The Australian government lied about the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify its involvement in the US-led war, an official inquiry into intelligence on Iraq was told yesterday.
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 US 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 US National Security Agency.
"Key intelligence assessment qualifications like `probably,' `could' and `uncorroborated evidence suggests' were frequently dropped. Much more useful words like `massive' and `mammoth' were included," he added.
Wilkie's comments to the inquiry are some of his strongest yet against Howard's administration. Since his resignation, Wilkie has made numerous attacks on Howard, embarrassing the Australian leader.
Controversy has been raging in the US, Britain and Australia over accusations those governments manipulated intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify the war with no evidence yet found of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
Howard has said he made the right decision to send a 2,000-strong force to the Gulf despite initial public qualms, but has said that intelligence could not have provided absolute proof of the Iraqi threat.
"We didn't ask that the intelligence material be distorted. I and my colleagues made a bona fide judgment based on the assessments that existed at the time," Howard told Australian radio.
Wilkie said he believes Iraq had a disjointed weapons of mass destruction program, but said the UN should have been given more time to search Iraq.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS