CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers

CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers of National Security Access
Full Article:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/08/cia-emails-reveal-winners-and-losers-national-security-access/56297/

Excerpt:

For everyone who didn't get special access to information about the Osama bin Laden raid, today was a little bit discouraging as new e-mails revealed CIA officials gushing over Hollywood filmakers at the expense of trained reporters and documentarians.

The filmmakers given top notch access have been known for months: Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the team behind the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker and the upcoming film on the mission to kill bin Laden Zero Dark Thirty. But we never got to see who was vying with them for access to details on the bin Laden raid, a group that includes former New York Times reporter Howard Blum, the History Channel and The BBC. Typically, details about deliberations over who wins and who loses in the competitive game of CIA access remains a secret, but thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, those conversations became public today.

From the outset, CIA, White House, and Pentagon officials began discussing the various Osama bin Laden projects with a slight degree of favoritism toward Bigelow and Boal's film. But pretty quickly the Oscar-winning pair blew away the competition and a highly-cordial subject-filmmaker relationship ensued.

Naomi Wolf Notes:

The Mark Boal/Kathryn Bigelow post is a propos. Am I the only one who is noticing that, if the Senate investigation finds that Boal and Bigelow were given classified info -- and I can tell you from my own interviews with the detainees' lawyers, the torture methods of detainees are CLASSIFIED -- then they are potentially guilty of exactly what Assange and Manning are accused of? In other words, if Assange is unable to leave the Ecuadorean embassy -- because he disclosed classified information -- and Manning is in solitary, stripped naked and denied his glasses -- because he released classified information -- then why are Bigelow and Boal -- if they disclosed classified information -- not facing the same threats of prosecution? Conversely, if we are being consistent (and of course best to NOT prosecute people for this 'crime', which was not prosecuted for decades before Obama went crazy with prosecutions) we keep Bigelow and Boal -- and Assange and Manning -- out of jail/away from threats of prosecution.

If classified info turns out to have been involved, then there is no real legal difference between Zero Dark Thirty and Wikileaks -- especially if the filmmakers keep insisting on 'authenticity' and 'true events'.

Unless the only difference between who is in prison in solitary, and who gets to go in nice clothes to film screenings, is whether the classified info exposes the US government to criticism, or else flatters its narrative.