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Australia Accused of Distorting Iraq Info
A former senior intelligence analyst Friday accused Prime Minister John Howard’s government of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq to justify sending Australian troops to war.
Ho-hum. Someone’s been taking lessons from the UK parliamentary ’inquires’.
And the U.S. This seems to be the favored tack of the global anti-war/anti-Globalization coalition...
The claim came on the first day of a Senate inquiry into the intelligence used by Howard to justify sending 2,000 troops to fight alongside U.S. and British troops in Iraq and mirrored the problems facing President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Yep. Quite a coincidence...
Andrew Wilkie, who quit as a senior intelligence analyst in March to protest the government’s support for war in Iraq, told the Senate that information passed to the government had been distorted for political purposes. ``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,’’ Wilkie told the inquiry. The ONA, or Office of National Assessments, is an elite agency which 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 - a phrase seized on by British tabloids - Wilkie replied, ``Yes, it was sexed up.’’ Both Bush and Blair have come under similar charges.
We saw how it turned out in the UK — not only did Blair not sex it up, the BBC got caught trying to claim it so.
In the United States, several former intelligence officials said that even as the Bush administration concluded Iraq was reviving its nuclear weapons program, key signs — such as scientific data of weapons work and evidence of research by Iraq’s nuclear experts — were missing.
Yeah, how dare Bush accept less than 100% guarenteed proof before taking action?
Blair’s government has been under sustained fire over accusations it ``sexed up’’ intelligence reports to justify going to war. In a speech to Parliament before fighting broke out in Iraq, Howard justified the war 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 lawmakers to use their control of the parliament’s upper house, the Senate, to demand an inquiry into Howard’s claims.
There’s the key graf: this is just a political hassle. Move along, folks.
Howard said Friday the assessment made of Iraq’s weapons capacity was justified ``at the time.’’ ``We didn’t ask that the intelligence material be distorted,’’ he said in a radio interview.
In fact, Howard had not only Aussie intel, but also French, Russian, German, US and UK intel, plus all the reports from the UN inspectors from before 1998 and from Blixie. Each and every one of them said that Saddam was dirty. The anti-war nuts now blame Howard for relying on all that.
Posted by: Steve White 2003-08-22
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=17868