August 23, 2003	Saturday	Jumadi-us-Sani 24, 1424

CANBERRA, Aug 22: Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s office exaggerated intelligence reports on the threat posed by Iraq to justify going along with Washington in the invasion of Iraq, a former government intelligence analyst told a parliamentary inquiry on Friday.

Andrew Wilkie — who resigned from Australia’s top intelligence assessment agency, the ONA, last March to protest the government’s stance — said Mr Howard’s office deliberately skewed the truth and misled the public over Iraq’s weapons capabilities.

“It was sexed up,” Mr Wilkie told the inquiry into the accuracy of intelligence reports in the lead-up to the invasion. “Sometimes the exaggeration was so great, it was clear dishonesty.”

Mr Wilkie’s claims echo the allegation that led to British arms expert David Kelly’s suicide last month and which is still causing shockwaves in British politics.

They drew a heated denial from Mr Howard, who challenged Mr Wilkie to substantiate his allegations.

“I don’t know on what he bases those claims, if he has got evidence of that let him produce it, otherwise stop slandering decent people,” Mr Howard told reporters.

He said ONA had told him Mr Wilkie had virtually no access to the relevant intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion.

Mr Howard, like his British and US counterparts, has been accused of waging the war against Saddam Hussein under false pretences.

Mr Wilkie claimed Mr Howard’s office removed ambiguous terms from ONA intelligence assessments and presented speculation as fact.

He believed intelligence agencies “did a good job” producing intelligence assessments but they were altered by Mr Howard’s office.

“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,” he said.

The inquiry also heard evidence from former chief UN arms inspector in Iraq Richard Butler, who said he was “shaken” by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.

Mr Butler remained confident WMDs would be located, saying he was certain they existed in Iraq when he was chairman of the UN Special Commission from 1997 to 1999. —AFP