Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Richard Smith, who tracked down the Melissa virus creator and caught the hands of Microsoft, RealNetworks and DirecTV in the privacy cookie jar, now has discovered that the Blair administration has been lying about how its Iraqi WMD info got, um, adjusted. The background, from Richard:

Back in February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organizations. This dossier was cited by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations the same month. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, quickly discovered that much of the material in the dossier was actually plagiarized from a U.S. researcher on Iraq.

As Michael O'Connor Clarke writes:

As you'll probably recall - when it was revealed that the dossier was a work of creative cut & paste, the response of the PM's office was to feign ignorance of the source, bluster, obfuscate, blame the spooks, and generally wash their hands of the whole thing.

The Blairies posted the document to the Web as a Word file. Smith looked inside and saw that Word had automatically tracked the changes made by four named users. As Michael says: "...as Richard's excellent digging reveals - far from being the spooks, it was people very, very close to the PM who pulled this thing together."

Michael's done his own detective work on a different topic. Having noticed several sites that babble like a brook, he decided to check who owns them. He finds links to Scientology. Yikes.