On 11 March 2003, Andrew Wilkie resigned from Australia’s Office of National Assessments (ONA), where he had worked as an intelligence analyst, after concluding that intelligence about Iraq was being used in a misleading way to support the invasion. Wilkie told the ABC that Iraq did not pose a meaningful security threat, that its alleged weapons-of-mass-destruction program was “very disjointed and contained,” and that there was no substantial intelligence linking Saddam Hussein’s regime to al-Qaeda. He said the decision reflected an ethical conflict between his duties as an intelligence officer and his “respect for the truth.”
Wilkie had reportedly submitted a December 2002 assessment warning the Australian government of unpredictable and potentially severe humanitarian consequences if war began, although the source notes uncertainty over the report’s sourcing. He later gave evidence to British and Australian inquiries and published his account in the 2004 book Axis of Deceit. The 2016 Chilcot Report criticised the Blair government’s prosecution of the Iraq War, reinforcing scrutiny of the intelligence and political case for intervention, but the supplied source records no successful prosecution or official finding against Wilkie’s former agency. Wilkie subsequently argued that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard should face international legal scrutiny; those demands were political claims, not reported convictions.
