Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

How to leak a lie

Among his other dislikeable qualities, John Howard is a control freak. He likes to be in complete charge of the political agenda and he is not too fussy about how he goes about it.

He hates being taken by surprise, and so he would have been both shocked and disappointed by the banner in last Tuesday's Australian: "PM's Spin Sexed Up Iraq Threat."

It was precisely opposite of what he had planned and worked for. To understand why, we must once again trawl through the drains to which Howard has debased the political process.

The report of the Senate Committee set up (in spite of Howard's vociferous protests) to investigate the way the intelligence services and the government handled the lead-up to the war in Iraq was actually completed and signed off a couple of months ago. Normally it would have been kept under lock and key until it was tabled in the Senate; this is the procedure with most committee reports, and any leak is treated as a serious breach of parliamentary privilege. In the past, editors of papers that have published such leaks have been called before the parliament and threatened with the direst penalties, up to and including immediate imprisonment without trial.

But this report (the WMD report for short) was a bit different; because issues of national security were involved it had to be cleared by the security services, both for accuracy and to check that there were no disclosures which could put security procedures or personnel at risk. Thus copies were sent to the Prime Minister's Department for distribution to the relevant agencies, their use to be strictly monitored and their contents to be kept secret until the report could be tabled.

However, shortly afterwards a major story appeared in The Australian under the byline of its political editor, Dennis Shanahan, which said the report would recommend a further inquiry into the intelligence services, and that while they had got it wrong, the government was completely innocent of exaggerating the information they provided. More stories along the same lines followed. Assuming Shanahan had not just made the story up, he must have received a major leak, and the sources for such a leak were limited to the intelligence services or the committee itself - both fairly unlikely given the contents of the story.

But as it turned out there was a third possibility. Labor's indefatigable interrogator, Robert Ray, discovered in a senate estimates committee that the Prime Minister's Department had itself retained a copy of the report. Not only that, but against all convention and principle, the department had used it to prepare a brief for Howard himself.

Ray, outraged at this assault on the senate's privilege, had not doubt about what happened next: "They gave it to their creature Shanahan," he thundered. And indeed, given Shanahan's known closeness to the prime minister's office and the fact that the leak seemed designed to benefit the government, it seemed a logical conclusion.

And when the report finally became public, the conclusion was confirmed, because it turned out that the leak was wrong, and obviously deliberately so. It did not clear the government; indeed, it pointed to no less than 12 occasions where ministers had been far more gung ho than the intelligence warranted.

Even more disturbing was the fact that the Office of National Assessments, on receiving a request for briefing notes for a speech by Alexander Downer (a request which would normally go to Downer's own Department of Foreign Affairs in any case), overnight threw caution to the winds and started talking up the threat of Iraq's weapons - though still not to the extent that Howard and Downer did.

Incidentally, the idea that ONA might be subject to political pressure is depressing, but not exactly new; it will be recalled that during the election campaign of 2001 Howard brandished an ONA report which said yes, asylum seekers probably had thrown children overboard - but that the source of that report was later revealed to be the government's own pre-election press releases. So much for our fearless and independent security blanket.

In what has followed since, Downer (who appears to have taken up more or less permanent residence in Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of them all) has stuck to the leak rather than the actual report: the government, he brays in the tones of one insisting that white is black, has been entirely vindicated. Others have not gone quite so far, but have taken comfort in the fact that Australian agencies and politicians didn't get it quite as wrong, or lie quite as much, as their counterparts in America and England.

And interestingly, the commentators have suddenly all discovered that in spite of what most of them were saying 12 months ago, the reason for Australia going to war actually had very little to do with whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It was mainly about Howard sucking up to George Bush, or, to put it more diplomatically, maintaining the American alliance.

To The Sydney Morning Herald's new political editor, Peter Hartcher, recently returned from a long stint abroad, this was blindingly obvious: "Why couldn't they just say so?" he asked. Which only shows he has a long way to go before comprehending the deviousness and mendacity of the Howard government and its operatives.

By the way, has anyone asked Howard about Saddam's people shredder recently?