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Selon le rapport Flood, les services australiens « ont manqué de rigueur en ne contestant pas les idées reçues ou les hypothèses sur les intentions du régime irakien » et, de façon plus générale, « qu’il n’existe au sein des services de collecte de renseignements pour ainsi dire aucune culture de contestation et de discussion systématiques des rapports de renseignements, sans parler de l’absence quasi totale de dialogue sur les informations évaluées »16.
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The post-war intelligence inquiries in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia all criticized their respective collection and analysis agencies for failing to properly scrutinize the claims of HUMINT sources. The Australian inquiry, held by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD (PJCAAD), cited the arguments of a witness to the UK’s Hutton inquiry, that human intelligence collection agencies have an incentive to overemphasise the reliability of their sources in the interests of demonstrating their relevance and usefulness to intelligence consumers. The Butler inquiry in Britain found that intelligence agencies’ increasing sense of urgency to clarify Iraq’s WMD holdings and capacities had led HUMINT collectors to put more pressure on sources: either relying more heavily on untried sources, accepting reporting chains whose length would have been unacceptable in other circumstances, or pressing sources to report on issues outside of their areas of expertise.10 In Australia, ASIS escaped much of the criticism endured by its American and British counterparts due to the fact that perhaps 97 per cent of the raw intelligence informing Australia’s intelligence judgements came from allied sources. This, however, raised specific issues for Australian intelligence. Shared human intelligence must ultimately be taken on trust, with the assumption that allied HUMINT collectors would only pass on intelligence they had deemed to be credible. Source descriptors on pieces of HUMINT must necessarily be general in the interests of source protection; and given the massive increase in the amount of reporting collection agencies have been required to do, these descriptors had tended to become formulaic, choices from a “pull-down” menu on a computer program. Despite these caveats, however, Australia’s analysis agencies were accused of being insufficiently critical in assessing their claims. The Office of National Assessments in particular was accused, like its counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom, of drawing too strong a set of judgements from the available intelligence. As the PJCAAD sternly admonished in its report, “Decisions to go to war, with the potential to cost many lives, must only be taken on the basis of the soundest information, information that Australian agencies can reasonably rely upon.”11
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