Friday, October 22, 2021 3:09:03 AM
Iraq war whistleblower Katharine Gun: ‘Truth always matters’
"Colin Powell, military leader and first Black US secretary of state, dies"
It's worth a watch even though while still watching it now, and before reading this, i figured the government would drop the charges.
‘Watching the film was like watching a case that was very similar to my own’: Katharine Gun, photographed last month in Durham.
Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer
Ahead of a new film, Official Secrets, the GCHQ worker who tried to prevent the 2003 invasion of Iraq recalls those feverish days – and their consequences
* Keira Knightley on playing whistleblower Katharine Gun: ‘Iraq was the first time I’d been politically engaged’
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/keira-knightley-interview-official-secrets-film
Tim Adams @TimAdamsWrites
Sun 22 Sep 2019 17.59 AEST
Last modified on Mon 23 Sep 2019 21.11 AEST
It is not often that a person’s character is revealed in two sentences. But it is tempting to believe that is the case with Katharine Gun.
In 2003, Gun was working as a translator of Mandarin at the government intelligence agency, GCHQ, in Cheltenham. She was 27. The country, at the time, was being drummed into war by the Blair government, desperate to achieve the United Nations’ sanction for the imminent American-led invasion of Iraq. In January that year, Katharine Gun was copied into a classified memo sent to GCHQ by a senior figure in the NSA, its US equivalent. The memo was a top-secret request to monitor the private communication of UN delegates for scraps of information, personal or otherwise, that could be used to “give the US an edge” in leveraging support for the invasion. Katharine Gun leaked that memo to the Observer, in the belief that the revelation of the proposed bugging and blackmail tactics might be enough to stop the war.
The Observer published the dirty tricks memo as a front-page splash just over two weeks before the invasion. Gun owned up to the leak a few days later to save her GCHQ colleagues from a witch-hunt. She was arrested and charged with breach of the Official Secrets Act. It was in a police cell that she uttered those two sentences that now seem to define the person she was and is. Gun was asked by Special Branch officers why she had chosen to act as she had. “You work for the British government,” her interrogator said, with a sneer.
“No,” Gun replied, steadily. “I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.”
The Observer’s front page story on 2 March 2003. Photograph: The Observer
Sixteen years have passed since Katharine Gun said those words, but they still ring in the air. Her whistleblowing was not enough to change the path of history, of course, and her last-gasp act of courage was all but forgotten in the brutal “shock and awe” of war. Truth has a habit of finding a voice, however. Gun’s words will, in the coming weeks finally receive the much wider audience they deserve. A film, Official Secrets, has been made of her story. She is played, with steely English resolve, by Keira Knightley. Her performance reminds you of the sentiment of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, revealing the full truth of American involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg has called Katharine Gun’s action “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen. No one else – including myself – has ever done what Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.”
The legal case against Gun was eventually dropped by the British government in 2004, after her lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC (played in the film with fabulous charisma by Ralph Fiennes), threatened to use disclosure to put the legal basis of the war itself on trial. Gun had, of course, been forced to abandon her career in the civil service and finally, struggling for work, left Britain altogether. For the past nine years she has been living in Turkey with her Turkish husband and their 11-year-old daughter. I met her in August in Durham, when she was on a brief visit to see her father. We sat in the bar of a city centre hotel, and talked about the ancient history of 2003.
[...]
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/katharine-gun-whistleblower-iraq-official-secrets-film-keira-knightley
Of course, and disgracefully, Blair and Bush got away with it.
See also:
Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion
wall_rus, Feb, 2010 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=46174929
Iraq war was illegal, top lawyer will tell Chilcot inquiry
StephanieVanbryce, Jan, 2010 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45824762
One other thing, the damage Iran closing the strait would do to themselves .. as i said it's the last thing
they would want .. also, why would they drone-dump on NYC when we haven't drone-dropped on Tehran?
.. if we bombed them as we bombed Iraq would they then? .. i doubt it .. and in all this don't forget
P - the Fatah [Fatwa] by Khamanei against the development of nuclear weapons .. if it was broken it
would be a real blow to his authority .. read it while wandering but have lost that post just now ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70346415
P - and the rest in that post, and others, outlining the aggression of the West toward Iran since 1953
.. they have a legal right to enrichment for peaceful means .. many others have programs toward
becoming a ""threshold country,"" as the link above mentions, are not bothered as Iran is now ..
P - This was has been going on for at lest 59 years ..
P - 1953 Iranian coup d'état
P - The 1953 Iranian coup d'état (known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup) was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States under the name TPAJAX Project. The coup saw the transition of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi from a constitutional monarch to an authoritarian one who relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power until his own overthrow in February 1979.
