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Jan. 21, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
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New Laura Poitras Documentary: On War, Propaganda & the Corporate Media

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras discusses her new documentary "Cover-Up" about the life and career of the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.  ------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Laura Poitras's Cover Up 00:15:03
Good evening.
It's Tuesday, January 20th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, we have a very special show and a very special guest for you.
She is the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Laura Poitras, who has a new film that is out on Netflix that is called Cover Up, which is ostensibly about the life of what I think, the person I think is the greatest investigative journalist of his generation, Seymour Hirsch.
But it's also a film necessarily about all of the events, the extremely consequential events that Hirsch has covered over the years, including things like the Vietnam War and atrocities committed in Iraq and throughout all sorts of American conflicts, as well as constant lies and government cover-ups and government propaganda.
And a lot of it might be known to some of you in very abstract and general terms as it was to me, but even if you feel like you're familiar with any or all of it, it's still a film that is remarkably affecting.
And I actually, there were a lot of things about those events that I thought I knew a lot about that I learned a lot about.
But just seeing how the film was put together in terms of the role of Seymour Hirsch and his investigative journalism and what differentiated him from most of his peers as a critique of the corporate media, not just in the past, but today, but also seeing the actions of the U.S. government that he played such a vital role in exposing in terms of what it does in its wars and the lead up to the war, how it sells the wars, how it lies about the wars are topics that,
even though they're fascinating history, could not bear any more relevance than they do to today's event as well.
So in sum, I can't recommend this film highly enough.
I've watched it twice.
I know a lot about Seymour Hirsch.
Obviously, he's an inspiration of mine.
I read his book.
Things like the massacre in Vietnam that he exposed or Abu Ghraib are things that a lot of us know about.
But the way the film was put together will, I promise you, leave you very affected, not just emotionally, psychologically as it should, but also just thinking in a lot of different ways about journalism and politics and government and our current debates.
And as for Laura herself, she's really one of the most remarkable people I've ever met.
I first actually got to know Laura back in 2011.
She was working on a film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and she came to Rio de Janeiro to interview me about that.
And we ended up talking about the fact that she had been placed on a government watch list that was an extremely intrusive government watch list that included the fact that every time she left the United States, which she often did because of her filmmaking and came back to the United States, she was not only interrogated, automatically detained and interrogated for hours, but her laptops were seized, her phones were seized, all because of a film that she made about the insurgency in Iraq that was actually nominated for an Academy Award in 2007.
That was the first documentary of hers that received an Oscar nomination.
Her second was for the film Citizen Four, which covered the work of Edward Snowden and the work that Laura and I did together in reporting that story and in meeting Snowden.
That film actually won an Academy Award.
And then a third film, which I think was one of her most remarkable, which is about the activist Nan Golden and her very singular and at times highly risky efforts in the art world to expose the fact that so many museums were reliant on the Sacker family and their wealth generated by getting Americans in high numbers addicted to OxyCotton.
She's an amazing filmmaker, an amazing journalist, has pretty much succeeded in everything she's done in a remarkable way.
She's one of the co-founders of The Intercept with me, along with Jeremy Scale.
I've known Laura for a long time.
I have immense respect for her work, which I think is obvious, but I still wanted to have her on because this film is not only so great on its own, but covers so many of the topics that my journalism covers that we cover often on this show.
And she always has very interesting things to say about her process as a filmmaker, what the film she thinks revealed, how she went about putting it together.
And so, even without seeing the film, I think you'll really find this conversation and her observations about all of these things very thought-provoking and very valuable.
Again, I want to really encourage you to watch the film.
Pretty much any film that she makes by definition is extremely well worth watching.
But I think this is one of her best.
And again, I went into it with the doubt that since I knew so much about Seymour Hirsch, about the Vietnam War, about the Iraq War, about Watergate, about his recent reporting on Syria and Ukraine and Gaza and so many other things about journalism in general, that I would know most of it and expect to be a good film, but not necessarily be that informed.
And that was what really most amazed me was how much of it was new to me, how the way it was put together made me think about these things differently.
And I think it's going to really shape how you think about current debates about things like Venezuela or Iran or the U.S. role in the world or the role of media and the independent media and all of those things.
So here's my conversation with Laura.
And again, I want to recommend Cover Up, which is on Netflix, as an absolutely remarkable film.
Laura Poitras, great to see you as always.
I'm excited to talk to you.
I'm excited to talk to you.
I'm sorry I'm not there in person.
Yeah, absolutely.
We'll have to arrange that the next time.
All right, so let's dive in.
It's been a couple of weeks since I've seen the film and it's still very fresh on my mind.
First of all, congratulations on it.
I think it cements your legacy as our generation's one of them, certainly greatest documentary filmmakers.
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
And it's obviously relevant to topics we frequently cover here.
So I want to talk to you about a lot of the substance that involves, I think, for me, the topics at least are U.S. foreign policy and investigative journalism.
Before I get to that, I just want to ask you one question about the process of the filmmaking, because when I went in to watch this film, the one doubt I had was, you know, Cy Hirsch is a huge inspiration for me as an investigative journalist.
I think he is probably for anybody who considers themselves that.
His stories are so, you know, historic that you feel like you're very familiar with them.
And so, and I read his book.
So part of me was thinking, is there going to be anything new here?
