MB Civic

O’Brien ..

The public needs an accurate accounting of the “facts” concerning the Manning’s prosecution and the criminal probe into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks– certainly more than we need Hollywood scripts by documentarians, like Gibney, or the former editors of major newspapers, like the Guardian and the New York Times, who haven’t bothered to show up to the legal proceedings, which are underway for more than a year and a half– proceedings, I might add, which are now the subject of their creative fancy and economic enterprise. If “We Steal Secrets” or the subsequent Q & A with director, Alex Gibney, revealed anything, it’s that the filmmaker is quite uninformed about the trial of Bradley Manning. He can barely speak on the topic or on that of the largest criminal probe of a publisher and its source in history. Which begs the question: What was Gibney relying on for his costly ‘string of pearls’ reportage, beyond his hackneyed entourage of unexamined glory-boats, bearing witness on the silver screen to their privileged punditry– that is, talking about themselves amongst themselves for their own benefit– certainly not the public’s– or future generations?

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