Newsroom Factroom - Red Team III (S02E07)

Bring on Operation Genoa and all of its fallout glory. Given that the cat's out of the bag and the handling of this story is now the bigger issue on the show, it seems allowable to reveal the name of the original mission and compare accordingly. Reading about it will not reveal anything not already covered in the show.

Operation Genoa is based on a real classified mission codenamed Operation Tailwind. The original special report was created by CNN and run in the same time slot: Sunday night at 9pm. The original mission took place in 1970 and was going into Laos and not the Hindu Kush like the show portrays. Rather than doing a point-by-point account of the massive number of differences, a few will be called out and only the larger ones fact-checked. Should you want to get a start by learning everything there is to know about the fallout from the story, there's a DoD report, the review of an independent lawyer hired by CNN, the pentagon's response, and a short film interviewing eyewitnesses. Oh yeah, and that election thing is happening...

The legend: accurate, potentially accurate, or inaccurate.  Lights, camera, election...

• Operation Genoa was an extraction. The first unit sent in goes down and a second unit goes in and saves the original captives, two marines.
• Inaccurate.
• The nature of the mission is one of the two details for which CNN apologizes in their official retraction of the story. The original mission was to create a diversion for another operation and put pressure on the other side. The portrayal of the mission as a rescue was a good choice because gas is historically a common tool in most rescue missions.
• The pentagon told the former US Navy Seal who wrote a book about capturing Bin Laden they would pursue any and all legal remedies.
• Basically, yes
• In a letter faxed to the book's author, the pentagon did threaten legal action for violating non-disclosures. Matt Bissonnette was never charged with any crime by the pentagon.
• US Representative Thaddeus McCotter had the strangest resignation speech ever.
• Agreed, but there's more...
• His resignation letter is there in black and white on Facebook, but that's just the last hurrah of a bizarre political career. Somehow fittingly, a scandal involving maliciously forged petitions erupted to interrupt the implosion, the likes of which still live on through Someecards. The sentencing of the aides involved was still going on until two months ago.

As far as Benghazi goes, the surprise of the actors and story behind the movie is more interesting than the White House trying to get their facts right after the fact... To close up Operation Genoa, definitely more than one person was fired over it (and it actually resulted in a complete change of CNN's board of directors) and CNN became the target for multiple lawsuits.

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