And yet I found the film so affecting, like on almost every level, obviously emotionally and psychologically, having to watch a lot of that, but even the thought-provoking process of reconsidering and thinking about how these events not were just allowed to happen, but continue to happen.
And I know you're not a big fan of talking about yourself, but I do wonder, you know, you spent years working on this film.
The footage we saw in the film, I'm sure, is a tiny fraction of what you and your colleagues spent years immersed in.
And some of it is, you know, very difficult to watch.
Even Sai said that a lot of times in these stories, he kind of had to stop.
Like he couldn't take it just in terms of the atrocity and the savagery and barbarism.
What did you personally take away from the film?
Like, what did you, how did it alter your perspective or view of these kinds of issues that you have yourself spent a big part of your career working on?
Yeah.
I mean, first of all, it's great to be here and to talk to you about the film.
And I thought you'd appreciate, you know, Sai's sort of doggedness and sort of how he sort of, you know, doesn't always make friends when he's doing his reporting.
And there are some echoes for those of your audience who know that we made a film together, also about journalism, also about state wrongdoing and lies and cover-ups.
And yeah, so I mean, I was really interested.
I mean, I approached Sy first when I was in the middle of the Iraq war reporting.
Like I'd gone to Iraq right when the, right after the Abu Ghraib torture photographs were public, came back and reached out to Sai.
And, you know, he was very generous.
I really wanted to make a film about him then, but I never, like that, that idea never left me.
And the reason is because, you know, his body of work is just so extraordinary.
And so with the film, what I really wanted to do is like, okay, let's like looking at a long historical scale and look at this repetition.
Like how does how does the government commit these atrocities, lie about them, try to cover them up, try to pressure the press not to publish them, right?
Because that's a big part of the story, right?
The government's always asking the press not to publish about these atrocities and then cyber, you know, reporting them.
And then they're ultimately being impunity, right?
There's ultimately nobody at higher up is held accountable.
I mean, that's what we see over and over and over again.
So that sort of became the story, right?
Because I knew, I mean, some of you know, the Milai reporting was known and to Abu Ghraib as well.
But like we was interested in like what are the thematic through lines if you look at history, stepping back.
And we were really inspired by films that I think you also love, like All the President's Men, The Parallax View, the sort of 70s paranoia thrillers and like how to create that sense of like that there's something that the government is always hiding and lying about and creates that sort of a vibe in the film and to tell that story.
But we were also very much trying to stay like in the edit room.
So I was editing Amy Foote and Peter Bowman.
And the rule in the edit room, there were a couple different rules.
One was don't get ahead of the story so that we know what the audience knows what Sai knows in the moment.
So with Milai, first it's just there's going to be a court martial and then he meets a lawyer and then the lawyer leads to a name and etc.
So we kind of play it out both to sort of create a sense of like this is how it works.
Like you don't know everything all at once, right?
You have a gut instinct, you follow your instinct and you follow the story.
And we wanted the film to have that so that, I mean, a film like All the President's Men, I mean, I can still rewatch it, even though I know the story, right?
Because it's good filmmaking.
And so like, how do we make the filmmaking have this kind of a dramatic pulse?
And yeah, I don't know.
And I just keep returning to these themes.
I mean, partly because this country keeps repeating similar, I think, catastrophic errors, like, for instance, regime change in other countries, which has never turned out very well.
And yet the press just seems to like sit down and dutifully like copy the, you know, the government's narrative rather than say, like, let's, let's look at how this has failed us in the past.
And so, yeah, it's very much about the present for me and as well as history.
Yeah, so I guess that's my question.
You know, I watch a film like the one that you just produced with your colleagues and walk away very affected.
And I'm sure most decent people would.
And exactly as you said, you know, we all, or not all, but most of us know the story of Milai and Abu Ghraib and just the general atrocities of wars in general and U.S. wars in particular.
And yet, even though people are well familiar now with the fact that the government led us into the Vietnam War, with the Gulf Duncan, into with the Iraq war, obviously with WMD, et cetera, you just watch how easy it is to not just sell new wars, even when Americans say they're sick of these words, they don't want regime change, but using exactly the same scripts.
You know, I don't know where Nicolas Maduro is a narco-terrorist and is going to pass all kinds of resources to Hezbollah, which is going to come through that.
Same with Iran, obviously, in regime change there.
Students are dangerous terrorists, students who protest wars are like, or they're communists, you know, the similar, but we have to spy on them.
Yeah, it's the same script over and over.
Like, in a way, I mean, and so I'm just wondering for you and for your expectations of the film.
I know I've had to combat and still have to combat this sense of futility sometimes.
You know, like you think, okay, this is super eye-opening.
People realize the government has repeatedly eyed them.
And then you watch and you see that war propaganda is as effective as ever, even though it's barely unchanged from what was previously debunked.
So in terms of your process of making the film and what your expectations were, how did you kind of confront that in your mind as a filmmaker?
I mean, you know, you know, one would hope, and I don't think that's, I don't know, I mean, it's hard to like live through this moment having just made this film, right?
Where you think like, don't fall for the lie again, right?
Or the press should not like follow, you know, dutifully repeat the government's narrative.
Like, don't do this again.
It's catastrophic.
We've seen it.
There's an absolute consensus that Vietnam was a catastrophe.
So was Iraq.
So was, you know, over and over.
And yet we sort of go, oh, wow, the CIA kidnapped someone.
Let's like, let's do a beat by beat of how they did it as if we don't know that the CIA is capable of murdering anyone on the planet, right?
