Howard stymies Iraq-war probe

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - Australia's Parliament will pit itself against the power of Prime Minister John Howard in a bid to determine whether the Government misled the nation into war in Iraq.

The Parliament's joint intelligence committee - set up last year to oversee Australia's spy agencies - will hold secret hearings to uncover the information passed to Howard on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which the PM used to justify the nation's participation in the United States-led invasion.

But the committee has no power to compel the agencies that provided most of the intelligence to Howard, the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) and the Office of National Assessments (ONA), to give evidence.

ONA analysis is under separate investigation following revelations that the office, and the domestic Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio), named Bali as a potential terrorist target well in advance of last October's bombings.

The Senate foreign affairs, defence and trade committee, spurred by a growing Opposition attack on the Government's failure to warn travellers of the risk, has already launched an inquiry into the matter.

Yesterday, it heard from Asio director-general Dennis Richardson, and ONA director-general Kim Jones, and senior analysts will appear before it.

As with suggestions of manipulation of intelligence over Iraq, the Government has rejected Labor claims of failure or massaging and maintains that no specific warnings of a terror attack on Bali had been given to it by Asio or the ONA.

But, with the political stakes rising over the continued failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, damning evidence emerging from a British parliamentary inquiry and another similar probe starting in the US, Howard is digging in his heels.

He has indicated that there will be no Asio or ONA co-operation and has repeated his defence that it is still too early to question pre-war intelligence because weapons inspection teams have not had sufficient time to find weapons of mass destruction.

Australian commentators quickly pointed out that this was the argument United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix presented against going to war in the first place.

The intelligence committee is now seeking legal advice on its ability to require evidence from the ONA and the DIO, as it can from Asio, the overseas spy agency Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and the electronic intelligence-gatherer, the Defence Signals Directorate.

But much intelligence is shared between agencies, and Opposition MPs believe a great deal of the raw information used by the ONA to advise Howard would be available from the organisations over which the committee has authority.

"This would be a question of how the Howard Government chooses to conduct itself," Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said.

"It can choose ... not to co-operate, but I think that then the Australian people would be asking some fundamental questions as to what the Government has to hide."

If the inquiry cannot compel evidence from the ONA and DIO and fails to uncover sufficient information to reach a conclusion, the Democrats and Greens will almost certainly pressure Labor to support their call for an open Senate hearing.