Reuters:

A government watchdog group is suing the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming the agencies are refusing to release details of their alleged meetings and communications with director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal.

It has been alleged that Bigelow and Boal — in preparation for the script to their Annapurna Pictures movie about the killing of Osama Bin Laden — received classified information regarding his death.

Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act complaint — which was obtained by TheWrap — in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. The group says the DoD and CIA have not complied with its FOIA requests within the legally required 20 working days.

Judicial Watch sent FOIA requests to the DoD and the CIA on August 9, seeking records of alleged meetings and communications between government officials, the makers of the Bin Laden movie and employees of Annapurna Pictures, according to the group’s complaint.

The DoD and CIA acknowledged they received the requests but said they couldn’t release the alleged information, according to Judicial Watch. The DoD cited “unusual circumstances which impact our ability to quickly process your request,” the suit says. The CIA said the agency was inundated with FOIA requests and couldn’t respond within the legally required 20 working days, Judicial Watch claims.

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Congressman Peter King told Fox News it’s clear there is “probable cause” for investigating whether the Obama administration leaked classified military information to the makers of an upcoming Sony film about the raid that took out Osama bin Laden.

King’s interview with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly earlier today revealed new details about the investigation and why the congressman thought the leak may have happened in the first place.

The New York Republican told Kelly the proof for his initial suspicions about the leak revolved around how much information about the raid hit the press shortly after it occurred.

“That compromised our assets on the ground,” he says.

His concern grew after reading a Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times “almost bragging that the administration would give Sony and [Director] Kathryn Bigelow unprecedented access to the most classified operation in history.”

That was enough to ignite a preliminary investigation by the Defense Department into the matter, King reveals. And, apparently, investigators found something worth pursuing.

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Conservatives cried foul last year when the folks behind the upcoming film about the death of Osama bin Laden mulled a release date just before the 2012 elections. The film captures the raid that took down the world’s most infamous terrorist, arguably the biggest achievement during President Barack Obama’s tenure at the White House.

The bigger story may be how much information Obama officials gave to the filmmakers to make the movie a reality.

The Pentagon is investigating whether members of the Obama administration leaked classified information to director Kathryn Bigelow of “The Hurt Locker” fame to help shape the film.

Rep. Peter King, who heads the House Homeland Security Committee, has questioned how much information was shared about the U.S. special operations mission in Pakistan that killed the al-Qaida leader in May. King on Thursday released a December letter from the Pentagon saying that the inspector general’s office covering intelligence matters “will address actions taken by Department of Defense personnel related to the release of information to the filmmakers.”

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After nearly a decade of treating the War on Terror as an act of hubris and greed perpetrated by the proxies of multi-billion-dollar corporations, Hollywood has found a new storyline. But in his August 26 piece for the Wall Street Journal, “Hollywood Tries a New Battle Plan,” John Jurgensen incorrectly identifies the source of the change.

It was not the public’s ambivalence to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq that caused director Nick Broomfield to portray our soldiers as adrenalized murderers in “Battle for Haditha” or cinema legend Brian De Palma to do the same in “Redacted.” Nor is it a sudden focus on capitalism, as filmmaker Peter Berg suggests in the article, that is motivating Universal Studios suddenly to produce “Lone Survivor” four years after its publication. It is politics.

Numerous books have analyzed politics in Hollywood, including Ben Shapiro’s recent Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. So, the fact that Hollywood is an unabashedly liberal community is no revelation. But filmmakers’ covert attempts to shift public opinion to the left needs to be understood better. (more…)

Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a Republican from Kansas, has introduced a bill that would stop the administration’s use of taxpayer money to help Sony Pictures, director Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal produce what is obviously going to be a $50 – $75 million Obama 2012 campaign commercial — and one that is currently (and not coincidentally) scheduled to be released just a few weeks prior to the 2012 election.

Bigelow and Boal

The Hill:

A Republican lawmaker from Kansas wants to prevent the administration from helping Sony make a move about the killing of Osama bin Laden.  

The Stop Subsidizing Hollywood Act introduced by Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.) would stop the Obama administration from spending taxpayer money to share information about the killing of bin Laden with Sony Pictures, which is looking to release a film about that event in October 2012. 

