The Story of the Dossier

Some embarrassment for the government in the last 24 hours.
On Monday, the government published another dossier detailing attempts that the Iraqis are said to have made to hide their weapons of mass destruction. Well last night it turns out that this document was something of a cut and paste job based on a graduate student paper published in a journal last September, as well as other sources.
The odd change has been made to make the text a bit more sinister, although no-one denies that the overall content is probably correct.
There are two problems here. Firstly, they should have credited their sources, and secondly, shouldn’t the intelligence services have better information than academic publications? I’m sure that as far as background information goes, such sources are unrivalled, but this dossier was published as an up to the minute snapshot of what’s happening in Iraq now. Not last summer, or 12 years ago (as some of the content refers to).
Tony Blair was appeared on a Newsnight special lastnight in front of a group of Geordies (his constituents) who were as yet not convinced by his taking us into combat. Jeremy Paxman gave him a really hard time to begin with, and I have to say that I still wasn’t convinced at the end. Surely North Korea is far more threat to the world at the moment than Saddam is?


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