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.
The 153 pages of records from the Defense department and the 113 pages from the CIA document show that the identity of the "planner, SEAL Team 6 Operator and Commander" responsible for the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden was released; both individuals from Hollywood were granted "access to 'the Vault,'" the CIA building that served as the secret locale for tactical planning of the bin Laden raid; and "For the intelligence case, the White House-approved talking points were used" to establish that the raid was "a gutsy decision" by the President and that "White House involvement was critical."
U.S. Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, confirmed on CNN's "Starting Point" the internal documents that placed director Bigelow in locations deemed "top secret."
"She was taken to locations and sites that are not even mentioned and have been blacked out of the reports ... because they are sensitive. Yet she was taken to them, and other people who were involved with her were taken there," Rep. King said.
He continued, regarding the exposure of classified information, "as far as I know, none of these [people] possess security clearances" yet they were "allowed an unprecedented visit to a classified facility, so secret that its name is redacted in the released email. If this facility is so secret that the name cannot even be seen by the public, then why in the world would the Obama administration allow filmmakers to tour it?"
King's question is rhetorical. We all know the answer to it.
Obama and his leftist cast view their roles as merely vehicles to election spin and to control the lens of events for voters to view a framed message around an incompetent group that is playing at national security.