Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Not only do I not support the disallowance of these particular regulations; I believe the government is absolutely right to have these two organisations relisted. That is not to say that I do not have some concerns about the direction that the world is taking in handling terrorism—and I fully concede that some of my remarks are made totally with the benefit of hindsight.

I was a little disappointed at question time today that Senator Coonan did not address one part of Senator Faulkner’s question, and I now think it is a necessity for the government to make a full parliamentary statement analysing or giving us the benefit of their analysis of the current situation in Iraq and the way forward. We had statements before we intervened in Iraq, and I think it is now time the government shared with the Australian people and the parliament where its vision is for the future of Iraq, given all the question marks over it, be they from former General Cosgrove, the new head of the British army and General Abizaid from the US, et cetera.

But I am particularly concerned about the recently published national intelligence estimate from the United States. Originally this was leaked to the New York Times, and I abhor that sort of breach of security—the fact that it was leaked. I think that was most unfortunate. But, now that it is in the public domain, this is the work of 16 security agencies in the United States and this report has been signed off by intelligence tsar John Negroponte, so it does carry a fair bit of heft and validity. Basically, the thrust of this report is that Islamic radicalisation, rather than being in retreat, has spread across the globe. One of the quotes is:

... the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse ...

Of course, the credibility of the national intelligence estimate was pretty high in 2002. A lot of politicians, at the time of intervention in Iraq, were very, very keen to quote from it. But I did notice, and I was very disappointed to read, the Prime Minister’s response to this particular report. He is quoted in the Age, on page 12, on 28 September. Having said some things on it, he went on to say:

Some of the intelligence agencies that were involved in this assessment were telling us … that Iraq in 2003 had weapons of mass destruction ...

In other words, this latest national intelligence estimate can be dismissed because some of the agencies contributing to this one apparently got it wrong in a previous one. I think that is a totally political response. I really do think that is just a political response and it required a better response from this particular government.

This particular form of assessment was also there in 2002. I do not want the Prime Minister to dismiss the 2002 one without some intellectual application to it because, when you go back and look at the declassified report as released in October 2002 and then compare it with a much more classified version, released later, in July 2003, you will find substantial differences. No-one has yet answered why those substantial differences occurred. In the 2002 report, all qualifications are removed. All doubts are erased. But, in the actual report, they continue to exist. We were not fully informed in October 2002 of the real situation. Let me quote some examples that were deleted from the 2002 report. It said, for example:

We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program ...

That was missing from the 2002 declassified report but existed in the classified report. Here is another example: ‘although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile’. That did not appear in the declassified version but was in the classified version. Every qualifier, every doubt, was erased. It became a political document, not an intelligence document.

The issues of UAVs and the threat that these could be used to convey chemical or biological warfare came up. Yet, in the classified version, the Air Force dismissed that, saying: ‘They don’t have enough UAVs; they don’t have the weaponisation capability. You don’t have to be concerned about it.’ But, if you just read the declassified version, everyone is under threat from the UAVs.

Of course, the other well-publicised area is that of uranium out of Africa, out of Niger. The declassified report indicated that Iraq had been trying to source uranium supplies from Niger. The classified report describes that as ‘highly dubious’. They knew that they had sent Ambassador Wilson to Niger. They knew that he had investigated and found no credibility in that.

What I am saying is that the national intelligence estimate has far more credibility than the declassified version of 2002 would indicate. Once we read the classified version, which was released later, we find all sorts of qualifiers in there. And no-one has yet explained why they were omitted from the declassified report. One can only presume that that was done for political reasons—and not necessarily at the direction of their political masters; I do not allege that. Rather, they were just trying to please. One of the problems we have in the modern day is politicians quoting from intelligence agencies to back up their political point. In the old days, this was never done. People instead said, ‘I will neither confirm nor deny.’ But it is convenient these days to buttress your political arguments by using an intelligence agency as a source.

Go back to the 2001 election, when the Prime Minister went to the National Press Club and quoted from an ONA report to back up his views on children being thrown overboard. We only found out after the election that ONA had based all its intelligence on the basis of ministerial press releases. Talk about a dog chasing its tail. Ministers put out false information—I do not say that they did so knowingly—on kids being thrown overboard. ONA, to impress their political masters, put that in an intelligence report. Then the Prime Minister read the intelligence report and said: ‘Ah! I’ve got independent verification.’ He then went to the National Press Club and used that to justify his actions. Then, lo and behold, the week after the election, the director of ONA started to admit the truth and told everyone that that report was just based on ministerial press releases.

I am disappointed with Prime Minister John Howard dismissing this latest national intelligence estimate as a flawed work from agencies that got it wrong previously. Let us have a debate on how flawed this information is. I am speaking with the power of hindsight here. Very few of us foresaw what the future of Iraq would be after intervention. None of us every conceived that the de facto civil war that exists there at the moment would have transpired or come into being.

We do not know where we are. We hear the trite sayings. ‘Don’t cut and run,’ is the latest political spin. What does that mean? Does that mean that we stay in Iraq forever and that anyone who suggests that we have a full debate about it and a full analysis of what is happening there is some sort of political coward who will not stick it out? That is much too trite a response in my view. I am not advocating an immediate military withdrawal from Iraq by anyone, but it has to be considered. In the terms of the British head of army, if it is exacerbating the problem—if it is going to result in absolutely no chance of a solution—then we have to start publicly discussing what the solutions are and how we can resolve it.

Dismissing a credible intelligence report from our closest ally based on the work of 16 agencies in the intelligence arm is not the way to go about it—unless you are only trying to protect yourself politically, and that is exactly what this exercise is on behalf of the Prime Minister. He cannot contemplate the fact that intervening in Iraq may have made Australia more vulnerable to terrorist attack. That is not politically acceptable. But if you do not face the facts—if you do not analyse the facts—you make it harder to protect your country. Here, the national good should prevail over the political good. We should have a full and frank discussion in this parliament as to the future of Iraq and our role in it.