*Ø* Blogmanac | Andrew Wilkie discusses WMD doubts

Reporter: Mark Colvin
MARK COLVIN: I'm joined by Andrew Wilkie, who made many headlines last year when he resigned from the top Intelligence filtering agency the Office of National Assessments, citing doubts about the intelligence on Iraq as his reason.

Andrew Wilkie, you may feel vindicated by this, but were you right? Was anybody right about the intelligence at the time?

ANDREW WILKIE: I prefer not to use the word vindicated of course, because the circumstances surrounding this are all so tragic. I do feel though, that my concern that Iraq did not pose a serious enough security threat to justify a war has been borne out ...

MARK COLVIN: Nevertheless, we do now know that a fair bit of this material was coming to Australia from America and from Britain. If this was the raw intelligence that was coming to Australia, how can you blame Australia for acting on it?

ANDREW WILKIE: Ultimately all foreign material was processed through Australian agencies – Australian agencies, which I hasten to add, did a pretty good job of dealing with some pretty terrible raw intelligence and some pretty skewed US assessments in particular.

They did a pretty good job and they delivered to the Australian Government reasonably good work, work which reflected the ambiguity in the intelligence picture and assessments which presented a reasonably measured picture of what was going on in Iraq.

Sure they over estimated the threat, but what the Australian Government, and John Howard in particular, and Alexander Downer in particular did, was to consistently play up those measured assessments, to harden them up, sex them up if you want to call it that ...
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Australia's role in the Iraq intelligence process under scrutiny