Hollywood hit job: ‘Fair Game’ propagates easily disprovable myths about lead up to Iraq War

When pressed to tell TheDC what information he had, as he claimed, that the Robb-Silberman Commission didn’t have when it issued its report, Liman first suggested that he had talked to Plame’s CIA colleagues.

The Robb-Silberman Commission interviewed, in its words, “hundreds of experts from inside and outside the Intelligence Community …”

When pressed further to see what else he may have had that the Robb-Silberman Commission didn’t have access to, Liman said that he talked to an FBI agent who had some information about the matter and that he had Karl Rove’s memoir, which had not yet been published when the commission issued its report. Pretty paltry stuff.

Liman also claimed that he reached out to Scooter Libby’s attorneys to get his side of the story.

“We made several attempts to speak with Scooter Libby, through more than one lawyer,” he said.

When asked to name the lawyers, he replied that the lawyers “specifically asked me not use their names.”

But one of Libby’s attorneys told TheDC that he polled Libby’s attorneys involved in the case and none of them said they were contacted by Liman or anyone else associated with the movie.

“My law firm serves as counsel to Mr. Libby. We were not contacted,” said Alex J. Bourelly, an attorney at Baker Botts LLP, in an e-mail to TheDC, “and we are told by Mr. Libby’s other counsel that they were not contacted, during the preparation of the movie ‘Fair Game’ by the Director, or anyone else associated with the film, to discuss or screen the film, or to approach Mr. Libby to see if he would discuss or screen the film.”

He continued: “Counsel for Mr. Libby were publicly disclosed during the trial and are easy to find.”

Despite all the major myths propagated by his film that could have been corrected with just a minimal amount of reading, Liman somehow seems to view himself as some top-notch researcher, saying that if one was going to “pick a filmmaker who was just going to create a puff piece, that was just going to tell their [Wilson and Plame’s] point of view exclusively, I would not have been the filmmaker chosen.”

“I’m way too strong-willed and I have too strong of a background in research,” he told TheDC. “If I was Valerie and Joe and just wanted someone to parrot my side of the story there are other filmmakers who would be infinitely better choices than Doug Liman.”’

Actually, if you were Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson, it doesn’t seem like you could do much better than Doug Liman.

In the end, the movie is what you would expect from Hollywood, especially a film relating to the Iraq War that got Sean Penn — Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro’s favorite sycophant – to sign on. If accuracy matters, “Fair Game” should be destined for the dustbin. But if history is any guide, it is a shoe-in for an Academy Award.