Flood Report Kevin Rudd - Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Security

Radio Interview with Mike Carlton

Transcript - 23 July 2004

Rudd:   Good morning. Good to be with you.

Carlton:        Yeah, you too. In fact, we went to war didn’t we because John Howard wasn’t going to say no to George Bush. Isn’t that it?

Rudd:   Well, you look at what John Howard said throughout 02 and early 03, he basically said his alliance with the United States would be a major factor in his mind. If you were in the Australian intelligence community at the time you would have seen that I think as strong code language and that the country was heading off to war irrespective of what the intelligence happened to say.

Carlton:        So, John Howard was in lock step with George Bush from September 11 pretty much?

Rudd:   Well, I don’t know what was in the Prime Minister’s mind in detail and I’m sure he’s never going to tell us in terms of when he made his own private decision. But I’ve got to say, where Flood leaves us on this is that the intelligence he did have in his possession was thin, ambiguous and incomplete and it was on that basis that this Prime Minister took our country to war. This isn’t like deciding to do the Saturday morning shopping, it’s saying ‘we’re going to war’. Thin, incomplete and ambiguous intelligence. What would Curtin have done or Menzies have done in terms of taking this country to war against Germany or against Japan on the basis of intelligence that was thin, incomplete and ambiguous?

Carlton:        I don’t know about Menzies, whether he could do what the British did. We just switch clients….

Rudd:   All I’m saying is, when it comes to this difficult decision about taking the entire nation to war it’s got to be more robust than that. The Prime Minister found himself in some trouble on this yesterday Mike and last night, I think on the 7.30 Report, he said that he had also strong circumstantial evidence about Iraqi WMD.

Carlton:        Well what was that?

Rudd:   I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about. But I’m saying now we have the Prime Minister’s recent defence, most recent defence, which is we’re going to take Australia to war on the basis of a Prime Ministerial hunch. Strong circumstantial evidence.

Carlton:        It seems we pretty much accepted then whatever the Americans or the British told us, CIA or MI6, we’ve accepted pretty much at face value. Gave it a once over and shoved it up the line didn’t we?

Rudd:   Well this is where I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the spooks, the intelligence committee. If you look at the detail of this 200-page report from Philip Flood, the finding is this: when we were gearing up for going to war in the last six months of 02 and early 03, guess how many intelligence officials Mr Howard had working in his own intelligence agency on Iraq?

Carlton:        Two or three I suppose.

Rudd:           Two or three part-time and full-time. But here is the other clincher: Mr Flood in this report says that none of them, repeat none of them, had any expertise on weapons of mass destruction. Any expertise whatsoever. So you have this group of two or three folk in the intelligence organisation sitting there having talks with no WMD experience, sitting there, having to absorb this avalanche of stuff coming in from London and from Washington. And remember we’ve already been told that 97% of the intelligence product which Australia based its decisions on came from offshore.

Carlton:        Yeah, absolutely. So I get back to that earlier question, it seems we pretty much accepted whatever the Americans or the British told us at face value?   There’s not much point and chance of doing anything else.

Rudd:   It seems that way. John Howard, I think, a core failing brought out by this report is that he didn’t make sure the intelligence agencies were properly resourced to give an independent Australian view of all this foreign product coming in.

Carlton:        Alright, now Mr Flood found that the Government hadn’t leaned on the intelligence agency. Do you accept that?

Rudd:           Well, I hold what Mr Flood said there up against what the Jull Committee, Mr Jull…

Carlton:        This is the Parliamentary Committee.

Rudd:   Parliamentary Committee, a Liberal from Queensland, a Liberal-dominated committee found only six months ago. And it found, looking at in particular at how the Prime Minister’s agency the Office of National Assessments hardened up its assessments on Iraq and made them stronger in the lead up to war, it said that, and I quote actually from what Mr Jull’s committee said, “it’s such a sudden change in judgement that it appears ONA at least unconsciously might have been responding to policy running strong”. Now that’s their way…

Carlton:        Well it’s very different. This is an intelligence agency doing the pre-emptive buckle saying we know what the Government wants to hear, let’s tell them.

Rudd:   That’s in fact what the Jull Committee is pointing to. Now Mr Flood has some different observations on that. Of course, Mr Howard goes running to Mr Flood’s observations and leaves his Parliamentary Liberal colleague’s observations swinging in the breeze. But if you’re in the Canberra bureaucracy at all these days and the culture which has developed there over seven or eight years, you know something Mike, the culture today is that there is a right answer and a wrong answer and if you deliver a wrong answer, let me tell you, your career doesn’t advance.

