Needlenose

The Huffington Post , among other sources, reported a couple of days ago that

“Fair Game,” the film about former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and the Bush administration’s leaks about her identity, is set to premiere May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn play Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Doug Liman, the producer behind the Bourne franchise, directed “Fair Game.”

Based on Plame’s 2007 memoirs “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,” “Fair Game” is the only U.S. film in the running for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.

The film’s trailer hasn’t made it online, but the clip below was posted to the festival’s web site.

The clip (posted above), though, raises questions about just how faithful the adaptation was.  As summarized by Greg Mitchell for the Nation:

It finds the couple–Naomi Watts and Sean Penn–in a playground with their kids running about, as Penn angrily confronts his wife over what he has just learned: that she may have written something that got him “sent” to Africa on that famous uranium fact-seeking mission related to Iraq WMD.

In the scene, she denies that she did that as he claims that if this gets out his career is ruined, and asks her to speak out. She suggests that maybe he did not think of his family first when he wrote that New York Times op-ed that drew so much attention…

Curiously, I don’t remember any of those moments being recounted in either Valerie or Joseph Wilson’s memoirs (on page 139 of her book, Valerie writes, “at no time did Joe or I ever consider that my cover and work at the CIA  would be compromised by the submission of the op-ed“) — but they do happen to be exactly in line with common, if false, Republican talking points during the controversy:

1. Valerie Plame Wilson sent her husband on the trip to Niger.
2. His wife’s role is an embarrassing fact that undermines Joseph Wilson’s credibility.
3. Joseph Wilson more or less invited the outing of his wife by publicly criticizing the Bush administration.

As many people, including Joseph Wilson, noted repeatedly during the past few years, these assumptions are absolute nonsense.  Why on earth would Valerie Plame Wilson think it would help her husband’s business to send him on an unpaid trip (except for reimbursing his expenses) to beautiful, scenic the bleak desert of Niger?  And how was Joe Wilson’s consulting business somehow dependent on a trip that he didn’t talk about until it was revealed in news reports a year and a half later?

Similiarly, as Plame herself notes in passing in her book (see the quote above), the idea that a career CIA officer working on vital nuclear-security issues would be exposed by her own government for the meager purpose of political retaliation was utterly unthinkable to most people… except, unfortunately, the cutthroat, politics-is-everything sociopaths who populated the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney White House (and their unquestioning acolytes).

Or, I guess, the amoral denizens of Hollywood studios, who are more interested in emotionally-driven conflict than accuracy.  As Fair Game’s director, Doug Liman (known previously for The Bourne Identity), said in an interview, the focus of the Plame movie was “story and character, and not… politics.” And I can see why people in “the industry”  might prefer a story about a CIA spy who secretly tries to help her husband’s career, but is inadvertently exposed by his media self-promotion, to the less combative, politically correct truth.

Besides, Valerie Plame Wilson herself is going to Cannes to promote the film, so I guess she and her husband have made their peace with whatever factual detours Liman & Co. may have taken in adapting their autobiographical accounts.  But maybe the need to accept personally insulting, false narratives just for the sake of getting their story told in some form is the depressing moral here… the Republicans make up a bogus version of events out of thin air, and it winds up being perpetuated because it serves the interests of certain moneyed factions (like Hollywood film backers) more than the actual truth does.

And everyone else has no choice but to accept it, and make the best of things.  And so it goes.

There’s a major profile in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine of veteran Washington, D.C. reporter Mike Allen of Politico:

Allen’s e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.

Like many in Washington, [White House communications director Dan] Pfeiffer describes Allen with some variation on “the most powerful” or “important” journalist in the capital. The two men exchange e-mail messages about six or eight times a day.

Now, I could weigh in on all the alternately snark-worthy and/or unsettling anecdotes in the NYT’s mammoth profile of Allen, but Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post has already done so in rather devastating fashion (noting that even leaving aside the celebration of Politico’s self-conscious and self-promoting shallowness, portions of the Times piece are “like reading a David Lynch screenplay.”)

Instead, I’m interested in the (perhaps even longer) untold story of how Allen arrived at this point in life.  After all, it was only six and a half years ago that he became a well-known journalist the old-fashioned way — co-writing a story for the Washington Post that was immediately hailed as “one of the most memorable pieces of White House journalism produced in the Bush era” and was substantially responsible for the conviction of a high-ranking government official on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Unless you’re a hardcore junkie regarding trivia of the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case, however, you probably have a dim idea, at best, of what I’m talking about.  Perhaps these words will refresh your memory:

… a senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge….

