On Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a speech entitled "A Policy of Evasion and Deception" to the United Nations which posed a number of justifications for war with Iraq. In the speech Powell presented a dossier of "credible British intelligence" that was used to point to weapons facilities.

The next day, it became known that the dossier was not in fact credible British intelligence, but rather was largely plagiarized from various academic and other articles, many of which were as dated as over a decade old. This put Powell's credibility and the justifications for war in question.

Hours after this news broke, the Department of Homeland Security announced an Orange Terror Alert, the second highest on that color-coded scale. The announcement was made that Homeland Security had credible intelligence that an attack was impending. This effectively blew the plagiarized dossier story off the front pages for over a month --only the Washington Post and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel published the story the next day that Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged flaws in the dossier. No other papers came back to the dossier until well after a month had passed.

On Feb. 14, ABC News broke the story that the intelligence used to justify an Orange Alert was falsified. Despite acknowledging this, Homeland Security declared we would remain at Orange Alert for the time being. The falsified dossier story, however, would not really be returned to until the Downing Street Memo appeared, suggesting that intelligence was being manipulated to match desired outcomes all along. Powell has called this incident a blot on his record.