Saturday, August 31, 2019
Film ‘Official Secrets’ is the Tip of a Mammoth Iceberg
August 29, 2019 • 9
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A new film depicting the whistleblower
Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion, is largely accurate, but
the story is not over, says Sam Husseini.
By Sam Husseini
Special to Consortium News
Special to Consortium News
Two-time Oscar nominee Keira
Knightley is known for being in “period pieces” such as “Pride and Prejudice,”
so her playing the lead in the new film “Official Secrets,” scheduled to be
released in the U.S. on Friday, may seem odd at first. That is until one considers
that the time span being depicted — the early 2003 run-up to the invasion of
Iraq — is one of the most dramatic and consequential periods of modern human
history.
It is also one of the most
poorly understood, in part because the story of Katharine Gun, played by
Knightley, is so little known. Having followed this story from the start, I
find this film to be, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably accurate account of
what has happened to date–“to date” because the wider story still isn’t over.
Katharine
Gun worked as an analyst for Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), the British equivalent of the secretive U.S. National Security Agency.
She tried to stop the impending invasion of Iraq in early 2003 by exposing the
deceit of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their claims about that country. For
doing that she was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act — a juiced up
version of the U.S. Espionage Act, which in recent years has been used
repeatedly by the Obama administration against whistleblowers and now by the
Trump administration against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Gun was charged for exposing—
around the time of Colin Powell’s infamous testimony to the UN about Iraq’s
alleged WMDs – a top secret U.S. government memo showing it was mounting
an illegal spying “surge” against other U.N. Security Council delegations in an
effort to manipulate them into voting for an Iraq invasion resolution. The U.S.
and Britain had successfully forced through a trumped up resolution, 1441 in November 2002. In early
2003, they were poised to threaten, bribe or blackmail their way to get formal
United Nations authorization for the invasion. [See recent interview with Gun.]
The leaked memo, published by
the British Observer, was big news in parts of the world, especially the
targeted countries on the Security Council, and helped prevent Bush and Blair
from getting the second UN Security Council resolution they said they wanted.
Veto powers Russia, China and France were opposed as well as U.S. ally Germany.
Washington invaded anyway of
course — without Security Council authorization — by telling the UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq and issuing a unilateral
demand that Saddam Hussein leave Iraq in 48 hours— and then saying the
invasion would commence regardless.
‘Most Courageous Leak’
It was the executive director
of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where I work (accuracy.org), Norman Solomon,
as well as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who in the U.S. most
immediately saw the importance of what Gun had done. Ellsberg would later
comment: “No one else — including myself — has ever done what Katharine Gun
did: Tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time,
possibly, to avert it. Hers was the most important — and courageous — leak I’ve
ever seen, more timely and potentially more effective than the Pentagon
Papers.”
Of course, no one knew her
name at the time. After the Observer broke the story on March 1,
2003, accuracy.org put
out a series of news releases on it and organized a sadly,
sparsely attended news conference with Ellsberg on March 11, 2003 at the National
Press Club, focusing on Gun’s revelations. Ellsberg called for more
such truth telling to stop the impending invasion, just nine days away.
Though I’ve followed this case
for years, I didn’t realize until recently that accuray.org’s work helped
compel Gun to expose the document. At a recent D.C. showing of “Official
Secrets” that Gun attended, she revealed that she had read a book co-authored
by Solomon, published in January 2003 that included material from
accuracy.org as well as the media watch group FAIR debunking many of
the falsehoods for war.
Gun said: “I went to the local
bookshop, and I went into the political section. I found two books, which had
apparently been rushed into publication, one was by Norman Solomon and Reese
Erlich, and it was called Target Iraq. And the other one was by Milan Rai. It
was called War Plan Iraq. And I bought both of them. And I read
them cover to cover that weekend, and it basically convinced me that there was
no real evidence for this war. So I think from that point onward, I was very
critical and scrutinizing everything that was being said in the media.”
Thus, we see Gun in “Official
Secrets” shouting at the TV to Tony Blair that he’s not entitled to make
up facts. The film may be jarring to some consumers of major media who might
think that Donald Trump invented lying in 2017.
Gun’s immediate action after
reading critiques of U.S. policy and media coverage makes a strong case for
trying to reach government workers by handing out fliers and books and putting
up billboards outside government offices to encourage
them to be more critically minded.
Solomon and Ellsberg had
debunked Bush administration propaganda in real time. But Gun’s revelation
showed that the U.S. and British governments were not only lying to invade
Iraq, they were violating international law to blackmail whole nations to get in
line.
