Iraq: Yahoo! News — WHOSE SIDE IS AMERICA ON?: “Once upon a time, a Ph.D. candidate in California named Ibrahim al-Marashi picked up the morning newspapers and found his 15 minutes of fame. Secretary of State Colin Powell was before the United Nations testifying that all good men must go to war because the aces of American and British intelligence had uncovered undeniable proof that the dictator of Iraq was making, hiding and getting ready to use weapons of mass destruction.
It turned out that a lot of the intelligence Powell cited that day came from al-Marashi’s doctoral dissertation on the military ambitions of Saddam Hussein , published two years earlier under the title ‘Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network.’ It was plagiarism at the highest levels. British intelligence had stolen 5,000 words from the American student, son of Iraqi parents, ignored his conclusions, and declared Saddam an imminent threat to English-speaking Christians everywhere.
Whatever happened to al-Marashi? His latest work, an essay from the newspaper Zaman in Istanbul published after he returned from a trip to Iraq two weeks ago, turned up here last week as President Bush visited and compared troubles in Iraq to World War II. The young Iraqi-American’s new work makes sad reading, stating in part:
’During World War I, the victorious British entered Baghdad and declared to its inhabitants that they were ‘liberated’ from years of ‘Ottoman tyranny.’ The British then took three regions, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, to form what is today Iraq. The Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Arabs had little in common with each other, other than their animosity toward the British. It was ”
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