If you’re still under the impression that Julian Assange is a whistleblowing hero, let the friends and colleagues interviewed in the documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” disabuse you.
Alex Gibney’s film relates the story of how US Army soldier Bradley Manning leaked a huge cache of damaging documents to the Australian WikiLeaks founder Assange, who while in Britain was later hit with allegations of rape and sexual assault in two separate cases in Sweden. Ordered extradited to Sweden, he refused and is currently holed up in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.
Gibney finds visually compelling ways to render the details of a somewhat familiar story, representing Manning starkly with his own pained and lonely words (from electronic messages) spilling out against an otherwise blank screen.
Manning is a paragon to the left-wing filmmaker (who made “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”), but despite Gibney’s editorializing, it emerges that the young soldier betrayed his country out of isolation, frustration and depression. He called his fellow soldiers “hyper-masculine rednecks,” once punched a (female) supervisor in the face, mused about suicide and said he was suffering from gender-identity confusion. On a rare trip home, his goal was to ride a train from Boston to DC in the guise of a woman. A well-adjusted Manning wouldn’t have leaked the files.
The only way he could feel connected was online — which was also the case with Assange, a father of four children with four different women who (Gibney entertainingly hints) could have been behind an unsolved 1989 worm attack on US computers that was accompanied by a lyric from the lefty Aussie band Midnight Oil — a favorite of Assange’s. (Assange hasn’t confirmed or denied this rumor.)
In the early going, the film is slightly unbearable as it (via sympathetic talking heads) portrays Assange as a revolutionary freedom fighter “dreaming of a better world,” but that nonsense turns out to be merely the setup for the pleasing sucker punch of the second half, when the anarchist (who unwisely turned down Gibney’s request for an interview) emerges as a paranoid creep.
Far from being a CIA honey trap, according to the film, the Swedish rape case resulted when Assange, having had sex with one woman with a broken condom, spurned her request to take an HIV test. She went to the police for help and discovered that the details warranted a rape charge. Moreover, contra Assange’s fears, if the US really wanted to extradite him (it has not even issued charges), it could more easily do so from Britain than from Sweden.
Assange’s own friends assail him for putting innocent people’s lives in danger by publishing unredacted memos about secret operations. When one friend confronted Assange, he said that any Afghan who cooperated with the US “deserved to die.”
Gibney soundly beats his subject with the irony club, pointing out that Assange’s new friends in Ecuador imprison journalists and that the hacker made associates sign a nondisclosure agreement. That thumping sound is beautiful music: the Left throwing Assange under the bus.
As for that crusader for truth Pfc. Manning, he has already pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him and faces many more years in prison.
Manning, as the film notes at the end, has been treated with unnecessary cruelty in prison (after saying so, and being contradicted by President Obama, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley honorably resigned). But despite Gibney’s best efforts to put a halo on Manning, the enormity of what the soldier did towers over what has been done to him.