Ibrahim al-Marashi
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Dr. Ibrahim al-Marashi is a historian researching the Middle East and political communications. He holds a PhD in History from Oxford University (2004), where his thesis was on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He is currently a scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
He is best known as the author of an article which was plagiarised by the British government in a 2003 briefing document entitled Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation (see Dodgy Dossier). This document was a follow-up to the earlier September Dossier, both of which concerned Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and were ultimately used by the government to justify its involvement in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Large portions of al-Marashi's term paper were quoted verbatim by then Secretary of Defense Colin Powell to the U.N. General Assembly.
The material plagiarised from Marashi's work and copied nearly verbatim into the "Dodgy Dossier" was six paragraphs from his article Iraq's Security & Intelligence Network: A Guide & Analysis, [1] which was published in the September 2002 issue [2] of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. Tony Blair's office ultimately apologised to Marashi for its actions, but not to the MERIA journal. [3]
Marashi worked as a visiting faculty member at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey from 2004 until 2006. Prior to this he was a research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, as well as a lecturer at the Center for Contemporary Conflict (CCC). According to his staff profile on the CNS website[4], Marashi:
- received an MA in political science from Georgetown University in 1997 after graduating with a BA in history and Near Eastern studies from the University of California Los Angeles, and
- previously worked at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University on a project classifying captured Iraqi state documents.
He is an Iraqi American of Iranian descent who lived at various times in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Morocco.
[edit] A quote
“I was a bit disenchanted because they never cited my article... any academic, when you publish anything, the only thing you ask for in return is that they include a citation of your work... There are laws and regulations about plagiarism that you would think the UK Government would abide by.” Ibrahim al-Marashi, quoted in The Times (London) February 7, 2003.
