 movie show, you know, here, here on a given Tuesday with George Kasin. George, welcome back to your show, the movie show. How you been? Thank you. I'm doing good, just busy. Am I all right? Okay, all right, good. Well, you're in school, you know, it always has an effect on things. So today in the movie show, we're gonna talk about official secrets. Official secrets is concerned with the violation of the Official Secrets Act of 1989 in Britain by a woman by the name of Kate Gunn. This is all true. And it's because of that, it's a fantastic movie. So George, my first question to you is, did you relate to her? Did you understand her? Did you understand what she was doing and why? I totally understand what she was doing. I totally understand her emotions, her feelings, her thoughts. Yeah, I mean, basically, she was saving her country from going to war unnecessarily for the nation, for Britain and for the United States. But I have my own feelings about what this was all about. When I was at university going for urban planning masters, all the professors would have on their doors, mobilization, mobile, M-O-B-I-L. It's all about oil. It was all about oil, Houston, Bush family. That was the point in this country, a lot of people opposed that war. And in Britain too, a lot of people were protesting that war. The whole thing was a charade, but at the time, and this is an honor to Colin Powell. The government wanted, the government under Bush wanted the war. And Colin Powell, he went along with it. He shouldn't have later recognized it was a huge mistake about fabricating these weapons of mass destruction. And that wasn't the only thing, that wasn't the only thing that Bush did in order to advance the war. The end of the movie, they give you the stats, right? 151,000 was the low estimate of how many Iraqis were killed. The high estimate was a million. The number of killed American troopers, what was it, 4,600? The number of wounded was much more than that. I want to say about 40,000 Americans were wounded and named and disabled for life. We learned about that. And it was a major war, major conflagration. And although we quote one end quote of the war, there were and there are real questions about we should have done that. They had nothing to do with 9-11. They had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Bush was trying to, they say, Bush was trying to finish unfinished work that his father had started and stopped at the advice of Colin Powell, by the way, back in the early 90s in Iraq. So, I mean, it's a shocking movie about the United States, isn't it? Yes, definitely still has considerations for today. I mean, so we can look back and try to take lessons from that. But Colin Powell was duped. I mean, I don't think he was part of this inner circle. They all knew Rumsfeld and all of them. They knew that this was not the truth. But as I said, there were personal interests involved here and not our national interests, but personal interests. And we'll get into that too a little more, if you'd like. Yeah, well, we talk a lot about the confidence of the American people and the American government. And although we quote one, the war, taking over Iraq and toppling the Sodom, ultimately, he gave his life. And I think most people really didn't appreciate it. Most people in this country, and they had great questions and they were seriously reserved about what the government was doing. And at the end of the day, they lost confidence in the government. They lost confidence in what Cheney and Rumsfeld, and for that matter, of course, Bush, who led the team. And this was kind of through the lens of one woman in her 20s by the name of Kate Gunn, who worked for the CGHQ, which was an intelligence organization in Britain, part of the British government. And this memo from, this is a really incredible story. This memo from somebody in the intelligence establishment in Washington, sent this memo to his counterpart. Maybe it was Tony Blair and said, you've got to come along with us. You've got to join our war effort. You should bring the UK in with us, even if you have reservations about the war. And Tony Blair was advised by his legal advisors not to do that, that the war would have been illegal without a vote of the EU, I think. And there was no agreement by the EU and nevertheless caused Britain to enter the war with George Bush, W. And so this memo became critical because this was proof that the American group of henchmen working for Bush was doing very manipulative things to force the UK, the government in Britain and other countries in Europe to join that war, even though there was no evidence of mass destruction. And there was no good reason for it. And they didn't agree, but he sort of twisted their arms, all of them including, you know, trying to get dirt on the individual representatives to the EU and use that to, you know, extort their votes. This memo was a reveal and through the eyes of this one woman who read the memo and said, holy moly, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. So what happened after she made that decision? Well, she had made the decision and she contacted a friend who was anti-war activist and she provided that memo to this friend. And then from there, it went to the news agencies, right? And they were thinking back and forth, should they reveal this, should they not? But eventually they did through the, they had their correspondent in Washington who was played by Raisi Fees or something like that. And he was really emphatic about, you know, revealing this and then finally they did reveal this. And then finally they did reveal it. And then- Well, let's talk for a moment about the reveal. You know, this is sort of like the Washington