This is not, you know, that's not the news.
And so I don't know.
Like, I guess I would wish that maybe, you know, that the public is more skeptical and that journalists were more adversarial, right?
I mean, that's what you, that's what I would hope that those two things could happen.
Because I do think that the, like, you know, we, in the United States, there is, you know, a free press still, right?
And so this idea that you would self-censor or not, you know, question the government's narrative is so shameful, right?
Because we have the right to do it, right?
It's protected.
It's protected.
And yet we still, you know, we see the press over and over not being adversarial, being too close to power.
And then here we go again, because I do think the press is important in raising these questions for the public.
And also, and I think, you know, this is something you've talked about and written about a lot, is that there's a lot of distrust of the press by the public because of the press lying to the public or the press censoring information from the public, right?
So I think all of that needs to be, you know, reestablished.
I mean, facts are facts.
They're non-partisan and they should be published.
And we need journalists that are going to, you know, make some people unhappy that are in power.
Yeah, you know, on that point, George Orwell in this preface that was supposed to be part of what was Animal Farm, but ironically, he had a lot of trouble publishing it.
That's one of the main points he made that I think has kind of eluded us in our understanding is that so often the most effective forms of censorship or propaganda aren't, you know, when you have thugs in black uniforms marching on the street and dragging away dissidents to prison because it's so overt that everyone understands it.
It's more the climate of social rewards and incentive and exclusion that creates the kind of self-censorship that, for example, in Great Britain, he was saying is even more repressive in a lot of ways than what we think of as the more repressive countries.
Corporate Media Subservience 00:00:53
And that is the irony is that on the one hand, you do still have freedom of the press and perfectly protected, et cetera.
And then on the other hand, you have this corporate media that just seems so instinctively eager, especially in the times most important, to be even more subservient to state messages than ever.
So I want to ask you about that because to me, the film is obviously about the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and U.S. aggression and foreign policy and all that, but it's certainly, you know, the main subject is Seymour Hirsch and therefore investigative journalism.
And to me, and this is one of the things that your film really, I think, finalized, is that I would say pretty much clearly, without aught of a doubt, Seymour Hersh is the greatest and most accomplished investigative journalist of that generation.
Great Investigative Journalist 00:03:04
And interestingly, we're both critics of the corporate media, but we, I think, both recognize that there are people inside Corporate Media who try and do good work.
And of course, he himself, you know, spent years working at the New York Times, the New Yorker, he's always kind of had one foot in, one foot out.
What is it about him having spent all this time talking to him, studying his work?
What are the attributes that you think made him stand out as such a great investigative journalist in comparison to his peers?
Right.
I mean, I think a number of things in the film, it's a portrait of like this country, our history of this country through the lens of size reporting.
And we go into his background.
We go into the fact that he grew up, his parents are immigrants from Eastern Europe.
They came over in the 20s during the pogrom.
So it was before the Holocaust, but the entire extended communities were killed in the Holocaust.
And in the family, there was just a lot of silence.
And he grew up in Chicago, poor.
His dad had a dry cleaning store in the south side.
And so he saw injustice.
He saw racial inequality.
He saw how, you know, certain people got ahead.
And it wasn't because they were, you know, smarter, you know, because there were sort of systemic inequalities.
And he just, he was in his bones.
And I think, and I think it's also in his bones to like be distrustful of power and silence, right?
He's always trying to get to an answer.
And, you know, I think what's so he has all those skills.
He's got, you know, great curiosity people skills.
I mean, I saw that at play making the film.
I mean, we had a big team of people and he was just so engaged with everyone.
He wasn't somebody who just like knew my name and then there was a sound person.
Like he knows Brian.
He knows everybody by name.
Everyone's been to his house.
He's cooked for them.
So he has like a real way with people and wants to, you know, like if you met him, he would know about, you know, where you went to school.
He'd know about your debating club, you know, where did you learn to, you know, what you did.
So he's, he just has that kind of like, everybody got interrogated by side in the process of making the film.
And, but I think the thing that I really admire and love about his career trajectory is that once he sort of really made his name, you know, really as an outsider, right?
With Milai, like publishing a story that nobody wanted, it was rejected by everyone and then became the biggest story in the world, changed the war, gets a job at the Times and, you know, looks around and just like, what is going on here?
That's sort of, you know, subservience to power, subservience to government narratives.
And he never kind of fell for like, oh, this, you know, like I'm comfortable in this job at the Times or the New Yorker or anything.
He just was always difficult, difficult towards the government, mostly, but I think also in work situations.
I don't think he was easy to edit.
I think he's, you know, no, I mean, I agree with you.
He's, you know, done, I think, in a greatest body of work.
Why Cy Never Got Comfortable 00:06:25
And I think other journalists at his position maybe got comfortable, right?
And then there's a seduction of, you know, access, right?
You know, to power.
And that's, I think, you know, we know some journalists that have fallen for that.
So, and he just never did.
He just never, he has no interest in being invited to a cocktail party.
You know, even this, you know, releasing the film, he's like, do I have to go to another cocktail party?
You know, like there's a, there's something about the release and, you know, festivals.
And he just wants to, you know, he wants to write, you know, and he's still writing today, you know.
And he's obsessed.
I mean, he's obsessed.
He's obsessed about Gaza and he's obsessed that this is happening as we're, as the world is watching.
Like we have this genocide unfolding on camera.
