Australian government 'sexed up Iraq intelligence'

The Australian government was today accused of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to justify sending its soldiers to war in Iraq.

The claim by a former senior intelligence analyst came on the first day of a parliamentary inquiry into how Prime Minister John Howard justified sending 2,000 troops to fight alongside British and American forces.

As in Britain, questions have been raised in Australia about whether Howard’s government “sexed up” any intelligence reports to make the case for war.

Andrew Wilkie, who quit as a senior intelligence analyst in March in protest at the government’s support for going to war, told MPs information passed to the government had been distorted for political purposes.

“Sometimes the exaggeration was so great, it was clear dishonesty,” he told the inquiry.

“I will go so far as to say the material was going straight from ONA to the prime minister’s office and the exaggeration was occurring in there, or the dishonesty was occurring somewhere in there,” he said.

The ONA, or Office of National Assessments, is an elite agency that evaluates intelligence from all Australian and allied agencies to advise the prime minister.

Asked if he was accusing Howard’s office of “sexing up” intelligence, Wilkie replied: “Yes, it was sexed up.”

In a speech to Parliament before the fighting broke out in Iraq, Howard justified the war by saying intelligence sources showed Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction and could give them to terrorists.

Experts scouring Iraq have so far failed to find such weapons, leading opposition MPs to use their control of the Australian parliament’s upper house, the Senate, to demand an inquiry into Howard’s claims.

Howard said today that the assessment made of Iraq’s weapons capacity was justified “at the time”.

“We did not ask that the intelligence material be distorted,” he said in a radio interview.

The chiefs of at least three Australian intelligence agencies will have an opportunity to answer Wilkie’s claims, but their testimony will be given in secret and cannot be published in the committee’s report, due on December 2 this year.

Wilkie also accused MPs on the committee from Howard’s conservative coalition of trying to discredit him by questioning his motives and his access to intelligence on Iraq.

“I am staggered that the government is still trying to discredit me,” he said. “Before the war we were all told that ... Saddam Hussein would use his weapons of mass destruction, he was a threat to global security, he would pass them to al-Qaida – the government’s in the dock here not me,” he said.

The inquiry has little power beyond publishing a report that could damage the reputation of Howard’s government.

In testimony earlier today, Richard Butler, a former Australian ambassador to the United Nations and the UN’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1997 to 1999, told the inquiry Saddam’s regime had trained terrorists at a camp just outside Baghdad.

But he did not believe Saddam would have given them weapons of mass destruction.

“I saw no evidence of Iraq giving over WMDs to non-state actors, to terrorist groups,” he said.

Butler said there had been “great animosity” between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaida, the terror network led by Osama bin Laden. Butler said he had talked about that with Saddam’s former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz.

“I would have been stunned if Saddam had wanted or would have allowed his WMDs to be given to al-Qaida, for example,” he said.

A poll in July showed that 36% of Australians believe the government knowingly misled them on Iraq. Howard still remains overwhelmingly popular.