Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, continuing their ongoing bombardment of the Obama administration (wasting endless amounts of time and money doing so), sued the CIA and the Department of Defense to force them into showing how much access was provided to Kathryn Bigelow and Marc Boal for their upcoming film about Osama Bin Laden. Trust me, my friends, if the inefficient Bush administration had killed Osama Bin Laden as they should have done no “conservative watchdog group” would be crying foul here.
“I find this recent document discovery troubling,” said [Peter] King in a statement this morning. “The Obama Administration’s extremely close, unprecedented, and potentially dangerous collaboration with these filmmakers is a serious matter that deserves serious scrutiny.”
Peter King chairs the Homeland Security Committee, according to this source.
Make no mistake, research like this is not unheard of. The “controversy” has been brewing for a while and believe me, this won’t be the end of it. From an LA Times story back in May:
“Part of the challenge for us is to capture how difficult this was because there is a version of it that in hindsight, it just looks like it fell into place,” Boal told Department of Defense officials at a meeting last July, according to a transcript. “That is why I just wanted to ask you hypothetically about what could have happened wrong, because it makes it more dramatic when it all goes right.”
The access Bigelow and Boal have had to CIA, DOD and other government officials is not unheard of for Hollywood productions. “Battleship” director Peter Berg embedded for a month with Navy SEALs in western Iraq as research for his upcoming SEAL film “Lone Survivor,” and filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd was granted an hour with President Bush for a 2003 movie he wrote for Showtime, “DC 9/11: Time of Crisis.”
The letter Judicial Watch sent turned into a lawsuit. So far, this is the statement by Bigelow/Boal:
“Our upcoming film project about the decade long pursuit of Bin Laden has been in the works for many years and integrates the collective efforts of three administrations, including those of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, as well as the cooperative strategies and implementation by the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency,” the statement said. “Indeed, the dangerous work of finding the world’s most wanted man was carried out by individuals in the military and intelligence communities who put their lives at risk for the greater good without regard for political affiliation. This was an American triumph, both heroic, and non-partisan and there is no basis to suggest that our film will represent this enormous victory otherwise.”
Uh, yeah, you bet they will do whatever they can to shame the Obama Presidency. Yes, even for this. Which is one of the reasons why I really hope it’s a Best Picture contender.
