I mean, this has been going on for a number of years, and it always sort of ended up kind of petering out, so, GAVIN HOOD: Other people had approached you before. The classified email Gun got leaked to The Observer was evidence of the clandestine attempt of the American intelligence to reportedly seek help from the UK in wiretapping the members of the UN Security Council to motivate them to vote in favor of the invasion of Iraq. And so I did. Pie de foto, So, lots of leads there. So how am I, with my tiny team of researchers, going to do anything like that? And so, its one of those moments where you realizeI mean, the chill went up my spine, like I thought, Ive got to get out of here. So, yes, that was not a good moment, yeah. Before I was charged, before my name came out, my biggest worry was that I would become a known person. That is a difficult question, she says. AMY GOODMAN: The San Francisco Film Festival. How often does she go through that fateful weekend, where she wrestled with her conscience after seeing the memo? The official editorial line, led by the then editor Roger Alton (now an executive editor at the Daily Mail) and political editor Kamal Ahmed (now editorial director of BBC News) was in close support of the Blair governments position on the invasion. AMY GOODMAN: This is the NSA guy who wrote the memo. ED VULLIAMY: At the time, yes, the editor and the political. KATHARINE GUN: I dont know. Youre, KATHARINE GUN: And then I was taken away. Explain what happened at the Q&A, Martin. ED VULLIAMY: Its a story of endeavor, to no avail. And I went back, and I felt worse that day at home. A New Film Tells Her Story, 15 Years Later: How U.K. Whistleblower Katharine Gun Risked Everything to Leak a Damning Iraq War Memo, Links to news stories (20032006) about Katharine Gun, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Katharine_Gun&oldid=1141586730, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2020, All articles containing potentially dated statements, Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 25 February 2023, at 20:22. I think of journalists as being bullet-proof in a way, she says, but obviously not., She and Bright have done several question and answer sessions in the US after the film has been screened at various festivals. AMY GOODMAN: But what caused you to say no? Be consistent. And they said they would try their best. AMY GOODMAN: Were going to leave it there, and I want to thank you all so much for being with us, Katharine Gun, the whistleblower; Observer journalists at the time, Martin Bright and Ed Vulliamy; and Gavin Hood, who is the director of Official Secrets, the story of Katharine Gun revealing the lies that led to the Iraq War on both sides of the ocean, in Britain and the United States, and led to so many deaths. Katharine Gun is known for When We Speak (2022) and Good Morning Britain (2014). If the war was illegal and she broke the law in order to expose an illegal war and potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives, I can use this defense of necessitythats usually used in more mundane, dare I say, contextsin this great political trial., And so he says, All right, now I need to know whether the war was legal or illegal. And he says, I need to find out what Lord Goldsmiths, the attorney-generals, legal position was in the run-up to that war. MARTIN BRIGHT: Well, I wasof course, the irony of the situation is that when we heard that a GCHQ employee, a 27-year-old GCHQ employee, Mandarin translator, I think we even said at the time, had been arrested, we were absolutely delighted, because we knew for sure that we had a big story at that point. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. And really, you know, she had so many questions for me, and she really genuinely wanted to know about the whole situation. In 2003, she leaked top-secret information to The Observer, concerning a request by the United States for compromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the 2003 Security Council.The diplomats were due to vote on a second United . 