 I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. We're going to talk about Fair Game, which is actually a, I don't know if you could say it's a docu-drama or a documentary, but it is really based on truth fact. And it stars, what is it now? I mean, Watts as Valerie Plain and Sean Penn as Joe Wilson, her husband at the time. So, George, thank you for joining me. This has been important movie to talk about because there are threads in this movie that lead right up to today. And since it's true, there are lessons to be learned. You know, when we say movies you can learn from with this one, we're not kidding. You can learn from this one. Sir George, give us in a five minutes summary what this is about. Back in the early 2000s, right, with the whole Iraq war, how we went to war in Iraq, right? Valerie Plain was a special CIA agent. And her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, was a former ambassador to Gabon and then Niger in Africa. Niger. Niger, okay, I'm pronouncing that wrong, in Africa. And the Bush administration was claiming that Iraq, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, had a nuclear weapons of mass destruction. And that was one of the reasons we went into Iraq to dislodge him, right? But with this, what the Bush administration was stating, Joseph Wilson wrote an article and stating that he had been, he had done some research as a consultant just before this and had gone to Niger and he was familiar with the situation. And he said, there was no way all this or orange uranium ore than past because he knew the infrastructure, the transportation infrastructure. And he said, this is a very backward country. There's no truth to this. This is all manufactured by the Brits and parlayed by the Bush administration. Yes, okay, let's hold there. And to put the environment on it, Bush was trying to establish a reason to attack Iraq. He was trying to get the Brits to support his initiative to attack Iraq. And he was doing everything he could to manufacture evidence in situations and data to suggest that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, tragic because we now know, and in fact, we knew then that they did not have weapons of mass destruction. But Bush believed that if he could come up with fabricated evidence, lies, in other words, he could demonstrate to the public and the world that it was a legitimate effort to go and attack Iraq. This was about that. So on your one hand, you would have this funny baloney paper that came out of Britain about how Sodom was saying was trying to develop nuclear weapons, which wasn't true. I'm sorry. I think somebody got bought off or intimidated into writing that paper. And then you had people in the CIA who were tasked with trying to go into, in this case, a Niger, and in other cases, Iraq itself, to verify that there were active attempts to build a nuclear weapon. And those attempts were around two things. One is aluminum tubes, which you use in the centrifuge when you build the uranium. And two is the uranium itself, which is called yellow cake. And as it happens, French Equatorial Africa, we know this even today, was Putin in French Equatorial Africa. The Sahel, we've done a number of shows about that, does have uranium. So the husband of the CIA officer, operative Valerie Flame, was asked by the CIA to use his contacts in Niger and determine whether there was yellow cake there, whether they were manufacturing it and sending it out to Saddam Hussein and so forth. And he went down there and found no yellow cake at all, as you said. And she, for her part, she was a very good operative. She was top, top line operative for the CIA, best of her class. She went to Iraq and she contacted the brother of an Iranian American woman who wanted to help her brother get out of Iraq. And he was going to spy for Valerie Flame. And she in return was going to arrange papers for him and transportation for him to come to the United States with his wife and several children and save them from what was going to be a war, because George Bush was organizing a war. And they have secret police, you know, Saddam Hussein was unkind to his own people and if he found out that this guy was a spy, you know, that would be the end of that. So it's two efforts, actually, to determine whether Iraq was building a nuclear bomb. And in the one case with the husband, Joe Wilson, in the one case with the husband, Joe Wilson, he found nothing. And the other case was his wife, Valerie Flame, and the Iraqi guy that she recruited in Iraq, in Baghdad. He found nothing. And he said, you're right, his sister came and asked him these memorized questions about all of the efforts that he was a scientist, all of the efforts that the Iraqi government was making to build a bomb. And he laughed, he said, you're kidding, they're not doing anything like that. They don't have the capacity. That's a project that never happened. What are you asking me these silly questions? And that was the payload back to the CIA. So they're getting it from two sources that there are no aluminum tubes that would qualify for a bomb. There is no yellow cake. There is no scientific effort in Baghdad to build the bomb, to getting all this data and they reject the