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Today's
Stories
October
11 / 13, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Kay's
Misleading Report; CIA/MI-6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz Flaps Broken
Wings
October 10, 2003
John Chuckman
Schwarzenegger
and the Lottery Society
Toni Solo
Trashing
Free Software
Chris
Floyd
Body
Blow: Bush Joins the Worldwide War on Women
October
9, 2003
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Bombing
Syria
Ramzi
Kysia
Seeing
the Iraqi People
Fran Shor
Groping the Body Politic
Mark Hand
President Schwarzenegger?
Alexander
Cockburn
Welcome
to Arnold, King for a Day
Website of the Day
The Awful Truth about Wesley Clark
October
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Schwarzenegger
and the Failure of the Centrist Dems
Ramzy
Baroud
Israel's
WMDs and the West's Double Standard
John Ross
Mexico
Tilts South
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Repub Guru Compares Taxes to the Holocaust
James
Bovard
The
Reagan Roadmap for Antiterrorism Disaster
Michael
Neumann
One
State or Two?
A False Dilemma
October
7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Slow-Motion
Ethnic Cleansing
Stan Goff
Lost in the Translation at Camp Delta
Ron Jacobs
Yom Kippurs, Past and Present
David
Lindorff
Coronado in Iraq
Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
Outing a CIA Operative? Why A Special Prosecutor is Required
Cynthia
McKinney
Who Are "We"?
Elaine Cassel
Shock and Awe in the Moussaoui Case
Walter
Lippman
Thoughts on the Cali Recall
Gary Leupp
Israel's
Attack on Syria: Who's on the Wrong Side of History, Now?
Website
of the Day
Cable News Gets in Touch With It's Inner Bigot
October
6, 2003
Robert
Fisk
US
Gave Israel Green Light for Raid on Syria
Forrest
Hylton
Upheaval
in Bolivia: Crisis and Opportunity
Benjamin Dangl
Divisions Deepen in Third Week of Bolivia's Gas War
Bridget
Gibson
Oh, Pioneers!: Bush's New Deal
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman
The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus
Nicole
Gamble
Rios Montt's Campaign Threatens Genocide Trials
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
Website
of the Day
Guerrilla Funk
October
3 / 5, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
October 11 / 13, 2003
CounterPunch
Diary
Bush, Straw, Seize
Broken Reed:Kay's Misleading Report; CIA/MI6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz
Flaps Broken Wings
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Bush seized upon the report of David Kay, head
of the Iraq Survey Group, to assert that Kay's interim conclusions
showed that Saddam had been in hot pursuit of weapons of mass
destruction, as demonstrated in particular by the "deadly
vial".
Kay made a cautious bid to help Bush
and Blair out, but it's a case of trying to bake bricks without
straw. The best dissection of the Kay report came in The Independent
from Dr Glen Rangwala of Cambridge (UK).
Kay stated flatly that his team had found
*no evidence of orders or plans to continue
an active nuclear program after 1991. The aluminum tubes were
not for the purposes of uranium enrichment.
*At the seven sites stigmatized in the
September 2002 dossier of Blair's government, there was no evidence
of suspicious activities or residues.
*There was no sign of imported uranium.
There were no C/B "battlefield munitions"
ready to be launched in 45 minutes.
There was no trace of "the chemical
weapons, biological weapons, viruses, bacilli and10,000 liters
of anthrax" invoked by UK foreign secretary Jack Straw.
Kay alleged that an Iraqi biologist had
"a collection of reference strains" at his home, including
"a vial of live C botulinum Okra B from which a biological
agent can be produced." Straw leaped on this, claiming that
this agent is 15,000 times stronger than the nerve agent VX.
Wrong, says Rangwala. The vial held not the super deadly type
A but the less lethal type B and there was no evidence found
by Kay's group of any preparations for the extensive process
required for weaponization. Botulinum type B can be used as an
antidote for common botulinum poisoning. The UK does so and calls
them "seed banks".
Kay asserts that Iraq had been acquiring
designs and undertaking "research" for missiles with
a range of more than the UN limit of 150km. Rongwala says emphatically
that Iraq was prohibited from actually having such missiles,
and that Kay's team had discovered no evidence of such possession
or facilities, "just the knowledge to produce them in future".
