Ibrahim al-Marashi

[CivilRightsNow]

http://truthout.org/docs_02/020803A.htm
Blair-Powell UN Report Written by Student
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Report

February 7, 2003

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
- Secretary of State Colin Powell before the United Nations, 2/5/03

The veracity of Colin Powell's report on Wednesday before the United Nations Security Council was dealt a serious blow when Britain's Channel 4 News broke a story that severely undermines the credibility of the intelligence Powell used to make his case to the UN.

Powell's presentation relied in no small part upon an intelligence dossier prepared by the British Government entitled, "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation." That report plagiarized large swaths of an essay written in September of 2002 by a graduate student from California named Ibrahim al-Marashi. Al-Marashi's essay appeared in the September 2002 edition of a small journal, the Middle East Review of International Affairs.

....

A "student", eh? Guess where at. Oh yeah, and he is staff now.
http://cns.miis.edu/cns/index.htm

They let the "student" write OP ED columns for the NY times for some reason. Here is one:

Just Following (Saddam Hussein's) Orders
By Ibrahim al-Marashi

An op-ed for the New York Times. March 25, 2003


Americans were understandably appalled by the televised images of dead and captured United States soldiers filmed by their Iraqi interrogators. But nobody should have been surprised. Documents taken in Iraq after the first Persian Gulf war showed the extent to which Saddam Hussein hoped to have his soldiers and even civilians exploit prisoners of war, particularly downed pilots.

The documents were found on battlefields and in government offices in southern Iraq and Kuwait during the war, and are now held by the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard. Many were issued by Saddam Hussein himself, and they provide a window into his thinking that is just as relevant today as it was in 1991.

For example, an Iraqi order issued on Jan. 27, 1991, 10 days after the air war began, said that "officers will be promoted if they capture an enemy and retrieve important information." Obviously, forced interrogation of uniformed prisoners is a breach of the Geneva Conventions. Still, it's clear that career advancement trumped the international rules of combat. Capt. Richard Dale Storr, an Air Force pilot shot down and captured six days after that order was issued, said he was questioned under illegal conditions. Suffering from a broken nose, a punctured eardrum and a dislocated shoulder, he was handcuffed and forced to lie on a cement floor. When his answers were deemed unsatisfactory, he was shocked with an electric prod.


(The rest can be found at...) http://cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/orders.htm

The think tank that he was a Research Associate at, not student, is a gem. It is called the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies.

"The Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) strives to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by training the next generation of nonproliferation specialists and disseminating timely information and analysis. CNS at the Monterey Institute of International Studies is the largest nongovernmental organization in the United States devoted exclusively to research and training on nonproliferation issues. "

Look at this website: http://www.miis.edu/
Look at these "alumni" comments: http://cns.miis.edu/cns/alumni/share.htm
This place is scary and weird.

Then this link has him saying he was a student at Oxford and 3rd year at St Anthony's and then that his idenity was being sheilded, maybe he was a doctor..huh? This article makes no sense.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,903502,00.html

http://www.oxfordstudent.com/2003-02-27/news/2
But I do find this article perplexing in that he does say this:
"He insisted that the lesson of the scandal was not that the government was necessarily lacking in intelligence resources, but that academic work should be taken more seriously as a source of information on the Middle East. "

[DUreader]

1. Thanks for the links, interesting

I'm not sure what to make of it