law. Why? It's because Bush needed to have data suggesting that they were engaged in weapons of mass destruction. What a crot our government was involved in. He was lying to everyone. The CIA was lying. Everybody was lying and doing dastardly things. Okay. And that's the environment in which this movie moves forward. It's a true story. Okay. How does it unfold after that? Talk about the New York Times article, which is, I found nothing, words to that effect, I found nothing in Iraq. Because he had experience in leisure, you know, and he was an ambassador for two or three other African countries. He had one, there was one, another small one. And he was very knowledgeable. So it just ruffled his feathers that they were coming up with this BS, right? So he wrote this article for the New York Times and pretty much explained his background, his expertise, and that there was absolutely no truth to this from his own experiences as an ambassador there in that country. And this aggravated Bush a lot. And you know, I went and looked online, I sent you a copy, George, of the very op-ed piece we are talking about. It wasn't very long, but it laid it out just the way you described. And this infuriated the Bush White House. What did they do? They did something that's totally out of line. They were able to get the identity of Valerie Plaint, who was a special agent, secret special agent of the CIA, leaked by Robert Novak, who was one of the buddies, I guess, that Washington post, I think. And he wrote an article basically leaking her identity of the world, right? To her neighbors, to her friends, the only ones who knew was her husband and her parents. Those are the only ones that knew she was a CIA agent. And this created unbelievable havoc for them, for both her and her husband, wasn't going to take this standing down. So he started getting on all these shows, you know, to explain his part of the story. But what this movie shows is what they went through. They were getting threats. She was getting threats. Her children. Don't forget Richard Amitage. Yes. I met Richard Amitage. She was deputy secretary of state, a retired military that, you know, got into the state department. And he came to Hawaii a few years ago, just before the Trump election, and spoke. And everybody thought he was really the cat's meow. I had no idea that he was involved in leaking, you know, her name and Colin's name, and wrecking her career and wrecking her operatives in Baghdad, the family, for example, that she had recruited. But it was much more than that. He had operatives all over the world. She was a major CIA operator, and she had recruits everywhere doing spying for her. And when she was out at this way, all of them were in great jeopardy. And in fact, the scientist I mentioned in Baghdad, the brother of the woman that she found and recruited here in the United States, was never heard of again, or anyone in his family. And although the movie doesn't go into it, you can presume they were killed by the secret police as having been involved in espionage in the prewar Iraq. by Saddam Hussein. So Armitage was directly in line for that. He took the memo. He gave it to Robert Novak. Novak published it with her name in it, knowing that he was outing, she was, and it came from Scooter Libby, who was ultimately prosecuted for related offenses, but not the offense of violating the statute that says you cannot reveal classified information. This is all a study on how people in the government deal with classified information. And Scooter Libby revealed classified information that resulted in mess and destruction of this whole apparatus that the CIA had done. And the CIA was not going to help. Not going to help Palry claim they disowned her. You know, the secretary never heard of you, that sort of thing. And so it was really gross that the government refused to help, refused to help the people she recruited, refused to help the people whose lives were now in jeopardy, and refused to help her. And her life was ruined. And the same thing with Joe Wilson. His life was ruined. They were all outed. And people, you know, such misinformation and disinformation was just like today lies everywhere, except the lies were coming from the United States. Now, what's uncanny is that Armitage was opposed to the Iraq war. He was opposed to us going, but he must have gotten from above. You know, he was directed to do so. He did it. He was coming from above. So it plays as you said it today with Trump. What's his name, the sort of column that he's on TV, something mayor, he's like he's also a comedian kind of thing. And he said that the Trump family, they lie like a rug, everything is a lie. So what you have is you had the same thing with the Bush and Scuder Libby, as you said, he was chief of staff to Cheney, the vice president's chief of staff. So this was this whole operation was coming directly from the top, which is what, as you said, what does this say about our government? And it plays into the present. You've got the same kind of, I mean, another Trump administration would be guilty of the same kind of things. I mean, the hand writing's on the wall. But as you said that family in Iraq, they probably would brutally murder, right? And