Spinning out of control

Australians are a politically disengaged bunch, writes David Fickling, but their government's deception over the war in Iraq may yet jolt them out of their apathy

David Fickling

CERTAIN aspects of character are assumed to be more or less the same the world over: fear of failure, hope for the future, hatred of injustice. You might have thought that the response to dishonesty would be similarly universal, but if public reaction around the globe to the lying and spin used to promote war in Iraq are anything to go by, it is anything but.

In the US, news that Washington ignored the testimony of its own intelligence agencies has been greeted by the plunging of heads into sand. For conservatives and much of the US mainstream, such matters are best not thought about. The four-square solidarity behind the White House following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks will admit no imperfection on the part of government.

Britain sees things differently. As any pom resident in Australia soon learns, Brits have an international reputation for whinging about things, and the Iraq war has consequently spawned ministerial resignations, blanket news coverage, and a select committee inquiry.

If national stereotypes are anything to go by, Australians might be expected to concentrate on their desire for good times, rather than worry about what's going on in Canberra. And true to form, public reaction from third member of the coalition of the willing has largely been one of ennui.

This is strange, given the strength of the case against the government here. In Britain, journalists, politicians and activists have spent weeks trying to dig up evidence that the government made up its intelligence claims relating to Iraq. In Australia, that evidence was on the front page of the country's biggest news weekly a full two weeks before the first cruise missile was launched on Baghdad.

The revelation came with the resignation of Andrew Wilkie, a senior analyst at Australia's top intelligence body, the Office of National Assessment (ONA). A former soldier with an open, affable manner, Wilkie used to sit in his Canberra office reading raw intelligence reports from Australian and international spy agencies, weighing them up and then boiling them down into briefings for the prime minister and cabinet.

His military background meant he was given a particularly wide-ranging role in the run-up to the Iraq war, though the government has done its best to downplay his importance among ONA's staff of 30.

Wilkie does not mince his words. Claims of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda were "preposterous". "They were clearly concocted. There was no strong intelligence to support it whatsoever," he says.

Evidence about that missing stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was similarly unreliable. "It was clear before the war that some of the evidence on WMD coming out of Britain and America was garbage," he says. "It was being skewed by political information from Iraqis who were trying to encourage a US invasion."

Only half-jokingly, he talks about sitting at his desk and rapidly directing Pentagon-originated intelligence reports to the ONA rubbish bin.

Wilkie was initially stunned by the level of interest his resignation generated. With typical journalistic understatement, the columnist who broke the story forewarned him that he could expect a few days of calls from the media. In fact, he says that fielding press queries has been a full-time job in the three months since he left.

This week he is in London, where the foreign affairs select committee will question him further about the subterfuge used to sell the war. His testimony is likely to be explosive. Governments in Washington, London and Canberra, he will say, were simply lying to the public about Iraq.

The intelligence reports Wilkie passed to the Australian cabinet did not begin to justify the unequivocal claims made by politicians, including prime minister John Howard (right), about Iraq's "massive" WMD programme.

Furthermore, assessments of the British and American governments made by Australian diplomatic staff and defence attaches showed a similar gulf between claimed and genuine motives.

"I know for a fact that in Australia, the government was being well advised that WMD was not the sole reason for Washington going to war," he says. "In fact, it wasn't even the most important reason ... The British and Australian governments were well aware of the real reasons for the war."

That the Australian government was aware of this, but kept it from the public while sending Australian troops off to battle, ought to have caused a scandal in Australia. But despite all those media calls Wilkie has faced, public feathers remain, for the most part, unruffled.

The Labor opposition is dragging its feet in launching a Senate inquiry into the abuse of intelligence, and its embattled leader, Simon Crean, has failed to confront the government in parliament.

No surprise there, a cynic might say. The Australian public have grown used to their government lying, most scandalously during the xenophobic campaign for the 2001 federal election.

In a masterpiece of innuendo and misinformation, ministers told the public that refugees on a stricken ship off the northwest coast of Australia were throwing their own children into the sea in an attempt to force the coastguard to pick them up and take them ashore. A photograph was given to the media purporting to show those children floating in the water.

Ministers hinted that Islamist terrorists might be choosing this hazardous route to get into Australia, particularly absurd claim given that Western-qualified English-speakers like Mohammed Atta are precisely the sort of Muslim immigrants that Australia's immigration department is still happy to welcome.

In fact, the photograph showed an Australian coastguard rescuing adult refugees after their ship sank. The "children overboard" claim was inspired by a single, unconfirmed report in which a refugee on deck was seen through binoculars lifting her child into the air.

For the most part, the government has emerged unscathed from the exposure of these lies, and Howard's unique talent for ambiguous rhetoric saved him from charges of outright misinformation. When asked about the children overboard affair, he said that parents who might do such things were not the sort of people he wanted in Australia, stopping just short of saying that children had in fact been thrown overboard.

But even Howard could be in trouble if a genuine inquiry is launched into the misinformation that preceded the Iraq war. Intelligence agencies are for the most part docile creatures, but recent events in Britain suggest that they can lash out if pushed too far. Current attempts by the government to pass off the overselling of the WMD issue as an intelligence failure may just goad them into action.

Wilkie is not the only spook to have questioned the government's line. At a senate committee hearing earlier this month, the serving head of Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation, Frank Lewincamp, suggested that the prime minister's pronouncements went well beyond what was known.

"The Australian government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons," Howard told parliament in February, while Lewincamp insists it was too early to make a definitive judgement.

If Howard is found to have lied to parliament, perhaps even the Australian public will be woken from their customary political apathy. Who knows? They might even have a bit of a whinge.

 

Counterpunch: WeaponsGate: The Coming Downfall of Lying Regimes  and: How the White House silenced the critics of WMD Intelligence

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