War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State (2013)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Sorry, this movie sucks

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's a shame to have to write a bad review about this title. It's actually some great information if you do not know much about the history of whistleblowers who I think are some of our greatest patriots, people who step up at the expense of their own well being in service of others and the US Constitution. That said, I'm not sure what else I could recommend that provides as wide of an overview as this film does. Certainly watching Citizenfour about Snowden is a fantastic start, and certainly The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Panama Papers is top notch as well. So, my main complaint is this film, which I stopped watching after close to 20 minutes, continually jumps between different stories and events with whistleblowers, apparently to make this seem more like a movie/film than the documentary it should be. Completely ridiculous for two particular reasons: 1 often one does not even know they've jumped to another topic, which takes place at a different time in history, place, and people...simply absured... 2 - even if one recognized the film has jumped or returned to another story, one is left trying to review (while also trying to pay attention to the film) what was said previously, say 5 minutes ago, and after listening to 5 minutes of other events. What a shame. Still a good film for a broad overview if you know nothing about whistleblower. Other than complicated direction, all stories are quite riveting when weighed against our democracy.

As has been known for decades, going back to the immediate start of the Cold War in the wake of the end of World War II, nothing ever grows in dark, secret places other than perhaps mushrooms. And yet our own United States government, which three hundred twenty million of us place our trust in, is a rat's nest of secrecy beyond anything that we could ever imagine in an old-school Communist state like Stalinist Russia or the Red China of Mao Tse-Tung. This has been especially true since September 11, 2001, where our national security state has not only kept as much highly sensitive information from the public as it possibly can, but has also severely punished anybody who blows the whistle on incompetence and criminal venality inside the national security state, and what President Eisenhower most famously referred to as the Military/Industrial Complex. This is the subject of director Robert Greenwald's 2013 documentary WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS.As shown in this 67 minute-long film, blowing the whistle on government dissembling has troubling consequences for the people who do it, whether they are inside the government itself, or inside the news media, which is supposed to be that mythical Fourth Estate, keeping the government honest. The most famous whistleblower in U.S. history, at least up until Edward Snowden, was Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon employee who, in 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and so inflamed the Nixon Administration that, in the words of Henry Kissinger, he became "the most dangerous man in the world." Both Ellsberg and journalist Seymour Hersh, the man who broke the horrible 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam to the world at large in late 1969, are interviewed by Greenwald here. But the main focus of WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS is on four specific whistleblowers who uncovered specific acts of malfeasance: Franz Gayl; Thomas Drake; Michael DeKort; and Thomas Tamm. Each of them uncovered things that the public would otherwise never have known about, and in each case they personally suffered for their efforts Gayl, bought to the attention of those in high places in the Pentagon about the vulnerability of Humvees to IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) in Iraq, which led to new and far better-armored MRAP vehicles being developed and deployed. Gayl, however, suffered a great deal for his trouble.Drake uncovered the fact that the NSA's claims of not spying on Americans without a warrant was, to put it quite mildly, not exactly true. Not surprisingly, the FBI and the national security apparatus gave him an enormous amount of grief.DeKort uncovered information about the Coast Guard's fleet of ships and boats having radios that were susceptible to catastrophic water damage and hulls that were vulnerable to fatal damage. He bought what he knew first to YouTube and then to "60 Minutes", and managed to survive the scrutiny.Tamm worked in the Justice Department for victims of the 9/11 attacks and developed protocols of "probable cause" to conduct wiretaps against suspected terrorist agents, only to find out that his superiors were going well beyond what was allowed under due process.As WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS shows, the idea that such activity is tantamount to treason is just a ploy by the national security state to cover up activities that at the very least acts of incompetence, and at their most extreme can create blowback years later. These people are oftentimes necessary for our own personal protection specifically, and the protection of our way of life and our freedoms in general. Greenwald admonishes us to never forget their intentions, and to question government authority without exception.

This documentary is very interesting and highlights the problematic ways whistleblowers are treated in America. The whistleblowers dare to come forward and tell the public about things that highly disturbs them in their professional lives - and they risk everything by doing it! Both their personal and professional lives are affected greatly due to the whistleblowing. While watching the documentary you get a sense that the people whistleblowing are people that do not deserve to be treated like criminals. Their concerns should be heard and the companies should react and change their wrongful actions. It is unacceptable that whistleblowers are not protected by the government, and that journalists cannot report on these issues without being afraid of harassment!

War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State highlights four cases where whistleblowers noticed government wrong-doing and took to the media to expose the fraud and abuse.While it was great to get interviews with folks like Seymour Hersh, this had the feel of a promotional film that encouraged more folks to come forward. Because of this I have given it 6 rather than 7 or 8, because I felt like it had only one side and one motivation.Granted, I am on the same side and any push for transparency is a good thing. But there is a difference between a political ad and a documentary, and I am not sure if this film is aware of that.