AMY
GOODMAN:
This is Democracy Now!, and we are broadcasting from Park
City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival.
This today - we begin
today’s program with We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,
a documentary that examines the key players involved in the release
of hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
Let’s go to a clip from the film, which
begins with former State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley, who
resigned days after accusing the Pentagon of being, quote,
"ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid" in its treatment of
suspected Army whistleblower Private Bradley Manning.
P.J.
CROWLEY:
This leak is industrial-scale. It touches every relationship the
United States has with other countries around the world. Even as
the United States and others try to manage the impact of this,
it will be a wound that just keeps, you know, opening up on a
recurring basis.
NARRATOR:
The behavior of the United States was also exposed, as the
cables revealed criminal cover-ups and a systematic policy of
using diplomats to spy on foreign governments.
MICHAEL HAYDEN:
Look, everyone has secrets. Some of the activities that nation
states conduct in order to keep their people safe and free need
to be secret in order to be successful. If they are broadly
known, you cannot accomplish your work. Now look, I’m going to
be very candid, alright? We steal secrets. We steal other
nations’ secrets. One cannot do that above board and be very
successful for a very long period of time.
AMY
GOODMAN:
The person who uses the phrase "We steal secrets" is Michael Hayden,
former director of the CIA and the
National Security Agency, or NSA.
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange,
features prominently in the film. He remains holed up in the
Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought refuge last year in a
bid to avoid extradition to Sweden and, ultimately, he says, to the
United States.
Meanwhile, Bradley Manning, the Army
private accused of leaking the documents to WikiLeaks, is facing
trial. Last week, the judge overseeing the pretrial hearing of
Private Manning ruled the government must prove Manning wanted to
aid the enemy as prosecutors have alleged.
Colonel Denise Lind told
prosecutors to prove Manning knew, or should have known, the
documents he is accused of passing to WikiLeaks would end up being
seen by members of al-Qaeda.
Well, to talk more about the film, we’re
joined now here in Park City, Utah, on the 10th anniversary of the
Sundance documentary film track, by the director, Alex Gibney, the
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. His other films include
Taxi to the Dark Side, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the
House of God, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
Taxi to the Dark Side, which focuses on an innocent taxi
driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed at Bagram Air
Force Base in 2002, is the film for which he was awarded the Academy
Award.
Welcome to Democracy Now!,
Alex.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Thanks, Amy. Good to be here.
AMY
GOODMAN:
It’s good to have you with us. So tell us why you decided to do this
film, We Steal Secrets.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Well, I think, to me, when I was originally brought into this - and
actually, I got a call from Universal to take it on, and I took it
on because I thought it was the ultimate David and Goliath story,
one man against the world - a guy, the Silver Surfer of the Internet,
Julian Assange, with a computer, wandering the world and taking on
the biggest superpower.
So it seemed a classic David and Goliath
story for me, at the beginning.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And then what happened?
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Well, I think part of the interest of the story is - and there were a
lot of components to the story - one, I discovered the character
Bradley Manning, on whom I focused a lot of attention.
I didn’t
initially think I was going to do that. I find him a tremendously
interesting and sympathetic character.
And also, I think there’s - you
know, the film charts a change in Julian Assange. I think in - at the
moment of his greatest fame, I think his rigorous adherence to the
truth, maybe, went - changed, let me put it that way.
AMY
GOODMAN:
What do you mean?
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Well, I mean that the biggest problem I had with Julian Assange came
up over the Swedish episode.
That is to say, an episode in which
questions were raised about his behavior with two women in Sweden.
And a lot of people, including me, thought at the time that this was
some sort of obvious sort of honey trap, some sort of
CIA plot to prevent him from leaking any
further documents.
And it turns out it’s not that. It’s - in my view,
it’s a story about one man and two women, but - and it’s been morphed,
I think, by Julian Assange into something bigger than that.
And now
I think he believes something that I don’t think is true.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Which is?
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Which is that the United States is trying to use or manipulate the
Swedish judicial process in order to get him to Sweden, in order to
send him to the United States for trial.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And why do you not think that is true?
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Because there’s no evidence that it’s true. I mean, we know that
there’s a grand jury proceeding - or, there’s a grand jury
investigation of Julian Assange, but there’s absolutely no evidence
that the United States is manipulating the Swedish legal process in
any way, shape or form.
Furthermore, it’s much more difficult to
extradite Julian Assange from Sweden than it is from the United
Kingdom. In fact, if he goes to Sweden and extradition proceedings
were to happen, it would - the United Kingdom would actually have to
sign off on that.