Jenkins said the bill, introduced on Friday, is necessary because the government has no role to play in helping the movie industry at a time of fiscal crisis.  

“In an era of 9 percent unemployment, trillion dollar deficits, credit downgrades, and record debt ceiling extensions it is unconscionable that tax payer dollars are being used to aid the Hollywood film industry in fact checking and script research,” Jenkins said. “American families have been forced to go through their budgets line by line and look for ways to tighten their belts, and it is time the federal government does the same.”

Sony, Bigelow and Boal have been given every opportunity to do the right thing and push the film’s release date into late December and out of the political arena. They have CHOSEN not to do so. Furthermore, they were the ones who chose to play politics with this film to begin with, not Rep. Jenkins and not anyone on the Right.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Val Jensen II:

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, broke a story last Saturday on the White House’s curious role in the production of a new Hollywood movie that tells the story of the killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEAL Team 6. The movie is set to be released October 12, 2012, conveniently just before the November presidential elections.

The movie’s creators are none other than director Kathryn Bigelow and journalist Mark Boal, whose 2009 movie, “The Hurt Locker,” won six Academy Awards in 2010.

The White House has offered Bigelow and Boal a questionable in-depth look into the mission which ended the terror king’s reign and is getting “top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration,” according to Dowd.

Predictably, The Washington Post, Reuters and, The Los Angeles Times led their coverage of the story with White House denials of jeopardizing national security. The Politico took a more balanced approach.

According to a Politico article on the matter, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, has written a letter to the CIA and Department of Defense demanding an investigation into the White House role in allowing unprecedented access into the mission and is quoted as saying, “It shouldn’t have been out there that SEAL Team 6 did this, and there have been so many details out there.” King continues, “And now we find out they are cooperating with a movie — what are we doing?”

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ADDED: Wonder what the Federal Election Commission thinks about this? This is a terrible thing Sony’s doing, using the bravery of these men to help Obama – politicizing their heroism. The decent thing to do is to move the release date well into December.

Screenwriter Mark Boal with director Kathryn Bigelow

Our utter failure of a president is looking to Hollywood for an October 2012 Surprise to save his hopes for a second term. Maureen Dowd says out loud what we all knew the moment the movie’s release date was announced:

The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.

It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.

“To the surprise of some military officers.” There’s an interesting statement.

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From Agence France-Presse:

Actor Sean Penn on Friday described the killing of Osama bin Laden by US troops as an act of “vengeance”. Penn, famous for his political and social activism, was at the Cannes film festival to present a risk-taking road movie, “This Must Be The Place”, in which he plays an ageing 1980s pop star in search of his father’s Nazi tormentor.

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 So, if there’s one thing you learn when you interview students over the death of Osama bin Laden… it’s not to interview students over the death of Osama bin Laden.

Still, a NY1 reporter went to a Brooklyn school, and found out that students were “not worked up” over binny’s death – but more interested in “weekend gossip.” Apparently, bin Laden doesn’t mean too much to teens, for they were too young to absorb “the impact of his terror.”

Meanwhile, Yahoo says that 66 percent of those searching for “who is Osama bin Laden” were ages 13 to 17.

I guess that beats “what was 9/11?”

Which brings me to some recent tweets, from various teens.

Groydis writes: “Who is Osama bin Laden, and why should i care?”

Asteriot adds, “Who is Osama bin laden? is he famous? am i the only one who don’t know who he is?”

Apparently not you idiot – since Corey-ealtman ponders, “who is osama and why is it important we killed him?”

God help us all.

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Watch the video below and you’ll see that Michael Moore is really, really, REALLY upset over this. With all the problems in the world, all the natural disasters right here in America, all the famine and disease and tragedy — THIS is what Michael Moore’s all emotionally ripped up over today. Somewhere a child is going hungry, somewhere an American serviceman or woman could use a helping hand, somewhere someone is losing their home — and THIS is what Michael Moore is using his power of celebrity to call attention to.

