Thursday, August 27, 2009

Dr. A.Q. Khan Bombs... Yet Again


I was going to do a piece about our venerated Father of the Bomb, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, caught comprehensively, stealing other people's work yet again, but the good folks at fiverupees blog have beaten me to it (dammit, I always have too much work!).

So it would be fair if I simply linked to their post on the same. It pretty much sums up what I was going to say anyway.

But I do have an update on the issue: the Houdini of national interest thinks he can squirm, yet again, out of this embarrassment.

Keep in mind the timeline. A.Q. Khan publishes his 'thought piece' about the importance of computer technology on August 19 in The News. On the same day an Urdu version of the article appears in Jang. On August 24, a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University exposes his rather dimwitted plagiarism in the letters section of The News (see the link above). Two days later, i.e. August 26, Jang publishes the Urdu translation of the second part of A.Q. Khan's piece with the following addendum:

"Most of the information contained in this article has been taken from the syllabi of famous British universities."

Syllabi?!? Don't you mean, the web intros on their admissions pages? I mean, can we get more absurd? This guy is more stupid than I thought.

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