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twomp
06-10-2013, 03:06 PM
We all know now about Glenn Greenwald by now but here is an interesting article about Laura Poitras and how the US government has gone after her for her film making.


By now, we know the revelations about U.S. government surveillance published in the Guardian and the Washington Post in the past week have the same source, Edward Snowden. And despite what Politico, in typically overheated fashion, is calling a “feud” between reporters at the two news organizations, they share something else: the involvement of award-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Despite the customary competition between news sources — heightened, in this case, by differing accounts of how the story was reported — Poitras achieved the unusual distinction of sharing a byline both with Barton Gellman on the June 6 Washington Post story on PRISM and with Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill on the June 8 Guardian story naming Edward Snowden as a source. In the accompanying video interview of Snowden, Greenwald is credited as “interviewer” and Poitras as “filmmaker.” Greenwald wrote in a tweet this morning, “The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with [Snowden] since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.”

Salon reached out to Poitras, Gellman and Greenwald to elaborate on her involvement in the reporting, but they have not yet responded to those queries. However, Greenwald did offer up this comment on his colleague: ”She’s easily one of the bravest and most brilliant people I’ve ever met.”

Poitras is a MacArthur genius grantee who was nominated for an Oscar for 2006′s “My Country, My Country” on the impact of the Iraq War on ordinary Iraqis, the first of a trilogy of documentaries about American post-9/11 policies. The second documentary, “The Oath,” focused on Salim Hamdan (former driver to Osama bin Laden and namesake of a major Supreme Court case on detention policies and military commissions) and his brother-in-law, and the third, currently in the works, is not coincidentally about whistle-blowers.

“My work is absolutely, completely dependent on the people who open their lives to me and take huge risks in doing so, often,” Poitras says in a video on the MacArthur Foundation’s website. “In most of the films that I’ve been working on in this trilogy, pretty much everyone has their life on the line in one way or another. Their life, their freedom. The films are based on their courage to sort of allow me to go along on these journeys.”

more here:

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/the_woman_behind_the_nsa_scoops/