A political bombshell exploded in Canberra on Aug. 22, when a former top Australian spy, Andrew Wilkie, testified that the Australian Government deliberately lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, in order to "stay in step with Washington."
"The Government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story," Wilkie charged, in evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. "The Government lied every time it linked Iraq to the war on terror."
Wilkie's testimony is devastating to the Australian Government, and to Prime Minister John Howard, who hitherto has escaped the personal pressure Tony Blair has felt in Britain. Wilkie was a former analyst at Australia's Office of National Assessments (ONA), the nation's senior spy agency, which coordinates the intelligence from all other agencies to provide assessments directly to the Prime Minister. Thus, he was heavily involved in the Iraq issue throughout 2002, and up until his resignation on March 10, 2003, in protest at the Government's determination to go to war against Iraq. He testified how cautionary, contextual words used in ONA's intelligence assessments on Iraq, such as "perhaps," and "probable," were removed by Howard's minions, and replaced with words like "massive" and "mammoth." "Before we knew it, the Government had created a mythical Iraq, one where every factory was up to no good and weaponization was continuing apace," he said. "Sometimes the exaggeration was so great it was clear dishonesty. I will go so far as to say the material was going straight from ONA to the Prime Minister's Office and the exaggeration was occurring in there . . . .The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, in particular, have a lot to answer for."
In response, Prime Minister Howard attacked Wilkie's credibility. "I am denying his allegations," Howard blustered, "ONA has indicated he had virtually no access to the relevant intelligence." Wilkie charged that this attack is further evidence of the Government's culpability: "In response to my attempt to explore . . . the gap between what the Government said before the war and the reality of after the war, the Government's defence was to attack me personally again, to call me a malcontent, to call me hysterical . . . . When confronted with the need to explain themselves, they continue to play the man and not the ball. It makes me think that they can't explain . . .the fact that we were sold the invasion of a sovereign state without UN backing."
Wilkie's explosive testimony strikes at the heart of the fascist apparatus that has seized on the "Reichstag Fire" incident of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Bali bombing of Oct. 12, 2002, to transform Australia into a police-state, and commit it to the U.S. Cheney-acs' perpetual war agenda. This is the international Synarchist network, which Lyndon LaRouche identified in the Aug. 8, 2003 EIR, as an "occult freemasonic conspiracy," originally founded on the worship of Napoleon Bonaparte and his financier-backed plans for world empire. One ofthe central institutions of modern Synarchism, LaRouche said, is the private financiers' front group known as the Mont Pelerin Society.
The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) totally controls the Howard Government, and he personally has long been affiliated with the Society's Australian fronts and their radical dogma of "free market" deregulation and privatization, which has devastated Australia's once-proud industrial economy. MPS's fronts were first exposed in a series of reports published in EIR and the New Citizen, the publication of LaRouche's Australian associates, the Citizens Electoral Council, in 1996.
Now, Australia's "mainstream" media has picked up those exposes. From Aug. 11-13, Australia's oldest and most respected newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, documented the growing influence of neo-conservative think-tanks in Australia-in particular the Sydney-based Center for Independent Studies (CIS)-all of which were generated by Mont Pelerin. Clearly echoing the 1996 EIR/New Citizen reports, the Herald exposed the CIS's funding from such financier interests as Rupert Murdoch, Philip Morris, and Shell, and its history, which it traced back to Friedrich von Hayek, "the global godfather of this neo-conservative movement." Hayek founded the "secretive" MPS in 1947, which works through front organizations, like the CIS and its U.S. sister organization, the Heritage Foundation.
Both the Wilkie evidence, and the Sydney Morning Herald's exposé of the Mont Pelerin Society, reflect, each in their own way, the global "countercoup" which U.S. 2004 Democratic Party Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has been organizing against the Synarchists and their stooges in government, such as Howard, Cheney, and Blair.
