A former senior Australian defence adviser claimed yesterday she was edged out of her job because she refused to lie about the case for war in Iraq.
Jane Errey, a former adviser to Australia's chief defence scientist working in the department's science and technology organisation, said she had been sacked after taking leave because of her refusal to mislead the public. "I felt like I was part of the propaganda machine," she said.
The case puts a further question mark over the Australian government's handling of intelligence in the run-up to the war, when it is already under attack from the opposition for its foreign policy record.
Ms Errey's job gave her access to information from the government's two top-level intelligence agencies. She said she went on leave as the war started after being instructed to compile media advice on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction for defence minister Robert Hill. "I believe I was being asked, as was the rest of the department, to perpetuate the lie that the government was putting forward in so far as the weapons of mass destruction existed and that they were a grave threat to the rest of the world," she told ABC radio.
A spokesman for the department said Ms Errey, a former candidate for the Democrat party, was sacked last week because she had failed to turn up for work since March 2003, despite completing all agreed terms of leave.
"The result of management differences on her future was such that she is leaving, but it's got nothing to do with work that she may have done in the past," Mr Hill told the Nine Network.
John Howard's government has been under attack in recent weeks from the opposition leader, Mark Latham, who claims a briefing with the defence department's chief intelligence official in January left him convinced Australia "went to war on a lie".
"I walked away from that briefing knowing and understanding the government's policy on Iraq was a fiasco, an absolute fiasco," he told parliament. His claims were rejected by the government, which said notes of the briefing mentioned no significant discussion of Iraq.
Ms Errey's criticisms are not the first time a senior intelligence official has criticised the handling of the Iraq war. Andrew Wilkie, a senior analyst at Canberra's intelligence clearing-house, the Office for National Assessments (ONA), resigned a week before war in protest at the government's misrepresentation of evidence about Iraq's WMD and claims of links between the Iraq and al-Qaida.
A parliamentary committee report in February concluded the government's case for war in Iraq had not been supported by the evidence available to it, and suggested the ONA had caved in to political pressure in ramping up its assessments of Iraq's weapons capability late in 2002.
A further internal report into the ONA was commissioned as a result of heavy criticism from the committee.