Maybe Congress should ask Hollywood to investigate the IRS and Benghazi scandals. Plainly the filmmakers are better at extracting key information from the Obama administration than any House or Senate committee.
We’re thinking particularly of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the film about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, which ended with his death at the hands of a Navy SEAL team in May 2011.
The Defense Department’s inspector general recently confirmed that both the then-director of the CIA and the top intelligence officer at the Pentagon revealed classified material about the raid to the film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter, Mark Boal — even though neither had the proper security clearance for such info.
Meanwhile, Congress and the American people are still waiting to find out exactly what happened last September in Benghazi, where four Americans, including our ambassador, were killed in an al Qaeda-related attack. The administration won’t even disclose the names of the attack’s three survivors, who were flown to Germany and have not been available for questioning.
Likewise, it might be useful to see if Hollywood could get a film out of the Lois Lerner story. The now-suspended head of the IRS tax-exempt division that targeted conservative groups famously pleaded the Fifth Amendment when brought before Congress to answer questions. And the attempt to pin all the problems on “rogue” elements in Cincinnati sounds awfully like the initial explanation that Benghazi was caused by a random mob upset over a YouTube video.
In short, at this sensitive moment in our history America needs the services of our movie industry, and Hollywood has proved it can keep secrets. None of the classified details revealed to the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” for example, were ever made public. And that film isn’t the only example. Earlier this year, “Argo” earned an Oscar for its story about how filmmakers helped Americans trapped in Iran escape — an operation that never would’ve been successful had Hollywood let the wrong info get into the wrong hands.
Surely Benghazi and the IRS would make worthy sequels to “Argo” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” There’s nothing like the potential for treatment on the silver screen to get the Obama people talking about who did what and why. When it comes to two issues on which the American people deserve answers, our bet is that the film is mightier than the subpoena.