Mainstream reviews of
“Official Secrets” still seem to not fully grasp the importance of what they
just saw. The trendy AV Club review leads: “Virtually everyone now agrees that
the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a colossal mistake based on faulty (at best) or
fabricated (at worst) intelligence.” “Mistake” is a serious understatement even
with “colossal” attached to it when the movie details the diabolical, illegal
lengths to which the U.S. and British governments went to get other governments
to go along with it.
Gun’s revelations showed
before the invasion that people on the inside, whose livelihood depends on
following the party line, were willing to risk jail time to out the lies and
threats.
Portrayal of The Observer
Other than Gun herself, the
film focuses on a dramatization of what happened at her work; as well as her
relationship with her husband, a Kurd from Turkey who the British government
attempted to have deported to get at Gun. The film also portrays the work of
her lawyers who helped get the Official Secrets charge against her dropped, as
well as the drama at The Observer, which published the NSA document after
much internal debate.
Observer reporter Martin
Bright, whose strong work on the original Gun story was strangely followed by
an ill-fated stint at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, has recently noted
that very little additional work has been done on Gun’s case. We
know virtually nothing about the apparent author of the NSA document that she
leaked — one “Frank Koza.” Other questions persist, such is prevalent is this
sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign governments to get UN votes or for other
purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with allegations made by former
NSA analyst Russ Tice about the NSA having massive files on
political people?
Observer reporter Ed
Vulliamy is energetically depicted getting tips from former CIA man Mel
Goodman. There do seem to be subtle but potentially serious deviations from
reality in the film. Vulliamy is depicted as actually speaking with “Frank
Koza,” but that’s not what he originally
reported:
“The NSA main switchboard
put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was
answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza’s office. However,
when The Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of
diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told ‘You have reached
the wrong number’. On protesting that the assistant had just said this was
Koza’s extension, the assistant repeated that it was an erroneous extension,
and hung up.”
There must doubtlessly be many
aspects of the film that have been simplified or altered regarding Gun’s
personal experience. A compelling part of the film — apparently fictitious or
exaggerated — is a GCHQ apparatchik questioning Gun to see if she was the
source.
Little is known about the
reaction inside the governments of Security Council members that the U.S. spied
on. After the invasion, Mexican Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser spoke in blunt
terms about U.S. bullying — saying it viewed Mexico as its patio trasero,
or back yard — and was Zinser was compelled to resign by President Vicente Fox.
He then, in 2004, gave details about some aspects of U.S.
surveillance sabotaging the efforts of the other members of the Security
Council to hammer out a compromise to avert the invasion of Iraq, saying the
U.S. was “violating the U.N. headquarters covenant.” In 2005, he
tragically died in a car crash.
“Official Secrets” director
Gavin Hood is perhaps more right than he realizes when he says that his
depiction of the Gun case is like the “tip of an iceberg,” pointing to other
deceits surrounding the Iraq war. His record with political films has been uneven
until now. Peace activist David Swanson, for instance, derided his film on
drones, “Eye in the
Sky.” At a D.C. showing of “Official Secrets,” Hood depicted those who
backed the Iraq war as being discredited. But that’s simply untrue.
Leading presidential candidate
Joe Biden — who not only voted for the Iraq invasion, but presided over rigged hearings on in 2002 – has recently falsified his record repeatedly on Iraq at presidential debates
with hardly a murmur. Nor is he alone. Those refusing to be held accountable
for their Iraq war lies include not just Bush and Cheney, but John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi.
Biden has actually faulted
Bush for not doing enough to get United Nations approval for the Iraq invasion.
But as the Gun case helps show, there was no legitimate case for invasion and
the Bush administration had done virtually everything, both legal and illegal,
to get UN authorization.
Many who supported the
invasion try to distance themselves from it. But the repercussions of that
illegal act are enormous: It led directly or indirectly to the rise of ISIS,
the civil war in Iraq and the war in Syria. Journalists who pushed for the Iraq
invasion are prosperous and atop major news organizations, such as Washington
Post editorial page editor Fred
Hiatt. The editor who argued most strongly against publication of
the NSA document at The Observer, Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director
of BBC News.
The British government —
unlike the U.S.– did ultimately produce a study ostensibly around the
decision-making leading to the invasion of Iraq, the Chilcot Report of 2016.
But that report — called “devastating” by the The New York Times–made no mention of the Gun case. [See accuracy.org release from
2016: “Chilcot Report Avoids Smoking Gun.”]
