Australia Doesn't Plan Weapons Inquiry

SYDNEY, Australia - Australia has no need for a special inquiry into its intelligence on Iraq because it is sure Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons, Defense Minister Robert Hill said Tuesday.

Australia received its intelligence from Britain and the United States, whose leaders both plan to name special panels to investigate the intelligence they used for going to war in Iraq.

But Hill said he had confidence in the intelligence Australia received and there was no doubt Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

"There were weapons. That is not in dispute," Hill told reporters in Sydney. "The issue is what happened to those weapons."

Australia contributed 2,000 troops to the Iraq war tha toppled Saddam and stood by the U.S. administration's assertions the war was justified.

President Bush decided on the investigation after David Kay resigned as the head of the U.S. mission to find banned weapons in Iraq, saying he thought Saddam likely had no such arms.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair will also appoint a commission to investigate faulty intelligence, Blair's spokesman said Monday.

Hill said Australia had already conducted a parliamentary inquiry to which Australian intelligence agencies had given evidence, and it was "difficult to see what benefit would flow from yet another Australian inquiry." The earlier inquiry has not completed its report and will not present its findings until March.

In a speech to Parliament before fighting broke out in Iraq, Prime Minister John Howard justified the war by saying intelligence sources showed Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction and could give them to terrorists. Opposition lawmakers then used their control of the parliament's upper house, the Senate, to start an inquiry into Howard's claims.

Some opposition lawmakers have raised the possibility of another inquiry depending on the outcome of the U.S. probe.

On Monday, Howard said Australia's intelligence on Iraq came largely from the United States and Britain.

"It didn't come from our own independent sources, obviously it was independently assessed and so forth, but it was primarily British and American intelligence," Howard said.