Matters of Public Importance: Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction Kevin Rudd - Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Security

Speech

Transcript - House of Representatives, Parliament House - 2 March 2004

I am gratified that the Minister for Foreign Affairs has chosen to remain with us for this debate. The report that has been tabled by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the Howard government exaggerated the intelligence information it received to politically justify its decision to go to war with Iraq. This is now an established fact in the political debate. This is not a Labor Party conclusion. It is not a partisan political conclusion. It is the bipartisan and unanimous conclusion of the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence, chaired by the Liberal Party.

Some have questioned why we went down this road of supporting this form of parliamentary inquiry. The reason was simple: we wished to construct an agreed evidence base for the debate about the government's past actions. We also wanted to have a base on which recommendations could be made for the future so that we could get the intelligence bases right for our future war against terrorism. The committee has done a commendable job: first, it has now been established that the government did exaggerate the Iraq WMD threat; second, it has now been established as a matter of fact that there was also intelligence failure; and, third, there will now be an independent commission of inquiry to deal with the future. These are the proven facts to emerge from this report.

The government's response to this has been what I can only describe as hyperactive spin control: first of all, a briefing out of the press gallery over the last couple of weeks that `we, the political arm of government, did not have a problem, only the intelligence community had a problem'—hence that remarkable brief delivered by certain advisers to the Sydney Morning Herald, among others—and then, on top of that, the frantic exercises in spin control by `Tony O'Leary Enterprises' up there in the press gallery, whizzing around to make sure that everyone had got the line. What we had was spin control on spin control. They sought to control the spin on the war by exaggerating the Iraqi threat, and now they seek to control the spin on having been outed for their spin control on the war. That is what they are up to. But when we peel it back, when you peek underneath, when you actually look underneath, at what has gone on here, we see a very unattractive performance by this minister on Iraq of the dance of the seven veils.

We have had a few veils on display here over the last two sitting weeks. We had Danna Vale the week before last with a remarkable performance on veterans' entitlements and we had Mark Vaile today with a remarkable performance on the status or non-status of the free trade agreement with the United States—whenever that might be agreed to, though we have been asked to support it in advance of that happening—but these two veils pale into insignificance compared with the seven translucent veils of our foreign minister, Mr Downer, in his defence, the Howard's government's defence, of taking this country to war with Iraq. When you peek beneath these veils, it is not a pretty picture at all. Veil No. 1 on the part of the minister is the government's defence, `We did not sex anything up.' This is a minister who uses the terms `sex up' and `sex' in this debate with worrying levels of repetition. The charge being levelled by this minister against himself is, `We, the political arm of government, are off scot-free unless a committee established, as a matter of evidentiary fact, that either I the minister or my advisers sat down and physically doctored documents.' That is what it is all about.

Can you picture Alexander up there in the office with all the advisers sitting down with their texta colours, their whiteout, and in comes the stuff from ONA, scribble, scribble, scratch, scratch, until you produce a satisfactory document. The minister and his advisers are not that dumb—that is not what it is all about—though we wait with interest the Andrew Bolt outcome and what that will show. No, the challenge here is to tell the Australian people the whole truth, the whole picture, accurately and completely. They are the terms used in the parliamentary inquiry report. That means telling the Australian people the doubts about the Iraqi WMD threat as well, not just shading it up.

When we look at this evidentiary basis, this document, this report, we see demonstrated 12 specific occasions on which the government have misled the Australian people by being selective in what they put out to the Australian people. To allay any doubt on this score, if you think this is some grand rhetorical flourish, I draw the attention of honourable members and the public to sections 2.40, 4.40, 4.82, 5.16, 5.17, 5.20, 5.21, 5.22, 5.23, 5.27, 5.29 and 5.32 and the second reference of 5.29—12 specific occasions on which the Howard government exaggerated the Iraqi threat. This not Labor's conclusion, this is not a partisan conclusion, but the unanimous conclusion of the parliamentary inquiry. [start page 25052]

Let us look at some specific examples. Exhibit A is an ONA report of 2001 which says that the scale of threat from Iraq WMD is less than it was a decade before. Then in 2002 we have the minister saying, `I do not think there is any doubt about Saddam Hussein having stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. There is a very grave concern that he has been enhancing those stockpiles in recent years.' And what does the parliamentary joint committee conclude? It says:

Therefore the case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq's WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations.

The parliamentary committee concludes `This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the Committee by' ONA and DIO. You cannot have a clearer conclusion unanimously by the parliamentary committee that this matter was not taken on the basis of the advice which had been provided by the intelligence agencies. That is exhibit A. For exhibit B we turn to what DIO had to say in October 2002:

DIO assesses that Iraq's capability to deliver a CBW agent in any substantial quantity to be restricted—the delivery of an agent by ballistic missile ... would probably only result in limited casualties. This suggests that, in the short term, Iraq's capability will be limited to a weapon of mass effect rather than a weapon of mass destruction.

What does the Prime Minister say here in this parliament in February 2003? He says:

... my purpose today is to explain to the House ... why Iraq's ... possession of chemical and biological weapons and its pursuit of a nuclear capability poses a real and unacceptable threat to the stability and security of our world ...

What does the parliamentary committee say? It says:

... there appears to be a gap on the matter of immediacy of threat. Assessments by Australian agencies about possible degradation of agents and restricted delivery capability cast doubt on the suggestion that the Iraqi `arsenal' represented a `grave and immediate' and a `real and unacceptable' threat.

