Hollywood Hit Job: 'Fair Game' Propagates Easily Disprovable Myths About Lead Up to Iraq War
BY JAMIE WEINSTEIN
It is an equation that is as certain as two plus two equals four: Sean Penn + Iraq War + Hollywood movie = something less than the truth.
And so it is with director Doug Liman’s “Fair Game,” starring Penn and released last Friday, despite Liman’s contention that he made strenuous efforts to depict only those claims he could back up. “I exercised the kind of restraint you don’t normally see from a Hollywood filmmaker,” Liman told The Daily Caller in an interview Monday. “I stuck to the facts.”
Background
The movie bills itself as “inspired by true events” and frames itself around the Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame affair. Wilson, played by Penn, was the former American diplomat sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for its purported nuclear weapons program from the African country.
The results of Wilson’s trip were viewed as largely meaningless by the CIA. But months after President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address in 2003 in the lead up to the Iraq War that British intelligence believed that Iraq had been seeking uranium from Africa, Wilson sprung into action — claiming that he disproved the possibility of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal and suggesting the Bush administration may have been intentionally using dubious intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.
By the time Wilson began talking to the press, the Iraq War had begun and the American people were becoming disturbed that no Weapons of Mass Destruction had yet been found. In July 2003, Wilson famously wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “What I didn’t find in Africa,” suggesting perfidy on the part of the Bush administration.
After the op-ed appeared, the late columnist Robert Novak wrote a column indicating that sources told him that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame (played in the movie by Naomi Watts), was a CIA operative that recommended Wilson be sent to Niger. The revelation led the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to Novak since intentionally revealing a covert operative’s identity is a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
The special prosecutor discovered early on that the main source for Novak’s article was State Department official Richard Armitage. Ironically, despite claims that the revelation of Wilson’s wife’s name was done by Bush administration proponents of the Iraq War seeking to discredit Wilson and his claims, Armitage was against going to war in Iraq, at least at the time the Bush administration initiated the invasion. (Novak, too, was an ardent opponent of the Iraq War.)
You wouldn’t know this by watching Liman’s “Fair Game,” since Armitage is nowhere to be found — except in script at the very end. The narrative that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby were nefarious behind-the-scenes players intent on destroying innocent reputations while pushing the nation into war on false pretenses fits too nicely into Liman and Hollywood’s leftwing vision. You can’t, after all, let facts spoil a cinematic anti-Bush diatribe.
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Comments :
Aug '10
Re: Hollywood Hit Job: 'Fair Game' Propagates Easily Disprovable Myths About Lead Up to Iraq War
Most of the story has been disproved already, why put out the movie ? It'll do as well as the rest of the anti-American genre. Most of the movies were based on mistaken premises or lies told in the media. Haditha, Fallujah and the rest have grossed a total of $18.37 so far and Hollywood accounting has provided sufficient losses to offset whatever taxes due on the money they made cutting kids up in Saw thru Saw 22, The Sharpening (and new handle).
That Armitage wasn't in the movie makes it a bald-faced lie. Who pays for that ?
Only way this movie is watched is when the NEA orders copies for every public school in America like Inconvenient Truth and Supersize Me ( now standard mandatory watching in public and parochial schools).
I smell Oscar
Meyer.
Edited on Nov 11, 2010 at 12:39pmJul '10
Re: Hollywood Hit Job: 'Fair Game' Propagates Easily Disprovable Myths About Lead Up to Iraq War
The one question that has always been lost in all this hoopla and smoke and mirrors following the release of Plame's name in the article in question was the original question asked to which the name Valerie Plame and her position was the answer.
.
Q: How did they end up picking such an incompetent idiot to go and investigate the allegations that the Nigerian Government were selling Yellow Cake to Iraq?
A: Nepotism, his wife works for the CIA as an analyst and she recommended him.
Jun '10
Re: Hollywood Hit Job: 'Fair Game' Propagates Easily Disprovable Myths About Lead Up to Iraq War
Here's a ditty I wrote back in the day.
Tea in Niger
Pour out my dear
I like mine clear
No milk to befog
In this political smog
Among the scones, tarts and pies
Who’ll spot the political lies
Ah! Devonshire cream
This must be a dream
Lather on the jams and jellies
It’s the politics of full bellies
Dibs on the last crumpet
Bids the Vanity Fair strumpet
What’s that at the end of the tray
Yellow cake, you don’t say
Alas, time to leave this resort
And write my CIA report
All the rest, as they say, is history
Armitage dispelled the mystery
Or was it Wilson to Corn
Big mouth to lowly inkhorn
Oh! what a bummer
Ain’t no Fitzmas this summer
Rove’s out of the jam
Powell’s on the lam
We’re done with Plame
And her fifteen minutes of fame
Edited to try and kill the double spacing between lines.
Edited on Nov 11, 2010 at 3:49pmAug '10
Re: Hollywood Hit Job: 'Fair Game' Propagates Easily Disprovable Myths About Lead Up to Iraq War
If they don't want to lose as much money as every anti-Bush screed film does, they better give Naomi Watts a nude scene.