Wilkie provides a complex and subtle analysis of how this distortion took place. The most common technique was the excision by political leaders of the crucial qualifying comments contained in the intelligence reports they used.
An assessment might mention, for example, the existence of "unconfirmed reports" about an Iraqi chemical weapons plant, or might speculate that a meeting between an Iraqi official and an al-Qaeda leader "could have" taken place. By the removal of the qualifiers, speculative assessments were, time and again, transformed into terrifying solid facts.
"Never did I see," Wilkie argues, "such a string of unqualified and strong judgements as was contained in the official case for war as was presented by Bush, Blair and Howard."
Sometimes the distortion was less subtle. Intelligence raising doubts had a tendency either to go missing or to be ignored. Crucial American evidence disputing the case about nuclear weapons was actually sent to Australian Government departments but somehow - in the tradition of children overboard or Abu Ghraib - failed to reach the desks of Government ministers or their staffs.
Although the weight of Wilkie's analysis falls on the deliberate distortions of the pro-war politicians, he is not uncritical of the quality of some of the American and British intelligence assessments that reached Australian eyes.
Intelligence from Iraqi exiles, now known to be deliberate disinformation, would not, in normal circumstances have survived conventional vetting procedures.
Nevertheless, it circulated freely. Huge gaps in knowledge - most importantly the pre-1991 "unaccounted-for" weapons materials, and ignorance about what had transpired following the withdrawal of the UN inspectors in 1998 - were sometimes filled by the intelligence agencies with heroic guesses pretending to be facts.
After September 11 all such guesses were of a worst-case-scenario kind. Intelligence assessments, for example, embroidered the concept of "dual use" facilities, thereby converting scores of Iraqi factories into sinister WMD-producing sites without a shred of solid evidence.
Most alarming in the Wilkie book is his analysis of the warped relationship that developed between the Howard Government and the intelligence agencies in the build-up to the war. According to Wilkie's account, the agencies became increasingly sensitive to the political requirements of the Government, influenced, consciously or subliminally, both by what they knew the Government wished to hear and by what they understood it did not want to know.
On the basis of what might be called the "want to be told" principle, the Australian intelligence agencies gilded the lily more than once. On September 12, 2002, a classified ONA report argued that there existed "no firm evidence of new chemical or biological weapons production". One day later, on September 13, in response to an implied Government request for anti-Iraqi ammunition, ONA argued, in an unclassified report, that "a range of intelligence and public information suggests that Iraq is highly likely to have chemical and biological weapons". Wilkie himself was present when Australian intelligence officers subtly misled the then opposition leader, Simon Crean, in a confidential WMD briefing everyone attending knew to be "unbalanced" and less than frank.
On the basis of the alternative "need not to know" principle, to which many Australian agencies were sensitive, intelligence potentially undermining the case for war was frequently diluted or even somehow lost. As early as 2002, Wilkie tells us, he knew that the case about Iraqi uranium purchases from Africa had been discredited. Nevertheless, precisely this information made an appearance in John Howard's critical pre-war speech of February 4, 2003.
Of course, for his whistle-blowing, Wilkie was not forgiven. At first, the Howard Government tried to discredit him by questioning his Iraq expertise. Second, they claimed him to be psychologically unstable. Finally, by leaking to the right-wing journalist Andrew Bolt a top-secret ONA report Wilkie had written on Iraq, the Government tried to suggest that Wilkie's judgement was hopelessly unsound.
This last tactic almost came unstuck. Leaking top-secret intelligence is a serious criminal offence.
Because Wilkie still has friends in Government, in Axis of Deceit he is able to reveal that, three days before Bolt's article appeared, Wilkie's Iraq assessment was obtained from ONA by the office of the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer.
Last week it was announced that, for lack of "admissable evidence", the Federal Police investigation into Downer's office had quietly been dropped. I always assumed the investigation would peter out like this. In Howard's Australia, while we may be strong on flagpoles, we are rather weak on spine.
