ABC's Nightline Mainstreams Pentagon Battlefield 2 Fiasco

It has been quite a day for video games on the tube.

Over coffee this morning we had Jack Thompson being Jack Thompson on CNBC's Squawk Box.

Then we howled as Jon Stewart flayed Congress over last week's video game hearings. And now the "Samir" story has gone mainstream, courtesy of ABC News and Nightline.

Who's Samir?

As reported last month by GamePolitics and Water Cooler Games, an important Congressional committee was wrongly told by employees of the Pentagon that a Battlefield 2 fan video was an insidious al Qaeda recruitment and propaganda tool.

In reality the video was cobbled together by a gamer named Samir, a Dutch citizen and BF2 devotee. GP's Colin McInnes scored the first interview with Samir (excerpts from which will appear in the upcoming issue of PC Gamer U.K.).

Late last month NPR picked up on the fiasco and now ABC's Jake Tapper has taken it to the masses with a terrific seven-minute expose on just how a Pentagon bureaucrat, prompted by a highly-paid defense contractor, managed to bungle this story.

Frankly, as a U.S. taxpayer, GP expects quite a bit more for the $7 million which the government paid to the contractor, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC).

ABC interviews Samir on camera (but with the gamer's face hidden, see accompanying screen cap) as well as the Pentagon official who made the erroneous declarations to the House Select Intelligence Committee. It's definitely worth watching.

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