And he’s had an extraordinary number of legal appeals in the United
Kingdom to ascertain whether or not these questions, because no
charges have been brought yet, but whether these questions are
legitimate, and, you know, he’s lost every time.
He’s gotten an extraordinary amount of, you know, legal opportunity
to bring his case, but he’s not really been successful. So -
AMY
GOODMAN: Do
you think he should be concerned? According to the Assange team - and
we will be speaking with Jennifer Robinson, his legal adviser, in
the next segment.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Sure.
AMY
GOODMAN:
But they cannot get an assurance from the Swedish government that
they will not extradite him to the United States.
ALEX
GIBNEY: But
I don’t think any government would give any individual that
assurance. I mean, Julian Assange wants to be above the law.
The
fact is, any government, if they receive an extradition request from
another government, has to process it through their courts to
determine whether it’s legitimate.
Julian Assange can’t expect to be
the only person who’s not treated according to the rules of law.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Let’s go to a clip of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.
This clip follows Julian Assange as he’s about to deliver a news
conference on the publication of the Afghan War Logs, that massive
trove of documents exposing the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
You
hear Julian Assange, but it begins with the voice of Australian
journalist Mark Davis.
MARK DAVIS:
He woke up late, of course. I’m knocking on the door. "Julian,
come on, man." He gets up, does his normal thing, you know.
JULIAN ASSANGE:
What’s the time? What’s the time?
MARK DAVIS:
Twenty-five to.
JULIAN ASSANGE:
I need to prepare a little list of things.
MARK DAVIS:
Alright, I’ll be two minutes. How are you feeling?
JULIAN ASSANGE:
Tired, haven’t been to sleep, but good. Good. Fourteen pages in
The Guardian this morning. "Massive leak of secret
files exposes true Afghan war." We tell our sources maximum
political impact, and I think we got pretty close.
MARK DAVIS:
There’s 10 trucks out there, 10 media trucks.
JULIAN ASSANGE:
Yeah, yeah. It’ll be a good outcome.
MARK DAVIS:
He walked out that door as the sort of aging student hobo. By
the time, you know, he had made this 50-yard walk, he was a rock
star. He was one of the most famous guys on the planet.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And Julian Assange walks into the Frontline Club, where he delivers
this news conference. Alex Gibney, take it from there.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Well, that’s an extraordinary moment.
I mean, this guy that very few
people had heard of suddenly walks in and presides over this
tremendous release of documents, which reveal the truth about the
Afghan war, a lot of truths that we didn’t know before about
civilian casualties, about an assassination squad.
It really was a
kind of lifting of the curtain of what was going on in the war in
Afghanistan that we weren’t being told by our government.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And in the film, you focus on that moment, July 12th, 2007, a video
that Julian Assange got a hold of and released, that took place over
New Baghdad, an area of Baghdad.
Talk about the significance of what WikiLeaks released.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
WikiLeaks released a videotape of an Apache gunship attack on some
individuals. And it’s a shocking bit of footage for all sorts of
reasons.
But one is because the helicopter is so high above the
ground, nobody could even see it on the ground. And they see these
individuals, the helicopter pilots. And we have the - Julian Assange
managed to get the footage of the in-camera - on-board camera.
So
you’re hearing the voices of the pilots, too, as they request
permission to engage and then end up killing a number of what turned
out to be civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and also
wounding very badly a couple of children, when another man, who’s
actually bringing his kids to school, comes to try to rescue the
wounded.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And yet, you hear the video, the soldiers saying, "Well, he
shouldn’t have been bringing his kids. That’s what he gets," or they
get -
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Right.
AMY
GOODMAN:
- for his father bringing them to a war zone.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Right. You hear a lot of vicious commentary by the soldiers.
I mean,
it’s - you know, it’s awful to see, frankly. It’s probably not
atypical in terms of the kind of hardcore comments that you would
see from soldiers in the field.
But the actual disparity of the
weaponry being utilized by this helicopter, this huge - the ordnance
is just titanic, and these people are wandering around with - you
know, just in the street with little or nothing. It’s a - it’s a kind
of a shocking look at modern warfare, where you can see the
devastation rain from above on civilians down below.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And why you felt it was critical to highlight this as a part of why
Julian Assange was releasing these documents, what it symbolized?
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Well, it symbolized a very valuable role that WikiLeaks was playing
in terms of releasing materials that were otherwise being kept
secret, unnecessarily.
