Representative Peter King (R-NY) read New York Times writer Maureen Dowd's latest column and quickly penned a letter to Gordon S. Heddell, Inspector General at the Department of Defense. Dowd's no stranger to controversy but with her latest New York Times article she seems to have placed "Cool Hand Barack" in a rather awkward position.
Dowd outed the administration's cozy arrangement with Oscar-winning couple Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal. The pair has a movie in production on the hunt and killing of Osama Bin Laden set to be released 3 weeks before voters head to the polls in 2012. Representative King has asked for an investigation into the "attendance of filmmakers at a meeting with special operators and Agency officers at CIA Headquarters."
Dowd's revelatory column was published the day after Taliban forces launched a rocket-propelled grenade and shot down a helicopter over Afghanistan killing 22 Navy Seals from the same unit as the commandos who took out Osama bin Laden on May 1. Not good.
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.
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.
Oddly enough this isn't the first time since Bin Laden's demise Dowd has written about the Bigelow/Boal pro-Obama Osama movie. 10 days after the raid on the number one terrorist's Pakistan compound, Dowd wrote about being holed up at the Sunset Boulevard Hotel in Hollywood watching videos of the "pathetic" "Norma Desmond" like Osama bin Laden. The lady obviously had movies on her mind.
In a May 10 column entitled "Old Man With Clicker" Dowd suggested that the "The Hurt Locker" team was already on the administration's radar.
The inside track goes to director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the pair who won Oscars for "The Hurt Locker," a movie about a bomb-defusing team of soldiers in Iraq that was so tense you thought your head would explode.
He and Bigelow began working on a movie about the hunt for Bin Laden in 2008 -- at a time when President Bush and Hollywood suits had put the terrorist leader on the back burner.
Why wait?" he asked. "I might be retired by the time we get out of Afghanistan. Don't you want to live in a world where artists mix it up in the culture in a timely way?"
He knows, however, that mixing it up about Osama can be dangerous, and is conscious of "the security ramifications...And about a year ago, Boal learned that the hunt for Osama had intensified.
Then the Navy Seal Team 6 dropped from the Pakistan sky. And now the duo, planning for a 2012 release, have an exciting ending and excited financiers.
We've certainly been getting more calls from studios," Boal says wryly. "We were charging ahead with a movie that ended in Tora Bora with Bin Laden still alive. Now we have a definitive ending.
Did team Obama envision a 2012 pre-election movie before, during and after the capture and killing of Bin Laden? Is New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd moonlighting as a Hollywood agent?
Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report
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