Heat on Australian Government over Iraq intelligence

By NICK SQUIRES in Sydney

Australia's "selective" use of intelligence to justify joining the United States-led war against Iraq will come under intense scrutiny this week when an intelligence whistleblower gives evidence to a British parliamentary inquiry.

Andrew Wilkie, who quit his job at the Australian Office of National Assessments in March over Canberra's decision to send troops to Iraq, has been asked to appear before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, which is investigating Britain's decision to go to war.

The committee is one of two parliamentary inquiries under way into the quality of pre-war intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Also giving evidence will be former Cabinet ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook as well as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Wilkie has repeatedly claimed that the Australian Government exaggerated the scale of Saddam Hussein's possession of such weapons and "concocted" a link between the Iraqi regime and terrorist organisations such as al Qaeda.

He says his criticisms have been vindicated by the fact that US and British forces have failed to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the two months since the war officially ended.

Wilkie, a persistent and potentially damaging critic of the Howard Government, says Iraq's weapons programme had been contained by 12 years of economic sanctions and was, at best, "disjointed".

Before leaving for London, Wilkie told the Sydney Morning Herald: "Australia went to war with the US and UK, without international endorsement, on the basis of what our Prime Minister described as a massive weapons of mass destruction programme in Iraq.

"That claim was obviously false. There is no doubt that Iraq did have weapons at one time and something will eventually be found and dressed up as justification, but it won't be anything of the magnitude we were led to believe existed."

He said he would tell the British inquiry that Australia's justification for joining the US-led campaign in Iraq represented "at least an intelligence failure and at worst Government dishonesty".

"Our Prime Minister needs to be called to account just as much as Blair and Bush.

"For him to now blame it all on foreign intelligence is not good enough because all that intelligence was filtered through Australian agencies."

The Government has tried to deflect Wilkie's criticism by saying that he worked only on humanitarian issues at the Office of National Assessments.

The day after Wilkie resigned, Howard said in a televised address that Iraq possessed "chemical and biological weapons capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale". He is still confident they will be found eventually.

The Observer newspaper in London reported that a British inquiry into two trailers found in northern Iraq found them not to be mobile germ warfare labs, as previously claimed, but facilities for making artillery balloon hydrogen.

Australia's opposition Labor Party, together with the minority Democrats and Greens, will push this week for a parliamentary inquiry into the Government's alleged doctoring of intelligence.

Herald Feature: Iraq