The Lincoln Plawg

Monday, February 10, 2003 12:25 p.m.

The plagiarised report, intelligence wars, etc

[The main site is up: it's just not taking any new material. Hence.......]

It can come as no surprise that the master chef in charge of cooking up Blair's fine report on Iraq last week was none other than the Nobel laureate of Rotational Medicine himself, Alistair Campbell. (Yesterday's London Observer has a long article detailing the sorry saga.)

Just like their US counterparts, the British intelligence community is under incessant bombardment from their political masters to get with the program and back up the war propaganda with facts if possible, lies if necessary.

The new head of homeland security, Sir David Omand has apparently accused Campbell of

sprinkling too much 'magic dust' over the facts to spice it up for public consumption.

Campbell is, it seems, part of the transatlantic team of truth-adjusters called the Coalition Information Center originally set up during the US intervention in Afghanistan [1]. And this group was at the bottom of the Blair report. Though

Campbell himself is said to have edited and cleared the finished version.

Wot larks! Even better, in the week that someone in the British IC leaked a report from the Defence Intelligence Staff denying any proven link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. (The transatlantic comparison, with poor old George Tenet under the cosh last October for failing to perform on the Hill as a Rum-ette should, is truly spooky. Not.)

The Observer piece does suggest a difference between the US and UK ICs: the Brits being distinctly more reluctant than the Yanks to offer up human intelligence for propaganda purposes.

More on the British version of Intelligence Wars here and here.

Not a group I'd heard of, I confess. But then, for a propaganda outfit, it doesn't exactly blow its own trumpet. It has no site of its own (that Google revealed, at least); and the name crops only three times in a Google News search. At the time of the row about the DOD's Office of Strategic Influence lie-machine, it was put forward by the White House as the saintly counter-example!