After Gun’s identity became
known, the Institute for Public Accuracy brought on Jeff Cohen, the founder of
FAIR, to work with program director Hollie Ainbinder to get prominent
individuals to support Gun. The film — quite plausibly — depicts the
charges being dropped against Gun for the simple reason that the British
government feared that a high profile proceeding would effectively put the war
on trial, which to them would be have been a nightmare.
Sam Husseini is an independent
journalist, senior analyst at the Institute for Public Accuracy and founder
of VotePact.org. Follow him on
twitter: @samhusseini.
Friday, August 30, 2019
The Real Big Brother
August 29, 2019 • 0
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It’s a billionaire’s world and
the biggest of them all is in the thick of it, as Eric Zuesse explains.
By Eric Zuesse
Strategic Culture
Strategic Culture
Jeff Bezos is the owner
of The Washington Post, which leads America’s news-media in their almost
100 percent support and promotion of neoconservatism, American imperialism and wars. This
includes sanctions, coups, and military invasions against countries that
America’s billionaires want to control but don’t yet control — such
as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, Libya, and China.
These are aggressive wars against
countries which have never aggressed against the United States. They are not,
at all, defensive, but the exact opposite. It’s not necessarily endless war
(even Hitler hadn’t planned that), but war until the entire planet has come
under the control of the U.S. Government, a government that is itself controlled by America’s billionaires, the funders of
neoconservatism and imperialism — in both major American political
parties, think tanks, newspapers, TV networks, etcetera.
Bezos has been a crucial part
of neoconservatism, ever since, at the June 6-9 2013 Bilderberg meeting, he arranged with
Donald Graham, the Washington Post’s owner, to buy that newspaper, for $250 million. Bezos
had already negotiated, in March of that same year, with the
neoconservative CIA Director, John Brennan, for a $600 million ten-year
cloud computing contract that transformed Amazon corporation,
from being a reliable money-loser, into a reliably profitable firm.
That caused Bezos’s net worth
to soar even more (and at a sharper rate of rising) than it had been doing while
it had been losing money. He became the most influential salesman not only for
books, but for the CIA, and for such mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin.
Imperialism has supercharged his wealth, but it didn’t alone cause it. Bezos
might be the most ferociously gifted business-person on the planet.
Some of America’s billionaires
don’t care about international conquest as much as he does, but all of them at
least accept neoconservatism; none of them, for example, establishes and
donates large sums to, anti-imperialistic organizations; none of America’s
billionaires is determined to end the reign of neoconservatism, nor
even to help the fight to end it, or at least to end its grip over the U.S.
government. None. Not even a single one of them does.
Plutocrat Bezos at the
Pentagon with then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, May 2016. (Wikimedia
Commons)
But many of them establish and
donate large sums to neoconservative organizations, or run neocon organs such
as The Washington Post. That’s the way billionaires are, at
least in the United States. All of them are imperialists. They sponsor it; they
promote it and hire people who do, and demote or get rid of people who don’t.
Expanding an empire is extremely profitable for its aristocrats, and always has
been, even before the Roman Empire.
Bezos wants to privatize
everything around the world that can become privatized, such as education,
highways, health care, and pensions. The more that billionaires control those
things, the less that everyone else does; and preventing control by the public
helps to protect billionaires against democracy that would increase their taxes
and government regulations that would reduce their profits by increasing their
corporations’ expenses. So, billionaires control the
government in order to increase their takings from the public.
With the help of the war
promotion of The Washington Post, Bezos is one of the world’s top
personal sellers to the U.S. military-industrial complex. He controls and is
the biggest investor in Amazon corporation, whose Web Services division
supplies all cloud-computing services to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA.
(He’s leading
the charge in the most advanced facial recognition technology too.)
In April there was a
headline, “CIA Considering Cloud Contract Worth ‘Tens of Billions’,” which
contract could soar Bezos’s personal wealth even higher into the stratosphere,
especially if he wins all of it (as he previously did).
He also globally dominates,
and is constantly increasing his control over the promotion and sale of books
and films, because his Amazon is the world’s largest retailer (and now also one
of the largest publishers, producers and distributors.) That, too, can have a
huge impact upon politics and government, indirectly, by promoting the most
neocon works helping to shape intellectual discourse (and voters’ votes) in the
country.
Bezos is crushing millions of
retailers by his unmatched brilliance at controlling one market after another
as Amazon or as an essential middleman for — and often even a controller of —
Amazon’s retail competitors.
He is a strong believer in
“the free market”, which he has mastered perhaps better than anyone. This means
that Bezos supports the unencumbered ability of billionaires, by means of their
money, to control and eventually absorb all who are less powerful than they.
