A faraway place,close to home

In the run up to the Iraq War in March 2003,  unknown to the big powers involved, a British woman working as a translator in England was about to expose the extraordinary pressure that the UK and USA were putting on smaller countries in the UN Security Council to elicit their vote for war.

“Official Secrets” is the recently released film that provides a dramatised account of how 27-year-old Katharine Gun was placed under severe pressure for leaking a memo that revealed how the United States undertook an illegal spying operation, gathering delicate information, while she was working at GCHQ or Government Communications Headquarters. On its website, GCHQ says: “Our brilliant people use cutting-edge technology, technical ingenuity and wide-ranging partnerships to identify, analyse and disrupt threats.” In practise, its agents gather information by secretly listening in to phone conversations, satellite signals and reading e-mails. They decode messages, monitor communication, and sign the Official Secrets Act, agreeing to protect state secrets and official information, mainly related to national security.

I’d highly recommend you see the movie if and when it comes out in the Philippines or becomes available online. I saw it the other day, coincidentally as the plane I was on overflew Iraq, the navigation map on board showed Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul. Cities that have been named all too often in news reports since those events took place more than 16 years ago. There were distinct stages, the invasion, occupation and insurgency; estimates of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the war vary a lot depending on the stage and the group doing the counting. For example, classified US military documents released by WikiLeaks in October 2010, record Iraqi and coalition military deaths between January 2004 and December 2009 at 109,032 deaths broken down into "Civilian" (66,081 deaths), "Host Nation" (15,196 deaths),"Enemy" (23,984 deaths), and "Friendly" (3,771 deaths). But an Oct. 19, 2006 report in the Washington Post states that “The deaths reported by officials and published in the news media represent only a fraction of the thousands of mutilated bodies winding up in Baghdad's overcrowded morgue each month. ... Bodies are increasingly being dumped in and around Baghdad in fields staked out by individual Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups. Iraqi security forces often refuse to go to the dumping grounds, leaving the precise number of bodies in those sites unknown. Civilian deaths, unlike those of American troops, often go unrecorded.” Estimates of the number of civilian deaths in the first three to four years of conflict vary from 150,000 to 600,000.  Even though US forces withdrew in 2011, the violence unleashed by the US-led invasion continues to this day.

Back in 2003, when Gun leaked the memo, she saw that the governments of the UK and USA were already on a war footing in the Gulf to overthrow then President Saddam Hussein, even lying to the public and covertly carrying out dirty tricks “against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria.”

Gun’s whistle-blowing showed once again how far politicians are ready to go to achieve their ends. There were big protests against the Iraq War at the time because of the lack of evidence to support the UK and USA decision to go to war. Gun told “secret truths, at great personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it” as another famous whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, put it.

As the war was about to begin, I had just given birth to my daughter in Hong Kong, where SARS had broken out, but my cameraman husband was in Kuwait waiting for the invasion for CNN. I left for Manila and my parents’ home with tiny daughter and a toddler son in tow, watching events unfold on cable news and worrying about what was to come and how dangerous it would be for my husband, friends and colleagues. They had already spent long months in Bosnia, Rwanda and Afghanistan during the 90s and it seemed that the wars of the early 21st century were to take the extreme violence and destruction of the previous hundred years to even worse lengths.

Watching the film brought back a jumble of memories of how journalist colleagues from all over the world covered the war and its aftermath, of how our lives as well were affected by bearing witness to this utterly unnecessary war. Unnecessary because there were no weapons of mass destruction, no collusion with Al Qaeda, no real reason that soldiers from across the continents should sacrifice their own lives and futures as well as take the lives and futures of others.

In the wake of the release of “Official Secrets” Gun has been asked what she hopes people will take from the film. “That accountability is key. And that if the perpetrators in these situations get away scot-free, that has a knock-on effect. That whole period undermined the judicial process, it undermined the parliamentary process, and it undermined the media and press and the intelligence service,” she told the Guardian newspaper. “We are all of us living, she believes, with the consequences of that. The simple fact is, she says: “Truth always matters at the end of the day.”

Back then, the term “fake news” hadn’t been coined but her words have an even stronger resonance now. Her story of extraordinary moral strength (had she been charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act as threatened, she would have faced a possible 14 year sentence in prison) raises lingering questions about how any individual would and should act if faced with a similar choice about whether or not to allow the powerful to get away with illegal acts, even murder.

A specific case in point this week is the killing of 58 people in Ampatuan, Maguindanao. In its aftermath, one witness was killed because he was willing to testify against the perpetrators; I met another who was in hiding fearing for his life. He had overheard a ghoulish conversation planning the massacre and clearly remembered what had been said. Many people must have known about the plans, could any one of them have challenged them? Would I? Would you?