Artificial Intelligence
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| Truth seeker - Carmel Travers |
It was a “spooky” atmosphere in which madness
prevailed says writer, director Carmel Travers when the seeds of her latest
documentary Truth, Lies &
Intelligence were first laid.
Rewind to March 2003, Australians were being
warned to ‘Be Alert, Not Alarmed’ as the Government poised troops to join their
US and British counterparts in the invasion of Iraq. Senior Intelligence
Officer Andrew Wilkie resigned from the Office of National Assessment with the
prescient view that a war based on questionable intelligence would lead to a
humanitarian disaster.
“In that couple of months after Wilkie resigned
everyone was swept away with the events of the war,” says Travers.
“It was as if people had forgotten the warnings that
he was uttering, as were other intelligence analysts in the United States and
the UK that ‘Hold on, we don’t really have proof of weapons of mass destruction’.”
Truth, Lies and Intelligence is an incisive investigation into how
erroneous intelligence was used by the US led coalition of the willing to
reconstruct the truth as an agenda for the Iraqi invasion. It explores the
aftermath and lifts the veil on the intelligence community which became a
scapegoat to what could be “the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam”.
Travers secured interviews with top level
intelligence analysts, including retired US State Department Intelligence Chief
Greg Thielman (a direct advisor to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell),
US Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Wilkie, all of whom confirm that there was no
concrete evidence that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction or had
any link to the 9/11 attacks.
She acknowledges the courage it took these
whistleblowers, few of which have escaped vilification, to convey their knowledge
on film. At times during the documentary, the strain becomes awkwardly
apparent.
“Their personal lives had been thrown into turmoil.”
says Travers.
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| Scapegoat - US Ambassador Joseph Wilson |
“That was certainly the case with US Ambassador
Joseph Wilson, not only had he been publicly vilified but his wife had been
outed as a covert CIA agent which forced her to resign. How often do they
really want another film crew to come into their lounge rooms?”
The documentary shifts gears from the political to
the deeply personal as Travers accompanies Sydney based Iraqi refugee Guzin
Najim back to Iraq in what ultimately becomes an aborted attempt to enter
Baghdad. Here Najim spent three years under house arrest and a further three in
Jordan, after her diplomat husband was killed on Saddam Hussein’s orders.
“I decided to include someone like Guzin Najim
because she came at it from a completely different perspective to say an
Australian woman like me,” says Travers.
“She was prepared to kiss the feet of George Bush for
going into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein. She didn’t care what the reason
might have been behind doing that. It was really important to me to not just be
sailing off on my own western liberal bandwagon but to actually stop and listen
to the point of view of someone like Guzin.”
Travers whose credits include the ground breaking
science series Beyond 2000 and the
award winning documentaries Refugee Like
Me and Climate In Crisis, says
she was compelled to make the film because of her own “instinctive disbelief”
in the Australian Government’s claims that Iraq posed a national security
threat.
“It was this whole question of what happens to the
truth when you have clear government policy imperatives that seem to be so
determined to push us to engage in a conflict?” she says.
“I felt that yet again as with Operation Desert Storm
we were not going to be told the truth.”
The director admits she feels vindicated that the
views expressed in the film have been corroborated by high level independent
inquiries in Australia, Britain and the US. But in the end, Travers says she’s
disappointed the documentary couldn’t find a more positive outcome, that for
Iraqi nationals like Najim, their country’s future remains bleaker than ever.
“What resolution has there been for Guzin? Absolutely
none. It’s been ten years since she left Iraq and I don’t think that she really
will get any resolution until she finds a patch of earth north of Baghdad where
she allows herself to believe that her husband’s been buried.”
This article was first published in The Guide, Sydney Morning Herald, September 5, 2005.
