"We Steal Secrets" the Story of Wikileaks by Alex Deleon <filmfestivals.com>

Whatever your view of Julian Assange, whether as a fearless crusader for truth or a heartless hacker and ego-maniac, Alex Gibney's amazing doumentary following the Rise and Fall of Assange and the scapegoating of his sexually confused US Army collaborator, Bradley Manning, asks all the hard questions from every angle and paints a woeful picture of the crisis in western democracy. 

When the Wikileaks news was breaking it was so fragmented and embedded in other war news, sensations and scandals, that many people found it difficult to unscramble what was what, and who was who. References to Assange's asylum in Sweden and his peculiar surname may have led some to think that he was Swedish; others were even confusing wiki-leakage with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.  All this is totally straightened out and put into contemporary context by Alex Gibney's remarkable new "We Steal Secrets" which is partly an inquest into the dynamics of investigative journalism and is itself a sparkling piece of investigative journalism -- in addition to which, on a cinematic level, it has the feel of an espionage thriller.

The basics are this: Julian Assange (not his original name but the anglicized form of an appropriated Cantonese name) is Australian and started out as an expert computer hacker, later journalist and political activist, campaigning avidly for transparency of government information, particularly with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the right of the public to know what was really going on there. Numerous deaths of civilians were blithely written off as "collateral damage" by the military, but because of Assange's Wikileaks website activity were eventually exposed as blatant murder of noncombatants.  All kinds of other highly sensitive military and political information was divulged.

The tone is set early in the film when we see secret army footage taken from a helicopter showing civilians on the ground mowed down by machine gun fire and hear gloating comments from the American attackers.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of secret army files that were turned over to Assange by a young American soldier, also an expert hacker, Pfc Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst stationed in Baghdad who had access to all the information stored in the computers there.

Bradley was openly gay and constantly harassed by his fellow soldiers but because of his computer expertise  his top secret clearance was never pulled. Appalled by what he was finding out in the line of duty his conscience got the better of him, and he made the moral decision to pass his privileged information on to Assange in order to blow the whistle on the atrocities revealed. 

In 2010 when Assange exposed hundreds of such files to the general public worldwide through his Wikileaks website he was hailed as an international hero by those against the war and the atrocities it engendered. Simultaneously, he was seen as a dangerous enemy agent -- a Satanical traitor in the war against terrorism who should be stopped or eliminated-- by those in favor of the war.

Gibney's movie traces Assange's background and rise to notoriety both through interviews with investigative journalists who followed him around, and a solid body of hagiographic footage made by Australian journalist and admirer Mark Davis. Davis in particular is on screen much of the time giving his views on Assange. The entire first half of the film paints a very positive picture of a valiant and charismatic crusader sporting long silvery hair something like an aging rock star. Wealthy and influential people in England are behind him. We see constant street demonstrations expressing solidarity with Assange in placards such as "Telling the truth is not a crime".  Assange had become a public hero, but later when he gets into trouble in Sweden the picture begins to change.

Two young female groupies accuse him of illicit sex and purposely breaking the condom! (A secret urge to clone himself?) His extradition from England for trial in Sweden is demanded. At this point the US government also wants to get hold of him as an enemy agent and the plot thickens rapidly. The Sweden business is pooh-poohed as a CIA plot and the girls are exposed to venomous threats. By equating the mission of Wikileaks with his own campaign to discredit the sexual assault charges in Sweden while in the process advocating the kind of secrecy he had been fighting against all along Assange manages to alienate many of his closest supporters.

 Were the Swedes to get him, the next step could be extradition to the USA and perhaps a fate worse than death. To save him from extradition Ecuador offers him sanctuary in their London embassy. At this moment he is still there, negotiating book offers with no further resolution in sight. Gibney had offered to interview him so that he could present his side of the story in this film but Assange demanded one million dollars as payment. The interview was canceled.

This is only half of the story. The parallel story of the persecution of Pfc Bradley Manning is the other half. Without him there would have been no such mass leakage of military and political secrets. Bradley, exposed by a buddy who later in the film repents tearfully has been imprisoned in an army brig for three years without being brought to trial.  This parallel story interwoven with the meteoric rise of Assange reveals Bradley's struggle with gender identity -- he really wants to be a woman -- and his personal torment over what to reveal and what not to reveal. If construed as giving aid to the enemy the beef against him could carry a death sentence. Yet, his actions seem to have been an act of conscience; the information was given to Mr. Assange, not to an enemy power and Bradley demanded no payment for this information. 

High American government officials such as Hilary Clinton and the former head of the CIA under President Bush offer their views. The official position, while condemning Bradley admits that little was revealed which could directly place US military personnel in jeopardy. A most surprisingly frank admission comes from Michael Hayden, former CIA chief, who states with blunt candor, "Yes, we steal secrets from other governments -- it's all part of what we have to do to preserve democracy..." --  his statement now informs the title of this film. The most interesting question posed is not whether Mr. Assange is a good guy or a bad guy, but whether government information should be rigidly controlled or allowed to flow freely. The sub-question: How much revelation of government secrets can a democracy safely tolerate?  

Assange is now trying to control the flow of information around him to suit his own views in much the same way as the government he earlier condemned.  The human fallout from the welter of events this film deals with is still up for grabs. The movie will be released on May 24 and Bradley Manning will finally come to trial on June 4. The release of this film at such a timely juncture will undoubtedly cause many people to rethink their views on the whole leakage business and the whole role of the US government. 

In a highly charged discussion following the advance screening I attended Mr Gibney was pointedly asked what he thinks the outcome should be --and what he thinks it actually Will Be. In response Mr. Gibney said that it Assange ought to go to Sweden to face the charges there, which are relatively minor and actually have nothing to do with the Wikileaks affair. He thinks that public opinion would protect Assange from prosecution by the US government because there was no actual treason or espionage involved/  Something like what happened in the Pentagon papers case.  He hopes that Pfc Bradley will be given at most a light sentence and allowed to return to civilian life with the time he has already spent in jail counting in his favor. As to what actually WILL happen -- that is anybody's guess.  But it is very unlikely that Assange will ever go to Sweden to face the charges there or leave the Ecuadorian embassy anytime soon. They have a place called "Gitmo" for people who are deemed to be overly dangerous to the American way of life ....

"Yep, says Hayden, We do Steal Secrets ...."