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 Id been politically engaged. And Mr. Ahmed is now the editorial director of the BBC, the revered BBC. is katharine gun still married to yasaralexa call my phone goes to voicemail. is katharine gun still married to yasar . Therefore, it is not surprising that Gun chose to move away from the center point of all the chaos once it died down. [23] Daniel Ellsberg praised the swiftness and importance of Gun taking action, saying it was in some ways more significant than his own whistleblowing on the Vietnam War. Koza's email requested aid in a secret operation to bug the United Nations offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. Katharine no pudo fingir y confes a los pocos das. After the case was dropped I did some media for 24 hours and then I immediately decided to run away and hide and not pursue the story any more. Why did you drop the case? I wanted to stop bombs dropping on Iraq., The consequences have been damaging not just for Guns career. But, you know, it. ED VULLIAMY: Yes, the people who were giving Martin traction to get this story out, and who effectively, according to Mr. Daviess book, censored mine, about the cooking-up of the WMD and the fact that we knew Saddam didnt have any. We speak with a British whistleblower whose attempts to expose lies about the Iraq invasion was called "the most important and courageous leak" in history by acclaimed Pentagon Papers whistleblower. They were just going to pick him up, and took him out. . Even the best bed will fail in the absence of good music. KATHARINE GUN: Yeah. I watched you last night at one of the premieres of the film, a kind of secret showing of Official Secrets. ED VULLIAMY: Well, he was the political editor at the time, who was giving me a lot of trouble over getting my cooked intelligence story into the paper. MARTIN BRIGHT: I mean, there are a series of questions of accountability here. I wasno, as soon as he didnt come out, I. You come home. Now, what we were doing when we were breaking this story was we were attempting to show that our governments had lied to us. AMY GOODMAN: So then you have Scotland Yard taking over. And Ben comes up with this idea. We still dont know who within the American administration ordered the operation. And looking back, its easy to be nostalgic about how things were with Bush and Blair, because it looks like these people were easier to hold to account. I was very concerned about joining any kind of organisation like Stop the War, and being used as a focal point or something. One question that recurs, she says, comes from audience members asking what they should do, how they should behave, in the current mendacious political climate. What does she hope people will take from the film? [5] Less than a week after the Observer story, on Wednesday 5 March, Gun confessed to her line manager at GCHQ that she had leaked the email, and was arrested. Maybe there will be sympathy.. [12] A government spokesman said that the decision to drop the case had been made before the defence's demands had been submitted. Theyre going to send him back to Turkey. And so he went to Elizabeth and had a cup of tea, as you do in England. Now, that doesnt mean we shouldnt try to hold them to account. And, you know, he had nothing on him. [25][26] Together with journalist Peter Beaumont, Gun advised and consulted over the years it took to make the film and they are "very happy with the result.[20]. Plead out. But as we said last night, this is the purpose of Albert Camuss great story La Peste, when Dr. Rieux is given the child dying of plague. Gun has spoken at the 51Fest and conferences arranged by organizations such as the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). I think most people have red lines that they wont cross. So, of course, I was a little bit sort of reserved. That whole period undermined the judicial process, it undermined the parliamentary process, and it undermined the media and press and the intelligence service. We are all of us living, she believes, with the consequences of that. And the situation, the toxic abomination of Brexit in our country, has sort of rehabilitated Blair in a sort of bizarre way. [9] Gun spent a night in police custody, and eight months later was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act. ED VULLIAMY: But my point is not against Mr. Ahmed. And we had to sit and wait for two hours while they winged it down from London. Katharine, 83, is an Oscar-nominated actress who appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, including The Graduate and The Stepford Wives. But I felt this information was explosive, it needed to get out. But yeah, I mean, I was hugely impressed. She urged "those in a position to do so to disclose information which relates to this planned aggression; legal advice, meetings between the White House and other intelligence agencies, assessments of Iran's threat level (or better yet, evidence that assessments have been altered), troop deployments and army notifications. No, Gun replied, steadily. He left the Observer not long after the events it describes and now runs the Creative Society, a charity that helps widen access to jobs in the media and the arts to candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. is katharine gun still married to yasarvpower777 referral code. Main menu. In a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, she said that she had not raised the matter with staff counsellors