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Granted, Mike Allen’s moment of celebrity for breaking this story faded in part because the proverbial other shoe never fell — the identity of the “senior administration official” was never revealed publicly, much less those of the leakers or the journalists involved.

But I suspect it’s not a coincidence that immediately after reading this article in September 2003, ex-Bushite press secretary Ari Fleischer sought high-priced legal help and refused to talk to FBI investigators without a promise of immunity.  Or that Fleischer would eventually admit speaking to the Post’s Walter Pincus on July 12, 2003, as part of a series of phone calls to (at least six?) Washington journalists he made with WH communications director Dan Bartlett from Air Force One during a flight back from Africa.

Pincus himself testified in Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury trial that Fleischer had leaked to him about Plame in that conversation.  As it happens, on July 12, 2003, Pincus was working on an article for the Post untangling some of the lies the Bush administration had told about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, a piece on which he shared a byline with… Mike Allen.  (Not surprisingly, Pincus was also an unnamed source in the Post’s scandal-breaking story quoted above.)

I suppose that if you asked Allen about this now, he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and say, “Ah, but that was a long time ago.” If he remembered at all, that is, in the blur of his near-sleepless life collecting tidbits of gossip and false leads for Politico.

That the latter is what has made Mike Allen a truly powerful reporter in Washington says more about our politics than I care to imagine.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Matt Yglesias caught this bit of double-talk about the Rod Blagojevich indictments coming from the Washington Post‘s Shailagh Murray in an online chat yesterday:

There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road.

Seeing Murray’s eagerness to tolerate phony claims of corruption in the hopes they will prove “useful” in reporting on a hoped-for presidential scandal later, I immediately flashed back to her comments in the summer of 2007, reacting to the actual corruption of a President commuting the sentence of a criminal in his own administration:

Yaawwn. That’s my view of the Libby flap. What on earth did people expect Bush to do?

Apparently her enthusiasm for White House scandal depends greatly on which party is occupying the White House.

This morning, former White House spokesliar Scott McClellan is due to testify to the House Judiciary Committee. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal offered a preview:

At a hearing Friday before the House Judiciary Committee, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan will get a chance to reprise some of the charges he made in his recently published book and in subsequent media interviews.

The hearings will also give Democrats an opportunity to dig back into the scandal over the outing of former Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame.

. . . Â Michigan Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, explained his reason for this week’s McClellan hearing this way: “In his book, Mr. McClellan suggests that senior White House officials may have obstructed justice and engaged in a cover-up regarding the Valerie Plame leak. This alleged activity could well extend beyond the scope of the offenses for which Scooter Libby has been convicted and deserves further attention.”

Although I wish Rep. Conyers luck in finding proof of criminal conduct, I’m not optimistic (and that’s even assuming the Shrub-in-Chief doesn’t pull some executive-privilege shenanigans to block McClellan’s testimony). Â As I’ve mused on occasion in the past, it seems to be ingrained in the liberal mindset to seek some kind of legal/procedural redress for the Bush-Cheney administration’s misdeeds, when they might be better off making the simpler political case regarding their lack of a moral compass. Â

The speed with the guilty pleas and forced resignation of the Nixon regime were followed by Ronald Reagan’s misrule, with only a one-term Democratic president in between — and the failure of the Iran/Contra lawbreaking to produce even that much — should make it clear that the ultimate remedy for the GOP’s gangster approach to government isn’t impeachment or prosecution; it’s convincing the American public not to elect Republicans in the first place. Â Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves fighting the same uphill battles to impeach or indict the fuckers every 8 or 12 years.

With that in mind, I think that rather than try to create the grounds for reviving special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation, the Dems on the House Judiciary Committee should use my favorite overlooked revelation from last year’s Libby trial to shed light on the Bushites’ moral bankruptcy.

McClellan’s primary involvement in the Plame leak was during the reaction to the Washington Post’s “1 by 2 by 6″ story on Sept. 28, 2003 (“a senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran,  two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife”).  A follow-up story by the Post’s Mike Allen the next day was even more specific about the circumstances (“the two White House officials had cold-called at least six Washington journalists and identified Wilson’s wife”)

Strangely, no one (save for this humble blog, as longtime readers know) has attempted to nail down the exact leakers/leaking referred to by this story. Â But this section of Ari Fleischer’s trial testimony discussing events during the week of the Plame leaks seems to be a very obvious clue:

Q … Is it a fact, Mr. Fleischer, that you and Dan Bartlett, on July the 12th on the plane headed back from Africa, agreed to contact several print and television media journalists?
A Â That’s my recollection, yes.
Q  And did you decide that you would contact the New York Times and The Washington Post?
A Â That’s my recollection.
Q Â And Mr. Bartlett would contact the Sunday talk shows?
A Â I don’t recall who Mr. Bartlett contacted. [...]
Q Â … When you called [...] somebody at The Washington Post as well, that was Walter Pincus?
A Â Correct.

