Powell, plagiarism, taxes, and war - Watch On The Right - Editorial

Humanist, May-June, 2003 by Michael I. Niman

The media spin after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN speech on February 5, 2003, was about as dynamic as a Fox News debate. Cheerleading talking heads immediately took to the airwaves to discern whether or not Powell succeeded in building a consensus for war. Did he pull it off? Will those arrogant self-righteous French--up to their necks in their own war to secure the world's chocolate supply in the Ivory Coast--support the pillage in Iraq? What about the Germans? What do they have against launching a Blitzkrieg or a Dresden-style firestorm against Baghdad? What about the Turks? Their empire once stretched to Europe, so why are they raining on the United States' parade? And what about the Angolans, are they for real? Don't they realize they could be next if they don't get with the program?

One pundit asked if Powell presented enough evidence to sentence Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to death. Well, it isn't that simple. The real question is did Powell make a convincing argument to sentence Saddam, the judge, the jury, the bailiff--how about the whole damn courtroom--to death? Because that's what war is. The French remember it; the Germans remember it--its horror is embedded in their cultures. But most Americans, with the notable exception of combat veterans, don't have a clue as to what the word war means.

Missing from the whole "was Powell convincing?" choir was any question regarding whether Powell was telling the truth. Yes, I thought Powell was convincing, but historian Howard Zinn's voice suddenly popped into my head, arguing as a key rule that journalists "never trust government officials--from any government." History has shown that politicians, with few exceptions, habitually lie. They lie to get into office and lie once they're in office. The current regime in Washington has elevated the art of lying to official policy, with the Department of Defense attempting to set up an Office of Strategic Influence (based upon an earlier Reagan/Bush-era Office of Public Diplomacy, the Contra-era office) for the stated purpose of planting misinformation in the world's media. The attempt died because people believed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was telling the truth about lying--just as they believe him when he is lying about telling the truth. Nonetheless, he promised to keep dispelling misinformation with or without use of the Office of Strategic Influence.

This is simple stuff. An organization that has a history of lying, that set up special bureaucracies to create and dispense lies, that has a stated policy to lie, might in fact be lying. This doesn't necessarily mean that Powell is lying. It could just as easily mean that he has been lied to. Either way, journalists need to dig deeper. This is, after all, an important story.

One embarrassing revelation about Powell's speech was that a key part of his evidence against Iraq was cut and pasted from a California graduate student's outdated academic paper, ripped directly from the Internet. In academia, we call this plagiarism. Stealing something straight off of a website, an act easily detected by feeding a string of words into a Google search, is plagiarism in its cheesiest form. Students who do it fail classes--this is nonnegotiable. In Powell's case, he isn't the plagiarizer. He properly cited a British intelligence service report--four pages of which were ripped off without citation, complete with spelling and grammatical errors--from a paper that appeared in October 2002 in an obscure academic journal.

The Brits, for their part, changed a few words here and there, inflated numbers, and added the term terrorist to make the Iraqis appear more ominous than the student-author intended. The student told the British newspaper, the Mirror, that the misuse of his doctored work represented "wholesale deception." Ominous or not, however, 97 percent of the citations in his paper were three to fifteen years old, rendering the whole package useless in a speech challenging Iraq's compliance to the UN inspection regimen. The U.S. Secretary of State--with this trash in his hand--addressed the United Nations Security Council, calling for the commencement of a war that might never end. For the U.S. media, the only question worth asking was whether Powell's sham was convincing.

One person Powell didn't convince was UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, who countered Powell's allegations by reporting that the UN weapons inspectors found no evidence of mobile-truck-based weapons labs, as alleged by Powell. Nor was there any evidence, provided by the United States or any other nation, of Iraq trying to foil inspections by moving equipment, which was also alleged by Powell. Blix also argued that his operation on the ground in Iraq was secure, and that Iraqis didn't--contrary to what Powell asserted--have advanced knowledge of inspections. Perhaps Powell should have spoken to Blix, and not Austin Powers, before making a fool of himself and the United States in front of the world. Blix's comments were front-page news in Europe, while they were all but invisible in the U.S. corporate media--a fact that helps explain the divergence in public opinion across the pond.