as she "honestly didn't think that would have had any practical effect". Gun had, of course, been forced to abandon her career in the civil service and finally, struggling for work, left Britain altogether. Together they have a 13-year-old daughter. Economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram on World Bank, Climate Emergency, Global Debt Crisis & More, We Want a Better Future: Meet an Asylum Seeker Evicted from, Jeremy Scahill on Mistreatment of Whistleblowers & Uneven Enforcement of Laws over Classified Papers, Part 1: In 2003, This U.K. Whistleblower Almost Stopped the Iraq Invasion. All I want to do is feel the emotions that this young woman felt, and dont want to be fussed over. And it was great. We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work. Gun is on Mondays episode of the Guardian podcast Today in Focus, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. La farmacia siempre en tu barrio This is viewer supported news. AMY GOODMAN: And so, what did you do when they said, Were going to take each one of you into a room.. [13] Speculation was rife in the media that the prosecution service had bowed to political pressure to drop the case so that any such documents would remain secret. She is from United Kingdom. You dont know who the GCHQ person is. Machine Gun Kelly and Daughter Casie, 12, Hit the Red . Yes and no. We, as a collective group of countries, decide that we need to stop an event, a humanitarian disaster or a genocide or whatever. It just means that the job is even more difficult than it was before. So, where is Gun now? I think of journalists as being bullet-proof in a way. And we still dont know why the British government dropped the case. The diplomats were due to vote on a second United Nations resolution on the prospective 2003 invasion of Iraq. And all of a sudden the news media is not interested in how we got into the war. You know, we had it in October 2002. . The Tony Blair Conscience Fund or something? We still dont know who Frank Koza is, or hes still not given a public interview about about what went on. And so, but theres another irony about the position of the attorney general, which is, the director of public prosecutions in Britain generally has real autonomy in deciding what cases to prosecute, except in cases of the Official Secrets Act, when he or she must get the authorization of the attorney general to prosecute. I was called up on Tuesday. I mean, we had imagined all sorts of things about who our source might be. Bright has also been closely involved with the film. She was arrested and charged with breach of the Official Secrets Act. Following the incident, Gun struggled to find work that she loved, and her husband had grown disillusioned with Britain. He was going in every week to basically prove that he was still resident or that they could pinpoint where he was. However, during one such trip, her husband was detained by the authorities. 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. You can use this space to go into a little more detail about your company. Theres no doubt. Im Amy Goodman, as we bring you Part 2 of our extended look at a new film thats out called Official Secrets, thats coming out at the end of August, that tells the story of a British intelligence specialist, Katharine Gun, who risked everything to blow the whistle on U.S. dirty tricks at the United Nations in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003. KATHARINE GUN: Well, yeah, yeah. Film-makers generally like to glamorise newspaper offices, making them All the Presidents Men hothouses of high-level argument and intrigue. When you think, Oh, well, I wish we tried hard with the Americanwith our American colleagues. Did you know that you can get Democracy Now! Posted on July 3, 2022 by . [11], The case came to court on 25 February 2004. He says, Wait a minute. We can all have a view on Saddam Hussein and whether he should be deposed or not. GAVIN HOOD: Well, its interesting you say that, because one of things Keira said to me that drew her to the script was, first of all, that she didnt have to wear a corset, because she does all these period dramas. Hes repackaged himself as sort of the European. And then I went on to interview Martin and Ed and then Ben Emmerson, the lawyer. Katharine Gun is the Most Important Whistleblower You've Never Heard of Gun discusses her attempt to stop the Iraq War, which is the subject of the new movie Official Secrets. Given my experience I would want to hear what happened from the horses mouth, I think.. When Brights story originally landed there were concentrated efforts to rubbish it in the gung-ho parts of the media. Its millions. You have the Iraq War continuing today, 16 years after George W. Bush, knowing there were not weapons of