CANBERRA, 23 August 2003 — A former intelligence analyst yesterday accused the Australian government of lying about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify the deployment of its troops to the US-led war.
“Sometimes the exaggeration was so great, it was clear dishonesty,” Andrew Wilkie told a parliamentary inquiry.
“The government lied every time. It skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story,” he said.
Prime Minister John Howard, one of Washington’s staunchest allies, quickly denied the allegation made on the first day of a probe by legislators into why Australia sent 2,000 troops to fight with US and British forces.
Separately yesterday, Jalal Talabani, a member of Iraq’s interim governing council who is in Australia to drum up foreign investment, told reporters that Saddam Hussein’s regime did possess weapons of mass destruction and they would be found in time.
The parliamentary inquiry that began yesterday mirrors the scandal that has engulfed British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose government is accused of having “sexed up” intelligence reports to justify the conflict.
Wilkie, who quit his job at Australia’s elite Office of National Assessments in March to protest the war, used the same phrase yesterday to describe the government’s handling of Australian intelligence.
“Yes, it was sexed up,” he said.
The political fallout of the allegations is unclear. Wilkie has made similar claims in the past, although never so forcefully or in testimony to Parliament. And, despite a July opinion poll showing 36 percent of Australians thought the government knowingly misled them on Iraq, Howard remains overwhelmingly popular as leader.
In other testimony yesterday, a former weapons inspection chief threw doubt on Howard’s claims that Saddam’s regime could have supplied terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
Richard Butler, who used to be Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations and was the UN’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1997 to 1999, said terrorists had trained at a camp near 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. He said there had been “great animosity” between Saddam’s secular regime and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terror network. Butler said he had talked about that with Saddam’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Tareq Aziz.
“I would have been stunned if Saddam had wanted or would have allowed his WMDs to be given to Al-Qaeda, for example,” he said.
