Former prime minister John Howard's justification this week on why we went to war against Iraq in 2003 obfuscates some issues.

I was the secretary to the federal parliamentary intelligence committee from 2002 until 2007. It was then called the ASIO, ASIS and Defence Signals Directorate committee - which drafted the report Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Howard refers to this committee in his speech justifying our involvement in the war.

John Howard: ignored advice. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The reason there was so much argument about the existence of such weapons before the war in Iraq 10 years ago was that to go to war on any other pretext would have been a breach of international law. As Howard said at the time: ''I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I've never advocated that. Central to the threat is Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons and its pursuit of nuclear capability."

So the question is what the government knew or was told about that capability and whether the government ''lied'' about the danger that Iraq posed. At the time, Howard and his ministers asserted that the threat to the world from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was both great and immediate.