mass destruction, invades Iraq with Britain. And the potential chink in the Official Secrets Act we had found, which could have become a defence for others, the defence of necessity [of speaking up to save imminent danger to life], it wasnt tested in court.. AMY GOODMAN: And did they say they were going to charge you with the Official Secrets Act? Shes out. Chicago Mayor Lightfoot Loses Election; Candidates Backed by Police & Teacher Unions Head to Runoff, Death Toll from Migrant Shipwreck Reaches 67 While Italy Cracks Down on, Student Debt Relief in Jeopardy as Conservative Supreme Court Justices Question Bidens Plan, Longest Alabama Strike Ends as Warrior Met Coal Miners Return. So I tried to look for work. They knew the difference between truth, lies and propaganda. And I can remember sitting back and thinking, This guy is not all there. And I did this sort of dive. is katharine gun still married to yasar. Her upbringing later led her to describe herself as a "third culture kid". AMY GOODMAN: And when did that come out? Its so great to have you all with us. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. I mean, I think we did feel that we journalisticallyyou know, we could have done more as a newspaper. GAVIN HOOD: This amazing lawyer, with great dignityElizabeth Wilmshurst, whos in the movie, Ralph Fiennes playing Ben Emmersonhas the cup of tea with her. is katharine gun still married to yasar. KATHARINE GUN: And also, Im justwell, whether its natural inclination or whether its what was kind of drummed into us at GCHQ, but it was, you know, this the sense of being private and not trusting journalists or people who are trying to ferret out information from you. There are familiar spy-movie pleasures to be had, too - one secret rendezvous between Ridley and Bright in a subterranean car park has . We are defending ourselves. [12] The Guardian newspaper had reported plans to drop the case the previous week. The story of Katharine Gun, a whistle-blower who exposed NSA spying in the lead-up to the Iraq War, gets the Hollywood treatment. You know, he couldntand it was the first time he had heard about it. Im Amy Goodman. is katharine gun still married to yasar. We didnt talk about politics much. "[22], In January, 2019, the film Official Secrets, recounting Gun's actions in 2003, received its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, with Keira Knightley playing Gun. Cada livro apresenta uma verso em multiformato para voc. You know, my initial instinct was Ive got to remain anonymous. In the film, Official Secrets, she is played by Keira Knightley. But she sails in with Gavin and comes straight up to me and goes, Oh, Katharine! and gives me a big hug. They said, Plead out., AMY GOODMAN: We dont want you to go to jail for years. The simple fact is, she says: Truth always matters at the end of the day., Official Secrets is released on 18 October. AMY GOODMAN: So, the Daily Mail, very sympathetic also to President Trump. So, in the film, when the director of public prosecutions says to Ben Emmerson, trying to wiggle out of it, Listen, it wasnt my decision to prosecute. Thats actually true. Yasur is a Turkish Kurd who is married to 47-year . - present) (1 child) And Mr.. At first they dont name you, but then they do. Together they have a 13-year-old daughter. . is katharine gun still married to yasar Shes ordinary. She continues to reside in Turkey and occasionally visits Britain. I mean, I dont think we imagined that we would be still friends and still talking about it 14, 15 years later. I felt awful. KATHARINE GUN: No, nothing atwell, they said they were arresting me on suspicion of breaking the Official Secrets Act. GAVIN HOOD: They failed. There have been other attempts to make a film over the years. It doesnt matter if you catch them out in a lie, because they dont care, because they lie as a matter of course, and they change what they say from day to day. It is not often that a persons character is revealed in two sentences. GAVIN HOOD: Thats exactly right. I mean, not the greatest decision of my life, I have to say. [5] While at work at GCHQ on 31 January 2003, Gun read an email from Frank Koza, the chief of staff at the "regional targets" division of the American signals intelligence agency, the National Security Agency.[7]. In Turkey, close to her husbands family, Gun and her partner, Yasar, could raise their child in peace. is katharine gun still married to yasar. After they charged me, thats when they tried to deport my husband. what happened to katharine gun husbandrequirements to be a ufc fighterrequirements to be a ufc fighter Yasur is a Turkish Kurd who is married to 47-year-old Katharine. AMY GOODMAN: So, theyre processing him. KATHARINE GUN: Mm-hmm. 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