CIA, Defense Dept. Sued Over Kathryn Bigelow's Osama Bin Laden Movie, Naturally

The conservative "watchdog" group Judicial Watch has sued the CIA and the Defense Department, alleging a failure to comply with requests to know what was discussed in consultations with Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal about the Hurt Locker duo's follow-up charting the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Great.



In a nutshell: JW sent a Freedom of Information Act request about the meetings -- themselves merely alleged at this point -- to determine what classified details (if any) about the bin Laden mission were shared with the Oscar winners. Both organizations failed to respond in the 20-business-day window required by FOIA, and so... yeah. Now there is a lawsuit. I can't even deal. Here, from TheWrap:

As of January 12, the DoD and the CIA "have failed to produce any records responsive to plaintiff's requests or demonstrate that responsive records are exempt from production," the suit says. "Nor have they indicated whether or when they will produce any responsive records." In addition to information regarding the alleged meetings and communications, Judicial Watch is also seeking compensation for attorneys' fees and other legal costs related to the lawsuit. The filing of the suit comes less than two weeks after Congressman Peter King, senior Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, said the Office of the Inspector General at Defense was launching an investigation over the alleged meetings.

Washington! Getting Things Done Since Never.™ Anyway, Bigelow and Boal have specifically responded to King's pseudo-pissed hotdogging before, and this is all just another compulsion of the "small-government" elite to control everything, up to and including the Stop Online Privacy Act, in the name of national security and jobs jobs jobs that 10 percent of you don't even have and won't even have as long as the Dept. of Defense is shuffling FOIA requests about Kathryn Bigelow movies in with all that private contracting it still has yet to do abroad (think of the hundreds of personnel who'll be hired to install much-needed porta-potties in hot spots in and around Afghanistan) and the House of Representatives has some jowly wraith from Long Island stomping all over D.C. inveighing against God only knows what irrelevant bullshit while the culture at large seethes with resentment and while today's sprawling Web blackouts remind you how helpless you are to see, create and share anything without some mega-institution first authorizing it, whether it's Wikipedia or the CIA or Congress or some bozo-cabal calling itself "Judicial Watch" pinning its legitimacy to whether or not a Defense Dept. intern bothers to make a few photocopies before his shift ends and he runs off to get high and play video games or whatever it is kids do these days when they're not shamelessly conscripted into war or debt or The Devil Inside or the next new hopelessness of 21st-century American life. Seriously -- just feel safer already! Someone's looking out for you! And by "someone," I mean "not a fucking soul."

[TheWrap]