Fair Game (2010)

[MinM]

So I finally got around to watching the Valerie Plame movie this weekend.

If I didn't know better the filmmakers seemed to be throwing a bone to HMW

Disney World is just like Vegas for kidz. - Joe Wilson

KWHing gets even more convuluted

[MinM]

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Joseph Wilson on Cheney's defense of the Iraq War, torture, Part 1
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Joseph Wilson on Cheney's defense of the Iraq War, torture, Part 2

[MinM]

Because of the Wilson/Palme affair, I have been thinking a lot about Phil Agee, who was recruited out of Notre Dame by the CIA, and who, I believe, is responsible for the law that make it a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a CIA agent.

Agee identified not only the agents he knew and worked with, or knew about - like LICOVY3 of Mexico City, a double agent American student from Philadelphia who is suspected by some of being the student "Steve" or "Ed" Keenan who rode Oswald around Mexico City on the back of his motorbike, but others as well. After the agents he exposed were taken out of the field, and the networks he exposed disassembled, he came out with another book that also exposed many agents, though not Welsh - the one he is accused of exposing who was then murdered.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that when replaced, the new CIA agents in embassies abroad merely took over the same offices and phone numbers as their predecessors, so it was no problem for Agee to out their replacements as well.

Agee is still alive, I believe, and his take on the Wilson/Palme affair would be interesting.

BK

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... 5290&st=45

[MinM]

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Now that Patrick Fitzgerald has closed the Blago Case:

Rod Blagojevich Hints That Feds Were After Barack Obama

viewtopic.php?p=354149#p354149

The conviction of Scooter Libby and protection of Cheney becomes clearer.

[MinM]

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Larry Sabato and Oliver Stone discuss "JFK" conspiracy - The Education Forum

Tribute to Roger Feinman Esq - The Education Forum

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2011/11/ ... tions.html

viewtopic.php?p=439436#p439436

[MinM]

viewtopic.php?p=268078#p268078

The brothers Hoeber wrote "Whiteout," the upcoming Kate Beckinsale thriller based on the comic book, and penned Summit's comic-book adaptation "Red," which has Bruce Willis is in talks to star. The duo are repped by Endeavor and the Cheng Caplan Co.

Universal has several board game titles in development as part of its six-year deal with Hasbro. "Ouija Board" is being produced by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes shingle, "Candy Land" has Kevin Lima attached to direct with Etan Cohen writing the script, and Ridley Scott is developing a project based on "Monopoly."

Beckinsale played a heroic Judith Miller-type character in Nothing But the Truth (2008)

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/movies/17trut.html

And her husband is doing a "JFK" movie:

In development are six pics DreamWorks bought from Paramount after the distribution deal with that studio dissolved last year.

They include the drama "The Trial of the Chicago 7,"

Secret Service actioner "Motorcade," the Steve Carell comedy "Dinner With Schmucks," comicbook adaptation "Atlantis Rising" and "The 39 Clues," based on a series of fantasy adventure books -- mostly pics that don't boast characters that can fill store shelves with toys. A flippant in-joke in town last week was the potential for "Chicago 7" to become the next great theme park ride...
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111800 ... =2520&cs=1

Motorcade (2010)

Published November 14, 2008 in Movie News
By Ryan Parsons | Image property of respective holders, Variety

Motorcade sounds simple enough and right up Len Wiseman's alley. A DreamWorks thriller, the film could promise tons of action.

Len Wiseman to Direct Motorcade

Considering that the thriller genre has been the highest scoring for DreamWorks, it is no surprise to see the studio cashing their bets here.

Originally scripted by Hans Bauer and Craig Mitchell -- rewritten by Billy Ray -- Motorcade is about terrorists attacking the president's motorcade as it traverses through Los Angeles. The idea is so simple that there is bound to be tons of Die Hard-like action.

While in reallife this type of event would be very, very unlikely, it could make for a terrific "blow shit up" flick.

Wiseman is known for the Underworld movies and last helmed Live Free or Die Hard.
http://www.canmag.com/nw/12797-len-wiseman-motorcade

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... 038#249038

viewtopic.php?p=268078#p268078

[MinM]

viewtopic.php?p=351636#p351636

'Rubicon': Smart Spies Who Connect The Dots : NPR

The creators of this new TV series are upfront about being inspired by some of the greatest conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s: All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor, and that underrated classic The Parallax View. But Rubicon isn't just a homage — it's a much needed update. In an era when we're all being watched, one way or another, the question "Who's watching the watchers?" becomes even more vital...

