilfun:

So some of it was from a post-graduate’s thesis but they hadn’t cited him as a source. Well they hadn’t cited any sources. SO what? Why is it any less relevant? Have they completely changed the structure of their intelligence services in the last 12 years? Have we? But I think people were making a mountain out a molehill, there’s nothing wrong with citing a post-grduates thesis after all, it’s supposed to be comprehensive and well researched. They should have given credit where credit was due however.

I haven’t read the work however and I bet you £20 that all these people saying it’s an outrage haven’t either (take Glenda Jackson or Menzies Campbell’s quotes from they BBC news website, when you put it in context of what actually’s been published, they’re comments are a bit extreme, probably showing they thought that it had all been a 12-year old’s work). After all it wasn’t supposed to be ground breaking as far as I understand, just another collection of arguments for making the case for war. Why broke what’s already working, i.e. why rewrite something. It’s not as if they’re going to get marked for the damn thing and get a degree for it is it.

I think all it shows is that some civil servant has been caught stealing someone else’s work cause he didn’t have enough time to write the damn thing himself.

Wow- I’m pretty shocked that anyone can be so blase about this. I agree with Clementine that this is utterly embarassing for the govt and their credibility is totally undermined.

Consider this. If they are reduced to copying from such sources, what genuine intelligence do they atually have on the situation? Surely not enough to justify a war, in the mind of any reasonable person.

I don’t know that much about the whole affair, not had a chance to buy a paper since Tuesday which was before it happened I think. As far as I understand from what little I’ve read of it on BBC news, it seems to just be one document that never pretended to be secret intelligence. How often do you see intelligence agencies giving out top secrett information to the press anyway?

I don’t know anything about the gy who wrote the post-grad thesis, I don’t know what university he went to or anything, but it’s not as if it’s an under grad paperor something like that The post-grad thesis’s are supposed to be high class and contributing something new to the field.

It was presented to the USA government as a document that was put together by the british intelligence to show the current situation in Iraq. It wasn’t given TO the press, it was presented by Powell at a conference. He said it was a ‘fine document by the british intelligence’.

Iy wasn’t just a ‘lie’… if the governement hold no evindences that Iraq has a link with Bin Laden and that Saddam has weapons of mass destroction, so why go to war at all? They are lying to fool us to go to war… a government like that has no respect for its nation and for those who elected them.

And, btw, i don’t want fat Prescott as prime minister, but then, that’s not the point.

There was an analysis of the report in The Independent, which revealed that the thesis had been transplanted verbatim into the report, apart from numerical estimates of Saddam’s arsenal - which spin doctors rounded up arbitrarily and falsely - and words were changed to project the image of Saddam as a terrorist. He may well be a terrorist, but this sort of concocted and arbitrarily doctored “evidence” does not present a convincing enough case to persuade people of the rectitude of this war. A schoolboy error of drastic proportions, I think. The fact that Colin Powell proclaimed it as a “fine document [drawing on] British Intelligence” undermines the case of the hawks further. If this document is endorsed by the USA as a reason to wage war, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the motives for this offensive are something other than a desire to ‘liberate the Iraqi people’ by disarming Saddam.

Note that this ‘intelligence’ document was leaked by a senior figure in MI6 (noone else had access to it). MI6 is said to be furious at Blair’s selective use of their intelligence reports to promote the case for a war against Saddam. They are said to have found that, though Saddam has a greater arsenal than he declares, the threat from him to the west is at most mild, and far less of a concern than that posed by N. Korea. The leak was part of an ongoing ‘dirty tricks campaign’ to sabotage Blair’s open abuse of their intelligence.

We know Saddam is one of the bad guys, but risking the lives of innocents for some rather unconvincing half-boiled associations between him and Al-Qaida would be facile. Powell has found himself linking the murder of PC Stephen Oake and the discovery of ricin in a flat in North London to Saddam Hussein in a desperate bid to “substantiate” strange and unanticipated allegations first made in public by Bush himself.

We should be targeting the terrorists. That is the duty of our political leaders, but when they can’t even bring themselves to take the obvious steps, for example deporting Abu Hamza (the preacher of hatred who does his best to poison the minds of young Muslims in North London), one is prompted to question the assertion that this war is anything more than a baseless political and moral vacuum. The Bush administration is buying time between now and the eventual capture of Bin Laden; and in the process it is gaining control of more Middle Eastern oil supplies, and is effectively achieving political hegemony in the region. Result! But they seem to have forgotten all the charitable tenets of their deeply-held Christian beliefs in their excitement - many will die in this war, Iraqis, Americans and Brits among others. For me and many others, that price is too high. Jeremy Paxman was thoroughly unsurprised when Tony Blair revealed to him that he and Mr Bush did not pray together when they met for tea, biscuits and warmongering in Texas - and nor should we be.

An interesting playful and fairly accurate analysis of the truth, Jawaad/ Hat off.

The MI5/6/Met/ScotlandYard response for the ‘increasing tension’ between government and intelligence services, was to express support for Blair’s bid to soften public opinion for the US/UK plan to implement 1441 ahead of this Friday. How did they do it? By taking orders from COBRA (the government’s intelligence committee, chaired by none other than Tony Blair) to send hundreds of troops and tanks to Heathrow airport, and other strategic places in London as a precautionary step against terrorist attacks. There was NO specific terrorist threat that came up in the last 48 hours. The threat is real, and persists at a steady level. With the fever pitch on the international scene, as countries vie for their place in the new post-cold-war international order, Blair is pulling out all the stops to get the public behind him. Chirac, Schroeder, Putin and Bush are all stretching their necks during this, the most important week since the UN was formed, in the history of world government. All the civil service Mandarins and many in MI5 and MI6 are seriously doubtful about this war (watch an anti-project mirage parliament pale into oblivion and insignificance - democracy on its knees, till Saturday’s march). Tony Blair himself ordered this mobilisation. Only Channel 4 have covered this event with any scepticism and thought.

I am dreading the Daily Mail’s headline tomorrow. This morning’s was quite attrocious: ‘Monstrous Ingratitude’. Some gutter press has seemingly fallen down the sewer.

Well the countryside alliance marches seem to have had little effect, why should the anti-war march have any effect either?

Well, the countryside alliance supports Fox hunting… with is basically in favour of animal suffering while the anti-war is… well self-explanatory.

If you think protests cause no impact, you should check on Mr. Luther King’s history

They do make a difference when the event is a ‘showstopper’. The march on the 15th will be the largest political demonstration in the history of Britain .

As for the Liberty and Livelihood march not working, that’s simply not true. The pressure from that march was to see a very ‘anti-hunt’ government actually take a Middle Way on the issue in their latest Hunting Bill - hence the ‘cruelty’ and ‘utility’ tests. All this despite the fact that the hunting issue had been a thorn in the Labour-left’s side for centuries on end. It was even in both Labour manifestoes in '97 and '01, to legislate for an outright ban on hunting.)