Jason Arday’s death and the racist weaponisation of plagiarism

On 18 July 2003, the body of UK weapons scientist Dr. David Kelly was discovered in the woods of Oxfordshire, some twenty miles away from the library where I was then writing a doctorate about Iraq. His death was ruled a suicide.

23 years later, Dr Jason Arday was found dead in south London, a few days after resigning from the University of Cambridge over allegations that he copied another person’s thesis, including the typographical errors.

Both Kelly and Arday were named, pushed into the media spotlight, and destroyed.

I never met Kelly, but we sat in the same seat a few days apart during a UK parliamentary inquiry. I was summoned to Parliament in 2003 because the British government had plagiarised material from my thesis and copied it into a dossier that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations to justify the invasion of Iraq, including my typographical errors.

Ironically, I was an Anglo-American of Iraqi heritage whose research had inadvertently become part of the justification for the invasion of my ancestral homeland. I never needed convincing that plagiarism matters. Since 2003, I have been trying to convince public audiences that it does.

In my Newlines Magazine article, ‘From the Dodgy Dossier to the Cambridge Controversies, Not All Plagiarism Is Alike,’ I wrote about the 2023 case in which Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard University in Cambridge, US, was the target of plagiarism allegations. In Cambridge, UK, Jason Arday was the youngest Black professor in the university’s history. While my work was linked to the Iraq War, they were targets in the culture war over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

Plagiarism is a matter to be weaponised, and only the strong have the power to survive its attack. Rarely do those caught up in plagiarism cases survive the attack.

Nobody in Tony Blair’s government, as far as we know, was disciplined for the plagiarism, despite lengthy trials and testimonies, including the Hutton Inquiry. The UK government taught a lesson that plagiarism is survivable if you have power. The lesson from Gay and Arday’s death is that it is not survivable without power.

In Arday’s case, there is another connection to those without power. It is rarely asked if his neurodivergence was a factor in what played out, similar to the life of the mathematician John Nash, the Nobel Prize winner whose struggle with mental illness inspired the movie “A Beautiful Mind.”

In all three cases, plagiarism led to three academics leaving their university positions.

In my TEDx IE Madrid talk ‘The Dodgy Dossier, the Iraq War, and Me,’ I talk about how when I moved to Istanbul, Turkey, to take my first academic job in 2004, Turkish newspapers featured headlines tying me to the justification for the 2003 war, with some headlines calling me its architect or  “mastermind.” Taxi drivers and fruit vendors asked me why I had started it.

At my university, leftist students organised protests against my presence and called me the architect of the Iraq War. In this case, it was weaponised by leftist students opposed to the Iraq War. Tragically, I agreed with them and told them so directly when they confronted me.

I had not plagiarised anyone, but rather I was the person plagiarised from, by a government whose war I opposed, using work I had written to explain to Saddam Hussein’s police state, which I also opposed. None of that mattered. Like the professors who followed me, a crowd decided my name did not belong in a lecture hall. They were not interested in learning the difference between the man who did the research and the government that stole it.

They have good reason to. As for the death of Dr. Kelly, this is how I most likely became a target in Turkey.

Another UK government report, issued in September 2002, falsely claimed that Iraq could deploy chemical munitions in 45 minutes. Kelly, a scientist in the UK Ministry of Defence and a commentator on a draft of that dossier, revealed to the BBC that the 45-minute figure was an exaggeration and asserted that Alistair Campbell, Blair’s media advisor, used that figure to “sex-up” the Iraqi WMD threat, giving the September 2002 dossier the title the “sexed-up dossier.”

My work was plagiarised in a February 2003 dossier known as the “dodgy dossier,” for which Campbell also took responsibility.

It was during the media frenzy in the UK that Kelly died by suicide. The dossiers became interchangeable in media reporting, and I argue they could collectively be labelled the “dodgy sex dossier.”

Those who did not follow the affair closely, including the Turkish media and students, associated me with the 45-minute claim. This conflation unleashed hostility toward me both in my personal and public lives, but nothing like that endured by Gay and Arday, who faced death threats and a barrage of racist tirades.

This precedent demonstrates that, over time, the nuances in these cases will be forgotten, with juries already having made up their minds.

I do not compare my life to the deaths of Arday or Kelly, or Gay’s resignation. My experience in Turkey led me to teach at IE University in Madrid and Segovia, which turned out to be a dynamic, cosmopolitan campus—a silver lining.

Yet all universities around the world need to have courses on plagiarism for both professors and students, especially in the age of artificial intelligence. The state universities in California where I work cite a lack of funding for these courses, but they have agreements with major AI and plagiarism tech companies. For years, I have approached these companies that make plagiarism software, telling them: “If you make money from selling this technology to universities, you can give back by teaching how to avoid plagiarism in the first place,” but to no avail.

Finally, bringing up the “dodgy dossier” should serve as a prominent reminder that civil society and the media need to remain vigilant. If the US and UK launched a war against Iraq in 2003 based on fabricated evidence, there should have been a greater uproar over the so-called intelligence that the US claimed to attack Iran in 2026.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of Middle East history at California State University, on the board of the International Security and Conflict Resolution (ISCOR) program at San Diego State University, and a visiting faculty member at The American College of the Mediterranean and the Department of International Relations at Central European University. His publications include Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (2008), The Modern History of Iraq (2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (2024).

Follow him on Twitter: @ialmarashi

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