Speaking of good conspiracy films, I *finally* just saw The Parralax View. Aside from a few cheesey fight scenes and not the best score, I think this and the original Manchurian Candidate are some of the best para-political films of all time...

Rigorous Intuition (v. 2.0): The things that don't add up

Thursday, December 06, 2007

"Well what do you think they're going to say?"
Alex Cox introduces The Parallax View

Read more: http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/12/thin ... dd-up.html

BTW the trailer seems to use a little KWH action off the first name of the star of the movie...

The Parallax View - Trailer (37241)

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - The Box

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33792

[JackRiddler]

Beckinsale played a heroic Judith Miller-type character in Nothing But the Truth (2008)

If you see that movie you'd know it would be hard to characterize it that way. Elements of Plame/Wilson and Miller were taken and remixed into a completely unrelated plot. You could call it an exploitation film, but it's not interpretable as an apologia for Miller. Interestingly, it begins with the completely unprovoked false-flagging (and bombing) of Venezuela for an assassination attempt on the president that Venezuela had nothing to do with. No doubt that the bad guys run the show in DC. As a movie it made a poor impression to start but got a lot better by the end. As a movie, not as a political commentary where the problem once again is adding more layers of passionate fictionalization to real-world stories that most people know little or nothing about in the first place, and that are already subject to so much disinformation.

[Stephen Morgan]

Beckinsale played a heroic Judith Miller-type character in Nothing But the Truth (2008)

If you see that movie you'd know it would be hard to characterize it that way. Elements of Plame/Wilson and Miller were taken and remixed into a completely unrelated plot. You could call it an exploitation film, but it's not interpretable as an apologia for Miller. Interestingly, it begins with the completely unprovoked false-flagging (and bombing) of Venezuela for an assassination attempt on the president that Venezuela had nothing to do with. No doubt that the bad guys run the show in DC. As a movie it made a poor impression to start but got a lot better by the end. As a movie, not as a political commentary where the problem once again is adding more layers of passionate fictionalization to real-world stories that most people know little or nothing about in the first place, and that are already subject to so much disinformation.

The obvious problem with the movie was that it relied on her being an idiot, and willingly staying in prison for years at a time in stead of revealing her source, which was a child she'd met on her kid's school bus. The judge only wanted her to ask her source, after all. They only wanted some government leaker, revealing the kid just top the judge would have put a stop to the whole thing, but no. It's one of those movies which relies on a manufactured problem which could easily be solved by reasonable behaviour, which is fine for a farce comedy, but not for a supposedly serious film.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Because of the Wilson/Palme affair, I have been thinking a lot about Phil Agee, who was recruited out of Notre Dame by the CIA, and who, I believe, is responsible for the law that make it a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a CIA agent.

Agee identified not only the agents he knew and worked with, or knew about - like LICOVY3 of Mexico City, a double agent American student from Philadelphia who is suspected by some of being the student "Steve" or "Ed" Keenan who rode Oswald around Mexico City on the back of his motorbike, but others as well. After the agents he exposed were taken out of the field, and the networks he exposed disassembled, he came out with another book that also exposed many agents, though not Welsh - the one he is accused of exposing who was then murdered.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that when replaced, the new CIA agents in embassies abroad merely took over the same offices and phone numbers as their predecessors, so it was no problem for Agee to out their replacements as well.

Agee is still alive, I believe, and his take on the Wilson/Palme affair would be interesting.

BK

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... 5290&st=45

Agee did respond to the Wilson/Plame affair in an interview on Democracy Now:


Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: We spoke with Phillip Agee in October of 2003. He was in Cuba. He talked about why George H.W. Bush leveled extreme charges against him and why he denied those charges.

PHILLIP AGEE: I was involved with quite a lot of other people in a guerrilla journalism campaign to expose the C.I.A.’s operations and its people, especially in Western Europe at that time. George Bush, father, came in as C.I.A. Director the month following the Welsh assassination. And as Director, he presided over the agency as they mounted a campaign throughout Western Europe, trying to make me appear to be a security threat, a traitor, a Soviet agent, a Cuban agent, all of those sorts of things which led to my expulsion from five different NATO countries in the late 1970s.

