12.00pm

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been accused of playing the same propaganda games as Saddam Hussein after chunks of an "intelligence" dossier on Iraq turned out to have been plagiarised from academic papers.

The dossier, published this week on a government website, said Iraq had mounted a massive campaign to deceive and intimidate United Nations inspectors hunting for banned weapons.

The latest in a series of British documents focusing on the alleged threat from Saddam and rallying support for a possible US-led war, it was praised by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in the UN Security Council on Wednesday.

It claimed to draw upon "a number of sources, including intelligence material". But red-faced officials admitted today that whole swathes were lifted word for word -- grammatical slips and all -- from a student thesis.

Outraged politicians jumped on the revelation to accuse Blair of misleading the public and said it cast doubt on the credibility of his whole case against Saddam.

"This is the sort of thing that Saddam Hussein himself issues," fumed opposition Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge.

One of Blair's former junior defence ministers, Peter Kilfoyle, said he was shocked that the government was trying to win over Britons on such "thin evidence".

Sections in the dossier on Saddam's security apparatus drew heavily on a 2002 article written by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a 29-year-old US postgraduate student of Iraqi descent who works at California's Monterey Institute of International Studies.

His major sources were captured Iraqi intelligence documents from prior to 1991 that are part of Harvard's Iraq Research and Documentation Project, as well as books and public information.

Marashi, who has never been to Iraq, told Reuters he was surprised and flattered that his research ended up in a British government dossier -- but could have provided the government with updated information if anyone had asked.

"The fact that they would have to turn to something in the open media reflects that maybe there is a deficiency in the intelligence gathering," he said.

"My primary worry at the moment is that it might reflect poorly on Powell's presentation by the very fact that he referred to that document."