- He works at the white-hot center of the media universe as the most reliable source for NSA surveillance scoops. He talks to Edward Snowden most days and has full access to the complete archive. And while Glenn Greenwald has spent the past year publishing revelations from arguably the largest cache of breached secrets in American-intelligence history, he promises the biggest bombs are still to come
There's a movie deal. Somebody's doing a movie. I was gonna ask you about that. Do they have people attached? We're just signing the contract now. I mean, the producer who's spearheading the project is Barbara Broccoli, whose father did all the Bond films, and she now produces the Bond films. So I was actually a little worried about that, because James Bond is stupid. But I haven't seen her films, so I shouldn't say that, but that's my impression from a distance. But she's a big mover in Hollywood, which is apparently important to, like, get a film done. And we want the film to be done, because, for me, like, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with All the President's Men, the film. And you know, the ability to reach huge numbers of people who don't stay online reading political writing is really important to everything we've done. [Ed. note: Sony didn't respond to a request for comment.] Just goes to show that Hollywood is a black hole of control over political discourse. Glenn Greenwald is a superstar, and I was following his writing for a good amount of time before the NSA leaks. This article describes his gusto pretty well. I find it ironic now that his 2012 critique of "Zero Dark Thirty" , if (the/his) film that is created from these events is in any way factually false or dramatized, could be subject to his own past scrutiny (sans torture): I probably will not be watching this movie should it come out. The highly funded blockbusters on well-known events, such as the Social Network, the death of Bin Ladin, etc., are, to me, equally subject to the above criticism; film is not reality, if anything, it is the closest we've gotten to the manipulation of time and space. I'll have to watch All the President's Men to get a better sense of what he's talking about.And now your book has sold in twenty-four countries, so you've got these book advances, the job at The Intercept, and all sorts of other income sources.
All of that is just ordinary propaganda and orthodoxy-boostering that, standing alone, would be too commonplace and inevitable to merit much comment. But what makes all of this so remarkable is that the film's glorifying claims about torture are demonstrably, factually false. That waterboarding and other torture techniques were effective in finding bin Laden is a fabrication.