According to this Wired News story, Sean-Paul Kelley — who maintains the increasingly popular weblog The Agnoist — simply cut and pasted reports from Stratfor and passed them along unsourced on his weblog to give the impression he had some sort of inside channel on war-related issues.
The Wired story reports,
In a series of interviews with Wired News, Kelley changed his story several times. At first, he said he used just four or five Stratfor items a day without crediting the company. Later, he owned up to “six or seven days when half was from Stratfor.”
Aside from a few scattered attributions, Kelley presented Stratfor’s intelligence as information he had uncovered himself, typically paragraph-long reports detailing combat operations in Iraq. He took these wholesale from a Stratfor proprietary newsletter, US-Iraqwar.com, which Kelley admits he subscribes to.
. . .
But in addition to failing to name Stratfor as the rightful source of the information, it appears that in at least two instances Kelley also tried to pass it off as intelligence provided by his own unnamed sources. On March 20, at the war’s outset, he wrote that “a little birdie told me” about certain information. In another case, his source was “a Turkish friend.”
If he was going to plagiarize, you’d think he’d have chosen a source a bit more obscure than Stratfor — as his weblog became more popular, it was almost guaranteed someone would notice the plagiarism.
