Fair Game is a new feature movie 
about the Valerie Plame affair. Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame. Sean Penn plays her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson. I am having trouble containing how much I appreciate this movie, so let me start with the facts:
In the buildup for the Iraq War, the Bush Administration was eager to claim that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. At the time, Valerie Plame was an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) working on counterproliferation. She was running operations around the world to find reliable sources of information about the funding and development of weapons of mass destruction. She has developed a most sensitive source to get information from an Iraqi scientist. Her bosses ask her if she can get her husband to help them check out a claim that Saddam was buying yellow cake uranium from Niger – one of the poorest countries in the world. Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, knew the area and had contacts in Niger. He agrees to check it out. The amount of uranium at issue would have filled a convoy of trucks. It would have been noticed by everyone around and left a long paper trail. Wilson goes to Niger, visits his contacts, talks to the witnesses, and inspects the records. Nothing indicates any sale to Iraq. He makes his report. Then he is stunned to hear President Bush claim in the 2003 State of the Union Address that, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Joe Wilson (pictured with staff and interns of the National Whistleblowers Center) checks out whether President Bush could have been referring to any other African country other than Niger. He learns that the White House staff was relying on the same report that Wilson himself had checked out. He learns that the White House took out the claim from a speech President Bush gave in Cincinnati, but it popped back into the State of the Union Address. After the US invades Iraq, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice claims that if anyone in the government had reason to doubt the President’s claim about Saddam’s uranium, then it would have to be some staffer in the bowels of the CIA. Wilson knew this was wrong, and he felt compelled to call on his government to redress it.
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