Because he is so enormously
gifted himself at amassing wealth, he has thus-far been able to rise to the
global top, as being one of the world’s most powerful individuals. The
wealthiest of all is King Salman— the owner of Saudi Arabia, whose Aramco (the
world’s largest oil company) is, alone, worth over a trillion dollars. (Forbes and Bloomberg exclude
monarchs from their wealth-rankings.)
President Donald Trump touches
lighted globe with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi King
Salman at the opening of Saudi Arabia’s Global Center for Combating Extremist
Ideology on May 21, 2017. (Photo from Saudi TV)
In fact, Bloomberg is
even so fraudulent about it as to have headlined on Aug. 10, “The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control $1.4
trillion” and violated their tradition by including on their list one
monarch, King Salman, whom they ranked at #4 as owning only $100 million, a
ludicrously low ‘estimate’, which brazenly excluded not just Aramco but any of the net worth of Saudi Arabia.
Bloomberg didn’t even try
to justify their wacky methodology, but merely presumed the gullibility of
their readers for its acceptance. That King, therefore, is at least seven times
as rich as Bezos is. He might possibly be as powerful as Bezos is. The supreme
heir is lots wealthier even than the supreme self-made billionaire or
“entrepreneur” is.
Certainly, both men are among
the giants who bestride the world in our era. And both men are libertarians —
champions of the belief that property rights (of which, billionaires have so
much) are the basis of all rights, and so they believe that the
wealthiest people possess the most rights of all, and that the poorest people
have the least, and that all persons whose net worths are negative (having
more debts than assets) possess no rights except what richer people might
donate to or otherwise grant to them, out of kindness or otherwise (such as
familial connections).
This — privatization of
everything — is what libertarianism is: a person’s worth is his or her “net
worth” — nothing else. That belief is pure libertarianism. It’s a
belief that many if not most billionaires hold. Billionaires are imperialistic
because they seek to maximize the freedom of the super-rich, regardless of
whether this means increasing their takings from, or ultimately impoverishing,
everyone who isn’t super-rich. They have a coherent ideology. It’s
based on wealth. The public instead believes in myths that billionaires enable
to be promulgated.
Like any billionaire, Bezos
hires and retains employees and other agents who do what he/she wants them to
do. This is their direct power. But billionaires also possess
enormous indirect power by means of their interdependencies upon
one-another, as each large corporation is contractually involved with other
corporations, especially with large ones such as they; and, so, whatever power
any particular billionaire possesses is actually a shared power,
along with the others. (An example was the deal Bezos made with Graham.)
Collectively, they network
together, even with ones they might never even have met personally, but only
through their representatives, and even with their own major economic
competitors. This is collective power which billionaires possess in addition to
their individual power as hirers of employees and other agents.
Whereas Winston Smith, in the
prophetic allegorical novel 1984, asked his superior and torturer
O’Brien, “Does Big Brother exist?”
“‘Of course he exists. The
Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’
‘Does he exist in the same way
as I exist?’
‘You do not exist,’ said
O’Brien.”
Big Brother poster
illustrating George Orwell’s novel about modern propaganda, 1984.
This collective power is
embodied by Bezos as well as any billionaire does. A few of the others may embody
it too, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg,
Charles Koch, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Jack
Dorsey. They compete against each other, and therefore have different
priorities for the U.S. government; but, all of them agree much more
than they disagree in regards to what the Government “should” do (especially
that the U.S. military should be expanded — at taxpayer’s expense, of course,
not their own).
Basically, Big Brother, in
the real world is remarkably coherent and unified — far more
so than the public is — and this is one of the reasons why they
control Government, bypassing the public.
Here is how all of this plays
out, in terms of what Bezos’s agents have been doing:
His Amazon pays low to no
federal taxes because the Federal Government has written the tax-laws to
encourage companies to do the types of things that Bezos has always
wanted Amazon to do.
The U.S. government
consequently encourages mega-corporations through taxes and regulations to
crush small firms by making it harder for them to grow. That somewhat locks-in
the existing aristocracy to be less self-made (as Bezos himself was, but his
children won’t be).
Elected politicians
overwhelmingly support this because most of their campaign funds were donated
by super-rich individuals and their employees and other agents. It’s a
self-reinforcing system. Super-wealth controls the government, which (along
with the super-wealthy and their corporations) controls the public, which
reduces economic opportunity for them. The end-result is institutionally
reinforced extreme wealth-inequality, becoming more extreme all the time.
The billionaires are the real Big
Brothers. And Bezos is the biggest of them all.