I mean, I think one of the big stories of
this film is how the United States government radically overclassifies material. In the case of "Collateral Murder," which
was the title of the short version of the video that Julian Assange
gave it, you know, Reuters even asked for a copy. After all, two of
their employees had been killed.
The Army said, "No, it’s
classified."
But it turned out that the Army had - there was already a
transcript of this in a book that had been written by a Pulitzer
Prize-winning author, with a complete transcript of this, and so - and
the Army has since admitted that it wasn’t classified.
So you’ve got
to ask yourself: What kind of games is the Army playing with
classification?
It’s one of the big issues that I think the Julian Assange-Bradley Manning case brings out, is this radical
over-classification of materials that’s keeping us from seeing the
truth of what’s going on.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And it goes way back. You begin the film in the 1980s in Australia.
Explain - was it "WANK"?
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Yes, it’s called the WANK worm attack. It
was one of the first instances of a computer worm, and it infected
NASA’s computer systems just before the launch of an Explorer module
called Galileo, which was powered by a plutonium battery.
And there
were a lot of anti-nuclear activists who were concerned that that
might explode in some way, rain down, you know, fallout on earth.
And so, suddenly, just before launch, this weird computer message
pops up in the NASA computers; it says, "WANK,
Worms Against Nuclear Killers," and has a little lyric from what
people later discovered was a song by Midnight Oil, an Australian
song, which was one of Julian’s favorite groups.
Later on, there was some question as to whether or not Julian was
involved with that. It’s never been proven. Julian is very coy about
it. He’ll neither say that he was involved nor that he wasn’t
involved.
But it seemed like an -
AMY
GOODMAN:
And the lyric was?
ALEX
GIBNEY:
"You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war."
But
it’s also interesting because it’s kind of the start of the
Internet.
And a lot of what We Steal Secrets is about is
about the Internet and the kind of conversations that happen on the
Internet, the kind of power that the U.S. government has in terms of
surveillance on the Internet, but the countervailing power that
individual citizens armed with an ability to use computers have to
fight back.
So - and it also places Julian Assange in that kind of
Melbourne hacker community, you know, from which he ultimately
emerged again.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And you take it from there right through to the Arab Spring, as we
move now onto the - to the second anniversary of the Egyptian
uprising, January 25th. You talk about WikiLeaks having contributed
to the uprisings in the Middle East.
ALEX
GIBNEY: I
don’t think there’s any question. I mean, it would be far-fetched to
say that WikiLeaks caused the Arab Spring.
These were popular
uprisings. But nevertheless, the revelation of a lot of these State
Department cables, again, pulled a curtain back.
And actually, you
see very honest State Department representatives talking about the
real corruption, dishonesty and appalling tyranny of some of the
regimes in - in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya. So, it’s - when they were
released, it was a tremendous validation of a lot of the critics of
the government.
AMY
GOODMAN: So
you talk about Julian Assange and also Bradley Manning in your film.
It focuses a lot on the transcripts of online chats that Private
First Class Bradley Manning had with computer hacker Adrian Lamo,
who would later turn Bradley Manning in.
I want to read some of
Bradley Manning’s words. You have them typed across the screen in
your film, We Steal Secrets.
He writes,
"If you had free
reign over classified networks... and you saw incredible things,
awful things... things that belonged in the public domain, and not
on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC... what would
you do?"
He goes on to write, quote,
"I want people to see the truth
... regardless of who they are... because without information, you
cannot make informed decisions as a public."
ALEX
GIBNEY: A
very powerful statement by Bradley Manning, indicating that, you
know, he was very much concerned and that he had some sense that
what he was doing was an act of whistleblowing.
Now, it’s not a
classic act of whistleblowing, because the quantity of documents
released and the manner in which they were released is rather
different than a classic whistleblower.
But nevertheless, you can
see that Bradley Manning is concerned that there’s this whole level
of dialogue that’s taking place out of the public eye.
It should be
in the public eye.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And he’s an intelligence officer in Iraq at the time.
ALEX
GIBNEY: Not
an officer. He was a specialist.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Specialist.
ALEX
GIBNEY: A
rather low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq.
AMY
GOODMAN:
This is another of the transcripts that you highlight of Bradley
Manning’s online chats with Adrian Lamo.
Manning writes, quote,
"Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are
going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find
an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in
searchable format, to the public...
Everywhere there’s a US post,
there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. It’s open
diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV
format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking
depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying."