I don't know if the sister was still there or she's back in the States. No, she's back in the States. And if you remember the scene of the movie, one night there's a knock on Valerie's door in her home, and she opens the door and there is the doctor, the Iranian doctor in the US, Iranian American doctor. And she says, I haven't heard from my brother. I thought you were going to save him. I thought you were going to make, keep him safe and bring him to the United States. What happened? I mean, so at the end of the day, Valerie was left high and dry. She couldn't help. I don't even think she was in a position to apologize. She couldn't say anything. She was sworn, you know, to maintain confidentiality. They were intimidating her. The CIA was making life miserable. These people thought she was kind of some kind of communist is really incredible. And such unfairness, such lying. And ultimately, you know, Stuart Libby was prosecuted, investigated and prosecuted. And he was prosecuted for something like lying under oath in the investigation. He was not prosecuted for revealing, you know, classified information, revealing the name of an agent, not that. And so he was fined $250,000. And that really talks about, you know, the vice president, Cheney was doing it, and probably Bush was doing it. And the scooter Libby, $250,000 in two and a half years in jail. However, Bush commuted the sentence. And in 2018, a year after Trump took office, he pardoned the scooter Libby, who actually never paid the price at all. And so, I mean, I gotta say, this all sounds like Republican shenanigans to me. And these poor people, they're hardworking, you know, honest, competent, you know, they care about the country, and they got bashed for doing their jobs. She was really a patriot. I mean, if you look at her history, you know, her father was an Air Force, top Air Force officer, you know, she was coming from the military family. And then for them to do this, it shows you that there's no honor, there's no credibility. I mean, there was a time where I would look at the opposing party, as you know, they had some business involvement and you know, stuff, but they weren't that bad. It was good to have the two party system. But for what we're learning, I mean, totally corrupt. I mean, there's problems with the Democratic Party too, but nothing like what they're doing. They're not patriots. These are scoundrels, all of them. Scoundrels. And they knew they were outing her to be terrible consequences. All over the world, not only in Iraq, but all her other, you know, she had other operations going in other countries around the world. Around the world. And they didn't give a damn, you know? So what does this tell you, you know? I mean, as we come up to this next election, all the more decent Republicans are out of the picture, right? Like the one, the moderates. And you've got Trump, who was a character jewer, who's just a, and he's the one who's going to have the Republican nomination. And it's going to be between him and Joe Biden. And that's the choice. And for me, there's really no choice there, right? I mean, I mean, Trump is just, is just... Well, and even before you get to that, you know, what happened here, these dedicated individuals who cared about the country and their jobs, middle-class people, they make a lot of money. They just work for the government. And they were highly competent, the two of them. And they had dedicated their lives to the federal civil service, really. And if they're doing their jobs, they got bashed for being honest and being concerned about this, this crack over weapons of mass destruction, they got their lives were destroyed. And I think it was very, very hard on them, just to follow up a little bit. They tried to just do, you know, and they got nowhere, probably on this thing about privilege, you know, you can't talk about what happened in the CIA. And so the Bush administration stopped any lawsuit, opposed any lawsuit. And Obama comes into office and he opposes any lawsuit. This does not, this does not endear me to Obama. He knew the story, he knew what happened with these people, because in fact, the two of them had written books, separately, Claim and Wilson had written books, and you could buy those books now to hear from both of their mouths what happened to them. And their lives were ruined. They had to leave town essentially, and they moved to Santa Fe. And it was, you know, it was a sweet moment, at least in the movie about now, after all the trouble that Wilson had created for Valerie Plain. I mean, had he not written that article in the Times, none of this would have happened to them. This is vengeance for the article. She forgave him, okay? But you wonder, you wonder exactly how this all affected their relationship. And in the end, you know, this is not necessarily in the movie. They got back together, they moved to Santa Fe. They lived in Santa Fe for a few years. But in 2017, they divorced. A marriage was broken somehow by their life experience with this. In 2019, he died. In 2020, she ran, I think for Congress, out of New Mexico, and she was number two. That's not good enough. She lost that election. Don't know what she's doing now. I expect she's still in