Hacker Cinema
Fair Game
2010 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Doug Liman
A devoted wife and mother leads a secret life as a CIA agent until her husband’s article exposes a scandal, putting her identity and loved ones at risk. As her world crumbles, she must navigate the fallout of her double life.
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The film Fair Game is about CIA analyst Valerie Plame and how she was shut out when decisions about WMD presence were made.
I don't know, it seems like it overrules the verdict (which only the president can do) but I am not sure. Its worth noting that initially, Libby specifically wasn't pardoned but his sentence was commuted.
> After a failed appeal, President Bush commuted Libby's sentence of 30 months in federal prison, leaving the other parts of his sentence intact. As a consequence of his conviction in United States v. Libby, Libby's license to practice law was suspended until being reinstated in 2016. President Donald Trump fully pardoned Libby on April 13, 2018. [1]
Which is rare:
> After Libby was denied bail during his appeal process on July 2, 2007, Bush commuted Libby's 30-month federal prison sentence, calling it "excessive", but he did not change the other parts of the sentence and their conditions. That presidential commutation left in place the felony conviction, the $250,000 fine, and the terms of probation. Some have criticized the move, as presidential commutations are rarely issued, but when granted they have generally occurred after the convicted person has already served a substantial portion of his or her sentence: "We can't find any cases, certainly in the last half-century, where the president commuted a sentence before it had even started to be served," said former Justice Department pardon attorney Margaret Colgate Love. [..] [1]
There's 2 movies which involve the Plame affair, Fair Game and Vice. Both well worth it, though its more a side thing in Vice while its the main subject in Fair Game.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby
I read this a couple of days after watching Doug Limman's movie "Fair Game." (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0977855/) Liman is known for playing the amoral chief of staff in House of Cards.
This CIA training book is all about avoiding self-deception and getting as close as possible to the truth. Those are good aspirations for any trade. Try debugging a complex system without doing those things. You can't.
But there's a whole lot more to making the truth useful. People with power must also avoid self-deception: they must listen. That didn't happen back in 2002-2003.
The movie is about Bush 43 and Cheney's push to convince the world about nuclear weapons in Iraq. That administration infamously disclosed the identity of a CIA undercover person called Valerie Plame. They did so to discredit her spouse Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Mr. Wilson made a fact-finding trip to the nation of Niger (north of Nigeria) to verify the administration's claim that Niger's uranium mines sold vast quantities of yellowcake uranium oxide to Iraq. Mr. Wilson's investigation proved that claim was false. Therefore, he needed to be discredited. Therefore the White House outed his spouse, wrecking her career and losing the lives of her contacts in various places.
CIA people come off as the good guys--earnest purveyors of truth--both in the movie and this training book. But even they can't prevent the kind of collective self-delusion that comes when politicians' minds are made up.
How many of us hackers embark on projects we know are doomed to failure? How many of us know how to validate our hunches with the right amount of information? Many of us, because that's the easy part. How many of us know how to convince people above us in the food chain? Far fewer. That's a place where training might come in handy.