I've written about why this is ghastly dreck at much greater length on CounterPunch, but I'll summarize here: If Walt Disney were alive today, the notorious right-winger would be delighted at the latest volley his namesake company has lobbed in the U.S. war on whistleblowers.
Wikileaks has written at some length about the raging factual inaccuracies in this 'docudrama', but the flick has more than Wikileaks in its sights. The film's broad themes undergird the same sorts of distortions that have been used to dirty up whistleblowers and information freedom advocates who include Stratfor whistleblower Jeremy Hammond, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdon, the late, great tech innovator and DemandProgress founder Aaron Swartz, and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. Namely: uncensored primary source material is bad, because dammit, how the heck can we control the information stream and the spin in the face of those nasty primary source materials?
Among its fantasy characters, TFE includes the racist stereotype of the 'good Arab' asset of State Department hacks -- a particularly appalling fiction that reinforces the wholly bogus notion that Wikileaks' release of State Department cables 'hurt our allies.' No, it didn't. To date, the U.S. government has utterly failed to document a single instance of 'harm' coming to a single one of its on-the-ground thugs, informants, collaborators or spies.
I saw this at a free screening hosted by the Chicago ACLU. Good thing their development director opened the event by announcing that they hadn't yet seen the flick and the event should by no means be construed as an endorsement of the film. Save your dough -- or better yet, check out Wikileaks' new documentary, Mediastan, which rather nicely documents the mainstream media's congenital unwillingness to speak truth to power.
Wikileaks has written at some length about the raging factual inaccuracies in this 'docudrama', but the flick has more than Wikileaks in its sights. The film's broad themes undergird the same sorts of distortions that have been used to dirty up whistleblowers and information freedom advocates who include Stratfor whistleblower Jeremy Hammond, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdon, the late, great tech innovator and DemandProgress founder Aaron Swartz, and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. Namely: uncensored primary source material is bad, because dammit, how the heck can we control the information stream and the spin in the face of those nasty primary source materials?
Among its fantasy characters, TFE includes the racist stereotype of the 'good Arab' asset of State Department hacks -- a particularly appalling fiction that reinforces the wholly bogus notion that Wikileaks' release of State Department cables 'hurt our allies.' No, it didn't. To date, the U.S. government has utterly failed to document a single instance of 'harm' coming to a single one of its on-the-ground thugs, informants, collaborators or spies.
I saw this at a free screening hosted by the Chicago ACLU. Good thing their development director opened the event by announcing that they hadn't yet seen the flick and the event should by no means be construed as an endorsement of the film. Save your dough -- or better yet, check out Wikileaks' new documentary, Mediastan, which rather nicely documents the mainstream media's congenital unwillingness to speak truth to power.