In fact, it was all based on lies, and to think that — to think that I was responsible for the death of any C.I.A. people for their exposures is absolutely false, because no one, as far as I know, of all of those people who were exposed as C.I.A. people along with their operations, was ever even harassed or threatened. What happened was their operations were disrupted. And that was the purpose of what we were doing. And we were right to do it then, because the U.S. policy at the time, executed by the C.I.A., was to support murderous dictatorships around the world, as in Vietnam, as in Greece, as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil. And that’s only to name a few. We opposed that use of the U.S. intelligence service for those dirty operations. And I’m talking about regimes now that tortured and disappeared people by the thousands.

AMY GOODMAN: Phillip Agee, speaking to us from Cuba in October 2003. He then talked about his time in Latin America working for the C.I.A. He left the agency in 1968 and subsequently decided to expose the C.I.A. support of corrupt oligarchies and death squads. Agee goes on to respond to the outing of Valerie Plame.

PHILLIP AGEE: Well, first, you have to realize that this law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, under which someone in the White House may be indicted, is his father’s law. This is a law sought by George Bush, Sr., when he was C.I.A. Director, and later as Vice President. He worked hard to get that law passed. And it’s the irony of ironies that the law is violated, I believe for the first time in a serious way, by someone working in the office of his own son. This is simply dirty politics, I believe. The Ambassador, that is Ambassador Wilson, poked a hole in this whole pack of lies that had been concocted to justify the war. And in retaliation, they try to ruin his wife’s career, and get even with him. You could say that it’s dirty politics as usual, but also one has to wonder what Papa Bush is thinking about the fact that it’s his own son’s office that has violated the law that he worked so hard to get passed.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of people saying it’s similar to what you did?

PHILLIP AGEE: But for a different reasons. My reasons were very clear, and we stated them many times. And as I mentioned earlier, I was not alone in that campaign. I was working with a lot of people from a lot of different countries. And it was a spontaneous campaign because people were opposed to the horrible political repression that the United States, through the C.I.A., was supporting in the 1970s. This current case is totally different. It’s simply a dirty, low shot to — out of revenge, essentially, I believe.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you have any dealings with, for example, some of the players we’re talking about today: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George Bush?

PHILLIP AGEE: I have not had dealings with them, but I have followed the political positions of these people since the early 1990s when Wolfowitz first came out with this policy document on a new United States foreign policy based on what would best be called, I think, neo-imperialism. And then later in the Project for a New American Century, the major players in this Bush administration were all signers of that policy statement back in the 1990s. And it called for preemptive wars, it called for the control of the United States of the world, essentially. And in this case, it’s a question of control of Middle East oil, among several other reasons, and these lies that were used to justify it have all now been exposed. The world knows that they were all false —- the justifications, that is. And so, the United States has been left alone. Germany is not going to participate. France is not going to participate. Russia is not participating. The United States has been left totally isolated in its intervention in Iraq -—

AMY GOODMAN: Do you —

PHILLIP AGEE: — and deservedly so.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you condemn the blowing of Valerie Plame’s cover?

PHILLIP AGEE: I don’t have any feelings whether it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. What is wrong is that it’s simply dirty politics, whether it was the blowing of her cover or some other action. It’s small potatoes, though, compared to the whole scenario of lies that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the continued occupation of that country.

AMY GOODMAN: Former C.I.A. operative, Phillip Agee, talking from Cuba in October 2003 here on Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/2005/7/27/f ... illip_agee

[MinM]

During a commemoration of John Judge and Mike Ruppert (04/17/14) .. Jim DiEugenio recounted a piece he did for Ruppert's site on Plamegate ..

[Karl Rove is so effective at manipulating public perception, so radically unprincipled and so abysmally cynical, that it's difficult to believe he isn't controlling whatever the headlines say is happening to him. Maybe the 21st Century Watergate is just Karl's latest grand operetta, designed to distract us all from the savageries "our troops" are committing in the Persian Gulf as you read this. In that case, some legal technicality is even now being incubated inside Mr. Fitzgerald's briefcase, ready to hatch at the right moment and send us all back to business as usual.

Or maybe this Watergate, like the last one, is a creature of the CIA. All those years ago, Dick Helms may well have instructed one of Nixon's burglars (namely, CIA employee Bernard Barker) to sabotage his own burglary by leaving behind the strip of tape on the door-lock. That way, when the burglars were caught, all their orders would point backward to Nixon except that one, which pointed not to Helms but to sheer incompetence. Goodbye, Nixon. If this were being repeated, the Agency will have somehow contrived to trap Rove and his bosses into outing Valerie Plame, while using the Downing Street leaks as a lever to force the White House into jeopardy.

