Australia went to war on back of 'thin' intelligence (original) (raw)

The Australian government did not manipulate the pre-war intelligence on Iraq but relied on information which was "thin, ambiguous and incomplete", a report published yesterday concluded.

The report, by Canberra's former high commissioner in London Philip Flood, found that there had been "a failure of intelligence" on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but said that Australian intelligence assessments "were on the whole more cautious, and seem closer to the facts" than those from Britain and the US.

Opposition politicians branded the report a whitewash. The Australian government has been under little political pressure over the pre-war intelligence failure, despite the fact that one of its main intelligence analysts resigned in protest at distortion of evidence just a week before the outbreak of war.

The prime minister, John Howard, welcomed the findings and promised to double funding to the Office of National Assessments (ONA), one of the agencies whose work was criticised four months ago in a parliamentary inquiry which prompted yesterday's report.

But opposition politicians said that a more rigorous inquiry was needed. "We have the prime minister of Australia taking this country to war on the basis of a hunch," said the Labor foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd.

Andrew Bartlett, leader of the influential Democrats party, questioned whether the positive findings of inquiry reports in the US, UK and Australia were credible.

"It beggars belief that intelligence agencies in Australia, the UK and the US all happened to tell their respective governments exactly what they wanted to hear without any political pressure being applied," he said.

Mr Flood is a former head of the ONA. Aldo Borgu, an analyst at an independent thinktank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said: "You are dealing with a man who used to govern the agency that he's writing about in this report.

"There's less political concern because the government ultimately got the policy result that it was after, which is the removal of Saddam Hussein."

The censored 200-page version of the Flood report released to the public yesterday revealed that the joint assessments on Iraq provided by the ONA and its military equivalent, the Defence Intelligence Organisation, amounted to just five and a half pages.

The inquiry in March found that 97% of the material they used came from foreign agencies, that they had made exaggerated assessments on 12 occasions, and that they were dependent on material which was overwhelmingly from untested sources.

"Adding to the problem was the thinness of the intelligence on which analysts were expected to make difficult calls," yesterday's report found.

The budgets of Australia's five foreign intelligence agencies have been doubled since September 11.