There’s a current TV advertisement for a credit card company that has actor Alec Baldwin sitting in the cockpit of a plane with a uniformed pilot in his shadow. As Baldwin pitches the wares of his bidders, he appears to press buttons and move levers in the cockpit amidst protests from the pilot. A smug Baldwin offers the response, “It’s OK. I’ve played a pilot before.”
It seems that the assassination of Osama bin Laden is viewed not as a strategic act that was within America’s national security efforts to address terrorism’s past acts and future destruction by Obama and his national security team, but also as a tool allowing the profiteers of Hollywood to serve as campaign surrogates.
The same Hollywood that insults and criticizes our military while supporting politicians who are committed to starve our national defense down to, as former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller claimed, “U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?” now is angling to produce a movie featuring the assassination and originally scheduled for release on Oct. 12, 2012, just weeks before the presidential election.
In January, Judicial Watch, a non-partisan organization that “promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law,” filed a Freedom of Information Act request on the matter. The documents released should make every American’s blood boil.
Emails and documents from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency reveal communications and direct meetings between government agency representatives and Kathryn Bigelow, an Academy Award-winning director, and screenwriter Mark Boal. Found in the middle of all of these activities is a White House that is facilitating and approving all of the information and access for the movie.