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Comment by jadedhacker | Hacker News Reader

The Post is a movie about the Washington Post, which has a large undisclosed financial conflict of interest with the CIA. Jeff Bezos's AWS has a large CIA contract, and Bezos owns the Post. Getting a take about leakers in such a movie is not the best way to acquire a real picture of the world.

The CIA only locks up brown people and tortures them in Thailand (star). It refers US leakers to the FBI which throws them into lonely prisons, terrifies, and abuses them.

EDIT: (star) Or rather it did. That's what Gina Haspel, our new CIA director nominee, is famous for.

EDIT2: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/why-the-washin...

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You understand that The Post is about the Pentagon Papers, and takes place in the 1970s, when Jeff Bezos was like 10 right?

I was curious so I looked it up, Wikipedia has Jeff Bezos born in 1964, and the Pentagon Papers leak in 1971. I'm too tired to bother with months, so for the sake of convenience we'll go with Jeff was 7 when this happened. In response to the parent post here-- I know Jeff is an impressive guy, but using technology that wouldn't appear for half a century or so to create a conflict of interest with the CIA at 7? Holy shit! If I were 1/100,000th that awesome I'd have a Turing Prize to go with my Fields Medal :P

All three of you missed my point. Please read my response in one of the adjacent subthreads.

You understand that while The Post takes place in the 1970s, it was written and filmed in the 2010s, right?

...that was my point. The quote was cherry picked from a movie that was filmed in the 2010s. The quote would have been selected to be included by modern film makers to expose to a wide audience. People say a lot of things, which things to include in a movie? Without looking, I'd even say it's probably a real quote. That doesn't affect my point, which questions that statement's truth value.

Yes, but the movie was filmed this year and the quote was included in the movie. It might be a real quote, but framing and selection are tools of propaganda.

> The Post is a movie about the Washington Post, which has a large undisclosed financial conflict of interest with the CIA.

A conflict of interest would be relevant, in different ways, if it was current with the events that the movie is about, or if the movie was produced by the Post.

But neither of those is true, sonit seems to be a non-sequitur.

This is the one compelling argument in this subthread. Thank you.

Hollywood has a long history of entanglement with the CIA and DoD in general. (How do you think so many war movies get access to equipment?) The Post was produced by Stephen Spielberg, an entertainer, not a typical careful documentarian. The social purpose of the movie is to soothe liberals at a time when their minds are being fractured by DJT and cries of "fake news". I wouldn't put it past Hollywood and the military to take this prime opportunity to insert propaganda via framing and selection of quotes.

Of course, I can't prove it that this is how this quote came to be, but what I can with certainty is to be skeptical of taking away core moral and factual positions from mass political entertainment and be doubly skeptical of claims (referring to the original claim sans movie) that come from the intelligence services (whose job it is to lie cheat and steal, duh).

EDIT: Here's an example of the CIA getting involved in the movie business https://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/the_cias_insidious_hollywoo...

God three letter agencies are terrifying.

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