Truth to Power

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Socialist Action december 2010 11 D Valerie Plame’s eponymous book. The movie stirs irector Doug Liman’s film “Fair Game” is based on up the anger and disbelief we all felt in early spring 2003 when we were fed the lies that led up to Bush’s so-called war. Hopefully, it will spur us once again to act to end Bush’s, and now Obama’s, wars.

This beautifully shot film by Liman, in which he uses many video and TV clips, opens on CIA agent Valerie Plame in various foreign locations. Meanwhile, back in the USA, President George W. Bush wants to invade Iraq, having shifted his attention from Afghanistan. Liman often uses a hand-held camera, creating jerky cuts and shakiness that lends the film immediacy.

Plame (a perfectly cast Naomi Watts), once back in D.C., is briefed by her CIA boss Bill Johnson (Noah Emmerich) about the possible invasion of Iraq. On TV, Condi Rice talks about aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq used to enrich uranium for WMDs. She invokes the scary “mushroom cloud” threat.

Limon also includes the televised congressional hearing in which Colin Powell shows “proof” of Saddam’s mobile biological weapons facilities (which turned out to be abandoned, rusting trucks); and a clip of Bush’s State of the Union address when he intones the noxious 16 words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Later, it’s made clear that the uranium is yellowcake from Niger.

Plame’s husband, ex-diplomat Joe Wilson (an excellent, much matured Sean Penn), had once been posted to Africa. Plame’s CIA superiors need concrete information about yellowcake for a report to the White House and the Pentagon; they recruit Joe to go to Niger undercover.

Once there, Wilson concludes that the logistics of shipping 500 tons of enriched yellowcake from Niger to Iraq would have attracted world-wide attention.

Tony Savino / Socialist Action ... Antiwar (continued from page 1: “New York meeting launches April 9 antiwar action”) again and again to the need to take on the increased efforts by the U.S. government to “manufacture” terror suspects. The meeting heard as well from Shaheena Parveen, the mother of a similarly imprisoned South Asian youth and a member of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM). DRUM’s day-to-day work dramatizes the intimate connection between attacks on the Muslim and immigrant communities.

Abayome Azikiwe of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice explained the case of Iman Luqman Ammen Abdullah, an African American community leader from Detroit who was lured to a warehouse in an apparent FBI sting operation and then shot 21 times.

Steve Downs, the attorney who founded Project SALAM, said that his organization will not rest until it has uncovered the cases of hundreds of other Muslim-American victims of entrapment and found ways to support their families. The antiwar activists in the room applauded vigorously, a seeming majority aware that efforts to involve the communities most strongly opposed to Washington’s wars—that is, the Black, Latino, and Muslim communities—required a new level of solidarity with the war’s victims here at home.

Those victims, of course, include the millions reeling from the bipartisan effort to reduce the deficit on the backs of poor and working people. Marty Nathan, a leader with the Northampton, Mass., campaign to Bring Our War Dollars Home, urged the room to understand how they really convinced the Northampton Town Council to pass their resolution. “We won,” she said, “ by talking to laid-off workers, to the homeless, to neglected veterans, to educators, to the workers at the soup kitchens, none of whom thought of themselves as ‘antiwar’ before. This is one of the bricks that must be laid to build a massive antiwar movement.”

Larry Holmes of the Bail Out the People Movement said that around April 9, the date of the projected antiwar demonstration, he hoped that the streets of New York would be regularly filled with protests against the cuts to public jobs, pensions, and benefits promised by the newly elected Governor Cuomo.

Margaret Kimberley, an editor and senior columnist with Black Agenda Report, argued for the independence of our movement from the Democratic and Republican parties if the movement is to connect with the most economically victimized. “Think of ACORN,” she said. “This organization would not be any worse off if Sarah Palin were president!”

To bring working people in the United States into the antiwar fold, argued Adaner Usmani of Action for a Progressive Pakistan and the Pakistani Labor Party, we must offer them a real understanding of what is happening in the countries under U.S. attack.

While the U.S. government whips up Islamophobia and tries to paint Pakistan as a nation of Taliban, terrorists, and jihadists, he said, “the country is composed in its majority of workers and peasants first and foremost. Just this summer, the largest textile mills were shut down by a militant strike, and 100,000 workers brought one of PakiBottom line, no such purchase was made. But Cheney sends his stooge, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (a shiftyeyed, bushy-browed David Andrews), to the CIA to coerce officials into massaging reports to track with the Bush administration’s yellowcake scenario. Bush soon announces that bombers are on their way to Iraq.