Carlton:        We’ve seen that in Defence, in the Defence Department. Absolutely.

Rudd:           Well it’s something which has been growing there….

Carlton:        Foreign Affairs?

Rudd:           For a long, long time.

Carlton:        Foreign Affairs?

Rudd:   Well the Department of Foreign Affairs which I know a bit, having worked there in the past, unfortunately what my former colleagues tell me is that there’s no culture of, let’s call it policy debate, within the show. There’s a right answer and a wrong answer. I don’t think that’s healthy for Australia. Let’s face it, it’s very difficult for us all getting it right all the time. You need what this report talks about in terms of policy contestability. But that’s not the culture alive in Canberra at the moment.

Carlton:        But this seems to be a failing through the western world. What we’re seeing here with this Flood Report is more or less the same as the Butler Report delivered in Britain and the report they also got in the United States. That intelligence agencies failed and failed grievously to work out what was going on [inaudible], added a brass band and a troop of dancing girls and sold it to their various people.

Rudd:           Well, here in Australia you’ve got two things happening. Plainly there is intelligence failure by the agency in getting it right but equally plainly you’ve got governments which have taken what they’ve been given by the intelligence agencies, and beating it up. Remember the Jull Committee, Mr Howard’s own parliamentary colleagues found only six months ago twelve separate occasions where what the Government was given by way of private intelligence in its own in-tray did not bear a close relationship to what the Government said publicly to the Australian people.

Carlton:        So did we go to war on a lie?

Rudd:           I’ve said before that John Howard took this country to war on the basis of a lie. You see that certainly in terms of the conclusions of the Jull Committee six months ago and when it comes to this one today. If you’ve got Mr Flood actually saying that the intelligence the PM was given was thin, ambiguous and incomplete, how could any Prime Minister in conscience say let’s go to war on that basis.

Of course, subsequently he changed his tune. It’s now all about humanitarian concerns for the Iraqi people and regime change.

Carlton:        So is the Prime Minister a liar?

Rudd:           Well, I’ll let the Prime Minster answer his own conscience on that question.

Carlton:        Well I’d like to ask you the question. I’ll ask you again – is the Prime Minister a liar?

Rudd:   I’m prepared to say that the Prime Minister took this country to war on the basis of a lie for the reasons I’ve just given. The truth in terms of how you handle national security is absolutely important. Remember, we’ve already had volume one of this. That was called kids overboard. And I had a look last night at what Senator John Faulkner’s findings were a few years ago on how everybody in the bureaucracy knew there were doubts about the Prime Minister’s claims then about refugees or asylum seekers throwing their kids overboard except the Prime Minister himself.

Carlton:        Yeah.

Rudd:   Well I think we have bit of a re-run here, you know?

Carlton:        A lot of these people don’t tell him of course.

Rudd:   Well, there’s a bit of that. But you can’t simply change your story the whole time.

Carlton:        The other leg to this report from Philip Flood, it hasn’t got as much focus this morning but I think it should, our intelligence agencies also failed, also lost the plot on Jemaah Islamiah, didn’t know enough about it before the Bali bombing which as we know killed 88 Australians. That is a grievous failure, isn’t it?

Rudd:   This is a concerning finding by Mr Flood because let’s face it, when it comes to the real security threat to Australia and Australians offshore, al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah are our big concerns. Iraq was never directly relevant to the war on terrorism.

Carlton:        Jemaah Islamiah is the front yard though.

Rudd:           Jemaah Islamiah is just up the road. It’s basically the wholly-owned franchise of al Qaeda in our neighbourhood. So, it always beggars belief in my book as to why we had the war in Afghanistan. After we went to war in Afghanistan rightly with the Americans to knock al Qaeda on the head there, that the Government of the time, Mr Howard’s Government, didn’t say “where have all these blokes now run away to?” And of course what we’ve picked up through bits and pieces of looking backwards now is that a large slice of them fled into South East Asia, teamed up with Jemaah Islamiah and as a consequence, throughout 2002 you see an emerging pattern of JI activity in our neighbourhood, culminating in the horror of Bali.

Carlton:        Yeah. Good to talk to you.

Rudd:   Good to be here.

Carlton:        Thanks for coming in. Kevin Rudd, Labor’s Shadow Foreign Affairs spokesman with some thoughts on that Flood Report.

Ends.