News Release

Official Leaks: “These Senior People Do Whatever They Want”

Share

Leon Panetta [left] and Mark Boal [right]

The Project on Government Oversight recently released government documents showing “CIA staff worked closely with ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ filmmakers and used White House-approved talking points about the intelligence used to locate Osama bin Laden.” See: “New Documents in Zero Dark Thirty Affair Raise Questions of White House Sanctioned Intelligence Leak and Inspector General Coverup.”

Marcy Wheeler just wrote “Official Leaks: ‘These Senior People Do Whatever They Want’” at ExposeFacts.org: “The CIA Director decided to partner with big Hollywood to write a selective version of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and the rest of CIA and DOD had to fall in line, going so far as exposing some of the SEAL team members’ identities.”

LARRY JOHNSON, lcjohnson1 at me.com, @larrycjohnson
Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He now writes at noquarterusa.net.

He said today: “I have a friend who was at that awards ceremony and he said the SEALS were visibly angry when Leon Panetta walked in with [‘Zero Dark Thirty’ screenwriter] Mark Boal. This is one more example of national security info being sacrificed for political expedience. …

“The public needs to understand what’s happening here: The government is prosecuting people who are alerting us to actual wrongdoing — while allowing actually potentially damaging national security information to be out there when the higher ups want it even though it hasn’t been properly declassified.”