Bombshell! I know that many students get busted by going online and copying term papers off the Net, but now the UK Government and Colin Powell have been found doing the same thing when presenting their "book report" to the U.N. Do you think they will get expelled from class?
No 10 admits mistake in copying Iraq dossier
by pa newsDowning Street today said it made a mistake in failing to acknowledge that a large section of a dossier on Saddam Hussein was copied from a Californian postgraduate student's outdated thesis.
The dossier was designed to help win over sceptics by outlining Iraq's alleged efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction. It said UN weapons inspectors were outnumbered by 200 to one by Iraqi agents trying to deceive them, and provided "up to date details" of Iraq's security organisations.
Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, even recommended it to the world in his keynote UN presentation on Wednesday, in which he called the document a "fine paper".
But it emerged overnight that much of the document was lifted from a paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi, from Monterey, California - who was researching material relating to the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War and not to the current situation.