That is exhibit B. Go to exhibit C. We have Mr Downer saying in the parliament in March 2003, on what was then a UN Security Council veto, that the veto denied the Security Council any further role in disarming Iraq. But he goes on to say:

Australian intelligence agencies provided hardly any explicit assessment on the question of the immediacy of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Time and again, exhibit after exhibit, we find that what this minister has done in his presentation and in relation to the Prime Minister's presentation is look at an intelligence report and then, when it comes to public presentation, excise the doubts and the uncertainties—in other words, present a magnification of the threat that exists.

To allay any further doubt about the specific accuracies in relation to the Prime Minister's claim that Iraqi WMD represented a real and unacceptable threat—as claimed by the PM on the eve of the war—what did the head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation say in this report? The head of the DIO—not a member of the Labor Party; the head of the DIO—said that the Prime Minister's judgment was `not a judgment that DIO would have made'. This is a direct assault on the credibility of the case which the government put into the public domain.

If there are any doubts overall on this, I draw honourable members' attention to section 5.20 of the report, where it says that ministerial statements plainly were more strongly worded than most of the Australian intelligence community judgments. In other words, the government exaggerated. They gilded the lily; they shaded it up; they did not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why? Because they wanted to magnify the nature of the Iraqi WMD threat to justify the political case, when they had already taken the decision to go to war. That is what it was all about.

Mr Downer, the foreign minister, says he is vindicated by this report. I do not know what language the foreign minister understands on these matters but, as I read this report, there are 12 specific examples of where you have clear indications—by way of what the report has said—of the intelligence being, on the one hand, over here and the government saying something on the other hand, as well as the concluding observations in the report that this simply does not stack up.

But I said there were seven veils. That was the first—that is, that we did not sex anything up. We will dance through the others, because this is, on the minister's part, a dance of the seven veils. We then had the Saddam Hussein defence. What does the minister say there? He says, `It doesn't matter if we got WMD wrong. Why? Because we got rid of Saddam Hussein.' Minister, point me to one sentence in your memorandum of legal advice where there is one reference to eliminating a dictator as being your legal justification for going to war—one sentence. No, Minister, point me to one word. Find me a single word that argues that, prior to going to war, this was the basis for going to war. Minister, this is a post facto rationalisation—and you know it.

Howard defence No. 3, the third of the veils, is the second Pearl Harbour argument—that is, we need to pre-empt in case we are going to be attacked. That rests on first-class intelligence. Does anyone now believe, based on this report's findings, that we have had first-class intelligence on Iraq? The case has been established entirely to the reverse. Then, last night, to the embarrassment of the government, the chairman of the parliamentary committee, Mr Jull, said that the conditions which have been outlined in the report—conditions relating to a pre-emptive attack—were not met as far as his judgment was concerned. Frankly, Minister, on that matter, your third defence falls apart. [start page 25053]

Then we come to the other element of the dance of the seven veils, which is called `blame the intelligence community'. If you had looked at the press in the last several weeks, you would have seen that the thrust of the briefing was: `the spooks are in trouble but the government is okay; the spooks might have got it wrong, but we the government didn't exaggerate anything'. I will remind the minister of one thing: the Westminster principle. Who was it who said in this House in an intelligence debate back in 1995, `The simple fact is that ministers under our system are responsible for departments and agencies within their portfolios'? That was this gentleman, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, in a debate with Senate Evans about responsibility for actions and activities within the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. In other words, Westminster then—owning responsibility for what your agencies do—rather than kissing it goodbye.

In eight years of Howard government, you have been responsible for the structure of your intelligence services, and here is your central failing: when you embarked upon a policy of global pre-emption with the United States, you did not engage in a parallel restructuring of the Australian intelligence services to give them the resources and capabilities to look at new theatres of potential military operation. The bulk of our intelligence agencies' resources are concentrated in our own immediate region—and this government decides to focus on Afghanistan and Iraq. When it comes to Iraq, when we get to the lead-up to the war, how many analysts in the Office of National Assessments does this government have working on Iraq related matters? A total of three analysts—and then not even full-time—were supposed to consume and independently analyse the totality of the global intelligence product and make some independent assessment of it. Minister, you have got to be dreaming!

Defence No. 5, the fifth of the seven veils, is: if you can't blame the spooks, blame the Yanks and the Brits. They say that 97 per cent of the intelligence came from offshore. Well, that is terrific. The purpose of ONA is to vet the offshore product—and, based on what I just said, you had three officers within ONA whose job it was to do that. You did not equip them with the capacity to do that.

Defence No. 6 is the one I love most of all: blame the opposition. The sixth of the seven veils is that it was our fault that the government took us to war based on false intelligence. This is terrific—the ultimate Orwellian triumph as far as your truth management in this entire exercise is concerned. It was the opposition's fault, honourable members, that we were foolish enough to believe what the government said to us at the time—it was our fault and not theirs. It was our fault that we believed the intelligence briefings that we were given at the time—our fault and not theirs. Minister, what language are you speaking?

The seventh of the seven veils, as the minister has said, is: why would we need a royal commission? Minister, how can you read this report and not conclude that we need an independent commission of inquiry to restructure our intelligence services in the future and to ensure that we have confidence that your government will not politically manipulate intelligence information in the future? I would suggest that the case for that is now rolled gold and clear for everybody who reads this report with any clarity and objectivity. (Time expired)

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