Tel-Chai Nation

Two scandals have just come up. First, Shakil Afridi, a key ally to finding Osama bin Laden has been convicted in Pakistan for helping the USA locate the monster, and guess what? The White House response has been incredibly weak. How peculiar that the same administration that did the right thing to punish bin Laden is suddenly betraying Afridi, who gave them the help that was needed to find bin Laden, and without Afridi's aid, it might have still remained difficult.

The next embarrassment is the revelation that the filmmakers for the planned movie about the raid on bin Laden's hideout may have been given access to classified info on the raid (H/T: Commentary):

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the special treatment given to the filmmakers “outrageous.”

“If these filmmakers got access that trained national security and military reporters did not, then it’s telling the public: ‘We are not going to allow trained journalists to tell this story. If you want to know what happened, go buy a ticket to a movie,’” she told The Daily Beast in an interview.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists said, “The whole interaction with the filmmakers appears to be self-serving and self-aggrandizing [attempts] in an election year to glorify the administration.”

Judicial Watch has more. One of the biggest problems is that Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal are also likely to have promised favors for the Obama administration like giving them the lion's share of all the credit for the raid, and not so much to any of the people involved, not even bold informants like Afridi. It amounts to sensationalizing the whole story and even cheapening the impact. Rep. Peter King has also stressed that a lot of security issues are at stake because of this movie.

I can't say I've ever tried to watch Bigelow's movies - the only one I really watched in full years ago was Point Break - but this is enough to dispirit me from them forever. Big Hollywood is also saying that the film needs to be scrapped, and I think it's for the best if it were. Bigelow and Boal have both embarrassed their reputations with this whole scandal.

Labels: anti-americanism, dhimmitude, islam, pakistan, showbiz, terrorism, United States, war on terror