Fair Game
starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Noah Emmerich, Michael Kelly, Bruce McGill, David Andres and Sam Shepard
screenplay by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth
directed by Doug Liman (also Director of Photography)
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
The purpose of a disinformation campaign is first to mislead the public and, second, to confuse the public. Perhaps we can say it does the former by accomplishing the latter.
Based on the books The Politics of Truth by Joseph Wilson and Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson Fair Game tells the true story of the outing by Bush Administration officials of CIA foreign operations director Valerie Plame in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Revealing the identity of a covert public servant like Plame was illegal, and White House staffer Scooter Libby was sentenced to prison and fined for it. I remember when all this was in the news. In a New York Times opinion article Plame’s husband, former United States Ambassador to Niger Joseph Wilson, challenged the Bush Administration’s claims of a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program in Iraq that was the President’ primary explanation for his illegal war. Wilsonought to have known, since he was/is an expert on Niger, and the government’s case citing huge sales of “yellowcake” uranium from that country to Iraq as the source of nuclear materials for its weapons program was both unlikely and unsubstantiated. But leaders of the Bush administration - VP Dick Chenney, Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other “neo-cons” - cherry picked intelligence, twisted facts, and just plain lied to justify their unprovoked, premeditated invasion of Iraq.
Several things. First, we know from U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix who was on the ground in Iraq with his inspection teach before the March 2003 invasion that there were no WMDs there. That was the assessment of most CIA analysts at the time. econd, to deliberately smother any war dissent at home Republican Party White House staff purposely intended to destroy the careers both of Agent Plame and her husband through a disinformation campaign. Now, remember that the entire case for the invasion and war in Iraq rested on disinformation in top of the post 9/11 terrorist attack hysteria to begin with. So the already ill-informed American public was primed for all kinds of stupidity.
The canard always trucked out by intelligence and security people is “Can you 100% guarantee that there are no WMDs/ terrorists/risks to American lives?” Etc. Of course, there are no guarantees. But any such admission by Bush administration policy dissenters is used as the wedge by scare mongerers to pave the way for official torture, domestic spying, suspension of habeus corpus, suspension of civil rights in general, etc.
After the disinformation campaign comes the personal character assassination - accusations that Plame was a third-rate, incompetent agent, and so on.
What country on earth, better than the United States, can be described as a “rogue nation”? And what organization constitutes a “global terror network” better than the Pentagon?
God, I’m so happy I’m not an American.
But I could be wrong.