TV Feature: Truth, Lies & Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

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.

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.