Words of Mass Deception

By Sydney Morning Herald

05/13/06 "SMH"-- -- Rod Barton blew the whistle on Australian, US and British lies about Iraq's hidden weapons cache. And the Australian Government has made sure he pays a high price for his stand. Hamish McDonald reports

FOR a decade Rod Barton knew the special loneliness of a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, teasing out clues from one of the world's nastiest regimes about biological weapons of unspeakable effect.

He worried about assassination by Saddam Hussein's secret services, not an unrealistic fear. He felt the derision of the ascendant hawks in Washington, confident they knew better than the UN inspectors about Saddam's secret weapons.

Now Barton is suffering a new kind of isolation after turning whistleblower on how the American, British and Australian leaders distorted intelligence to justify their invasion of Iraq and how they condone the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

Back home in Canberra, Barton is ostracised and unemployed in his old intelligence profession, to which at 58 and still formidably incisive, he could still contribute a lot. He looks at the view of the Brindabellas. He roams the world's trouble spots on Google Earth, the satellite imagery website. The house could not be any tidier, nor the garden crammed with any more shrubs.

Barton made waves and is being punished. In March 2004, he and another Australian, the Foreign Affairs disarmament specialist John Gee, resigned in protest from the Iraq Survey Group, set up by the US Central Intelligence Agency to find the Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that had been the excuse for invasion. The CIA was refusing to face the truth that Saddam's weapons had been destroyed in 1991.

In February last year, Barton went public on ABC television. Now he has written a devastating book about it, The Weapons Detective (Black Inc. Agenda, $29.95). His security clearances withdrawn, Barton knows he will not be getting any more contracts from his old employer, the Defence Intelligence Organisation, which he had joined as a young microbiologist in 1972.

Old colleagues at the intelligence organisation have been warned not to have contact with him, not even social meetings. In one act of spectacular pettiness, at the insistence of the Prime Minister's staff, Barton and Gee were dropped from the guest list for last year's 20th anniversary meeting in Sydney of the Australia Group, a forum of intelligence specialists from 38 countries on chemical and biological weapons, which the two had helped set up in 1985.

"I knew that blowing the whistle would bring some penalties, but not to this extent," Barton says. "Was I that much a threat to the security of Australia when - what was it I spoke out about: prisoner abuse?"

In his new book, Barton lays out in shocking clarity that the reason for the Iraq invasion cited by America's George Bush, Britain's Tony Blair and Australia's John Howard was false.

Blair and Howard knew it was false, Barton says. Bush may not have known, because his intelligence agencies were reporting what he wanted to hear.

When shown the Australian intelligence assessment, Howard even asked: "Is that all there is?"

Barton saw both the British and Australian intelligence assessments about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction before the March 2003 invasion. Saddam had at most a few chemical and biological weapons left over from the 1980s, and no means of delivering them. There was no evidence he had resumed WMD programs after UN weapons inspectors were kicked out in 1998.

It was no grounds for war, so the intelligence was doctored - notably in the British "dossier" published on the orders of the British Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, John Scarlett, which claimed Saddam had chemical and biological weapons deployable "within 45 minutes of an order to use them".

Howard cited the British dossier in assuring the Australian public and Parliament his Government had "compelling evidence" that Saddam possessed these weapons. "Is it a lie or is it a spin or what?" Barton said. "But it's certainly misleading the people."

The liars and spin doctors have prospered, the whistleblowers have been shafted. Barton's former UN colleague and friend, the British defence scientist David Kelly, killed himself in July 2003 after being outed for telling a BBC journalist how Scarlett had "sexed up" the Iraq intelligence. Scarlett was still "sexing up" the post-invasion intelligence, Barton shows, but has been made chief of Britain's famous spy service, MI6. Barton shakes his head: "John Scarlett should not head any intelligence organisation." In the CIA, the medals, cash bonuses and promotions go to agents who tell their chiefs about new weapons threats, not the ones who caution the evidence is weak.

In Australia, Barton sees a general culture of compliance in the public service spreading to the intelligence agencies. "You know you're not going to get promoted if you tell the Government something that's unpopular," he says.

One bit of unwelcome reporting by Barton, to Australia's Defence Department, was the first indication of the special "purgatory" centre being run by US Special Forces at Camp Nama, next to Baghdad Airport.

"High value" prisoners selected for disorientation before interrogation have a hessian bag put over their heads for up to 72 hours, and are deprived of food, water and sleep, made to stand up for long periods, exposed to intense heat or cold, and bashed at random intervals. Unlike the improvised brutality by US soldiers exposed at the Abu Ghraib prison, all this is sanctioned by the US Administration, which claims it does not amount to torture. "That's what makes it so much worse," Barton says.

"We went to war on WMD, which is withdrawn now. And now the casus belli is to bring democracy and human rights - yet we, the coalition, are detaining people without trial, and we the coalition are using torture techniques," Barton says. "As a member of the coalition we have a responsibility. We, the Australians, should be telling our American colleagues: This is just not acceptable; if you want us as a member of the coalition, to continue our presence there, then we ask you to stop this practice.

"But of course this Government doesn't want to upset the Americans, so we won't do that."

Copyright © 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald.

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