Others are just padding for the report, on the assumption nobody's going to take the time to look at the data or methodology when there's a juicy conclusion to be gobbled down.
A quick check shows that some of the examples are fairly common text. Boilerplate. In a few cases I've read the "quotes" here. Hard to avoid some things. I mean, I know I've read "some of the examples are fairly common text" before I wrote it, but I'd be hard-put to cite it. Same for "padding for the report". Serious "investigation" would rule those out as inevitable.
In other cases, "a few words" results in absurdities.
And in others, it's obvious an attempt was made to specifically avoid a quote. Even if it meant "suspected terror suspects" was in Clarke's text instead of "suspected terrorists". This is the kind of change that a lot of teachers along the way say to make to avoid making the text look like a quote pastiche. I just graded a bunch of high school projects where students following instruction--sometimes students in college-level classes--did exactly this. You break up quotes, interpolate a few words, drop out a few, re-arrange the text and you've met the requirements of not having a word-for-word quote.
I await the verdict.
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