Let me quote in full Rongwala's final
points, made in The Independent for October 5: "One sentence
within the [Kay] report has been much quoted: Iraq had 'a clandestine
network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi intelligence
service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and
suitable for continuing CBW research'. Note what that sentence
does not say: these facilities were suitable for chemical and
biological weapons research (as almost any modern lab would be),
not that they had engaged in such research. The reference to
UN monitoring is also spurious: under the terms of UN resolutions,
all of Iraq's chemical and biological facilities are subject
to monitoring. So all this tells us is that Iraq had modern laboratories."
White House, Downing
Street, CIA and British Secret Service in Plot to Murder Leading
Syrians
Maybe they are now, but the evidence
is incontrovertible that just such a plot was being hatched back
in 1957. Plus ca change.
On September 27 the London Guardian ran
a long piece by Ben Fenton describing private papers excavated
by a British historian from Royal Holloway University, Matthew
Jones, from the archive of Duncan Sandys, British secretary of
defense in the Conservative government of the late 1950s headed
by Harold MacMillan.
Sandys' papers contain a document drawn
up by secret high level working group that met in Washington
DC in September 1957.
This document is remarkable for the frankness
with which it outlines plans for assassination ("eliminate")and
subversion by Western intelligence services.
The "preferred plan" reads,
in part, as follows: "In order to facilitate the action
of liberative [sic] forces, reduce the capacity of the Syrian
regime to organize and direct its military forces, to hold losses
and destruction to a minimum, and to bring about desired results
in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made
to eliminate certain key individuals. Their removal should be
accomplished early in the course of the uprising"
The three individuals scheduled for assassination
were named in the document approved by the Eisenhower administration
and by MacMillan. They were Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, head of Syrian
military intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, head of the Syrian general
staff; and Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Communist Party.
MacMillan described the action plan as
a "most formidable report" in his diary and ordered
it be held secret from British chiefs of staff, because of their
propensity "to chatter". The background of the report
was the overthrow in 1954 of the conservative military regime
of Col. Adib Shishakli by an alliance of the Syrian Ba'ath Party,
Communist Party politicians and their allies in the Syrian army.
Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA's Middle Eastern
chief hot from a successful coup against Iran's legitimately
elected Mossadegh government, strongly urged a coup in Syria.
The plan was for CIA and British SIS operatives to initiate "sabotage,
national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities"
in Iraq and Jordan which would then be blamed on Damascus. It
emphasized that "in mounting "minor sabotage and coup
de main incidents within Syria. Care should be taken to avoid
causing key leaders of the Syrian regime to take additional personal
protection measures."
In the end the plan was abandoned because
Jordan and Iraq wouldn't come aboard. The interest of the MacMillan
government was of course to curry favor with the US, and patch
things up after the US had spiked the UK attack on Nasser in
1956.
Dershowitz: The Case
of the Plagiarist Prof (continued)
For those who care to follow such things,
here is Prof Alan Dershowitz's effort at rebuttal of my recent
excavation of his plagiarisms in his awful book The Case for
Israel. Dershowitz's bluster is followed by my closing speech
for the prosecution.
First Dershowitz:
Alexander Cockburn's politically motivated
claim that I "plagiarized" from Joan Peters is total
nonsense Let's begin with what is undisputed: Every word written
by others appears with quotation marks, is cited to their original
or secondary sources and is quoted accurately. This means that
they are not plagiarized. James Freedman, the former president
of Dartmouth and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has
concluded, after reviewing the relevant material, that what I
did was "simply not plagiarism, under any reasonable definition
of that word."
Cockburn's claim is that some of the
quotes should not have been cited to their original sources but
rather to a secondary source, where he believes I stumbled upon
them. Even if he were correct that I found all these quotations
in Peters's book, the preferred method of citation is to the
original source, as the Chicago Manual of Style emphasizes: "With
all reuse of others' materials, it is important to identify the
original as the source. This ... helps avoid any accusation of
plagiarism...To cite a source from a secondary source ('quoted
in ...') is generally to be discouraged..."
It is especially cynical that Cockburn
would have me cite the quotes to Peters, since Norman Finkelstein-his
source-has alleged that Peters herself originally found these
and other quotes in earlier books. Should I have cited those
books? That is why citing the original source is preferred.
I came across the quoted material in several secondary sources.
They appear frequently in discussions of nineteenth-century Palestine.
