Teribus

You really can talk a blue streak. Your ad hominem attacks (calling people naive and stupid) are tiresome, even I'm sure to people who generally agree with you. I shall not respond in kind.

As someone pointed out on this thread, there are portable backpack nukes. Thus you simply cannot define any system capable of delivering a WMD to be a WMD itself. ANY system, including a person, is capable of doing that. Rockets are NOT WMDs, they are just delivery systems, like a truck or a backpack. Even if they were banned materials, or had longer ranges than allowed by the UN, it is inaccurate to say, as this article says, that WMDs were shipped out of Iraq.

Here is the upshot of what even YOU said, ungrammatical though it may be:

In other words, while the stockpile of WMD agents, munitions and delivery systems as stated by UNSCOM have not been found. It is clear that items have been exported from Iraq during the run up to the invasion, the exact extent and nature of the complete list of items exported is not known at present.

So what you're saying is: "No one knows." "Items" have been exported, but no one knows what "Items" they were. Does this not strike you as a little thin to pin a headline of "WMD exported from Iraq" on? The TRUE headline would be "we still have no conclusive evidence that WMD were exported from Iraq in the run-up to the war."

Not a very good headline, that.

When I said we can't blame Iraq I meant that it's OUR ATTACK that has destabilized Iraq's borders. I meant that even in the Saddam days, the Iraqi government was not in full control of its borders. You might as well blame the US government for anything smuggled in or out of the US.

Perhaps I was wrong about it being an undergraduate student. Sorry about that. (Everyone makes mistakes, but luckily I didn't invade a foreign country based on mine!) But it having been a grad student doesn't change the upshot much.

I don't know if you have a post-graduate degree, Teribus, but to someone who does [Masters and PhD], the claim that a student covered three MILLION documents in his thesis, or even read them en route to his PhD, is obviously farfetched. I could just as well claim that "the research materials for my dissertation consisted of the Research Libraries Information Network," since I had access to all that through ILL, or that it consisted of "everything in the English Language," since the linguistic parts of my thesis were relevant to the whole language. It's a meaningless claim. How many of these documents did he actually read? And as to the question of whether undergraduate level research has ever resulted in a Masters degree, you should read some of the theses I have seen.

A graduate student's research is generally not considered ready to cite broadly. Here's why. In academia, the way research is vetted is through the publication process, not the PhD granting process. When a paper is submitted to a journal, it is given to three (or so) of the top experts in that particular field, who decide if it is worthy of publication or not. They don't know who the author is, and their own identities are protected, so they cannot be affected by personal feelings about the author and they don't have to worry about the author knowing who said what. When a book is submitted to a publisher, the same process ensues (though sometmes the author's name is revealed).

When you are getting a PhD, your thesis is read by whichever people YOU selected as your committee: generally, the faculty members at your university who would be the most sympathetic to your arguments (this does vary from place to place, but my description is a common model). A Masters thesis is often read by just one faculty member, but often by two or three. All these people know you very well personally and have a personal stake in your success. They know that any harsh criticism will hurt your feelings and that you will know it came from them. Furthermore, the level of scholarship they expect is lower. Practically all PhDs get the comments "this is good enough to graduate, but if you publish this you'll want to do this, this and that before you submit it."

So the difference: a PUBLISHED work has been read anonymously by some of the world's top experts, and judged good enough to be published. A THESIS has often been read by whoever is most sympathetic at your own University, usually your personal friends and mentors, and judged good enough for you to graduate--usually the same as "not quite good enough to publish."

Finally, the post-graduate researcher (what we would call a grad student in the USA) "was disappointed that HM Government hadn't credited him with the work." In other words, the dossier was plagiarized! From a "not quite good enough to publish" thesis, which was, incidentally and by your own admission, about ten years old.

Now, why wouldn't they credit him? There's only one reason I can think of: it would be immediately apparent to anyone in the academic or intelligence communities that an unpublished piece of student work was NOT conclusive enough for the intelligence community to count on.

Sure the student who wrote it said it was still relevant, but this is hardly evidence. ("This just in: Ashcroft claims Ashcroft never lied.") What do you think he's going to say? "No, it was crap then and it's crap now?" And if it was such good and relevant research, how come he didn't publish it in ten years? Even academic publishing isn't THAT slow!

Finally, as to your point that the dossier wasn't dodgy because it contained ONE verfiable fact, well, I applaud the author. He got something right. Champagne for everybody!