Jan, 2012 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70448357
Would have made a good president...
[...]
CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166400740
"Colin Powell, military leader and first Black US secretary of state, dies"
It's worth a watch even though while still watching it now, and before reading this, i figured the government would drop the charges.
‘Watching the film was like watching a case that was very similar to my own’: Katharine Gun, photographed last month in Durham.
Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer
Ahead of a new film, Official Secrets, the GCHQ worker who tried to prevent the 2003 invasion of Iraq recalls those feverish days – and their consequences
* Keira Knightley on playing whistleblower Katharine Gun: ‘Iraq was the first time I’d been politically engaged’
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/keira-knightley-interview-official-secrets-film
Tim Adams @TimAdamsWrites
Sun 22 Sep 2019 17.59 AEST
Last modified on Mon 23 Sep 2019 21.11 AEST
It is not often that a person’s character is revealed in two sentences. But it is tempting to believe that is the case with Katharine Gun.
In 2003, Gun was working as a translator of Mandarin at the government intelligence agency, GCHQ, in Cheltenham. She was 27. The country, at the time, was being drummed into war by the Blair government, desperate to achieve the United Nations’ sanction for the imminent American-led invasion of Iraq. In January that year, Katharine Gun was copied into a classified memo sent to GCHQ by a senior figure in the NSA, its US equivalent. The memo was a top-secret request to monitor the private communication of UN delegates for scraps of information, personal or otherwise, that could be used to “give the US an edge” in leveraging support for the invasion. Katharine Gun leaked that memo to the Observer, in the belief that the revelation of the proposed bugging and blackmail tactics might be enough to stop the war.
The Observer published the dirty tricks memo as a front-page splash just over two weeks before the invasion. Gun owned up to the leak a few days later to save her GCHQ colleagues from a witch-hunt. She was arrested and charged with breach of the Official Secrets Act. It was in a police cell that she uttered those two sentences that now seem to define the person she was and is. Gun was asked by Special Branch officers why she had chosen to act as she had. “You work for the British government,” her interrogator said, with a sneer.
“No,” Gun replied, steadily. “I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.”
The Observer’s front page story on 2 March 2003. Photograph: The Observer
Sixteen years have passed since Katharine Gun said those words, but they still ring in the air. Her whistleblowing was not enough to change the path of history, of course, and her last-gasp act of courage was all but forgotten in the brutal “shock and awe” of war. Truth has a habit of finding a voice, however. Gun’s words will, in the coming weeks finally receive the much wider audience they deserve. A film, Official Secrets, has been made of her story. She is played, with steely English resolve, by Keira Knightley. Her performance reminds you of the sentiment of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, revealing the full truth of American involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg has called Katharine Gun’s action “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen. No one else – including myself – has ever done what Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.”
The legal case against Gun was eventually dropped by the British government in 2004, after her lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC (played in the film with fabulous charisma by Ralph Fiennes), threatened to use disclosure to put the legal basis of the war itself on trial. Gun had, of course, been forced to abandon her career in the civil service and finally, struggling for work, left Britain altogether. For the past nine years she has been living in Turkey with her Turkish husband and their 11-year-old daughter. I met her in August in Durham, when she was on a brief visit to see her father. We sat in the bar of a city centre hotel, and talked about the ancient history of 2003.
[...]
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/katharine-gun-whistleblower-iraq-official-secrets-film-keira-knightley
Of course, and disgracefully, Blair and Bush got away with it.
See also:
Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion
wall_rus, Feb, 2010 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=46174929
Iraq war was illegal, top lawyer will tell Chilcot inquiry
StephanieVanbryce, Jan, 2010 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45824762
One other thing, the damage Iran closing the strait would do to themselves .. as i said it's the last thing
they would want .. also, why would they drone-dump on NYC when we haven't drone-dropped on Tehran?
.. if we bombed them as we bombed Iraq would they then? .. i doubt it .. and in all this don't forget
P - the Fatah [Fatwa] by Khamanei against the development of nuclear weapons .. if it was broken it
would be a real blow to his authority .. read it while wandering but have lost that post just now ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70346415
P - and the rest in that post, and others, outlining the aggression of the West toward Iran since 1953
.. they have a legal right to enrichment for peaceful means .. many others have programs toward
becoming a ""threshold country,"" as the link above mentions, are not bothered as Iran is now ..
P - This was has been going on for at lest 59 years ..
P - 1953 Iranian coup d'état
P - The 1953 Iranian coup d'état (known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup) was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States under the name TPAJAX Project. The coup saw the transition of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi from a constitutional monarch to an authoritarian one who relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power until his own overthrow in February 1979.
Jan, 2012 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70448357
Would have made a good president...
[...]
CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166400740
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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