And yet we haven't stopped it.
And I think that that just, you know, drives him like morally, I think he finds it so offensive.
And that's what interests me so much, Laura.
And I want to like, maybe, maybe it is a little elusive because maybe it's like a more psychological question than anything else.
But you know, if you look at Sai's just record in terms of accolades, you cannot find anybody with more impressive accolades, you know, just the number of awards that he's won at the highest level of journalism.
And yet he's ending his life and ending his career essentially unemployable in mainstream media.
I mean, since he left the New York Times, he's went to Substack.
If you listen to how, you know, extremely unaccomplished journalists speak of him, it's like he's some kind of a nutcase.
He's sort of like the way he began.
And that's not because he was forced into that.
I mean, along the way, he could easily have taken the much, you know, more lucrative and tension-free path that been celebrated as this, you know, sort of the Bob Woodward path.
And yet he took the opposite path.
And I, I remember when I, when I first got to NYU law school, which is kind of known where it brands itself as this very like public interest left-wing kind of law school, like you go and you learn how to represent the indigent and the poor.
Everybody who gets there, they do a survey in the first year.
Where do you want to go work?
And everybody says, oh, I want to go work at like public interest firms.
And maybe like 4% people say, I want to go work at big Wall Street law firms.
And by the third year, they do the same questionnaire.
And everybody says, you know, 95%, oh, I'm going to work at big law firms.
Like even people who enter these institutions, law school or corporate media, who might have the same kind of intentions that Cy has.
Like, I want to fight against the establishment.
I want to, you know, do the kind of reporting that confronts power, succumb to all of those human incentives that you just laid out, you know, like wealth and access.
And, you know, we had the same thing during Snowden where we saw the kind of doors that can open up.
I once had breakfast with Tonah's Ecoates, and he talked about how he was always fighting against walking through those doors and has kind of removed himself from the public platform in a lot of ways to avoid that.
Cy Hirsch to me is like the ultimate example of that.
And to me, it seems like that's a big factor in why he succeeded so much as a journalist.
How do you connect those kind of personality traits with the work?
Yeah, I mean, you know, one of my favorite stories that just had to be in the movie is when he and Jeff Gerth, he brings Jeff, who's also this sort of like writing for this underground, you know, about sort of corporate power and money.
And it's like, we're going to investigate a corporation.
At that point, which is kind of shocking, I mean, we fact-check this.
The Times had never investigated a corporation.
They decided to investigate Gulf and Western.
And at some point, Jeff says, I think I should look into the corporate filings of the New York Times.
And then they found out that, you know, the executive editor, Jay Abe Rosenthal, had gotten a loan from the board.
And it was like a sweet deal, like, you know, very low interest.
And they, and they know, you have Cy like run, you know, it's basically like, you know, going into his office, his boss's office, saying, What the fuck is this?
Like, how do how do you expect us to do our job?
We can now we can't publish what we know because you know you've taken this loan.
And ultimately, Abe Rosenthal did remortgage his apartment because of what Cy did.
But it's, you know, it's just, I mean, I think he's just not, you know, like the whatever the, he would talk about that he was supposed to be in love with the Times, you know, and he just wasn't in love with the New York Times.
Like he doesn't, he's in love with journalism and investigative journalism.
He's in love with getting the story.
He's in love with writing.
He's not in love with an institution or the sort of the doors that are open.
And, you know, in terms of being at Substack, you know, he's, you know, he says, you know, I, you know, I've always been a bit of an outsider, so it's perfect, you know, and he's not, you know, there are a lot of people who are going there for different reasons, as you know, you went there before you started the show.
So I think it's, Yeah, I mean I think it says something about journalism, the state of journalism, where we're at with it.
But in terms of what makes a tick, I mean, one thing about Cy is that he can always tell you what he did, but when you ask him, you know, why did you do it?
He's not good at answering that question.
He's just not.
I mean, we asked it a million times.
I mean, he ultimately, in the end, he says, what else can you do?
I mean, you know, I mean, I think for him, it's like, if he's not chasing the story, he's not feeling, you know, that he's alive.
You know, yeah, I think Cy might be the only person on earth who dislikes talking about themselves more than you do.
And that was such an interesting attention in the film.
I do want to say, like, one thing that really struck me that I think surprised me, because I've known Cy for a while.
Not great or anything.
I mean, I don't think we've ever even met in person, but we've had interactions.
And he obviously has a reputation for being a very cantankerous sort.
And I think the film shows that that's not just a reputation, but at least to some extent, certainly a big part of how he interacts with almost everybody.
At the same time, what struck me so much, Laura, was when he talked about what I alluded to earlier, which is the fact that doing all of this reporting on these atrocities, on this barbarism, on the savagery of our own government, of having to just constantly, you know, face and delve into and investigate and talk about just the worst possible, like he talks so openly about how difficult that was for him emotionally.
Why Journalists Remember 00:08:17
And so to me, you know, most professional journalists, I think they think almost like it's noble or maybe it just happens automatically or maybe they didn't have a very strong moral conscience to begin with.
They kind of look at it as like a profession.
Like you write about these things in the abstract, but you don't really write about them in these strongly moral terms and therefore don't connect to them in that way.
After all these years, he still does.
He's so affected when he talks about these massacres and torture and the like.
How important do you think that is in terms of why he's been so intrepid in this work?
Yeah, totally.