Santa Fe with her kids. So, I mean, the whole thing is like a, it's a bone crusher. And the movie captures that, although it doesn't take you to the last chapter, it captures that. And it's really well done. And I believe that it's sort of an accurate statement of their life experience being attacked by their own government, who they worked for, being lied to by their own government as we all were. Okay. And then being the subjects, the victims of vengeful, obviously horrible, vengeful moves by the government, intending not to do anything positive. It didn't serve the public good. They just wanted to do vengeance. People had ruined their lives. How nice of them. So, you're saying yourself, gee, we didn't know about that at the time. It only came out later when they persisted in telling their story. And you wonder how much of that kind of thing goes on now. And your point is well taken. There's probably more of it now than there was then. These were the good old days. But now it's not, it's not the good old days. And certainly during Trump, it's not the good old days. It's a dangerous business being a CIA operative. You know, she applied to the CIA immediately after school. She did well in school, and she was top of her class in the CIA. She wanted to serve her country. She was young and inspired. Okay. How many young and inspired kids would apply to the CIA after seeing this movie, eh? Oh, I'm sure very few. You know, they wanted to make an example of her. But that example does not bode well for the young kids coming out of college to want to, you know, when I graduated from college, a letter came to our, to our house from the FBI, because I must have, whatever reason, wanted me to be cruelly for the FBI. But my mother tore it up and threw it away. I was entering law school at Washington College of Law in Washington. And she didn't want me to do that because she was afraid, you know. And, you know, my dad, Sperry, wanted to send him to Turkey because he spoke fluent Turkish as well as Armenian. And my mother definitely opposed that because the whole history we'll talk about sometime. My mother was afraid that they would kill him over there because of his background. So I mean, bottom line is, you know, here what we're talking about is, like you said, who would want to be a CIA agent? Who would want to help this our country when you've got these kind of scoundrels sitting in the White House? And, and, and I'm really, I worked by Taylor Law for Obama to get him elected. And he was a disappointment on, as you said, on many, many levels. I mean, he, he, the deep state or whatever we have here was able to tell him, no, you can't do that. So just a sad situation. I would like to see us to get back to the days, I mean, when in my youth when our government, at least on the surface, it seemed to me to be, you know, more honest, but I mean, in retrospect, as I do a lot of more historical reading, even in the 50s, who was that guy? The brother of we mentioned him, got a senior moment, who will come to me in a minute, the brother who was the head of the CIA, one of the earlier ones. And, and he was doing a lot of focus, focus stuff too. So, you know, you look at the Constitution, you look at what this country was based on, this whole episode with Valerie Plain is totally opposed to what our country is supposed to be. And if you have a democracy, you've got to stick with those values. And if you don't stick with those values, where are we? Well, you know, the other, the other side of it is that this was in a way, it was a how to do it look on how to be a spy. What spies do, you know, a blonde woman, pretty presentable, who dressed well and talked well and could speak multiple languages and all that. She was a winner. But when she went to Baghdad and all those other cities where she was trying to recruit agents for the CIA, she was in great jeopardy. It's, it's, it's, it's very dangerous to do this. It's dangerous for you, Valerie Plain, and it's dangerous for your family here in Washington. And it's dangerous, of course, when the people in your recruit, we're talking about murder. And if, you know, if you somehow get turned in or your, your agents get turned in, you are facing great danger. And it amazes me that people who ran the government didn't know that or knew it and ignored it. But the bottom line for me is the world is a dangerous place. The US has to do this to gather intelligence. It's like, you know, what's happening now in the Middle East, you have to have intelligence. If you turn your back for one minute and you don't have intelligence, see what happens in Gaza. You cannot not have intelligence. And yet the cost of getting intelligence is very great. Because it's a, it's a life endangering experience, whoever is involved. And so there's a kind of confluence between what Valerie Plain was doing and, and the family she recruited was doing or trying to do. And what's happening now, what happened in, in Gaza, in southern Israel just a week ago. So that's the world we live in. And what is very troubling is that the government isn't strain about it. The government lies, you know, and then, and this whole thing about to so, so we have a, a, a failed rocket going down on that