Iraq highlights our intelligence failings

THE WAR in Iraq has exposed some fundamental problems in the Australian intelligence community.It is now clear that the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs presented by the Government to the public before the war was inaccurate and misleading. Further inquiries to prove this point are unnecessary. The fact is, the intelligence agencies did not have a clear picture of Iraq's WMD capabilities after the United Nations inspectors left in 1998. The heavy reliance on United States satellite imagery and defector reports led to a series of speculative and unsubstantiated claims. Each of the main points raised in Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council on January 5, 2003 - stockpiles of chemical weapons, mobile production labs for biological weapons,uranium from Africa, aluminium tubes for a nuclear weapon program - are now disputed. If you are going to commit a country to war on the basis of this sort of intelligence, you'd better make sure it's right. The real concern here is the extent to which individual intelligence agencies have been compliant in the face of this political assault. Recent revelations that MI6, Britain's premier human intelligence agency, was tasked with propagandising in the media about Iraq's WMD capabilities are deeply concerning.And the CIA is still trying to repair the damage to its reputation over the aluminium pipes case. Prime Minister John Howard will justify his arguments for going to war by saying that the Office of National Assessments, the peak assessment agency, had checked the facts. But Australia's intelligence agencies had no independent means of verifying the claims of their British and American counterparts. In the absence of such hard intelligence, ONA's role would have been limited to conducting a thorough spellcheck. What it should have been doing was alerting the Prime Minister to the many gaps in the intelligence, as the State Department tried to do in the US. The whole episode shows that Australia's six national intelligence agencies have become politicised and lacking in both human and financial resources. And this has serious implications for Australia's future security. As the primary source of intelligence to the Prime Minister, ONA has just 30 professional analysts to cover the world