The Australian government lied about the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify its involvement in the US-led war, an inquiry into intelligence on Iraq has been told.
A former senior intelligence analyst, Mr Andrew Wilkie, who resigned in March in protest over Australia's case for war, said today that Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, a close US ally, created a mythical Iraq by dropping ambiguous references in intelligence reports.
"The government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story. . . . The exaggeration was so great it was pure dishonesty," Mr Wilkie, formerly of the Office of National Assessment (ONA), told the inquiry.
The ONA is equivalent to the US National Security Agency.
"Key intelligence assessment qualifications like 'probably', 'could' and 'uncorroborated evidence suggests' were frequently dropped. Much more useful words like massive and mammoth were included," he added.
Mr Wilkie's comments to the inquiry are some of his strongest yet against Howard's administration. Since his resignation, Mr Wilkie has made numerous attacks on Mr Howard, embarrassing the Australian leader.
Mr Howard has said he made the right decision to send a 2,000-strong force to the Gulf despite initial public qualms, but has said that intelligence could not have provided absolute proof of the Iraqi threat.
"We didn't ask that the intelligence material be distorted. I and my colleagues made a bona fide judgement based on the assessments that existed at the time," Mr Howard told today.
Mr Wilkie said he believes Iraq had a disjointed weapons of mass destruction programme but that the United Nations should have been given more time to search Iraq.
He said the Australian intelligence community had done an acceptable job in judging the threat posed by Iraq, but was sometimes biased by US intelligence, government pressure and politically correct intelligence officers.
"The government was prepared to deliberately exaggerate the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and terrorism threat so as to stay in step with the United States. The Australian government misled the Australian public over Iraq," Mr Wilkie said.