This time, however, the CIA is not being run by someone like Dick Helms, a veteran werewolf whom President Nixon inherited. It is run by Porter Goss, whom Bush (i.e., Cheney) appointed as part of a long war against the agency. That conflict pits the CIA against a solid alliance comprising the White House, the Pentagon, and the titans of the oil industry. Though the Agency's bark remains as horrifying as Cerberus' howling from the porches of the Inferno, it may have few teeth left for either attack or defense. Mike Ruppert surmised as much, four months ago in "GlobalCorp":

"Look, the agency does many things in many roles from raw intelligence gathering, to economic warfare, to satellite recon, to paramilitary operations requiring cover and deniability, to drug smuggling. But since its inception it was always focused in large part on medium and long-term intelligence gathering and covert operations through the costly, patient, expensive means of placing NOCs (non-official covers) or assets in missions where it might take five, ten or fifteen years to bear fruit. These programs were always centered on "what if" contingencies which inherently implied that multiple outcomes were possible; that there were alternative futures to be influenced and shaped.

"Battlefield intelligence is a different critter. It presupposes that there is nothing more important than the battle that has been joined at this moment. If the battle is not won, there are no future choices. Hence nothing matters other than the war that is being fought today. No Yaltas or Potsdams; no future deep cover moles will be needed.

"Every country in the world is betting everything it has on this one hand knowing that after 2007 or 2008 the game ends. The map of the future after that is unknowable and, to large extent, irrelevant. That's why Rumsfeld has won the battle to control American intelligence operations and why the new National Intelligence Director John Negroponte is getting the job."

Either the White House is controlling this Rovegate scandal (in which case it is a grand diversion that will come to nothing), or the CIA is controlling it (in which case it may sink the administration and perhaps the Republican congressional majority, anointing Hillary Clinton), or nobody is controlling it - in which case this is part of the institutional flake-down of what used to be the government. Either way, we all get front-row seats. Pass the popcorn (and don't mention Peak Oil). -JAH] ..

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/w ... gate.shtml

That preamble (above) more or less got it right ..

...It is now possible for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to bring a string of indictments against sitting White House officers that could surpass the Iran/Contra affair and for those charges to form the evidentiary basis for bills of impeachment against both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.

In Part 2, Jim DiEugenio will survey the possible criminal cases Fitzgerald may make against journalists Judith Miller and Robert Novak and certain White House officials. He will conclude with a possible case for impeachment against both President Bush and Vice President Cheney based on both the Fitzgerald inquiry and the Downing Street Minutes.

Sounds like some wishful thinking from DiEugenio. Of course we now know that Patrick Fitzgerald's role was more like that of Seymour Hersh in the My Lai story described in the second to last paragraph ..

It is interesting to note that two of the journalists hardest at work on exposing this intelligence charade are Walter Pincus and Seymour Hersh. Pincus has a long history of being a CIA comrade-in-arms all the way back to Watergate, and more recently in the mugging of the late Gary Webb for his exposure of CIA cocaine smuggling. Hersh launched his career by doing a limited hangout for the CIA and Pentagon on the My Lai Massacre, decrying anyone who thought it was part of a larger planned operation - which it was, namely the Phoenix Program. Concerning the current scandal, Pincus wrote an article for the Washington Post (6/12/03) before Wilson's column appeared, criticizing the administration's handling of data in no uncertain terms: "Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was consistent was not seriously scrutinized."

Another good analogy comes from Larry Chin's take on Watergate ..

Watergate was not, as the stereotypical myth and breathless legends go, a great moment for democracy in which a corrupt president was brought down, and a great "investigation" reformed Washington. It was an inside coup d'état, and a limited hangout, that saved Nixon and his cabal from true exposure and jail time, and helped preserve—not reform—the system that made his crimes possible...

***

.
Now that Patrick Fitzgerald has closed the Blago Case:

Rod Blagojevich Hints That Feds Were After Barack Obama

viewtopic.php?p=354149#p354149

The conviction of Scooter Libby and protection of Cheney becomes clearer.

Blacklisted News ‏@BlacklistedNews: High-Level NSA Official: the NSA Has Become “J. Edgar Hoover On Super Steroids” http://dlvr.it/6H880Y