Soccer Dad

Unfair plame

Variety reports that there's a movie about Valerie Plame and her introverted husband in the works.

(via memeorandum)

Warner Bros. is developing a feature on the lives of Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the married couple drawn into a D.C. firestorm.

"[D]rawn into?" Joseph Wilson very publicly inserted himself into the firestorm. In fact he reasonably could be said to have created the firestorm. In fact his role was like the kid who calls in a false fire alarm and watches with amusement as the public safety officials rush to take charge of the situation.

For anyone who has any inkling that Wilson might have had a passing acquaintance with the truth in this episode should read this paragraph from the bi-partisan report of the Senate Select subcomittee on intelligence.

(U) The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article (“CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid,” June 12,2003) which said, “among the Envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.”’ Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong” when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have “misspoken”to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were “forged.” He also said he may have become conhsed about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.

Nice synopsis at PowerLine

And the CIA, far from being a right-wing bogeyman, has been complicit in the Wilson/Plame farce from the beginning: sending the unqualified and politically-motivated Joe Wilson to Niger at his wife's urging, not signing him to a confidentiality agreement, not even getting a written report from him, referring the "outing" of desk employee Plame for criminal investigation, etc. No doubt the truth about the Plame matter will be as AWOL from the movie as it is from Variety's blurb.

Just one Minute greets the news with a sense of foreboding.

Don't kill me now - I want to feel the stake in my heart at the moment the film is announced as the winner of "Best Picture".

Wizbang is hoping there's more of the story to be written.

The Variety piece also says Plame's story was "illegally leaked by the White House." Maybe the movie will include the prosecution of that illegal leak we have yet to see.

And let's go back to producer, Jerry Zucker, in Variety:

"Almost everything that we need for the movie is available from print outlets, and obviously we haven't read the book yet because it hasn't been approved by the CIA," Jerry Zucker said. "Valerie has been incredibly careful with what she tells us, it's almost like she is still working for the CIA. The biggest element of the movie to us is the story of two people who spent their lives in service of their government, and were then betrayed by that government."

"Betrayed by their government"? More like betrayed their professionalism in service of opponents of the elected government of their country.

(My choices to play Wilson and Plame? Harris Yulin and Gwyneth Paltrow. Though the age difference is probably a bit bigger than between the Wilsons.)

Blogdigger tags: Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson, Movie.