The Mark Twain quote, highlighted by Cockburn, appears in many
books about the subject. I came across it in 1970 while preparing
a debate about Israel for The Advocates. Cockburn also points
out that I quote some of the same material from the Peel Report
that Peters quotes, but he fails to mention that I also use many
quotes from the report that do not appear in Peters's book. I
read the entire report and decided which parts to quote. I rely
heavily on the Peel Report, devoting an entire chapter (six)
to its findings. They are quoted directly, with proper attribution.
Cockburn refers to Finkelstein's "devastating
chart," which compares several quotes from my books with
quotes from Peters's book. By juxtaposing these quotes, he makes
it appear that I am borrowing words from her. But these are all
quotes-properly cited in my book-from third parties. Of course
they are similar, or the same. One does not change a quote. And
since I did find some of the quotes in Peters's book, as she
found them in others, it should come as no surprise that the
ellipses are sometimes similar or the same.
It is important to recall that my book
is a brief for Israel. It does not purport to be a work of original
demographic research, as Peters's does. A few pages are devoted
to summarizing the demographic history, and these pages rely
heavily on quotes from others to make my points. I found most
of my quotes in secondary sources. When I was able to locate
the primary source, I quoted it. When I was unable, I cited the
secondary source. Contrary to Cockburn's implication that I cited
Peters once, I cited her eight times in the first eighty-nine
pages (Ch. 2, fn 31, 35; Ch. 5, fn 8; Ch. 12, fn 34, 37, 38,
44, 47). Of my more than 500 references, fewer than a dozen
were found in Peters and cited to original sources. Although
we use a few of the same sources-and we each use many
sources not used by the other-I come to different conclusions
from Peters about important issues. As I made clear in my book,
"I do not in any way rely on" Peters's conclusions
or demographic data for my arguments. Peters's basic conclusion
is that only a small number of Palestinians lived in what later
became Israel. She provides specific figures, which have been
disputed. My very different conclusion is that:
"There
have been two competing mythologies about Palestine circa 1880.
The extremist Jewish mythology, long since abandoned, was that
Palestine was "a land without people, for a people without
a land." The extremist Palestinian mythology, which has
become more embedded with time, is that in 1880 there was a Palestinian
people; some even say a Palestinian nation that was displaced
by the Zionist invasion.
The reality, as usual, lies somewhere
in between. Palestine was certainly not a land empty of all people.
It is impossible to reconstruct the demographics of the area
with any degree of precision, since census data for that time
period are not reliable, and most attempts at reconstruction-by
both Palestinian and Israeli sources-seem to have a political
agenda.
I offer very different and rougher estimates,
which Cockburn and Finkelstein do not challenge, as they do Peters's.
How then can I be accused of plagiarizing ideas or conclusions
with which I disagree, from a book that I cite eight times, using
the preferred form of citation?
Why then would Cockburn attack me so
viciously? The answer is in his sentence bemoaning the fact that
a pro-Israel book is "slithering into the upper tier of
Amazon's sales charts." He disapproves of my message and
of the fact that it is reaching a wide audience. Instead of debating
me on the merits, he has tried to destroy my credibility with
a false accusation. (This is not the first time he and Finkelstein
have gotten together and employed this tactic against people
with whom they disagree.)
Let people read The Case for Israel and
judge it for themselves against Cockburn's charges. I have sent
his attack and my response to President Summers. I have nothing
to fear from false charges.
Alan M. Dershowitz
Alexander Cockburn replies
Every time he tries to leap to firmer
ground,defending the rotten standards of scholarship in his rotten
book Dershowitz simply sinks in deeper. Start with his defiant
declaration from the dock that he did not commit plagiarism because
"Every word written by others appears with quotation marks,
is cited to their original or secondary sources and is quoted
accurately." This skates (rather clumsily, I have to say)
round the question of what source Dershowitz actually did use
for his citation and whether or not he acknowledged it. Often
he used Peters and pretended he didn't, which would get him into
very hot water at Harvard if he was a student and not the Felix
Frankfurter professor.
Here are Harvard's own rules, as set
forth in "Writing with Sources A Guide for Harvard Students
Copyright 1995 The President and Fellows of Harvard University":
"Plagiarism is passing off a source's
information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite
them." And also: "When quoting or citing a passage
you found quoted or cited by another scholar, and you
haven't actually read the original source, cite the passage as
'quoted in' or 'cited in' that scholar both to credit that person
for finding the quoted passage or cited text, and to protect
yourself in case he or she has misquoted or misrepresented"
I discussed only Dershowitz's first two
chapters, as dissected by Norman Finkelstein, Dershowitz's nemesis
in this whole affair, who points out that 22 of the 52 footnotes
to these chapters are lifted from Peters without attribution.
