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Iraq war: Conscience and media evasion
Comment
Norman Solomon
OF course Katharine Gun was free to have a conscience — as long as
it didn’t interfere with her work at a British intelligence agency.
To the authorities, practically speaking, a conscience was apt to be
less tangible than a pixel on a computer screen. But suddenly — one
routine morning in early 2003, while she was scrolling through
e-mail at her desk — conscience struck. It changed Katharine Gun’s
life, and it changed history.
Despite the nationality of this young Englishwoman, her story is
profoundly American — all the more so because it has remained
largely hidden from the public in the United States. When Katharine
Gun chose, at great personal risk, to reveal an illicit spying
operation at the United Nations in which the US government was the
senior partner, she brought out of the trans-Atlantic shadows a
special relationship that could not stand the light of day.
By then, the president of the United States — with dogged assists
from the British prime minister following close behind — had long
since become transparently determined to launch an invasion of Iraq.
Gun’s moral concerns were not unusual; she shared, with countless
other Brits and Americans, strong opposition to the impending launch
of war. Yet, thanks to a simple and intricate twist of fate, she
abruptly found herself in a rare position to throw a roadblock in
the way of the political march to war from Washington and London.
Far more extraordinary, though, was her decision to put herself in
serious jeopardy on behalf of revealing salient truths to the world.
The e-mailed memorandum from the US National Security Agency that
jarred Katharine Gun that fateful morning was dated less than two
months before the invasion of Iraq that was to result in thousands
of deaths among the occupying troops and hundreds of thousands more
among Iraqi people. We’re told that this is a cynical era, but there
was nothing cynical about Katharine Gun’s response to the memo that
appeared without warning on her desktop. Reasons to shrug it off
were plentiful, in keeping with bottomless rationales for prudent
inaction. The basis for moral engagement and commensurate action was
singular.
The import of the NSA memo was such that it shook the government of
Tony Blair and caused uproars on several continents. But for the
media in the United States, it was a minor story. For The New York
Times, it was no story at all. In a time when political players and
widely esteemed journalists are pleased to posture with affects of
great sophistication, Katharine Gun’s response was disarmingly
simple. She activated her conscience when clear evidence came into
her hands that war — not diplomacy seeking to prevent it — headed
the priorities list of top leaders at both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
and 10 Downing Street.
Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, the authors of the new book “The Spy Who
Tried to Stop a War,” describe the scenario this way: “Twisting the
arms of the recalcitrant (UN Security Council) representatives in
order to win approval for a new resolution could supply the
universally acceptable rationale.” After Katharine Gun discovered
what was afoot, “she attempted to stop a war by destroying its
potential trigger mechanism, the required second resolution that
would make war legal.”
Instead of mere accusation, the NSA memo provided substantiation.
That fact explains why US intelligence agencies firmly stonewalled
in response to media inquiries — and it may also help to explain why
the US news media gave the story notably short shrift.
To a significant degree, the scoop did not reverberate inside the
American media echo chamber because it was too sharply telling to
blend into the dominant orchestrated themes. Overall, to the editors
of American mass media, the actions and revelations of Katharine Gun
merited little or no reporting — especially when they mattered most.
My search of the comprehensive LexisNexis database found that for
nearly three months after her name was first reported in the British
media, US news stories mentioning her scarcely existed.
When the prosecution of Katharine Gun finally concluded its journey
through the British court system, the authors of the new book about
her note, a surge of American news reports on the closing case “had
people wondering why they hadn’t heard about the NSA spy operation
at the beginning.”—Arab News
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