Post, you know, revealing what Nixon had done. You know, you always get in trouble when you reveal something that's embarrassing or the reveals against the law because it's, you know, an official secret. That's why the Official Secrets Act is so important here. So the remarkable thing is that they had this memo. It came from the anti-war activist, which is not necessarily a credible source. And they published it after a very strenuous argument in the editorial board. They decided to take the chance and publish it because although the newspaper had supported the war up until that point, this memo changed the mind of the editor. And it was a really good story. And he decided he'd go with it and take the risk, even though he might wind up in jail under the Official Secrets Act. So they published it and it hit the newsstands the next day in full. So remember what happened when it hit the newsstands? That was one of the most remarkable things in the movie. And in reality, do you remember what happened, George? The only thing I can remember is that right now is the Drudge Report came out and stated that some of the language was in the memo, a purported memo, was British way of speaking instead of English way of speaking. So that thing is like it was a fake kind of thing that come from anti-war activists. Yes, so the Americans were using American spelling like recognize and favorable. And the British spell those words differently. And somebody looked at it carefully as it appeared in the newspapers, oh, wait a minute. This is not the American way of spelling. This is the British way of spelling. This is a phony. And so all the interviews, I forget, Martin Bright was his name, the reporter at the London Observer newspaper was scheduled to do all these interviews with international cable news networks and the like. And they all canceled on him. And he found the reason was that they had decided it was a phony based on the spelling. So there was this very tense moment. This is also one of the high points of the movie. This very tense moment in the newsroom and the editorial newsroom of the Observer where the editor is shouting at top of his lungs. And they had the original memo which had the American spelling. And the editor is shouting to every corner of that newsroom. Who changed the spelling? Remember? Remember what happened? Yeah, it was one of the low level staffers that she used spell check. And in England with the spell check, it changed the spelling of some of these words to the British version. And that's what was released. So her drudge report, you know, drudge, back then he was really very powerful. He had put it on his drudge report and it was this big brouhaha. They thought they were all gonna get arrested. They were, you know, made them look really bad. And then finally that was the thing. So they released the original memo wording and then they knew it wasn't a fake. But she started crying, you know? She used spell check, you know? She just inadvertently figured, oh, I'll use spell check. I'll make sure everything's right before it goes out. She used spell check on original evidence. Why did you do that? Well, I always do that. That's my job. Exactly. That's what she, you know, it's like sometimes people get into this rote thing, you know, they don't think. And it's just their way of doing things that they're comfortable with that. So she did that. And it almost created a major, you know, thing. But then it was shown to be accurate. So now one of the things, like before we go on, Saddam Hussein, just as an aside, he was against al-Qaeda. He was against these jihadist groups. And by removing him, they became more powerful, you know? And that's what we're dealing with still. And then, you know, another quick aside, you know, we messed up in Iran. We got rid of Mossadegh. And then the British, Petroleum, British and Americans had brought down the Shah. You know, they eventually brought that because he was getting too powerful. And then you've got these crazies over there that want to blow up the nuclear bomb to Israel. So we create our own problems. And we should have, I mean, Saddam was a secularist. He was a bad guy. He was killing Kurds. You know, he was a horrible man. But by removing him, you unleashed these jihadists. So I mean, we create our own problems. Well, I'll leave it at that. You know, anything. You'll leave it at that, but none of those guys really, aside from Colin Powell, who should have known better, Rumsfeld and the vice president, Cheney, they didn't know better. They did not know. And I don't think Bush had done very well in school. And he didn't know that you want to topple somebody. You know, there's an after effect as a vacuum. What moves into the vacuum? I mean, it was predictable. And there were a lot of people writing stories about it and academic articles at the time, but he didn't listen to them. He had his own agenda. But going back to the story, so what is very interesting and it goes to the next movie I would like us to review is the British, how they handled this. The Official Secrets Act, very serious business, essentially espionage. And this woman with the wrong end of it, and she broke down in the investigation with the intelligence people. And she just told them, I can't stand the pressure anymore. I can't stand being a traitor like this. I did it. I revealed this to the anti-war group, and I broke the law. And it's in large part, the movie is her story. And I'm sure that the individual, the real Kate Gunn suffered a lot over this, but the actress was good. And furthermore, she was either living with or married to a Middle Eastern guy, remember? The Brits harassed her and him till the cows came home. They were just so