Pincus, of course, was leaked to about Plame in that conversation, although Fleischer claimed not to recall it. Â It seems very clear that if Pincus got what he describes as an unsolicited leak, the other reporters Fleischer/Bartlett called on July 12 did, too — and if someone on Air Force One (say, Colin Powell) overheard and went to the Post, there’s your 1x2x6 story.

So the questions to McClellan would be, after running down the evidence above:

Presumably, Scottie will say no to both questions. Â Having already hinted at a White House oddly uninterested in getting to the bottom of a leak of classified information, Democrats can then allude to McClellan’s/Bush’s statements at the time of not being able to track down anonymous “senior officials” and bring out the clincher:

“Let’s say the President had a senior staff meeting… he could have asked the Vice President if he knew anything, and the answer would have been yes. Â He could have asked the Vice President’s chief of staff [Libby]. Â He could have asked his top political adviser [Karl Rove]. Â He could have asked his communications director [Bartlett]. Â He could have asked his Secretary of State [Powell, to whom his deputy, Richard Armitage, had admitted talking to Robert Novak]….”

The point being that Bush was literally surrounded by people who leaked about Plame or knew about the leaking — but never showed the least bit of curiosity, because he was more interested in not getting caught than in finding the truth.  That’s the way Republican presidents operate, and that’s what I hope McClellan’s Democratic questioners in the House try to establish in today’s hearing.

Via Think Progress, Rep. Henry Waxman is still chasing after information on how Valerie Plame Wilson was outed as a CIA employee — and, judging from the letter he released this morning (sent to Attorney General Ashcroft Gonzales Mukasey), not quite as quixotically as I’d assumed:

On December 3, 2007 , I wrote to request that you arrange for the production of documents relating to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak of the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson, including copies of FBI interview reports of White House officials. I appreciate that you have since made redacted versions of the interview reports of Karl Rove, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and other senior White House officials available to the Committee.

I am writing now to renew the Committee’ s request for the interview reports with President Bush and Vice President Cheney and to request unredacted versions of the interviews with Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Scott McClellan, and Cathie Martin. I also request that the Department provide all other responsive documents that were approved for release to the Committee by Mr. Fitzgerald.

So Fitz authorized the release of investigative files, and Mukasey actually turned some stuff over?! I hadn’t realized this.

In his interview with the FBI, Mr. Libby stated that it was “possible” that Vice President Cheney instructed him to disseminate information about Ambassador Wilson’ s wife to the press. This is a significant revelation and, if true, a serious matter. It cannot be responsibly investigated without access to the Vice President ‘s FBI interview.

It’s not really “a significant revelation,” since Libby said the same thing in his grand jury testimony, which was made public during the trial. But I guess it’s handy for keeping the pressure on.

The interviews with senior White House officials also raise other questions about the involvement of the Vice President. It appears from the interview reports that Vice President Cheney personally may have been the source of the information that Ms. Wilson worked for the CIA. Mr. Libby specifically identified the Vice President as the source of his information about Ms. Wilson. None of the other White House officials could remember how they learned this information.

The last sentence is noted solely for humor value. If only links to Needlenose 2.0 weren’t still messed up, I’d cite one of my posts on the “theory of Immaculate Dissemination.”

In his FBI interview, [press secretary Scott] McClellan told the FBI about discussions he had with the President and the Vice President. These passages, however, were redacted from the copies made available to the Committee. Similar passages were also redacted from other interviews.

There are no sound reasons for you to withhold the interviews with the President and the Vice President from the Committee or to redact passages like Mr. McClellan’s discussions with the President and the Vice President. Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation is closed and he has indicated that it would be appropriate to share these records with the Committee. There has been no assertion of executive privilege.

Moreover, withholding these documents would create an unfortunate double standard. During the Clinton Administration, the Committee requested the records of FBI interviews with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1997 and 1998 as part of the Committee’s campaign finance investigation. These records were turned over to the Committee by the Justice Department without any consultation with the White House.

Obviously these quaint notions of independence and oversight are now defunct, and I presume that the Bushites have no intention of turning over anything that is genuinely incriminating. But kudos to Waxman for trying, and for exposing the lack of any fig leaf to cover their mendacity.