Osneyda picked out “The Pirates of Somalia” yesterday at East Street Variety & Video and we watched it after supper. In its own way (screenwriter and director Bryan Buckley’s), it traces the offbeat early career of real-life Canadian journalist Jay Bahadur as he, with zero conventional reporting experience, finds out what makes the Somalian pirates tick and becomes a best-selling author and sought-after authority on them.

If half a dozen reporters like Bahadur (at least the character in the movie) were on the case, would the truths of the September 2001 attacks be common knowledge and justice in this atrocity be under way? That’s hard to say, because every news outlet you can name with the kind of budget to put reporters on it simply won’t — at least that we know about. It’s been nearly 17 years, what are they waiting for?

Barrie Zwicker, in his 2006 book, Towers of Deception: The Media Coverup of 9/11 (which I’ve read only bits of), nails the reason why. Bruce’s copy is somewhere on Cape Cod, part of an offloading from our backpacks in Wellfleet to make them lighter. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, Towers of Deception is not mentioned in Zwicker’s Wikipedia entry.

Maybe Seymour Hersh, who turned 81 this month, is working on the needed exposé. I was reminded of the possibility by the first name Buckley gives the fictional Seymour Tobin, played flavorfully by Al Pacino in “The Pirates of Somalia” as a retired but celebrated Canadian reporter. (The movie’s working title was “Where the White Man Runs Away,” a fitting description of the U.S. media and 9/11 truth.)

Recommended: Hersch’s 10,000-word article published three years ago by The London Review of Books: “The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” available online for free. Also see the New York Times Magazine article by Jonathan Mahler, “What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?

– Mark