I mean, he's been, I think, I think he would say he's still obsessed with the Milai.
Like what happened there and how could it happen?
And what's really interesting about how he broke it.
So, you know, the event happened in the spring of 68, and he didn't report it until over a year later.
So, and he got a tip and followed it.
And at that point, like, a lot of people knew about it.
Ron Rittenhauer had written letters to Congress as a whistleblower.
He breaks the story.
It's a huge story, but he does this, and they syndicate it.
Like, this is, you know, it's this amazing thing.
He and David Oakes, they like, they write the story and then they call the Boston Globe and they say, we can, you know, you can publish this for $100.
And they said, that's how they do it.
They syndicate it.
So he sort of starts with his model.
But then at some point, there's no question that the massacre happened, right?
The photographs then come out in Life magazine.
But Sai doesn't stop there.
After he does the first stories, he continues and speaks to 50 more soldiers to understand not that it happened, but how could it happen?
And because he could not understand it.
Like he couldn't understand how these kids, you know, he'd been to, he'd been in the army.
How did these kids, what happened?
What are the conditions?
And what was the chain of command that, you know, that created those conditions?
What were the, so he's obsessed with it and obsessed with whether or not the right people were ever held accountable.
I mean, the fact that, you know, General West Moreland, who ran this war, who ordered these body, you know, for these body counts, like this was the metric, you know, this is what allowed these soldiers to go in and slaughter this village of civilians, including babies.
They wanted body counts.
And they actually, there's, this is dark.
After the massacre, that actually the New York Times published, there was a press release from the army saying we had this big victory against the North Vietnamese, you know, and it was the Milar massacre and it was published.
So it was like they put out this propaganda and it got replicated.
And then, you know, Tsai ultimately, you know, explained what really happened.
And I think he, I mean, I think the fact that nobody in a position of power was held accountable still, you know, haunts him.
And the stories, I mean, to what he heard, you know, and also to kind of, you know, what these soldiers went, you know, like what I think he, you know, he absorbed the trauma of that, you know, what happened on that day.
And so, yeah, and I think he, it, he, he, he does carry it with him, like, emotionally to today.
It's not like something from the past.
Right, which I, you know, is incredibly impressive to me, I think, and unusual for a professional journalist, but probably a huge burden to him.
But, you know, on the issue of this massacre, you know, and one of the points the film makes, and I think people came to understand pretty quickly is that it was not an isolated incident.
You know, it was things that were being done all the time in Vietnam.
And the country understood that this was not, you know, I remember when we started doing the Snowden reporting, some of the emails I was getting and the feedback I was getting that was like most supportive of Snowden and most supportive of the reporting were members of the military, people inside the U.S. security state, because they're kind of people who understand the realities really well, better than most people.
They kind of have a code that they believe in if they make that a career and were offended that these things were being done.
And I was surprised by how much support was expressed from those factions for what Snowden did and the broader need for this to be known.
And yet here you have William Calley, who, his own parents, it was undisputed that they went in and under his direction, they put bullets into the heads of babies and young girls, not as collateral damage, but deliberate.
They slaughtered the entire village of known civilians.
And then he's sentenced to life in prison over it because, you know, I think in part because of that military code I was just referring to, maybe because of the need strategically to show that this was being punished.
And yet he ends up spending a tiny amount of time in prison because the public reaction was so supportive of him and in defense of him that Nixon almost felt politically obligated to release him, or maybe he wanted to as well.
And the public opinion enabled it.
I found that to be like one of the most disturbing things in watching this film that I took away.
What do you think explains that about why so many Americans knowing what this is, again, not collateral damage, not like a miss shoot, not one guy for a minute, you know, reacting poorly.
This was a deliberate campaign of civilian massacre, putting bullets into the heads of old ladies and babies.
Why was there so much of a defense of this in the United States?
I mean, first of all, I mean, I remember being in the edit room when we got in this footage.
So we use it, Milai, this is the be early in the film, and then we, there's an epilogue which talks about what you just described of Callie being kind of first sentenced and then let loose.
And I remember seeing the footage of like, you know, with the song, you know, the song of the Cali song and then the telegrams and the marching with the peace signs free Callie.
And I was just like, is this like, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing because I couldn't understand how there could have been a movement to free this man who was, you know, everybody knew was responsible for these civilian murders.
And, you know, it turns out how to understand it.
I mean, certainly we put it in the film at the end because it says a lot about this country's failure to address its atrocities and this, you know, repetition of impunity, right?
Like, and an impunity that then paves a way for, you know, for people to get away with it the next time, right?
Nobody's held accountable.
And I, yeah, but I personally.
But why do you think that is?
Is it like something unique about the American experience and how many wars we fight as a country?
Is it something more universal about human nature and tribalism?
Like what accounts, you know, any decent human being watches that and it's just sick to your stomach.
You know, you just want to run away as quickly as possible and forget that it happened.
And that they, you know, millions, I'm not talking about a few fringe people.
I'm talking about millions of Americans were rising in defense, marching in protest.
They were playing songs.
Like, what accounts for that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I do think his getting off, you know, he is, becomes a scapegoat, like, because like Wesmoreland, like you have Nixon, you have the people who are actually responsible, the, you know, the leaders and of the architects of the war that, you know, don't want to be on the hook for it.
Right.
So I think there's a piece of that in terms of why he's part of it.
