Hollywood buys option to film bin Laden driver’s story

Hollywood buys option to film bin Laden driver’s story

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — It’s true that a production company owned by Hollywood heartthrob George Clooney optioned the story of Osama bin Laden’s driver.

Not quite true are tabloid reports that Clooney is reserving for himself the role of retired Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Swift, the former Navy JAG officer who championed the case of driver Salim Hamdan from the prison camps to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hollywood publicist Stan Rosenfield told The Miami Herald by telephone Tuesday that Grant Heslov, who wrote Good Night, and Good Luck with Clooney, optioned a recently released book on the Hamdan case by New York writer Jonathan Mahler.

Heslov and Clooney are partners in the Smoke House production company.

”There’s been no decision on casting, directing or anything of that nature,” said Rosenfield, Clooney’s publicist.

”They do intend to develop it as a motion picture,” Rosenfield said, but not necessarily any time soon. “This is a long process. Sometimes it takes 10 years.”

Hamdan, 40, is the lone war court convict at Guantánamo.

A military jury convicted him of providing material support for terrorism last week and sentenced him to time served plus less than five months, meaning he could be eligible for release at New Year’s.

Under Bush administration policy, Hamdan can also be held here indefinitely as an ”enemy combatant” — as long as there is a war on terror and Defense Department officials independently deem him too dangerous to go home to his native Yemen.

The full title of the Mahler book is The Challenge: Hamdan v Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power.

It tells the tale of the civilian and military lawyers who took Hamdan’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court and eventually sunk the White House’s first draft of a plan to try Guantánamo detainees by military commission.

Hamdan had maintained his innocence from his very first meeting behind the razor wire here with Pentagon-appointee Swift in 2004. He said he took the job of driving bin Laden in Afghanistan for the money — $200 a month — and at his trial apologized to the six U.S. military jurors for any pain his work had caused.

The jury acquitted the father of two with a fourth-grade education of a second charge of conspiracy that sought to hold him responsible for a worldwide string of al Qaeda terror.

Rosenfield declined to say how much the company paid for the movie rights.

Mahler likewise declined to comment on the details.

”I’m thrilled that the book is in the hands of such quality filmmakers,” he said by e-mail from New York, “and have no doubt that they’re going to do justice to this extraordinary story.”

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George Clooney keen to play lead in anti-war Iraq films

New York, Aug 5 : George Clooney is all set to star in a movie on the Iraq war, even though anti-war films about Iraq tend to bomb at the box-office.

What’s more, Clooney will also be producing the pic, as well as starring in it.

Clooney and his production company, Smoke House, have paid seven figures for the rights to Jonathan Mahler’s book “The Challenge.”

The book is the story of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s Yemeni driver, who is charged in the first US war-crimes trial since World War II, now under way at Guantanamo Bay.

The story traces the account of Hamdan’s journey from a mosque in Yemen and bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan to solitary confinement.

According to reports, Clooney is considering one of the lead roles, that of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, reports The New York Post.

Swift was part of the legal team that took Hamdan’s case to the Supreme Court and won a pretrial decision that even terrorists are covered by the Geneva Convention. However, the victory cost Swift his job and marriage.

Malaysia Sun ,Tuesday 5th August, 2008, (ANI)

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