What an extraordinarily revealing set of priorities:

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The video below, the second part of the interview, shows how badly the Obama Administration has bungled the post-mission narrative. If you’ve lost Michael Moore… As Jim Treacher so memorably put it: The Obama Adminstration took their victory lap in a clown car. The segment is also a case study in how the Left has learned how to wrap anti-American language into patriotic rhetoric:

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Here’s Jon-Smuggy-McSmirk-ObamaButtBoy-Stewart in April of 2009, sanctimoniously accusing his own country of torture:

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Oh, but wait… Even though, according to –wait for it! wait for it! — MSNBC, “waterboarding aided the bin Laden raid,” below is Jon Stewart yesterday celebrating the results of same waterboarding with proclamations about America being back, uhm, baby. Yep, according to Mr. Stewart, America has its “balls” back, but of course neglects to mention (or doesn’t yet know) that we wouldn’t have without a little of what he described and defines as “torture.”

I guess the results of “torture” and the actions of Cheney’s “secret assassination squad” are all good if Obama gets a poll bounce:

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HBO just can’t help themselves.  Less than two weeks after the pay television giant announced Julianne Moore, 50, will play a 43 year old Sarah Palin during the 2008 Presidential election, the network announced its intentions to make another anti-GOP movie based on the 2008 Barton Gellman book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency as well as The Dark Side, a 2006 documentary which aired on Frontline, a PBS public affairs series.

There is no argument that Gellman’s book casts a very dark and negative shadow over Republican Vice President, Dick Cheney.  His own website describes the book as taking on “the full scope of Cheney’s work and its consequences, including his hidden role in the Bush administration’s most fateful choices in war: shifting focus from al Qaeda to Iraq, unleashing the National Security Agency to spy at home, and promoting ‘cruel and inhuman’ methods of interrogation.”  If you didn’t know any better, you might think that description fits a member of the KGB, or even the Gestapo.

The Dark Side, not to be confused with the UK horror film publication or as the general concept of evil in the Star Wars universe or the anthology horror TV series produced by George A. Romero or the DC comics super-villain, no The Dark Side is a documentary produced by David Fanning and Michael Kirk of Frontline.  The title of the documentary perverts a quote from Cheney a few days after the 9/11 attacks in which he stated that in order to defend America against future Osama bin Laden and al Queda attacks, we would have to work “sort of the dark side, if you will,” because, “That’s the world these folks operate in…” and depicts the struggle between the CIA and the vice president and how Cheney was the chief architect of the war on terror and invasion of Iraq.

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Recently New York Times blogger and humanities professor Stanley Fish referenced my Big Hollywood review of the Coen Brothers’ remake of John Wayne and Henry Hathaway’s True Grit. Though I have reviewed a film or two for various publications I’ve never thought of myself as a film critic. So Professor Fish referring to me as such was certainly interesting, if not flattering.  Agree with my review or not, I am glad a western is making money, but Professor Fish had more heady matters on his mind.

Fish’s main point is that in the new True Grit, purposely there is no relationship between physical heroism and virtue. To the professor physical heroism is displayed by almost everyone in the new film, “‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and the universe seems at best indifferent, if not hostile.” He sees young Mattie Ross as far more heroic for her acceptance of the world as random and brutal, Jeff Bridges Cogburn’s heroism is merely an after thought. The professor didn’t in the least misunderstand my desire to instead see the kind of heroics John Wayne displayed in the original film when he takes on the outlaw gang single-handedly with his “Fill your hands, you son-of-a-bitch!” charge to glory.

Justifiable violent responses to real life threats are often not random. America has always had common men heroes and well trained professionals who can reach down deep into themselves and find the kind of inner courage needed to risk life and limb to save the life of another or stand up to the evil and power hungry. The elitist left who for the time being control most of the public debate on popular culture would have us believe that all is relative. Despite the current “no tolerance” foolishness in American schools, sometimes you have to hit back, and hard, or else the bully will take far more then just your lunch. You’re own personal dignity is indeed something worth fighting for. (more…)

Like the unhinged Rosie O’Donnell, the waningly influential Michael Moore is almost too easy a target to bother with anymore – and yet he keeps handing us such tempting ammunition. In an interview published the day after Independence Day, which he no doubt spent like the rest of us, celebrating this country and being thankful for our abundance and our freedoms, Moore blathers on predictably in his ongoing campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Correction – his campaign against American victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Moore and the anti-war Left were truly anti-war, they would be protesting the real warmongers – Islamic fundamentalists – or at least protesting both sides equally. But they reserve their condemnation for the world’s greatest terrorists. I’m talking about those jack-booted, nuke-happy imperialists America and Israel, of course.