But in terms of why, I mean, I think, listen, you know, I mean, you know, if I want to be generous, I would say, you know, this was, this was a war that, you know, I don't think people, you know, wanted to be fighting.
And so maybe they felt that he shouldn't be a scapegoat.
But I'm not going to defend it.
You know, I can't defend it or explain it.
I can explain why I think he got off.
I think that has a lot to do with, you know, like wanting to reinforce the bad apple theory, right?
Criticism Of Journalistic Practices 00:15:44
I mean, which is the same thing that happened with Abu Grave, right?
Oh, some rogue, you know, soldiers, you know, got out of hand when we know it came from Rumsfeld.
We know that there are torture memos.
You know, we know that this is what there was systemic torture of prisoners throughout the military and the CIA.
Nobody was ever held accountable.
The only people who are ever held accountable over and over and over again are the whistleblowers who expose it.
I mean, this is what, this is what, you know, is the, I think, the, you know, tragedy and what should be changed, right?
That we, you know, that the whistleblowers should not be the ones serving, you know, being sentenced for crimes that are being committed by others.
You know, they're the ones who are exposing their crimes.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Let me ask you a couple questions about a couple other questions about Sai's journalistic practices that obviously have been so effective, but also have produced a couple of errors, like getting human beings that the film, I think, very, very commendably examined instead of making this hagiography that would have just served everybody, including him.
You know, there is this paradox, right?
Like we were talking earlier about one of the things that makes him so great and different to most corporate media is that he really takes seriously the idea that you're supposed to be adversarial to power centers.
You're supposed to be skeptical of the claims they make, investigate them, not blindly mouth them, find the secrets they're trying to hide and expose them, that that's the role of journalism.
And yet at the same time, if you're a journalist trying to do that, you necessarily kind of have to interact with and even depend upon people who inhabit that world.
I mean, obviously, you know, we were very anti-US security state, and yet our source in the NSA story was somebody who came out of Booz Allen Hamilton, worked at CIA, worked at NSA, and Edward Snowden.
I did a story last year in Brazil about the corruption of a Supreme Court justice.
I got this huge archive from somebody who had worked very closely with him in his office.
So that's just the nature of journalism.
But I think Cy more than anybody has really relied on these kind of like mid-level people at CIA, the Pentagon, even maybe a little bit higher than mid-level at times to do a lot of his reporting.
And one of the criticisms that has been made against him, I think, by people in good faith, is that a lot of times those people have their own kind of propagandistic agenda and that he can become captured by the community of sources on which he relies.
Do you think there's validity to that critique?
I mean, I think that there's, I mean, there's a number of different things.
You know, first of all, I do think like his Mila, and as you're saying about our reporting on the NSA, he did develop sources out of Milai, people who were critical of the war that became sources going forward in terms of his reputation.
I mean, I think, I mean, sources always have, and, you know, there's always an agenda, right?
Not that, I mean, and you always, it's always the job of the journalist to filter out what is the agenda, what is public interest, you know, how to verify facts, et cetera, et cetera.
So I don't think it's, you know, the fact that somebody, you know, is leaking something or, you know, I think it's the job of the journalist to verify the facts and to filter out, you know, like making sure that they, you know, are getting the full picture.
And, you know, but I do think, as you said in the film, like there was, he has made mistakes and there was some reporting that I couldn't defend and didn't want to defend and that we had to push back on.
I mean, I think probably the, you know, a single source, I think that gets really, you know, that's, that becomes really risky.
And it's something I think he's been criticized for rightly in terms of that.
In terms of anonymous sources, that's kind of, you know, every, you know, news organization in the world publish, you know, with works, publishes information by anonymous sources.
I think the question then always is on the, on the, the, the role of what to publish and whether or not to give people anonymity is what is the risk they're taking, right?
Are they Henry Kissinger just trying to spin a narrative?
Then they shouldn't have anonymity, obviously, right?
Or if you're, but if you're Camille LaSapio, who gave Sai photographs of torture in Abu Ghraib, she has everything to lose, right?
You know, she could have Bush coming after her.
She could be charged, et cetera.
Absolutely.
Anonymity is appropriate there.
So it's, you know, I think there's just always a range.
And I think, you know, Sy's best, I would argue, you know, even though he can have contentious relationships with his editors, I think, you know, those collaborations have been, you know, proven to be really good collaborations in terms of the journalism, right?
Because he pushes pushes.
So to have, you know, somebody pushing back, I think is healthy for any journalist.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, every human being needs that.
I want to ask you about a couple of the criticisms in specific cases and even a couple of the errors that he readily talked to you about.
One in particular, but before I ask you about that, I just want to I want to talk to you about this dynamic that always strikes me.
And it's a little elusive to describe with precision.
But one of the things that drives me crazy is so you have Cy Hirsch, who's obviously an outsider in so many ways, especially now, but he's sort of always been, had a lot of enemies.
And so if he makes a mistake, you know, like running around touting what turned out to be a fraudulent letter about JFK and Marilyn Monroe or a couple other stories.
Yeah, which he's never published.
Right, which he never had to publish.
Exactly.
But he was, I guess he was, it was a little unclear to me, but I guess he was sort of like walking around talking about it, representing it was true.
But I don't know.
He was talking about it.
Yeah, but he didn't publish it.
I would be so angry if I got blamed for an error where I had a fake document, but I never reported it on or published it because obviously that's part of the process.
Like, I think you have to publish it before you get blamed for it.
