XDA

Here is a very instructive piece by Hawkish Cliff May at NRO which includes these forgotten, by me, bits of history:

It’s also important to point out that Novak did not report that Plame had ever worked in a covert capacity. He later told me and others that he had assumed she was merely a desk-bound analyst and, had he been aware she was more than that, he would have steered clear. I believe he was telling the truth. Do Pincus and Leiby think he was lying? I’d ask them to make that clear as well.

So how did the public learn that Plame had been undercover? David Corn revealed that in a story in the leftwing magazine The Nation. I remain convinced that Corn’s unnamed source was Joe Wilson, who had received an award from a group associated with The Nation for — can you guess? — “truth-telling.” Wilson also had written for The Nation, accusing President Bush of having “imperial ambitions.”

[...]

On the silver screen, Plame attempts to exfiltrate Iraqi scientists who know for certain that Saddam has no nuclear-weapons program only to have her CIA handlers shut down her mission. This is pure fiction, but savor the irony: Too many in the CIA worked diligently to undermine President Bush — the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate saying Iran’s nuclear-weapons program had been halted is only the most infamous example — but in the movie, the CIA protects Bush and betrays Plame.

By the way: As Quin Hillyer pointed out in The American Spectator, Plame’s own memoir suggests she was among the many intelligence analysts — at the CIA and other agencies — who were convinced that Saddam was still developing weapons of mass destruction.

She was in good company: The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate concluded with “high confidence” that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear program. Former vice president Al Gore and then-senator Hillary Clinton believed that. Senator Ted Kennedy said: “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”

As for Wilson, prior to the U.S. intervention, he told Dave Marash, then a reporter for ABC News, that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might “use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have.” That was his argument against the war: not that Saddam did not have WMD but that it would be dangerous for American troops to face them.

Fair Game, the film, is not fair. It slanders innocent people caught in a web spun by Joe Wilson to flatter his vanity and that of his wife. But what can you expect from Hollywood?

Here is a video discussion with Lionel Chetwynd and Roger L. Simon. Very sound criticism.

Here are the weekend estimated receipts. Not only did they go down, again, (60% fall off in revenue) but the number of theaters showing it declined as well ( by 35%). Another leftist fantasy bites the dust blown from the trash heap of history.

Labels: Fair Game