Daily Update

When US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his dramatic presentation on Iraq to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, he recommended reading a dossier of evidence released by British intelligence earlier in the week. "I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that United Kingdom distributed yesterday, which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities," Mr. Powell told the UN Security Council.

It turns out that the British weren't so intelligent in how they got their intelligence. The BBC says that most of the dossier was actually copied from three other articles, including a paper written by a post-graduate student from California that largely relied on information that was 12 years old. Channel Four News in Britain first broke the story after a professor recognized the student's work.

The work appeared to have been lifted from a copy of the paper that appeared earlier this year on the website of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. While Ibrahim al-Marashi acknowledged the age of the material in his article, the British government did not when it copied the work. Of the 19 pages in the document, four of them were copied "word for word" (including typos and grammatical mistakes) by the "authors" of the British report.

The Guardian reports that the content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged.

The British government continued to stand by the work, saying it was "accurate." But British Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell added: "This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons. The dossier may not amount to much but this is a considerable embarrassment for a government trying still to make a case for war."

The news of the plagiarized intelligence may not be much help for those trying to prevent war with Iraq, according to the The Independent, which writes that the war on Iraq seems " increasingly inevitable." And while the British government may be embarrassed at being caught "cheating" on such an important document, Thursday it sent 40,000 more troops and 100 aircraft to the Gulf.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the US government is " twisting arms very hard" all over the world, and is having some success. While most members of the Security Council remain opposed to an early second resolution, non-permanent members Chile and Angola seem to be coming around to the US point of view. Meanwhile, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, says Powell's report was "very solid," and that time for Saddam Hussein was "very short".

The New York Times says the US believes that it may be able to get the second resolution from the UN security council that it now wants so much, because France is more likely to abstain from, rather than veto, any new resolution. And The Times of London reports that Russia is "resigned" to the fact that the US will invade Iraq.

Perhaps sensing that his time is growing short, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government Thursday allowed a biological scientist to be interviewd by UN weapons inspectors alone. The Financial Times reports that UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix says he is going to Baghdad this weekend, and that " private interviews, U2 flights over Iraq, and legislation" are on the table, but Blix wants even more than that. Earlier this week, Blix had warned Iraq that it was " five minutes to midnight" and that it's now up to Iraq to prevent war.

Recent Updates Saturday, March 22 Friday, March 21 Thursday, March 20 Wednesday, March 19 Tuesday, March 18

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US citizens abroad warned of terrorist attacks

The US has told NBC that it is considering raising its terror level alert to the second highest level. The US is very concerned about the possibility of a chemical or biological weapons terrorist attack on US citizens abroad, as soon as next week. Homeland Security officials say that their level of concern is at the highest its been since the Sept. 11, 2001 attack. The officials say the threat grows worse the closer the US gets to actually attacking Iraq.

The San Jose Mercury News reports on another concern for the Department of Homeland Security: agri-terrorism. "Nobody thought anybody would crash a plane into the World Trade Center, either," Michael Harrington, executive director of the Western Association of Agricultural Experiment Station Directors, said. "If someone were intent on attacking the agricultural and food system it could be done."

Meanwhile The Washington Post reports "President Bush has signed a secret directive ordering the government to develop, for the first time, national-level guidance for determining when and how the United States would launch cyber-attacks against enemy computer networks." While a "secret directive" may not be so secret once it appears in the Post (the President actually signed it last July), the move comes as the Pentagon prepares to launch some computer attacks on Iraq. "Whatever might happen in Iraq, you can be assured that all the appropriate approval mechanisms for cyber-operations would be followed," said an administration official.

One place the new cyber-attack teams might want to check out is a user group on Yahoo! according to MSNBC. The group is known as "crusader" and is written mostly in Arabic. But the language of the group is not what causes concern, says MSNBC. The user group features detailed security information on US military facilities, including close-ups of checkpoints and satellite photos of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia; air bases in Oman; a Navy port in the United Arab Emirates; and the air base at Qatar ��� with special attention paid to the security perimeter.

"It provides really the ultimate tactical information for a would-be suicide or homicide bomber," said Evan Kohlmann, who monitors militant Islamic Internet activity for The Investigative Project, an anti-terrorism group. "This is the most specific incidence of targeting US bases in the Persian Gulf that I have seen in four years of working the subject."

Also...
• Bush must prepare country for war's cost ( Troy (NY) Record)
• Toting the casualties of war ( Business Week)
• Insurers in US clash over terrorism-policy pricing ( Taipei Times)
• Hamas is ready to take rule from Arafat, official says ( FoxNews)
• Robert Fisk at Harvard criticizes the US media ( Harvard Crimson)
• War against Iraq: questions and answers ( The Christian Science Monitor)

• Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan at csmbandwidth@aol.com.