mean. And I said to myself, gee, the Brits are always so courteous and treat people very nicely, etiquette, whatnot. No, not in this case, they were awful. And they ruined the lives of the two of them. Yeah, he was a Kurdish guy from Turkey that she was married to Yasir Gunn. And they made their, as you said, they made their life miserable. They were gonna deport him, even though he was married to a British citizen, you know, that creates the way to be a citizen. And they tormented them. And in the end, it says that they wanted to make an example of her, right? But British petroleum had, Saddam Hussein had nationalized the oil fields in Iraq. And that was the whole impetus for George Bush, as I had alluded to, his family's interests, their friends in Houston, corporate interests for oil. They wanted those oil fields back. So, and the same thing with British petroleum, that was the, those were the lobbying people, both in England and Britain and in America, that were pushing for this. So, yeah, and they made their lives miserable, you know? And the- But they threw her in jail. She was not really a flight risk or anything. She had confessed, they threw her in jail for a while, a long time. And they threw him out of the country or tried. They tried. They used his connections with some MP in Parliament to stay there, because there were people who were protesting. And I guess the great percentage of the British population were ticked off at her for violating the Official Secrets Act. But a lot of them agreed with her and thought that this war was illegal. And then one of the public defenders that they had to defend her, right? She said that I usually deal with petty criminals and she gave her the name of this liberty, which helps political prisoners, right? And then Ralph Fiennes became, the name was Ben in the movie, he became her attorney. And he was a very smart guy. I mean, the role that he was playing, thought of what can they say to put, so that she doesn't get to defend her. I mean, and they thought up this whole thing that they didn't know if it was gonna work, but it was that she was protecting her country, right? And if there was- Well, I think that's true. That is exactly what motivated her. So they fashioned a defense, which was a real long shot, because she'd already confessed that she did it and violated the Official Secrets Act. They fashioned the defense around her, her true thoughts that the war was illegal and what the government was doing and what the American government were doing that were all wrong and acting illegally. So his defense was faithful, but I remember that the lawyers in the room, right? Ralph Fiennes, who's brilliant actor, I'll never forget in Schindler's list, he played the role of the Nazi who woke up in the morning and shot the Jewish people who were working in the construction site, outside his window, for sport. He went hunting every morning with his rifle from his window. He was so mean in that Schindler's list, he was extraordinary. But in this movie, he was also extraordinary. He played the role of a lawyer. His acting in this movie was out of this world. It was elegant. It was understated elegance. And you could really see him as the perfect lawyer for the case. They had a big argument. Remember with his staff, his staff said, you got a pleader guilty and take what comes. And he said, no, we can't do that. We're not gonna do that. We're gonna have a defense. We're gonna plead her not guilty even though it's complicated. And he did. That was extraordinary too. The whole legal aspect of this is a lawyer's dream movie, don't you think? Yes. And one of the interesting things with the prosecuting attorney, the prosecutor, right, was a close friend of Ben, who was the role that was being played by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes. Fiennes. Fiennes. And they showed the interaction on the beach. The two of them are fishing at the end. Ralph Fiennes is really angry at his friend. But what they did is at the end, and maybe I'm jumping the gun, is that they dropped the gun. You're jumping the gun. Okay, yeah. So they're harassing her. They're on a public relations campaign against her. There's this Martin Bright person for the observer trying to help her defend her. The anti-war people are trying to help her, but she's in terrible shape and she sticks with it. And she does, you know, ultimately, I think I'm not sure if she was in jail at the end or not, but there's this long walk under the British courthouse in the dungeons and alleys of the building. And she's walking through the tunnel there to come up into what everybody thinks is this fine British example of justice. But in order to get there, you really had to go through the dungeons. And she comes up there and the prosecutor has got a confession in his pocket. And Ralph Fiennes has got the defense of, quote, necessity, end quote, which you can see how twisted that is, to argue that she did it because she felt the war was illegal. And there was no defense like that in the law, no defense like that in the Official Secrets Act of 1989. But that was his defense. And then there's this remarkable, remarkable scene. It's enough to give you chills and spills for a week. What happened? Yeah. Well, the prosecuting, the prosecutor, right? The British government had decided to drop the case, you know, literally let her off, you know, after tormenting her and her husband for over a year or something. Then they, so in the courtroom, you see the judge, right? And the judge who knows the precedents, you know, he's talking about Official Secrets Act. And he says, this is the Official Secrets Act. But then the prosecutor, you know, prosecuting attorney, prosecutor, the British