LONDON, February 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Britain admitted Friday, February 7, it relied mostly on old and unauthentic information in its new Iraqi dossier to sell to its public opinion and the world community its alliance with the U.S. in unleashing war on Iraq under claims of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

"In retrospect, we should, to clear up any confusion, have acknowledged which bits (of the dossier) came from public sources and which bits came from other sources," said Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman.

The admission followed a television report which said that large parts of the dossier were copied almost verbatim from a thesis written by a student, Ibrahim al-Marashi, and that much of the data he had used was over ten years old, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Marashi’s paper was published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.

Other sections in the dossier were apparently taken from defense journal Jane's Intelligence Review.

The dossier, published on Monday, February 3, was designed by London, the U.S.’s chief ally in seeking to wage war on Iraq, to help win over skeptics by outlining Baghdad's alleged efforts to hide weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, February 5, the British government report was a "fine paper... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities".

But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, told Channel 4 news on Thursday, February 6, that most of pages six to 16 of the 19-page document were copied word for word from Marashi's thesis, including its "grammatical errors and typographical mistakes".

Downing Street introduced the dossier as a "new report" on Iraq's alleged illegal weapons activities.

But Marashi said his study was based largely on documents that were seized by Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq in 1991 and documents left in Kuwait at the time by Iraqi forces retreating during the Gulf war.

"There are laws and regulations about plagiarism and so forth that you would think the UK government would abide by," Ibrahim al-Marashi, the post-graduate student on whose work the dossier was based, told BBC radio on Friday.

The row comes as Blair attempts to convince a skeptical British public that he is right to back U.S. President George W. Bush's aggressive stance on the Iraqi crisis.

The fact that Britain had promoted a student's thesis as its own evidence of Iraq's failure to meet U.N. demands was met with disbelief by his critics.

Shadow defense secretary Bernard Jenkin said the Tories were deeply concerned by the report.

"The government's reaction utterly fails to explain, deny or excuse the allegations made in it," he said.

This document has been cited by the prime minister and Colin Powell as the basis for a possible war. Who is responsible for such an incredible failure of judgment?"

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell added: "This is the intelligence equivalent of being caught stealing the spoons.

"The dossier may not amount to much but this is a considerable embarrassment for a government trying still to make a case for war."

"If that was presented to Parliament and the country as being up-to-date intelligence, albeit collected from a variety of sources but by British intelligence agents ….it is another example of how the government is attempting to mislead the country and parliament on the issue of a possible war with Iraq," Labor politician and Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson told the radio station.

"And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying," she stressed.

"I am shocked that on such thin evidence ….that we should be trying to convince the British people that this is a war worth fighting," said Kilfoyle

"I am shocked that on such thin evidence -- a Californian postgraduate thesis -- that we should be trying to convince the British people that this is a war worth fighting," said former Labor minister Peter Kilfoyle.

On Thursday, Blair said the British public could swing behind a war on Iraq if a second U.N. resolution was voted to call for one.

"If there were a second U.N. resolution, then I think people would be behind me. I think if there is not, then there is a lot of persuading to do," he told a televised debate broadcast by the BBC.

Blair, who was facing a studio audience of people opposed to a war, acknowledged that Iraq did not present an immediate threat to Britain but claimed the country could not afford to allow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The cost to Britain of war on Iraq, based on a similar length of campaign to the 1991 Gulf war and without further deployments, could be between 3.2 and 3.5 billion pounds (5.2 and 5.7 billion dollars), a report from a leading international think-tank said Friday.