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WMD: Australia accused of hype
CANBERRA, Australia (CNN) -- The heat being generated over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction has moved to Australia with a former senior intelligence officer accusing Canberra of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. Speaking to an inquiry called by the Australian Senate, Andrew Wilkie said Friday information in intelligence reports had been distorted by the prime minister's office and "sexed up" to suit the government's political agenda. Wilkie resigned from Australia's elite Office of National Assessments (ONA) in March in protest against the government's alleged misuse of information provided by the agency. The ONA is an elite agency which evaluates intelligence from all Australian and allied agencies and passes on that advice to Prime Minister John Howard's office. The Howard government has been a staunch supporter of the Bush administration position on Iraq and contributed troops and military hardware to the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing". Wilkie told the Senate inquiry Friday that key words from ONA reports which qualified the veracity of intelligence reports on Iraq's WMDs had been removed by the prime minister's office. They had been replaced by more emotive language which supported the government's position on the threat of Iraq, he said. "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 Associated Press reports. Asked if he was accusing Howard's office of "sexing up" intelligence, Wilkie replied, "Yes, it was sexed up."
Australian National University political analyst Ross Babbage told CNN Friday that other officers within the ONA did not support Wilkie's views. He said Wilkie's allegations had changed from the claims he made when he resigned -- that humanitarian issues involved in invading Iraq were being underplayed -- to now reflect the charges being made in Britain over the Blair government's alleged distortion of intelligence information. Babbage said that it was his understanding that within the ONA Wilkie's views were "not widely shared". Former chief United Nations weapons inspector Richard Butler told the inquiry in earlier evidence that he was "shaken" by the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq following the war. He said that while Saddam Hussein's regime has trained members of terrorist group al Qaeda, he did not believe Iraq would have given them WMDs because there was "great animosity" between the two. Key data missing"I would have been stunned if Saddam had wanted or would have allowed his WMDs to be given to al Qaeda, for example," he said. 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. In the United Kingdom, Tony 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 open an inquiry into Howard's claims. 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. Copyright 2003 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
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