government, as I said, had decided to drop the case. So that's the thing, you know, that you don't expect, right? Is that the case is gonna be dropped and she's a free person again. But she, you know, as Ralph Fiennes has said to his buddy, former buddy on the beach, you put her through hell and her husband through hell for a whole year. And he said, well, we wanted to make an example of her, right? So, you know, and by that time, they knew that there was no weapons of mass destruction. We had gone into Iraq and there were no weapons of mass destruction. So this whole thing was fake, you know? It wasn't a real war. It was a war, as I had said, to help oil interests in America and in Britain. And that was what it was all about. And all those people who died, not only Iraqis, but American soldiers and, you know, who died and got maimed, we send our young men and women to war to get killed for who's interests, for the interests of our oil interests, right? In this case and other, you know, lobbyists, powerful interests, that's what we're preserving, you know? Instead of, I mean, all these young kids, they don't, they're young, they do crazy things, you know? They think they're invincible and they get killed. So the whole thing is, there's still lessons for today. We're still dealing with this. Now Bolton wants to go to Iran and blow them up, you know? I would like to see regime change in Iran, you know? But we're gonna go, do we have to go to war to do that? I guess, you know? So there's pluses, you know, in certain cases, but war really is just brutal. Well, that's a big point here. The war was brutal. These guys were playing with the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And it was all on a lie. And they were using the worst strategies of manipulation and lying to each other and forcing each other into a war that was not justified. You know, it reminds me of the Tonkin Gulf incident way back when that got us into Vietnam. Not clear that we needed to go to war in Vietnam. It was the claim that we were attacked and our naval vessels were attacked in the Tonkin Gulf. And it wasn't true. At least a lot of people don't feel it was true. And then we spent 50,000 American lives fighting Vietnam and we were embarrassed at the end and it lost the confidence of the people. It lost the generation that might have been confident in America and they weren't, they aren't. It changed the course of history. And so did the war in Iraq without any weapons of mass. You knew, I knew as it was unfolding in the press and the press knew and the students knew and academia knew and anyone who really read it knew that this was phony. There were no weapons of mass destruction and yet the White House, you know, pushed this thing. And that's why this movie is so important because it talks about a turning point, you know, a tipping point in confidence by Britain and by the US in government into a war where hundreds of thousands of people died really unnecessarily, as you said. So very powerful. It also, you know, to me, and I want to suggest another movie that covers this dynamic in Britain. They were really mean to, what was her name? Jan Gunn. Catherine. Catherine Harwood Gunn. Yeah, Catherine Gunn. By the way, they showed a picture of her at the end of the real Catherine Gunn. And as she came out of that scene in the courthouse. And she was sort of just like the actress, except she was blonde, the actress wasn't blonde. But she had the same style, same way of speaking. And you could see in her the things that had been portrayed by her actor in the movie. But I thought the Brits were really hard on her unnecessarily so. And they didn't mind, you know, making life impossible for her. And I thought, you know, is this really the Brits? And the answer in part is found in the next movie I would like to review with you called Sardar Udam. It's about an Indian man who is part of a group that is still trying to do vengeance for the great massacre of 1919, where an enormous number of people, 20,000 people were killed, defenseless people were killed by the Brits. And he's trying to do vengeance on that. And you can see how the Brits were into torture, including waterboarding. They tortured anyone they thought had information for them, whether they had a good reason to think that or not. And that was in the late 30s, 20 years after the massacre. So now here we are in the 2003, whatever it was, 2004, during the Iraq War. They're also mean, not as mean, but mean. And it just changes your view of how British justice works. Everybody's very polite. Then they take them down in the basement, beat them up. This is troublesome. The whole thing is troublesome. But I'll tell you, I went back and I looked at that last five minutes of the movie. And we've given it away already, but it was so powerful. She doesn't know what's going to happen to her. She's ready to go to jail for life. In fact, I don't even know. I didn't have a capital punishment. She could have gone to jail for life under that statute. And she had confessed. And the prosecutor was ready to go. He never telegraphed anything about his intentions or the crown's change of heart. And the judge says, OK, proceed. And he says, sorry, Judge, we aren't going to introduce any evidence. Judge says, what? You have a confession. You know, how about proceeding? No, we're not going to do it. Why are you not going to do it? You have a duty to the British people to proceed with this case. You're not going to introduce even the confession? Nothing? She says, yes, the crown has changed its mind. After a year, it's not going to prosecute this case. Why not? And this is really incredible interplay between the two lawyers. Well, Ralph Fine says to him, you