FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2003
Australia lied about Iraq threat: Analyst
REUTERS
CANBERRA: The Australian government lied about the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify its involvement in the US-led war, an official inquiry into intelligence on Iraq was told on Friday.
A former senior intelligence analyst, Andrew Wilkie, who resigned in March in protest over Australia's case for war, said Prime Minister John Howard, a close US ally, created a mythical Iraq by dropping ambiguous references in intelligence reports.
"The government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story...The exaggeration was so great it was pure dishonesty," Wilkie, formerly of the Office of National Assessment (ONA), told the inquiry.
The ONA is equivalent to the US National Security Agency.
"Key intelligence assessment qualifications like 'probably', 'could' and 'uncorroborated evidence suggests' were frequently dropped. Much more useful words like massive and mammoth were included," he added.
Wilkie's comments to the inquiry are some his strongest yet against Howard's administration. Since his resignation, Wilkie has made numerous attacks on Howard, embarrassing the Australian leader.
Controversy has been raging in the United States, Britain and Australia over accusations those governments manipulated intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify the war with no evidence yet found of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
Howard has said he made the right decision to send a 2,000-strong force to the Gulf despite initial public qualms, but has said that intelligence could not have provided absolute proof of the Iraqi threat.
"We didn't ask that the intelligence material be distorted. I and my colleagues made a bona fide judgment based on the assessments that existed at the time," Howard told Australian radio on Friday.
Wilkie said he believes Iraq had a disjointed weapons of mass destruction programme, but said the United Nations should have been given more time to search Iraq.
He said the Australian intelligence community had done an acceptable job in judging the threat posed by Iraq, but was sometimes biased by US intelligence, government pressure and politically correct intelligence officers.
"The government was prepared to deliberately exaggerate the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and terrorism threat so as to stay in step with the United States. The Australian government misled the Australian public over Iraq," Wilkie said.
Former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler told the inquiry on Friday that 85-90 percent of specific, hard intelligence he received on Iraq from countries including the United States and Britain was accurate, but also very rare.
Butler, who led the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq between 1997 and 1999, said the more voluminous, speculative intelligence, such as intercepted messages and pictures taken by spy planes, tended to be less than 50 percent accurate.
"I'm sure once (Iraq) is finally swept then there will be some weapons of mass destruction found. I don't think they would have destroyed all of them or could have. Let no-one doubt they had a weapons of mass destruction progamme," Butler said.
The Australian inquiry, some of which will be held in secret because of the confidential nature of some intelligence, is due to report back to the conservative government in December. The Australian parliamentary hearing parallels an inquiry into the information the British government used to make its case for invading Iraq and toppling maintenance Hussein.
Prime Minister Tony Blair and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon are due to give evidence next week at the inquiry into the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly, who was caught up in a row over the prime minister's case for war with Iraq.
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