Twelve Pair Visit Syriana:Matt Damon & George Clooney come back together for political thriller

FilmStew.comDaily ^ | Wednesday, May 26, 2004 | Mark Umbach

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Matt Damon and George Clooney come back together for political thriller

Matt Damon and George Clooney, who are currently working together on Steven Soder-bergh's Ocean's Eleven sequel - Ocean's Twelve, will reteam for the Stephen Gaghan-helmed political thriller Syriana. In addition, Amanda Peet is in final negotiations to join the project. Set up at Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh's studio-based Section Eight will produce the project with shooting slated to begin during the summer.

Gaghan adapted the script, which is loosely based on the Robert Baer non-fiction novel See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism. Syriana stars Damon as Bryan Woodman, a financial advisor who reps a Middle Eastern country's oil interests. Clooney will play Baer, a former CIA agent who was tracking terrorist cells. Peet would star as Woodman's wife, who must console her husband during a family tragedy. In the vein of Traffic, the story will intertwine several storylines and characters involving the CIA, foreign policy, the oil industry and terrorism.

Michael Nozik will produce Syriana with Clooney and Soderbergh, while Section Eight's Jennifer Fox and Ben Cosgrove are executive producing with Georgia Kacandes.

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Book Review:About the Author ROBERT BAER was a case officer in the Directorate of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1997. He served in places such as Iraq, Dushanbe, Rabat, Beirut, Khartoum, and New Delhi, and received the Career Intelligence Medal in 1997. He now divides his time between Washington, D.C., and France.

Book Description: In his explosive New York Times bestseller, top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA’s efforts to root out the world’s deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

A veteran case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, Baer witnessed the rise of terrorism first hand and the CIA’s inadequate response to it, leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This riveting book is both an indictment of an agency that lost its way and an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism, and includes a new afterword in which Baer speaks out about the American war on terrorism and its profound implications throughout the Middle East.

“Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.” –Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker

From The Preface: This book is a memoir of one foot soldier’s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks. It’s a story about places most Americans will never travel to, about people many Americans would prefer to think we don’t need to do business with.

This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again. But I hope this book will accomplish one more purpose as well: I hope it will show why I am angry about what happened to the CIA. And I want to show why every American and everyone who cares about the preservation of this country should be angry and alarmed, too.

The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see.

[Dan from Michigan]

I'll skip it.

[Zack Nguyen]

I wonder if the movie will mention that the left systematically destroyed the CIA because many of them didn't think we needed an intelligence agency. See Robert Reich's book, where he ridicules the need for it.

[noscreenname]

Eight bucks to help fund the left's political agenda? I think not.

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Even if no one could have foreseen those attacks, it's still inconceivable that so many people had to die in order to wake us up to the fact that we have sacrificed a national resource for greed and convenience and small-minded politics. I'm incensed, and I think we should all be incensed, that the courageous passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 were the White House's first and only line of defense on September 11-not the CIA or the FBI or the Immigration and Naturalization Service or any other office or agency that we pay our taxes to support.

The other day a reporter friend told me that one of the highest-ranking CIA officials had said to him, off the record, that when the dust finally clears, Americans will see that September 11 was a triumph for the intelligence community, not a failure. If that's going to be the official line of thinking at the agency charged with manning the front lines in the war against the Osama bin Ladens of this world, then I am more than angry: I'm scared to death of what lies ahead.

Excerpted from See No Evil by Robert Baer
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/DailyNews/pt_020117_baer_excerpt.html

[bitt]

but THIS part is pretty good...

"Americans need to know that what happened to the CIA didn't happen just by chance. The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The oceans on either side of us were all the protection we needed. Afloat on this sea of self-absorption, the White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see. "

[fight_truth_decay]

Afloat on this sea of self-absorption

We enjoyed living in a land of cotton candy and merry-go-rounds.