Watching film clips of the night bombing of Baghdad—smoke and flames against the darkened sky, hearing the thunderous roar of bombs, and building collapsing; civilians shouting, screaming, running for stan’s largest cities to a halt for almost two weeks demanding that the government honor a pledge to raise wages.”

This conference is the first step toward recognizing, he argued, “that the undeniable fact of shared oppression represents the only useful foundation for going forward.”

Hanadi Doleh of Al Awdah and the US Palestinian Community Network also called for direct solidarity. The goals of UNAC, as reflected in the End US Aid to Israel resolution passed at the Albany conference, and the goals of the USPCN meeting just held in Chicago, she said, are the same. “Let us work collectively to put them into practice.” Nada Khader, the executive director of WESPAC, an organizer of the women’s track at the same Chicago conference, and an early presence in the support work for the Newburgh Four, spoke of her new confidence that we can build an antiwar movement that is genuinely welcoming to all and free from exclusion.

Marilyn Levin, a co-chair of UNAC, recounted the political advances made at the Albany conference, spoke of the failure of either political party to address the war in the recent elections, and urged all the groups present in the audience who wanted to build April 9 to join the United National Antiwar Committee and choose representatives to serve on its Continuations Committee. Joe Lombardo, also a co-chair of UNAC, spoke forcefully of the need for mass actions this spring and urged that attendees begin immediately to do the outreach that will make such an action successful.

Sara Flounders of the International Action Center led the important effort to schedule the first national meeting of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, which followed the UNAC meeting in the evening of Nov. 6. (Read more concerning the FBI attacks on page 12.)

Around $5000 was pledged for building the April 9 New York City demonstration, and more than 100 activists signed up to participate in UNAC national campaigns that include: Bring the War Dollars Home, Muslim Civil Liberties, Palestine, Iran, No War/No Warming, Witness Against Torture, Teach-Ins, and April 9.

The optimism evidenced by this level of participation was born, in great part, because a broad range of political forces (Left) Naomi Watts (ctr.) as CIA agent Valerie Plame in “Fair Game.”

their lives, I couldn’t help contrast it with films showing the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The Baghdad bombing seemed enormous in comparison, which doesn’t minimize the Twin Tower horror. It has been recorded that from March to June 2003 to 2006, 151,000 Iraqi citizens were killed.

The Wilsons are outraged. In his article for the Washington Post, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” Joe Wilson basically called the Bush administration liars. Subsequently, in retaliation, New York Times journalist Robert Novak wrote a piece naming Plame as a CIA agent. The “outing” destroys her career and almost ends her marriage. She becomes persona non grata, a pariah.

Subsequently, the Wilsons sued the Bush administration. In 2007, hearings were held. A clip during the end credits shows Valerie Plame testifying against Libby. He was later charged and convicted of felonies unconnected to Novak’s unveiling of Plame, and sentenced to a couple of years in prison. Bush later commuted his sentence.

In “Fair Game,” Doug Liman and screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth depict the CIA as good guys and the Bush administration as bad. We who read alternative media and the internet know that the CIA is behind disappearances, the operation of notorious “Black Sites,” and the imprisonment and torture of alleged terror suspects without due process—all against international law. For decades since World War II, the CIA has been behind the toppling of foreign governments and other such atrocities.

However, this film’s message is about the importance of speaking truth to power at whatever cost. n Tony Savino / Socialist Action (Above) Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report speaks at the Nov. 6 UNAC meeting in New York City. (Left) Maggie Zhou of Climate SOS takes the podium on Nov. 6.

had put aside political or organizational differences and cooperated to make the Nov. 6 meeting successful.

Important pacifist, anti-intervention, religious, solidarity, and left groups that did not work closely together before the Albany UNAC conference have now pulled together and created a pole for antiwar organizing on a political basis that meets the real challenges facing the movement.

The decision by significant forces in the mainstream Muslim community to devote leadership to the antiwar movement is one of the factors inspiring a new level of cooperation.

This new unity, in and of itself, is no guarantee that massive numbers can be mobilized in April. It does, however, lay the basis for the kind of mass outreach that can become possible as the Obama star dims and the confidence to fight back grows. For other reports on the meeting, visit the UNAC website at www.nationalpeaceconference.org. n