Finkelstein recently laid waste Dershowitz's attempts at self-exculpation
in the Harvard Crimson. As Finkelstein points out, One problem
for the beleaguered prof comes in the form of ellipses. Dershowitz
echoes Peters' ellipses. Another problem identified by Finkelstein:
When it comes to Twain, Dershowitz cites from one edition and
Peters from another, but the page numbers he cites are from
Peters' edition, not his. So Peters' text is where he got the
quote from.
Yet another problem goes to the concluding
sentence from the Harvard guidelines quoted above. Dershowitz
echoes Peters' mistakes. From Twain she cites as one continuous
paragraph what are in fact two separate paragraphs separated
by 87pp. Dershowitz follows suit. He's handcuffed to Peters in
a more serious breach of scholarship when he plagiarizes her
erroneous citation of a British consular official's supposedly
first-person description to Lord Canning of an instance of anti-Semitism
in Jerusalem. The description was not Young's, but a memorandum
by one A. Benisch, which Young was forwarding.
Another bloodied glove, as it were,
comes with Dershowitz's attribution of the admittedly unlovely
neologism "turnspeak" to George Orwell. This was a
coinage by Peters, who cited Orwell as having inspired it. Glazed
with literary pillage, and ever eager to suppress the fact that
he was relying heavily on one of the most notorious laughing
stocks of Middle Eastern scholarship, Dershowitz seized on Orwell
as the source, once again cutting out Peters out.
Quoting the Chicago Manual Dershowitz
artfully implies that he followed the rules by citing "the
original" as opposed to the secondary source, Peters. Of
course we know he didn't but, aside from that, he misrepresents
the Manual here, where "the original" means merely
the origin of the borrowed material which is, in this instance,
Peters.
Now look at the second bit of the quote
from the Manual, separated from the preceding sentence by a demure,
3-point ellipse. As my associate Kate Levin has discovered, this
passage ("To cite a source from a secondary source...")
occurs on page 727 which is no less than 590 pages later than
the material before the ellipse, in the section titled "Citations
Taken from Secondary Sources." Here's the full quote, with
what Dedrshowitz left out set in boldface: "'Quoted in.'
To cite a source from a secondary source ("quoted in..")
is generally to be discouraged, since authors are expected
to have examined the works they cite. If an original source is
unavailable, however, both the original and the secondary source
must be listed."
So Chicago is clearly insisting that
unless Dershowitz went to the originals, he was obliged
to cite Peters. Finkelstein has conclusively demonstrated that
he didn't go to the originals. Plagiarism, Q.E.D., plus added
time for willful distortion of the language of Chicago's guidelines,
cobbling together two separate discussions.
Some time ago three judges on a Florida
appeals court overturned a $145 million landmark judgment against
tobacco companies. In their decision the judges appropriated
without acknowledgement extensive swaths of the brief put forward
by the tobacco companies' well-paid lawyers. The judges were
sued for judicial plagiarism and as so often Dershowitz had a
pithy quote: "If a student ever did what this judge did,
he'd be tossed out on his rear end from Harvard Law School. We
teach our students as a matter of ethics that when you borrow,
you attribute."
Professor Sayres Ruby of Amherst, who
tells us his credentials are "from the ground up",
meaning they are drawn from practices actually used in colleges
whose Honor Codes he either enforced (Davidson College) or in
that position examined elsewhere (UVA, Citadel) has studied the
Dershowitz/Peters case file and writes that "I
can say unequivocally that under Davidson College's and other
schools' honor codes Dershowitz's quotations constitute plagiarism,
with clear attempt to deceive as to (A) his research and (B)
his findings. Thus his plagiarism is serious and unambiguous,
and if it were a student in question, the debate would regard
levels of punishment. Maximum punishments would be considered
without any doubt, including at UVA expulsion, at Davidson two-term
suspension, and at military schools such as West Point or the
Citadel a discharge."
But then, Dershowitz isn't a student.
He's the Felix Frankfurter professor at Hasrvard Law School,
meaning presumably that he's beyond reform. Two-tier justice
for all!
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
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