But in any event, so when you are an outsider or kind of a dissident personality like Cy Hirsch is, these whatever errors you can that you have made, and of course you're going to make errors if you're a human being over 60 years, especially if you're engaged in high-risk reporting, get so inflated so that anything you do is then used to just discredit you completely for everything you've done.
Meanwhile, as long as you're kind of like promoting mainstream narratives, you can be the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Atlantic, all of which sold the lies that led to the Iraq war.
Whenever you think about Cy Hirsch, it's a zillion times worse.
And those are still considered credible.
Like, what do you think of that dynamic?
Yeah, I totally, I mean, I totally agree that there's totally disproportionate.
It came up, we spent a lot of time editing some stories that didn't make the final film.
One of them was the Bin Laden killing, which I think Sai's reporting.
So he published a counter narrative, which is two years after Bin Laden's killing, which pushed back on a lot of what was perceived as what happened that day.
And I think his, you know, his reporting actually really holds up.
Like he says, you know, it's ridiculous to think that Pakistan didn't know that the U.S., like that somehow Pakistan doesn't have radar, you know, this idea that they had no idea that the U.S. was going in or that, and, you know, he argues that the tip was a walk-in.
It wasn't through torture.
You know, his, as I think his version of what happened, I think is much closer to the truth than what was that sort of the agreed upon or the narrative that the mainstream media ultimately published.
But because it happened two years after, there was, you know, people had, you know, invested books were written, you know, a lot of people, there were a lot of, I think, anger that he was presenting different sets of facts.
And, you know, I mean, I did, I mean, you know, working with journalists, I think we, you know, we see a lot of, I don't know, I did, I mean, I'm a little bit conflicted because I didn't in the film want to say Sai is above criticism because I don't think he is, right?
I don't think anybody is, right?
We all make mistakes.
And I also felt like, let's like, let's take on the ones that, you know, felt that the film should take on and not say like, oh, it's, it's, it's overblown, because I think then, you know, maybe it, it invites criticism that, you know, I didn't want to invite, right?
I mean, I think it's, he should be held to a high standard.
Like, you didn't want to be an apologist.
He didn't want to be an apologist.
Yeah.
And he's held to a high standard, partly because he's pissed off some people along the way, partly because of his, you know, incredible body of work.
So, you know, I'm sympathetic to like what you're saying.
Like, I think, I think some of the blowback is out of proportion to, you know, back.
Yeah, I mean, the Obama, you know, overseeing the killing of Osama bin Laden is such a perfect case of all of these media issues because the version of events that was issued was something that, you know, even major media outlets debunked within a week.
They said it was an attempt to try and arrest him, but they opened fire.
There was a huge firefight.
They said that he used his wife as a shield to protect himself to make him all of these were lies and demonstrated lies.
And that's what drives me crazy is you read that.
And then the next time something like that happens, the media yet again trumpets the government version.
And I think that's what makes Sai so uniquely great.
Laura, let me ask you about one specific issue where you did cover reporting that he himself even talks at, you know, quite candidly, he feels like he misjudged things, which was Syria and Assad, where he basically says, you know, there was this big debate online, big debate in general, that Obama had drawn this red line that Abbashar al-Assad uses chemical weapons against his own people, that would be a red line.
The UN concluded that he did.
The US government alleges he did.
There was kind of a group of foreign policy.
And there were multiple incidences like across like four years and I think 2013, 14, 17, and 18.
So there are multiple.
So a lot of things I think have been conflated in terms of how they've been represented, but keep going with the question.
Yeah, so right.
And so there were a lot of people who insisted and continue to insist that those were fabricated, that that didn't happen.
So I want to, I never really got involved in that debate for a lot of reasons.
So I don't have a lot to say, but I want to leave it to the side.
But there was some, I guess, controversy slash confusion about exactly what Sai was saying on this question during that part of the film where he says, I underestimated the capacity for evil that Bashar al-Assad had.
It did seem to me, and I think others, like he was recanting the doubts he had expressed about the use of chemical weapons, whereas other people who had been invested in this issue on that side were saying, no, he wasn't recanting that.
This was more a general admission that he misevalued, poorly evaluated the evil of Assad and wasn't recanting the doubts about the chemical weapons.
Aaron Mate said he actually called Sai Hirsch and Sai Hirsch said he didn't mean to recant that part of the journalism.
What can you tell us about exactly the nature was of that conversation and to what extent it involved the doubts he expressed about the use of chemical weapons in Syria?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think in a way, I think I'm going to kick that one.
You should talk to Sai about that one because there are multiple stories and I'll let him speak for himself on that.
I do think he, you know, Assad was a source for some of his post-9-11 reporting.
And, you know, that's specifically what I asked him about the film.
Did he get too close to power in that case?
Because for me, that was a hard one for me to understand, you know, given Sai's track record of being very adversarial towards people in power, particularly in positions of Assad.
So that's.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
But yeah, you should ask Sai.
Yeah, absolutely.
I just have a couple more questions because in part because I don't want to talk too much because I really want people to watch this film and not feel like they don't have to because they've listened to a long conversation between us.
But I did want to ask you one of the stories that Sai has done most recently that made a huge impact and that put him outside of the journalistic consensus was reporting that he did about the explosion of Nord Stream 2, which was the pipeline built to enable Russia to sell natural gas, cheap natural gas to Europe that was exploded during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
And of course, the big question was, who did that?
