Heard It Through The Grapevine

By Cernig

When War Party shills or the Bush administration repeat the old lie that "everyone thought Iraq had WMDs", they conveniently forget that French intelligence didn't, that weapons inspector Scott Ritter didn't, that Russian intelligence didn't, that Al Gore didn't, that German intel had already worked out that Curveball was a conman and warned the CIA...and leave out the fact that most Western governments were relying on the US to tell them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Australian PM Kevin Rudd has been laying out that latter inconvenient truth for his public, on the occasion of his ordering a withdrawal of Aussie soldiers from Iraq. It's a story that's got very little attention in the US, however.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has accused his predecessor of abusing intelligence information to justify invading Iraq, saying that the Australian people were misled.

Rudd made one of his most strident attacks on the former government's decision to join the Iraq war as he fulfilled an election pledge to withdraw Australian combat troops from the Middle East country.

''We must learn from Australia's experience in the lead-up to going to war with Iraq and not repeat the same mistakes in the future,'' Rudd told the Parliament.

He criticised former Prime Minister John Howard's government for going to war without accurate information or a full assessment of the consequences. John Howard had sent 2,000 troops to support US and British forces in the 2003 invasion.

''Of most concern to this government was the manner in which the decision to go to war was made: the abuse of intelligence information, a failure to disclose to the Australian people the qualified nature of that intelligence,'' Rudd said.

...A government-commissioned inquiry in 2004 into Australian spy agencies' pre-Iraq war intelligence cleared Howard's government of overstating the case for joining the U.S.-led invasion.

But in his 185-page report, retired diplomat and spy master Philip Flood lamented ''the thinness of the intelligence on which analysts were expected to make difficult calls'' about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Details about the intelligence and how it was provided were not available.

We now know that the US intelligence community had plenty of caveats and counter-arguments about the Bush administration's WMD claims, but that anything which contradicted the preferred narrative was sanitised before presentation to the American public, in large part by administration spin factories such as Douglas Feith's OSP. It has become apparent as time went on that the same fixing of intelligence around the policy went on before classified briefings were made to Congress and before US intelligence was passed to allies. Those nations who also believed that Saddam had WMDs largely did so because they trusted the US to give them the straight poop and the Bush administration betrayed that trust to further their wished for war. Garbage in, garbage out.