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Fair Game

Naomi Watts, Sean Penn

If Barack Hussein Obama, or someone in his administration, had outed a covert CIA agent, at best we would be watching something akin to a scene from Frankenstein with Republicans marching on the White House, pitchforks in hand, especially if that exposure resulted in the murders of innocent people. That is exactly what George W. Bush’s boys, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove did. Those flag waving, country loving bastions of morality in a petty move made the identity of a covert agent, Valerie Plame, and literarily have blood on their hands. Rove and Cheney should be strapped to a table, having a man in a white coat inject them with sleepy juice. And before I get any of that Ann Coulter/Fox News garbage that Plame was just a glorified paper pusher, while much of her time in the CIA is top secret, she was an undercover agent in Athens and Brussels where she gathered covert information and recruited information.

How can I say that these red, white, and blue Americans are criminals? They are responsible for the deaths of people who put their necks on the line for this country and they did it all in the name of politics. On July 14, 2003, bottom dwelling, Republican toadie Robert Novak, in newspaper column, mentioned the name of the front company that the CIA established as a cover for Plame: Brewster Jennings & Associates. Now I know this is going to be hard for some of you, because you love the GOP more than your country, but take a step back for a second and pretend that you are a foreign diplomat or agent who is unfriendly with the United States. You sit down for breakfast, your favorite bowl of cereal and a big glass of orange juice or whatever trips your trigger. You pick up the newspaper and there is Robert Novak’s column. He gives Plame’s name and even mentions the cover company she worked for. What do you do? I don’t know about you, but I am calling back to whatever tetanus filled place I call home. I’d be getting my spooks on the phone, you know the guys who make Sayid Jarrah from “Lost” look like a boy scout. I am telling them to check out if a “Valerie Plame” or anyone associated with Brewster Jennings & Associates has ever visited our country, pretty easy to do with passports and the like. Then I’d round up anyone who has been associated with, or had any contact with Plame, or her company, and put the thumbscrews to them until they sing like they are a member of the Village People. If you don’t think this happened you are either naïve or such a participant that your dream in life is to go to a Bedtime for Bonzo fantasy camp. What makes this affair even sadder and more ironic is that Plame was in charge of the task force looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Irony my name is Bush.

While Karl Rove denies he said it, what made the administration consider Valerie Plame “fair game?” In 2002, for a myriad of reasons the administration decided that they wanted to go to war with Iraq. The best way to sell this pig in a wedding dress to the American people was to drum up the notion that Saddam Hussein had chemical and nuclear weapons that could be used against the United States. We did “not want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The American people wanted an eye for an eye for 9/11. Never mind that Hussein also hated religious extremists and Iraq had nothing to do with Ground Zero. We were going to war so break out the flags and the yellow ribbons. One little problem, even though Sean Hannity thinks that there were these mysterious caravans of trucks, that somehow evaded our intelligence and satellites, taking these weapons to Syria. Like unicorns farting rainbows out their backsides, they did not exist.

Now, this is where the political motivation clashed with the intelligence gathering and evaluations operations of this nation. The CIA had let a big, fat one go by them when the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Bushies were not going to let that happen again. The politicians put pressure on the agency to give them what they wanted. It was in this atmosphere that Vice President Dick Cheney operated. A piece of information that the White House had been given was an allegation that Iraq had bought yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger. Strangely, the person best equipped to find out if this was true was Joseph Wilson, who had been a diplomat in the region under President George H.W. Bush, and been an assistant to President Clinton requiring security matters. He was also Valerie Plame’s husband. After visiting Niger, Wilson filed a report stating that there “was nothing to the story.”

End of story. Boat drinks for everyone. One little problem, sixteen little words. On January 28, 2003, in his State of the Union Address, the President intoned, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Incensed, Wilson wrote a series of op-eds questioning if Bush and his underlings were less than truthful about the intelligence they were claiming as fact, that they "exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Soon afterwards, CIA Director George Tenet admitted as much stating, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.”

At some point after his “What I Did Not Find In Africa” op-eds started to appear, officials in the White House decided that Wilson needed to be discredited. It was decided that the best way of doing this was to claim he was not really qualified to make such an assessment, that his being sent on such a mission was a clear case of nepotism. His wife, not the Vice President, had sent him. Valerie’s name was floated to several columnists. Novak was the first to jump at the bait. What they simply saw as a game of politics was more serious than they realized. In September, the CIA requested that the Department of Justice (DoJ) investigate how Plame’s name had been made public. The DoJ turned the matter over to the FBI. A special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was named and a grand jury convened. Fitzgerald was unable to get to the bottom of the conspiracy because of administration officials lying. So he did the only thing he felt he could do. He indicted the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff, I. Lewis Libby, on five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements. Convicted, facing a 30 month stint in prison, and a $250,000 fine, President Bush, backtracked on previous statements and commuted the sentence. Although the felony conviction remained on his record, Libby hooked up with the conservative Hudson Institute. The fact that he did not receive a full pardon became an issue between the President and Cheney.

Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame’s autobiography, retells this story. Sean Penn and Naomi Watts play Wilson and Plame in this political thriller. Yet, the problem with the movie unlike other films in this genre, there are no action scenes to keep the movie moving along. Instead, Fair Game is a serious drama with two of the best actors in Hollywood. The problem is, like the rash of Iraq War based movies, I do not see audiences wanting to go see the film. The few people who go to see it already have there minds made up… much like people did when the scandal broke out in the first place. My political perspectives are clear, but I believe that I am fair. One of the things that I do is ask myself how would I react if someone with a similar political leaning did the same thing as what I am outraged by. What if Barack Obama’s staff had outed a CIA agent? Would I defend him blindly or be outraged? Too often people treat their political party like a beloved sports team. Right or wrong they are my team. The problem is we should only have one team, America.

Verdict: Great Acting. An Alright Movie That No One Will See