I’m still trying to breathe after seeing on Lateline the photos of American soldiers smiling as they pose with tortured Iraqi prisoners, if torture is the word for the horror. The images are out of a Caligula movie. The world has gone to hell. George Bush’s war on Iraq will haunt all our lives. I recant my objections to Latham’s policy. Out now! There must be a better way, there must be. We must find leaders fast, real fast.
All we can do is what we can do. This week, Webdiary columnist Jack Robertson interviewed Andrew Wilkie, an Australian hero who did and is doing what he can do, and decided to do what he could to find out what was happening to the Australian Federal Police investigation into the leaking of Wilkie’s top secret ONA report to Howard cheerleader Andrew Bolt, columnist with the Herald Sun and invitee to Rupert Murdoch’s recent gathering of his worldwide army of propagandists in Cancun. Jack is doing what he can do. Here is his preliminary report. More to come.
To begin, here’s my summary of the story as of last September, from Howard on the ropes: Labor’s three chances for a knockout blow:
The leak of intelligence whistleblower Andrew Wilkie’s top secret ONA report on Iraq to Government-friendly journalist Andrew Bolt in June began to haunt Howard last week after his government brazenly briefed government backbencher Sandy Macdonald on its contents to hit Wilkie over the head with in the parliamentary inquiry into Howard’s pre-war intelligence.
The leak of Wilkie’s report is a serious breach of security and a criminal offence which went unnoticed back in June. The Macdonald drama lifted the lid on the scandal, revealing that ONA had referred the leak to the Australian Federal Police for investigation on July 4. NINE WEEKS later, the AFP had not interviewed Bolt! The AFP now joins the Australian Electoral Commission as an ‘independent’ body under strong suspicion of having been so politicised under John Howard that it no longer performs its duty without fear or favour.
I rang the AFP last week to ask when the investigation began and why Bolt had not been interviewed. The reply: “Following a thorough evaluation, the AFP moved into investigation phase YESTERDAY.” The AFP said it was also investigating the use of top secret material by Macdonald. In other words, a government MP is under criminal investigation and the leaker could well be a government staffer or minister guilty of a serious crime and a serious breach of security in a security-conscious Australia.
I was the subject of an AFP investigation many years ago when I was leaked a Simon Crean Cabinet submission. These types of leaks – unlike leaks of classified security documents like Wilkie’s – are usually ignored, because often it’s politicians doing the leaking. I was interviewed at the Canberra headquarters of the AFP within days of Crean’s referral, and said “no comment” to all questions asked because my source was confidential. But the police had good reason to interview me. I could have got the document anonymously in the mail or found it in a rubbish bin, and in either case could and would have been frank with the AFP. So why wasn’t Andrew Bolt interviewed? Two reasons spring to mind – either the police already knew who leaked it and didn’t want to pursue the matter, or had decided not to investigate at all.
This is an intolerable situation and, as other writers have pointed out, makes a despicable comparison with Australian defence force officer Merv Jenkins, who took his own life in Washington after vicious government retaliation for his failure to obey a directive not to give US intelligence contacts information on East Timor prior to the independence vote despite government-to-government agreements to do so (see Mike Carlton’s A leak by the bucketful and Michelle Grattan’s It’s no secret: let he who is without spin…).
But the significance of the Government’s Bolt play is much greater than further proof of its entrenched double standards and dangerous politicisation of Australia’s core democratic institutions. If it’s OK to leak intelligence to discredit the whistleblower, why isn’t it OK to release intelligence to refute Wilkie’s accusations that Howard lied about his reasons for invading Iraq? Why not declassify the intelligence which would prove Howard’s constant claims in arguing the case for war that invading Iraq would REDUCE the risk of terrorism, REDUCE the risk of WMDs finding their way into the hands of terrorists, and make the world a SAFER place for Australians? Why won’t Howard disprove Wilkie’s assertions by proving his own case?
He sure needs to now. Sensational documents just released by the British parliamentary inquiry into Blair’s stated reasons for war reveal what the British Joint Intelligence Committee told Blair (and the Australian intelligence services) six weeks before the war:
“The JIC assessed that al-Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq,” the British parliamentary report says.
“The JIC report, ‘International Terrorism: War with Iraq’, also said there was no evidence Saddam Hussein wanted to use any chemical or biological weapons in terrorist attacks or that he planned to pass them on to al-Qaeda. “However, it judged that in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material, whether or not as a deliberate regime policy.” (Australia was told: war will fuel terror).
