Former Australian spy chief Philip Flood presented a report on July 22, which found that the intelligence provided by Australia’s spy agencies on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was “thin”, “ambiguous” and “incomplete”.
Like the Butler report into the British spy agencies’ WMD intelligence, released a week earlier, Flood found that there was no political pressure put on the intelligence agencies by their government masters to provide phony intelligence.
However there is clear evidence to the contrary, as was revealed by the earlier parliamentary inquiry into the spy agencies’ WMD assessments. That inquiry found that up until September 13, 2002, the Office of National Assessments (ONA) and the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) had agreed that while Iraq had a capacity to “restart” its pre-1991 WMD programs, “chemical weapons and biological weapons, if they exist at all, would be in small quantities”.
Then, as the Senate inquiry’s Liberal Party chairperson David Jull noted, there “was a sudden and as yet unexplained change in the assessment provided by ONA between 12 and 13 September 2002". According to Jull, from September 13, 2002, the ONA “was more ready [than the DIO] to extrapolate a threatening scenario” and “more ready to accept the new and mostly untested intelligence” that was being passed on to Canberra by the US and British governments as they mounted their case for invading Iraq.
Was it merely a coincidence that this change occurred after foreign minister Alexander Downer had requested a new ONA assessment for the preparation of a speech in which he would indicate that his government agreed with Washington and London’s claims about Iraq’s possession of WMD stockpiles?
Flood notes that divergence between the ONA’s and the DIO’s assessments, but disconnects it from Downer’s request. According to Flood, “There were some implicit changes in ONA assessments caused by imprecise language from late December 2002". He goes on to state that the “ONA’s judgment, while reasonably argued, has not been borne out by what has been found in Iraq, and DIO’s caution has been justified”. Yet his report is much more critical of the DIO than the ONA.
Not surprisingly, Flood’s report has been welcomed by PM John Howard and the Coalition government. In releasing the declassified version, Howard stated that Flood’s inquiry supported the government’s claim that it went to war based on intelligence “assessments arrived at without political pressure” and that put paid to critics’ claim that “we took this country to war based on a lie”.
Howard also noted that Flood “made the observation that at the time these crucial assessments were made the only government in the world that was arguing that Iraq did not have WMD was in fact the then government of Iraq”.
Given that the now ousted Iraqi government’s statements have since turned out to be true — or as Howard disingenuously put it, the invaders’ WMD “assessments have not so far been matched” — the new lie that is being peddled by the US, British and Australian governments, and their corporate media backers, is that there was a “failure” of intelligence.
Prior to March 2003, however, the US, British and Australian spy agencies had highly credible information that Iraq had no WMD stockpiles or active WMD programs.
In August 1995, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, after defecting to Jordan, provided UN weapons inspectors, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 not only with detailed information on Iraq’s WMD programs but also told them that all of Iraq’s WMD had been destroyed in the summer of 1991 under his direct orders. Kamal’s claims were verified during 1996-98 by UN weapons inspectors, and again in the months before the US-led invasion in March 2003.
In reality, as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter noted in relation to the Butler report, the invaders’ pre-war WMD claims were not the result of an “intelligence failure. It was an intelligence success. The job was to provide intelligence that would support the policy of regime change.”
From at least 1992 the CIA and MI6 began recruiting and bankrolling Iraqi emigres — like Ahmed Chalabi and new Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi — to help them carry out this policy.
After the Bush administration decided to use Iraq’s alleged possession of WMD as a pretext for violent “regime change” through a US-led invasion of the oil-rich Persian Gulf country, the CIA and MI6 dutifully presented as “credible intelligence” the blatant fabrications about WMD provided to them by Chalabi’s Pentagon-funded Iraqi National Congress and Allawi’s CIA-funded Iraqi National Accord.
The whole purpose of the Flood inquiry, like the Butler inquiry, is to try to hide the British and Australian governments’ real war aims, which had nothing to do with any alleged WMD threat, but with helping their US ally secure control of Iraq’s vast oil wealth.
From Green Left Weekly, July 28, 2004.
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