Accusers become the accused as intelligence backfires

By Peter Hartcher

In all three of the countries at the forefront of the invasion of Iraq,
official inquiries have now concurred that the war was based on faulty
intelligence.

In the US, in Australia, and now in Britain, it is a matter of official
finding, and not just political accusation, that the main rationale for
war had no sound basis in fact.

In a sense, it is a statement of the obvious. If the intelligence had
been accurate, Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction would by now be on prominent display.

Remember how George Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
had said that "we do not want the smoking gun to become a mushroom
cloud?" We now know there were no mushroom clouds in prospect, only
mushrooms - the parliaments and the people of these three countries,
kept in the dark and fed manure.

Yet the findings of these official inquiries are still big news. Why?
Because the three governments that had thundered war will not even
whisper contrition.

The Australian inquiry, a bipartisan parliamentary committee, disclosed
on March 1 that only some 3 per cent of the intelligence the Federal
Government used was from Australian sources.

The other 97 per cent was from the United States or Britain:

And it was deeply deficient.

The US Senate committee found last week that "the major key judgements"
in the warnings of WMD "either overstated, or were not supported by, the
underlying intelligence".

Among the many flaws the US report identified was that the CIA did not
have a single spy in Iraq. It found the US intelligence agencies
suffered from "group think". It described its suspicions of Iraq to be
"a hypothesis in search of evidence". Facts that did not fit the
hypothesis "tended to be thrown aside".

Now the British report, though much milder, has found that some British
intelligence was "severely flawed".

Perhaps most surprising, and heartening, is the finding by the
Australian committee in March that, despite Australia’s heavy dependence
on US and British intelligence, and despite the deep flaws in this
material, Australian analysts were able to see through the distortions
and the errors.

One agency, Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation, never bought
the alarmism over Iraq, the report showed. In other words, the truth was
available to any who sought it. But at the top of the governments of the
US, Britain and Australia, the politics simply crowded it out.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/15/1089694431729.html?oneclick=true