Wilkie made these very points upon his resignation from ONA before the war. Why did Howard invade? Didn’t he care about increasing the threat of terrorism? Did he judge that our security reliance on the United States was so large that he had to agree to a request from a mad president? So large that he ignored the best available intelligence and passionate warnings from Indonesia and and other neighbours that invading Iraq without UN sanction would greatly destablise the region, thus increasing the risk to the safety of Australians?
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Special report on the Andrew Wilkie leak
by Jack Robertson, Meeja Watch columnist for Webdiary
Andrew Bolt, the Herald-Sun journalist at the centre of an on-going Australian Federal Police investigation into the alleged leaking last year of a Top Secret ONA report, said yesterday he did �go through� the report while writing a June 2003 article discrediting the analytical credibility of its author, the former ONA analyst Andrew Wilkie.
The confirmation comes amid fresh claims by Wilkie about the internal distribution and handling of the report which re-kindle suspicions that elements of the government were involved in the leak.
The controversy first erupted after 23 June last year, when Bolt�s article ridiculed Wilkie�s credibility as a critic of the government�s Iraq policies, apparently based upon his access to top secret pre-invasion assessments Wilkie had prepared in late 2002. The article, titled �Spook Misspoke�, said:
�When I go through the only secret report that Wilkie ever wrote about Iraq as an Office of National Assessment analyst, I wonder just who fell for a �fairytale�.
Asked whether this description of his access to the report was correct, he said, “Of course it is. Otherwise why would I have written it?”
�Everything I wrote about that [Wilkie] report … is accurate, and raises serious doubts about the credibility of Andrew Wilkie that need to be investigated by those who would like to elevate him to Sainthood.�
Asked whether he had gained this access at a time �closer to December 2002, or closer to 23 June 2003�, Bolt would only say that “I can tell you that my [article] is accurate, and I�d like [Wilkie supporters] to deal with the revelations it [contains] that go to the credibility of Andrew Wilkie.”
“Andrew Wilkie was making wild claims that traded on what he has promoted as his superior knowledge of Iraq. [His supporters] need to question whether [they] should put so much faith in this man.”
Bolt declined to comment about his source for the report. Asked if he was prepared to exclude the Prime Minister�s and the Foreign Minister�s offices as his source, he responded:
“Don�t insult my intelligence and yours. If you claim to be a journalist, these questions are just so preposterous…they�re an insult. You would not put them to anyone else that had revealed documents that supported a thesis with which you whole-heartedly agreed. The only reason you�re asking me is that you want to elevate Andrew Wilkie against the evidence.”
Bolt did not respond to a separate written enquiry on whether or not he had been interviewed to date by Australian Federal Police over the matter.
Since resigning from ONA in March 2003 in protest over what he said was an untenable disparity between the pre-invasion �exaggerations� of Saddam Hussein�s WMD threat and links to al-Qaeda presented publicly by the Howard government and the more measured assessments of the professional intelligence community he was seeing at the time, Wilkie has come under sustained personal and professional attack from Mr Howard�s government and his media supporters. Last year the Prime Minister apologised to Wilkie after acknowledging that a member of his staff had leaked untrue allegations to the media about the state of Wilkie�s marriage and mental stability.
Wilkie said that Bolt�s article lampooning his humanitarian risk assessments was part of a concerted campaign to neutralise his broader criticisms of the decision to invade Iraq, in particular his consistent querying since he resigned of the WMD and terrorism-link arguments John Howard used to sell the war.
However it has always been the deeper security implications of Bolt�s references to his classified report, rather than Bolt�s �mischievous� spin on it, that primarily concern Wilkie. After reading the article last year, he wrote to the Prime Minister urging an investigation into a serious breach of national security. It is an offence under the Crimes Act for an unauthorised person to receive access to classified material.
In fact when Wilkie wrote to Prime Minister Howard, the ONA had already initiated an AFP investigation into the alleged leak � an investigation that continues nearly ten months later. A second leak investigation � arising from an alleged leak that came to light well after the Bolt article appeared, and involving the same report and the National Party Senator Sandy McDonald – has already concluded with no charges being laid.
It is not known what is causing the Bolt leak investigation to progress so slowly.