The U.S. government had multiple times threatened explicitly to do it.
The media immediately started insinuating that maybe Putin blew up his own pipeline.
First, it was a mystery.
Nobody knows.
It was a mystery for a long time.
Right.
And Sai reported pretty definitively based on sources that it was a team of U.S. Navy divers who did it.
I know you can't cover everything.
Obviously, you have to make editorial choices.
That was one thing that you didn't really get into.
I'm wondering, was that part of something that you discussed with him?
What were your impressions about that?
I don't need to ask about things outside the film, but I'm just wondering about the editorial choice not to include that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it is in the film that we thought was important to include.
And that was, you know, particularly, you know, there is, I did push back on the sort of single sourcing on this one because there were very different versions of what happens by journalists who I actually personally know that have pushed back.
So, you know, and I don't, for me, there are a lot of unanswered questions about what happens, you know, because it's why is the prosecution take so long?
What is going on?
I mean, the stakes are really high because it's, if it was an uh attack, I mean, if you know, because of the impact it has on, you know, natural gas and prices in Germany, and like what does it mean?
You know whoever committed this act of direct and the environment?
So yeah, so um I yeah, I push back on it because I, you know I, I know some journalists who came up with very different um, um reporting than than than Side did.
But again, i'll let Side speak for his own reporting on that one.
All right, so last question.
I just want to ask a general question about the film.
You know, you and I have known each other for a long time.
You made a film that involved me.
And so I got to see part of your, a big part of your process and how you think.
I've interviewed you about other films you've done.
You know, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how you go about things, especially when it comes to films.
And I think like one of the things that most uniquely characterizes your film, and I think is in many ways one of the biggest factors in your success is that, you know, the style of filmmaking that you like to do is just show people kind of just like the truth in the most objective way possible and let people make decisions for themselves, which, you know, I think is like how journalism in general is best done.
At the same time, you know, a film like this takes a huge amount of effort.
It takes a lot of like, just not effort in terms of work, but emotional and psychological investment, especially a film that's about things this affecting.
And I don't believe that anybody, including you, would do it unless you had some degree of optimism that it would be worthwhile in the sense that it could make a positive impact in the world and change things and not just be about documenting important parts of history.
And we were talking about before about like this frustration, seeing things being repeated over and over, no matter how many times you debunk them.
But what were your expectations in terms of how this film would be received in that regard?
Enormous Risks, Small Victories 00:02:26
And how do they compare to how the film has been received thus far?
I mean, you know, the films I do, I mean, I guess, you know, looking back on them, I could draw some themes.
I mean, they're written about people who are willing to take enormous risks to present information that contradicts what is the, you know, to contradict either a government narrative or to expose lies and secrets or wrongdoing.
And they do it at enormous risk.
And what I'm really interested in making film is showing that that's possible, right?
That somebody like Edward Snowden could change how we understand our, you know, the world in which we find ourselves.
You know, he risks his life to do that.
I think Sai risked enormous, I mean, he had death threats.
I mean, there was a lot.
He was spied on.
I mean, there was a lot, huge risk to do that body of work.
You know, filming with you in Hong Kong, like we knew this was really, you know, potentially really risky, right?
In terms of exposing, she didn't, you know, it wasn't like that the museums all stood up and gave her a standing ovation when she started demonstrating.
They were, they were angry.
Like, how could you, you're one of us.
How could you, you know, we have, we, you're in our collection.
How can you demonstrate in our halls and call attention to the evil people who we take money from?
You know, I mean, I just love those stories, Julian Assange, right?
Lifting the veil of, you know, what the U.S. is doing in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the State Department.
I mean, like, those are amazing stories about like, yeah, you know what?
Like, it is possible to, you know, that people or small groups of people can create actual change.
Like, I just believe in that.
So, yeah, I guess it's a bit optimistic given where we are in the world.
But, but yeah, I still believe it.
Like, I still believe that there are tipping points, right?
And that people, you know, lay the groundwork for the future, right?
And we should not accept the status quo as inevitable because it never is.
Like, history is not inevitable.
It's created.
And I just believe that we need people who resist and push back.
And so I feel very lucky to make this these kinds of films that I do because I think they show that Ed said this thing like some at some point he said at Snowden, you know, the odds are against us, but odds don't matter when you win.
Government Watch List Nominee 00:01:21
And that always just felt like kind of perfect, right?
It's like, yeah, you know, it's not looking good, but we have to keep trying.
Yeah.
Well, you won't say this about yourself, but I will.
You're not just the person who makes films about people who do risky work out of conscience and belief.
You are such a person.
The first time I think we really ever talked and met was because you were on a government watch list, a very intrusive one for a lot of years because of the film that you made about the Iraq War that was nominated for your first Academy Award nomination.
So you have a lot of years of doing that kind of work.
And you're certainly someone who belongs very high on that list.
I'm always so happy to speak to you.
I always love getting to watch new films.
I'm so excited when one comes out.
And I just want to say again, I mean, I don't think there are many people who know more about the incidents covered in your film, about Cy Hirsch's work, about these wars.
It's been about journalism.
It's been kind of central to everything I've done.
And yet there's so much I took away from the film.
So I guarantee that anybody who even thinks they already know a lot about this will react the same way.
Thanks so much, Laura.
It's always great to see you.
Thanks, Clint.
Thanks for the work you do and keep doing.
See you soon.
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