What should we be doing instead of trying to secure lasting victory in those countries? Plucking an estimate out of his sizeable, um, back pocket, Moore says, “$15 billion is what we’ve been spending almost every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don’t have it.”

Yes, if only the American “killing machine” would stop ravaging innocents abroad in order to steal their resources and enslave their peace-loving peoples, we could turn instead to doing some good in the world. For once. Because God knows Americans need to change our greedy, warmongering, rapacious ways and learn us some generosity, compassion and service to others. Then the world will like us again. (more…)

Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar has been taken into custody.

According to the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program there is a bounty of up to $10 million on Omar for sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda network in the years prior to the September 11 attacks as well as the period during and immediately thereafter.

At the end of March, US Military Intelligence was informed by US operatives working in the Af/Pak theater on behalf of the D.O.D. that Omar had been detained by Pakistani authorities. One would assume that this would be passed up the chain and that the Secretary of Defense would have been alerted immediately. From what I am hearing, that may not have been the case.

When this explosive information was quietly confirmed to United States Intelligence ten days ago by Pakistani authorities, it appeared to take the Defense Department by surprise. No one, though, is going to be more surprised than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It seems even with confirmation from the Pakistanis themselves, she was never brought up to speed.

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The great thing about a-holes, is you can see them coming. Whether it’s Sean Penn or Jeanine Garafalo calling you a racist or wishing you dead – their essential douchebaggery makes them easy to spot and harmless. Their inanities should only generate guffaws, not concern.

I wish I could say that about nice people.

See, nice people are worse.

Case in point: Matthew Modine.

He’s a nice guy. Pleasant, in a puppy dog sort of way. I loved him in Vision Quest.

But he’s also clueless. Dangerously so. And when you combine congeniality with congenital cluelessness, you have a recipe for carnage. (more…)

Imagine if somebody were to really sit down with Osama Bin Ladin and say, ‘listen man,what is it that you’re so angry at me about that you’re willing to have people strap bombs to themselves, or get inside of airplanes and fly them into buildings.’ That would be the miracle if we can get, sit down and talk to our enemies and find a way for them to hear us. – Matthew Modine

No, we’re not making this up. It’s all captured on video here.

Ahh, to have the luxury to be so airy and ignorant and superior about such things. He should thank the United States Military for that luxury. (more…)

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So what happens when the world’s worst person agrees with you on a contentious issue?

Well, it should make you reconsider your view, on said contentious issue.

You’d think that, anyway.

Take Osama bin Laden, who, in a very eloquent and articulate message just released on audiotape, warns us of the dangers of global warming – blaming the US and other industrialized countries for rising temperatures. He says, the only way to stop climate change, is to employ drastic solutions to help bring our economy to a halt. He added that the world should boycott American products, and have more sex with goats. (more…)

So, Osama bin Laden must be giggling like a school girl in his soiled diapers. While we flounder over the basics of terror prevention, my guess is the turbaned turd has already moved on, thinking it’s hilarious we’re still taking baby steps against bombers. Turning B.V.D’s into I.E.D’s? That’s sooo last decade. If anything, radical Islam has already set their sights on far bigger fish – why kill a thousand, when you can kill hundreds of thousands? And even if it takes them another decade or two to get nukes – no matter. They’ve got an eternity. Meanwhile, I hung up on Time Warner Cable after being put on hold for five minutes.

Worse, how can our government acknowledge a larger, more apocalyptic threat, when they’re troubled acknowledging the current, manageable one?

Look at Flight 253. By ignoring basic principles of profiling, they let the guy through. And when he was caught, rather than call him a wartime combatant, he’s referred to as a lone extremist. And now he’s being lawyered up, to be tried as a basic criminal. (more…)