hospital yesterday in Gaza. And it's a question of credibility. And so Biden says, I agree with the Israelis and the Israelis say it was from, you know, from terrorist organization and Jihad. And, and they, they say they have data and I believe them. And Biden says he believes them. But think about it. It's a credibility issue. And there are mobs all over the Middle East now that don't believe Biden and don't believe the Israelis. And they're all too happy to reject that. So at the, at the end of the day, we're talking about whether those prevails with lies prevail. And if you send it out on social media, as, as a modest did, and say no, was the Israelis and you do that minutes after the event takes place, if finds it, it finds our own throughout the Middle East and everybody's in the street, fully believing that it was Israelis, even though it wasn't. And so credibility is everything. And, and when the government does the kinds of things like starting up weapons of mass destruction, you knew and I knew at the time it was a crock. We knew that, but they, they, they persisted in lying to us for quite some time. And in fact, justified a phony war on that, on basis of a lie. Some people say that the Vietnam War was also a war based on a lie. And so, you know, I'm saying governments should not lie. They have to tell the truth. And they have to make us believe what they say. It's really important now. They say if you tell a lie enough times, it's believable. This whole thing with the 2000 election, Trump keeps insisting that if that election was stolen, some of his own Republican, you know, officials that are, that were in charge of the vote are saying no, that Biden won the election, yet Trump is still saying that no, it was stolen. So, so I mean, we're talking credibility, right? I mean, this is just wearing, wearing deep shit. And what we alluded to, where was the Israeli intelligence operation? To not know. And where was Mr. Erdogan, who, who, who probably had, had notice of this because he's so tied with the Hamas leadership? Who, who know what was this was coming? And how did it, how did the Israeli intelligence miss this? Where was it? Well, as I said before, you've got to have intelligence. You must have intelligence so this happens. And you also must tell the truth about what you find. You don't have to, you know, disclose everything, but at least when you disclose something, tell the truth. And what, what happened in this movie was, was not that, and it was, it's a black eye that will last for a long time on the American government and on the Republicans in the Oval Office. So that's what we got, George. Read the newspaper, watch the news, and you have to look at it with a jaundiced eye to figure out who's telling you the truth and who's not. It's an everyday chore that we all have to engage in. And in fact, that's what Joe Wilson said to his class, he was teaching. That was his primary occupation at the time. And he told his class, it's up to every one of you to use critical thinking. This is back in what, 2006 or seven like that. You have to use critical thinking, you have to know when they're lying to you. And then you have to read everything through the filter of critical thinking. And it was a powerful statement that Sean Penn delivered. For my money, it was the most important part of the movie. It was the portarole, the real message as he was, you know, lecturing his class on the duty of a citizen in a democracy. You could hear the echo of that right now. You can. And oh, George, they were lucky enough to get murdered, Valerie Playmer, husband and children, because some crazy could have gone and shot that because that was how elevated the feelings were. Yes, that's true. They were really pariah. And there were people after them. And this is not during Trump. And, you know, it's not, it's not the, the stochastic, the stochastic long whistle thing from Trump. This was, you know, two generations before that, under a Republican president, where people were out to hang the two of them, even though they hadn't done anything wrong. Tell the truth. So George, what do you, what do you take from this movie? And what do you give as a rating for this movie? I'll give it a 10 because of the whole idea of this whole issue. It's really blotted out to light and people pretty much for a lot of people have forgotten what this was all about. So I'll give it a 10. I think the acting was good. I didn't have any problems with the acting or the premise. So I'll give the movie a 10. It was a good movie. And it really hits the, hits the point on the bullseye. Yes. And as you and I have discussed before, we like movies that tell us stories that we need to hear about. This is a movie we can learn from. And so I give it a 10 for that alone because we learned, and as you said a moment ago, it's easy to forget these events. They somehow blend into history. And then we don't realize how very instructive they are. And how important it is that we understand what happened with Valerie Plame. Thank you, George. Thank you, Jay. Thanks. Hopefully your viewers will make note of this whole issue and let that sink in. Yeah, let it sink in. George Cation, movies you can learn from here on Think Tech. Aloha.