British use reporter’s work in Iraq fiasco

AN unwitting co-author of Tony Blair’s damning dossier on Saddam Hussein said last night that he didn’t want his work used to justify a war in Iraq.

Irish journalist Sean Boyne found himself at the centre of a diplomatic fiasco yesterday after it was revealed that Downing Street had plagiarised part of an article he had written on the Iraqi intelligence network, as well as other material from a postgraduate thesis by a Californian student.

The article originally appeared in Janes Intelligence Review six years ago, but sections of it were lifted and included in Mr Blair’s dossier, designed to help win over anti-war sceptics by detailing Iraq’s alleged efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Boyne, the Sunday World political editor, first developed his interest in Middle East Affairs when covering the Gulf War in the early 1990s for the newspaper.

Over the following years he developed contact with a number of Iraqis with insider knowledge and wrote the occasional article for Janes.

"I got to know defectors who came over from Iraq. At the time there hadn’t been any definitive study done of these intelligence services so I wrote a two-part series on that in 1997.

"It’s one of the areas Janes covers and it would be of interest to academics and anoraks ” he said.

But Mr Boyne’s fan base was obviously far wider than expected and included the British authorities.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell even recommended the dossier to the world in his keynote UN presentation on Wednesday, in which he called the document a “fine paper”.

Describing the Iraqi intelligence network as elaborate, Mr Boyne said it is headed by Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay and the most elite unit is the special security organisation whose role is to protect the Iraqi dictator.

Down the line there is then the secret service, the Mukhabarat, the secret police the military intelligence unit and the military security branch.

At this point he reckons the structures of the organisation and their roles would be unchanged so the information would still be accurate.

Yesterday, Mr Boyne found himself being interviewed on Sky News and the BBC as his definitive work came to prominence.

“Someone said I should send an invoice to Tony Blair, but I don’t think I will. I am sure their own intelligence would have knowledge in this area and they are not depending on one humble hack in Dublin,” he said.

Although admitting to being surprised and even mildly flattered that his work was held in such high esteem, he said he does not want his research to justify starting a war.

“I would be against the war. I don’t think it’s justified at this time. Maybe if there’s another UN resolution then that would be a different case. Wars kill innocent people ,” he said.