Official Secrets (9/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 112 minutes

R

Despite having control of both houses of Congress for six years, George Bush II did nothing about the border crisis, nothing about the subprime mortgage crises, and blew up the balanced budget he inherited from the Clinton/Gingrich pairing by his inept handling of the financing for the war he started.

Yes, then there’s the war. It was ill-advised, totally uncalled for, and upset the balance in the Mideast that pitted Iraq’s Sunnis against Iran’s Shiites. In the late 20^th century they had fought a war against one another that cost over a million lives.

Why did America go to war against Saddam Hussein…again? In the first war the ostensible reason was that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Bush I got together a coalition that defended Kuwait. But what was the reason that Bush II started another war against Iraq? The pretext was that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” Bush was trying to get the UN Security Council to pass a resolution authorizing military action. In fact, of course, there were no weapons of mass destruction. It was a pretext as lame as Lyndon Johnson’s pretext for escalating the Vietnam War in 1964 by fabricating an attack on U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf, which never happened.

Enter Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a British translator for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency, who was married to an immigrant Muslim, and who was against the war that was being discussed in 2003. Gun’s job was to translate documents from Mandarin Chinese into English. But she ran across an email from Frank Koza, the chief of staff at the regional targets division of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), that requested aid in illegally wiretapping the offices of six small nations who appeared to be swing votes that could determine the outcome of a resolution before the U.N. Security Council to approve an invasion.

In order to stop the march to war, and at enormous personal risk to her, she leaked the top secret information to a friend who could get it to a journalist. The story was soon reported in “The Observer,” a left wing newspaper and all hell broke loose.

While this is not a documentary, but a scripted film, it shows archival films of Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell mouthing what we now know to be falsehoods in their effort to get the war on track.

Directed by Gavin Hood (who directed Eye in the Sky, which was the second best film I saw in 2016) from a script by Gregory and Sara Bernstein based on the book “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion” by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, the acting is outstanding, highlighted by Knightley and Ralph Fiennes as her dogged attorney, Ben Emmerson.

It’s chancy to believe history as told by motion pictures, but this film seems right on. More important, it is one of the most entertaining and captivating films I’ve seen so far this year.