know, we think it's because you don't want to reveal the papers we have subpoenaed from you. You don't want to tell us what happened and how the people around Tony Blair were telling him this war was illegal. We think you don't want to talk about that. And the judge says to with a prosecutor, yeah, what is it? Why don't you want to talk about that? What's going on here? And the prosecutor, who is the lead prosecutor for the crown? Something like, I've said all I'm going to say, we're simply not going to prosecute. And the judge says, OK, OK, Catherine Gunn. And this was the part where it just blew your mind. He says, you're free to go. Yep. What an amazing close that was. It's worth watching a movie for the last five minutes. Keira Knightley played that role of Catherine Harwood Gunn brilliantly. She's a good, really good actress. Yeah. Portrays the emotional strain. She kind of represents all of us. She didn't want to hurt anybody. She just couldn't stand the idea that all these people were going to get killed in a war that wasn't justified. It really bothered her. And in a moment of strength, I suppose, otherwise others would say weakness. She went for it and she turned this thing over. She had second thoughts later. She is a John Q. Everyman character. She could be us. We could any of us find ourselves in that predicament. She was not a professional security person for Britain. She'd only been there kind of as a backwater, a rather a backstop job, a secondary type of choice for a job for less than two years. She could have been any of us. That was her conscience. And she went with what she felt. And luckily, she was released. Otherwise, she would have, as you said, she would have been in prison for life under that Official Secrets Act. Well, it talks about courage, doesn't it? I mean, part of the Trump administration is the people who went along with him, who he bullied it to go along with him, they didn't have courage. Some of them had courage later after it was too late, which I don't appreciate that really. I don't think any of us should appreciate that. But it's a story of, it reminds me of Ann Applebaum's article about how Eastern Europe folded to the communists after World War II. And it was based on fear. It was based on a lack of courage. And that was what this ordinary middle class, middle 20s person exhibited, courage. And that's what people should have exhibited in the Trump administration, courage. And that's how we save the democracy now, standing up to power, courage. That's why the movie is so powerful, George. Yes, that's how it's very much apropos for today with what's going on with Donald Trump saying that he won the election. And all his cronies are a majority, except for a few that have really courage, like Lynn Cheney, are saying that, no, he's got everybody because of fear on that side of the aisle, that they just shut up and let him say his stupid, I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, they did that thing in Arizona and Biden had more votes when the recount. So I mean, this movie is very good for what's going on today as you have alluded to, totally. Yeah, well, that's why I like these documentaries based on true stories, where they try to be faithful to what happened. And I'm sure they're thinking of these same issues when they put the movie together. They're thinking of why are the Brits being so hard on her? Why are they being so mean? They're thinking of the failure of the morality in the British government at the time. As one very senior, who was the prime minister or something made a comment, no, it was an admiral, an admiral who was gonna lead the British forces or supervise the war when the war happened. And he makes this very central statement. He said something like, it's one thing to reveal official secrets when it's necessary for the conduct of the military. But when it's just a matter of embarrassing a politician, it shouldn't apply at all. And that's the central theme in the movie. Exactly, exactly. She was even saying, Tony Blair's on the TV and she says, oh, garbage, what he's saying. That's what really got her so ticked off is when he gets up there on the TV and he's claiming things and she knew what were untrue. Most of the Brits knew what were untrue and she was gonna do something about it and she did something about it. As you said, she was thinking back and forth, should she, should she not? And then she just got the, I think when she saw Tony Blair on the TV, that's what got her goat, she's gonna go and do it and she did it. And that's why that final scene is so powerful because she's vindicated and she's a hero to the British people. And they appreciated it. They extolled her virtue at the end that she was vindicated. But the whole movie is a statement of how government lies to us. And we should not tolerate that. That's what it's about. In this case, in this one case, she was vindicated, came out a hero. It was worth the risk that she took, which was a huge risk. And it spoke well ultimately of the British government, ultimately, but I think the message is, we cannot tolerate government lying to us. We cannot tolerate that. Yes, totally agree. Yeah. Anyway, George, we're out of time here, but I hope we can do Sardar Udam, which is another statement of the British government in the 30s and how they conducted themselves against this Indian person who was mighty offended by the murder of 20,000 defenseless Indians. And I hope you can take a look at that. We can compare notes on it later on. Thank you, George. George Kacen, this is what we need to do. Examine movies like this in the context of current events. Thank you so much, George. Thank you, Jay, for all your thoughts as well. Aloha. Aloha.