Friday, August 22, 2003

There are charges of sexed-up Iraq intelligence in Australia, too:

The Australian government lied about the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify its involvement in the U.S.-led war, an official inquiry into intelligence on Iraq was told on Friday.

A former senior intelligence analyst, Andrew Wilkie, who resigned in March in protest over Australia's case for war, said Prime Minister John Howard, a close U.S. 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," Wilkie, formerly of the Office of National Assessment (ONA), told the inquiry.

The ONA is equivalent to the U.S. National Security Agency....


--Reuters

Wilkie asserted, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, that,

In particular, the public was misled when the Government linked the war in Iraq to the "war on terrorism" and al-Qaeda, talked about Iraq's efforts to restart its nuclear program and spoke of "massive" weapons programs.

There seems to have been a lot of that going around.



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