Wilkie said on Tuesday that he had now been interviewed by AFP as part of the on-going investigation:
“I was finally interviewed [by the AFP] late last year. As far as I�m aware, there�s been no outcome of that. I don�t know if it�s been completed … I got the impression from the police when they interviewed me that I was pretty well towards the end of their list. I got the impression they�d �made their enquiries�. I also got the impression that they had a strong sense of what had happened, but were not optimistic they�d ever be able to prove it.”
In response to questioning in Parliament last year, Prime Minister Howard and senior Ministers stressed that the initial distribution of Wilkie�s report, in December 2002, involved �in the order of 300 copies�. The Opposition countered by pointing out that the nature of the distribution and handling of classified material is such that it is unlikely that any of the original issue copies would have remained in circulation � that is, in a position to be leaked to Bolt � as late as June.
On 10 September last year then Opposition leader Simon Crean asked the Prime Minister:
“Can the Prime Minister inform the House who in his office had access to this top-secret report? Did the Prime Minister or any member of his office who had access to this top-secret report fail to return it before 23 June 2003, or request a copy of it in the weeks prior to the publication of its contents in the Herald Sun newspaper? Will the Prime Minister ensure that this information is made available to the Australian Federal Police?”
Mr Howard replied:
“I would have to talk to my staff about that. I am not going to give an answer on the run without talking to them.”
A week later, on 17 September, Lateline�s Tony Jones asked Opposition Foreign Affairs spokesperson Kevin Rudd, a former diplomat:
TONY JONES: The PM, of course, says there were 300 copies of this document in circulation. How are you hoping to pin it on one particular person, or one particular office, when of those 300 copies there could be thousands of photocopies, for example?
KEVIN RUDD: Well actually photocopies is not authorised of these documents – I used to work in the system. What happens is you’re given one, you effectively sign for it and you have to hand it back or attest to the fact that it’s been destroyed. But on top of that, you have to put the chronology in order here. Andrew Wilkie, who I think has probably been interviewed on this program before and certainly on other outlets of the ABC, wrote this document back in December last year, from memory.
Now it’s not until June of this year that Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun in Melbourne then begins to reproduce bits of it, or what he asserts to be bits of it, in his newspaper column. Now this document would have been in quite large circulation within Government in December, January, maybe even February, in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Why does it suddenly appear in June? One of the questions I put to Mr Downer – which he didn’t really answer, in fact he didn’t answer at all – was, “Did anyone from your office, Mr Downer, request a copy of this document in the weeks leading up to the article appearing in Mr Bolt’s column in the ‘Herald Sun’ on 23 June? Again, duck and weave, evade the question. If Mr Downer had a robust answer to that, I’m sure he could have provided it. He did not.
There has been no indication since the controversy peaked in September that the AFP investigation has made progress. Andrew Wilkie is not confident that the official investigation will trace the leak, but echoed Mr Rudd�s Lateline comments with regard to the handling and circulation of his report�s original round of issues.
“As you can imagine, [classified reports] all go out in one hit � hundreds go out, electronic and paper… at the time, [which in this case] would be December. And there�s a �burn-or-return� policy, basically. You�ve got to destroy them, and say you�ve destroyed them, or you�ve got to return them. Parliament House does not hang onto copies. They just don�t want the trouble, and they don�t have the facilities for storing vast amounts of Top Secret documentation… [Bolt�s article came out] at least six months or so from when the report came out. So by that stage, the Prime Minister�s office, the Foreign Minister�s Office wouldn�t have had a copy.”
He also revealed that since his AFP interview last year he had been made aware of further information relating to the leak that may re-ignite Opposition speculation on the matter.
It is already a matter of public record that a copy of Wilkie�s report was sought from and issued by ONA some time in June last year. On September 10, Senator John Faulkner told Parliament:
“I remind the Senate of the chronology of the leak of this ONA document classified Top Secret AUSTEO. On June 19 this year, former ONA analyst Andrew Wilkie gave evidence to the United Kingdom Foreign Affairs Select Committee on weapons of mass destruction. His appearance received a great deal of publicity in the Australian media. Around this time someone – I believe from within government – accessed from ONA on a return and burn basis that highly classified, top secret AUSTEO codeword document and it was provided to Herald Sun journalist Andrew Bolt. I believe that the motivation was to discredit Wilkie.”