whiskas - dossier was a rehash, admits blair govt

LONDON FEB. 8. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair's office has been forced to admit that its latest `intelligence' dossier on Iraq was not based on any fresh evidence but put together from academic sources. It also conceded that the sources should have been acknowledged but insisted that the facts contained in the document were `solid'.

The belated and half-hearted apology came as the Government's own MPs accused it of `misleading' the public after it emerged that large parts of the dossier were `lifted' from already published material, freely available in the public domain.

This included an article by an Iraqi-American post-graduate scholar, Ibrahim al-Marashi, published in the September 2002 issue of Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs, and material from Jane's Intelligence Review The dossier was the fourth put out by the Government in recent months to strengthen Mr. Blair's case against Iraq, and earlier in the week an unsuspecting Gen. Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State, praised it as a `fine' work in his speech to the U.N. Security Council.

As pressure grew on Downing Street to clarify, a spokesman admitted that it was a "pull-together of a variety of sources'' and that "in retrospect we should have acknowledged which bits came from public sources and which bits came from other sources''.

It seems that the dossier was assembled by junior officials in Downing Street after the Government failed to get fresh intelligence evidence to justify action against Iraq.

The sources were omitted to make it sound like freshly-minted intelligence.

``It's almost unbelievable that such a thing could happen,'' Tony Wright, a senior Labour MP and chairman of the Commons Public Administration said. He said it was "absolutely essential'' for the Government to make sure that it had credibility, especially at a time like this.

The Opposition called for all government information on Iraq to be supervised by a Cabinet Minister to ensure that it was credible.

The last laugh belonged to the India-born Cambridge lecturer, Glen Rangwala, who first spotted that the dossier was not original.

"I found it quite startling when I realised that I'd read most of it before,'' he chuckled.