Rohan Pearce
"A whitewash" is how anti-war activists are describing the report of the parliamentary inquiry into intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), released on March 1. The warmongers, predictably, greeted the report's conclusions as vindication of PM John Howard's war policy.
A media release by foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer claimed that the report "vindicates the government's use of intelligence in stating the case for disarming Iraq" of its alleged WMD.
While the inquiry was fundamentally flawed — thanks to its narrow terms of reference, the extensive vetting of its findings by government ministers and the government's majority on the committee — it still provides evidence of government deceit in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.
Exposure
The report centred on information provided to the government by the Office of National Assessments (ONA) and the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO).
It recounts how "the case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq's WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations". But it concludes: "This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the Committee by Australia's two analytical [intelligence] agencies."
In the period February 2000-September 2002, the report states that "In general ... the agencies' view on the existence of Iraq's WMD is that, while there is a capacity to restart programmes, chemical weapons and biological weapons, if they exist at all, would be in small quantities and that the existence of nuclear weapons is doubtful".
A September 12, 2002, assessment by the ONA claimed, "the case for the revival of the WMD programs [by the Iraqi government] is substantial, but not conclusive". Even the evidence for this fairly cautious assessment was flawed, being based on WMD-related expertise among Iraq's scientific community and the rebuilding of so-called dual-use facilities — civilian facilities that could conceivably also be used for manufacturing WMD.
Pre-war UN inspections revealed that there was no evidence of illegal activities at such sites. Yet between 2000 and 2002, the existence of dual-use facilities seems to have been the primary piece of solid "evidence" for Iraqi WMD programs.
The ONA assessment revealed that intelligence information was "slight on the scope and location of Iraq's WMD activities". A joint ONA/DIO assessment in July 2002 had revealed that there was only "scarce, patchy and inconclusive" intelligence material about alleged attempts to revive an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
The ONA's assessment of Iraq's alleged WMD programs shifted substantially from September 13, 2002, onwards — the time that the Australian, British and US governments began talking up war against Iraq. The assessment of the DIO, however, remained similar to its previous, cautious and sceptical, views. None of the DIO's assessments made it into the war speeches of Howard and his government.
Presenting the report to the House of Representatives, the Liberal's David Jull, who chaired the inquiry, stated that Australian intelligence agencies "denied any political pressure" and that "the committee noted this and accepted it". He added, however, that "the committee was aware of a sudden and as yet unexplained change in the assessments provided by ONA between 12 and 13 September 2002".
Overnight change
The September 13 assessment was made at the request of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and was the basis of government speeches. "The change marks a divergence in assessments between ONA and DIO, and DIO commented in their submission that 'the final product was not formally cleared by the contributing agencies'. This was the only hint the committee received of any dispute between the agencies", claimed Jull.
In a March 2 interview on ABC Radio's AM program, Downer claimed that the request for a new ONA assessment by his department was "for the preparation of a speech that I was to give". Later in the interview, he maintained that he "didn't notice any particular change in ONA's assessments in September 2002".
AM's reporter, Matt Brown, pointed out, however, that "on the 12th of September the ONA was saying things like 'there is no firm evidence of new chemical and biological weapons production', and then on the 13th of September, they were putting it another way round stating that 'Iraq is highly likely to have chemical and biological weapons'."
As ONA whistleblower Andrew Wilkie told the inquiry, "sometimes government pressure, as well as the politically correct intelligence officers themselves sometimes, resulted in its own bias in the assessment being provided by the intelligence agencies."
When he presented his report to parliament, Jull argued that after September 13 the ONA "was more ready to extrapolate a threatening scenario from historical experience, more ready to accept the new and mostly untested intelligence and more ready to see the rebuilding of dual-use infrastructure and mobile facilities as indicating the concealment of new production and the consequent possession by Iraq of WMD."
That is — the ONA stopped relying on actual evidence.
Jull then unintentionally revealed how ludicrous his denial of political pressure was. He claimed that the inaccuracies were a product of not taking into account the effect of the 1991 Gulf War, more than a decade of brutal economic sanctions, extensive UN weapons inspections and Washington's 1998 bombing campaign. Jull essentially argued that the ONA was unable even to examine the public record.
A real inquiry
Pip Hinman, an activist in Sydney's Stop the War Coalition, told Green Left Weekly that the PM's attempts to use the Jull report to vindicate his government's lies were a "sick joke".
"While Howard claims the report vindicates his government's decision to join the 'pre-emptive' attack on Iraq, the opposite is the case. The inquiry, though narrow, showed that Howard was not misled by the intelligence agencies. Rather, it provides evidence that the government lied about Iraq's weapons capability to justify the illegal invasion."
Hinman, also a member of the Socialist Alliance, criticised the new inquiry announced by Howard on March 1 as "a whitewash". "The narrow terms of reference, which don't even mention Iraq, mean that it won't even examine how the government used the intelligence on WMD when it made the case for war.
"That's why we need an inquiry with the power to subpoena everyone — from the PM down — which will get to the bottom of how the government used the intelligence. Anything else is a waste of public money."
Greens Senator Bob Brown also argues that "intelligence failure" is not the issue that needs to be investigated. He responded to the report's release by arguing it showed that "Rather than insist on corroboration of unsubstantiated reports about weapons of mass destruction, Mr Howard embellished them to warnings of potential 'mammoth' death and destruction if Saddam Hussein was not attacked."
"The prime minister was not misled by the Australian agencies, rather he misled the Australian electorate."
Kevin Rudd, Labor's foreign affairs spokesperson, also claims that the report was "a catalogue of intelligence failure, and it is a catalogue of a government cherry picking the intelligence advice it received to suit its own political objective".
On March 8, Greens MP Michael Organ will present a bill to the House of Representatives to establish a royal commission to investigate the WMD scandal. He described the government's proposed intelligence inquiry as an "an insult to the intelligence of the Australian people".
Organ's proposed royal commission will "investigate the accuracy, independence and use of intelligence information" about Iraqi WMD. In February, the ALP refused to support a Greens motion in the Senate that would have established a judicial inquiry into the government's use of WMD intelligence.
In contrast to the Greens' proposed inquiry, which would be able to force politicians, including Howard, to appear before it, and would have an explicit mandate to examine the truthfulness of pre-war claims made by politicians, the federal government's inquiry will merely look at the "capacity" and performance of intelligence agencies, particularly the ONA.
Howard revealed on March 4 that the inquiry would be headed by Philip Flood, notorious for helping to cover up the crimes of Indonesia's Suharto dicatorship. He was Australia's Indonesian ambassador between 1989 and 1993. After the infamous 1991 massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery in East Timor's capital Dili, then under Indonesian occupation, he was part of a conspiracy by the Labor government to conceal a series of follow-up killings by the Indonesian military.
From 1996 to 1998 he was the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He's also a former ONA director.
From Green Left Weekly, March 10, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.