We know a few facts about it:
If this story gets swept under the rug, it will be a severe blow to democracy around the world. And I am not being hyperbolic when I state that.
The plagiarized article appeared in the review MERIA, authored by Ibrahim al-Marashi. It discussed a scenario that was twelve years before, 1990-91. Not only was it outdated, the author conceded that there were some errors.
MERIA is not, nor was, edited by the persons you cite.
Reporter Sean Boynes 1997 article for Jane's Intelligence Review was also plagiarized and misquoted in the trashy dossier.
Be that as it may, the bottom line was that a purportedly mature and adult Secretary of State made a total ass of himself in front of the international community. Even if he got his little war.
For a good sum up of that story, here or the Guardian. There is also the very important work done by Dr. Glen Rangwala.
"Marashi's essay was published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs in Sept 2002, a scholarly magazine run by the GLORIA Center (acronym for Global Research in International Affairs Center) in Herzliya, Israel. Its director is Barry Rubin, who has also been a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- an Israel policy think tank. Rubin is part of the coterie--which includes Daniel Pipes, Michael Ledeen, and the arch conspirator Richard Perle--who have been pressing for a US attack on Iraq.
Marashi told Raposa that the documents on which he had based his paper had been given him by Kenaan Makiya, a well-known Iraqi exile, and proponent of invasion, much favored by Powell's own State Department. Makiya claims to have some 4 million pages of documents seized from northern Iraq after Operation Desert Storm."
Rubin is the director of MERIA and is in tight with Pipes and Ledeen. Furthermore, some of the administration's favorite NeoCon names sit on MERIA's Board of Editors.