ALEX
GIBNEY:
There again. I mean, I think he’s seeing this vast array of
documents that show a kind of - it’s like there’s two levels.
There’s
the sort of public display of diplomacy, and then there’s,
undergirding it, sometimes very inspiring messages between diplomats
talking about what’s really going on.
And look, to be honest, Amy, I’m not - I
think that many of us would be appalled if every time, every
communication between diplomats or between soldiers in the field was
summarily leaked by every private who was working for the Army or
the State Department. But I think what this represents to me is a
kind of wholesale corrective.
That is to say, too much has been held
too secret for too long, and this was a kind of bold, maybe
ill-considered, but - I don’t want to use the word "ill-considered."
Maybe - I’m not sure he considered the full consequences, nor did he
read every document. It is a vast leak.
But it - in a sense, it
creates a kind of rough justice here, because it shows us something
that is being kept from us. It’s a whole level of dialogue that
Americans should be seeing that they’re not.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And the link you see between Private Bradley Manning and Julian
Assange? Of course, Private Bradley Manning accused of leaking all
of these documents to WikiLeaks.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Correct. And we don’t know. Julian Assange has always maintained
that he doesn’t know, or he didn’t know, that these documents that
came to him were given to him by Bradley Manning.
The military has
slowly been leaking chats between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, which indicate
- and also Julian - Manning’s chats also indicate some familiarity.
So -
AMY
GOODMAN:
But how do you know that they’re - if the military is leaking these,
that they’re actually between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange? In
fact, in the film, you put quotes around Julian Assange.
I guess
that’s what the chat does. How do you know that it’s Julian Assange?
ALEX
GIBNEY: No,
no, no. In Bradley Manning’s computer, we know - it was introduced as
evidence. Now, I suppose you could say - we’ll see whether David
Coombs challenges that evidence in court.
But actually, David
Coombs, who is Bradley Manning’s attorney, has already gone to the
court, in a very unusual way, to say that they’re prepared to plead
guilty to a number of more minor offenses having to do with taking
data off classified networks and also leaking them to WikiLeaks.
So,
you know, I think what they discovered on Bradley Manning’s computer
was that the address of these chats, you know, Manning had, in fact,
in his address book, indicated that this one address, which is seen
in the chats, was the address of Julian Assange.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Have you been subpoenaed in any way from any court case, whether
around Private Bradley Manning or the grand jury with Julian
Assange, with - around the interviews you’ve done?
ALEX
GIBNEY: No.
AMY
GOODMAN:
So, ultimately, what did you learn? What were you most surprised by,
Alex, in doing this documentary?
ALEX
GIBNEY: Oh,
that’s a good question. In a way, I came into this story thinking
that it was about a machine - that is to say, this new leaking
machine, this electronic dropbox, and also this ability to post
material all over the world on mirrored sites so that could never be
taken down.
That, I think, is the most important innovation. I don’t
think the dropbox is that much - that important. But ultimately I
discovered this is not a story about a machine; it’s really a story
about people.
And you discover that this whole process of leaking,
and moral decisions that have been made about what should be secret
and what should not be secret, these are deeply human concerns by
poignant, sometimes very noble, sometimes very flawed, figures who
engage in this.
And I think the story has been misperceived and misanalyzed as a series of sort of political stick figures, when in
fact it’s actually a deeply human story that should be seen, in
part, as that.
The other thing I learned was the way in
which we’re all trying to understand what happens on the Internet,
that we assume that it’s a machine for freedom - and in many ways, it
is - but it’s also a surveillance machine for the government. And
peculiarly enough, it’s also a kind of maelstrom of cruelty, where
people hide behind online names to deliver horrible invective and
insults.
And that, we discovered, in terms of Julian Assange’s
supporters going after these Swedish women in ways that are sort of
horrible. So, it’s about a lot of things, but I think it’s really
about modern life.
But it certainly is about this battle between
what should be and what should not be secret.
AMY
GOODMAN:
And finally, did you interview Julian Assange?
ALEX
GIBNEY: I
never interviewed Julian Assange.
I spent a good bit of time trying to
interview Julian Assange. There were times when he agreed to be
interviewed and not agreed to be interviewed. But ultimately, he
never agreed to be interviewed.
There was a long negotiation over it, a
six-hour conversation that I had with him at the Norfolk manor, you
know, in England, but -
AMY
GOODMAN:
Where he was under house arrest.
ALEX
GIBNEY:
Where he was under house arrest, yes. Manor house arrest, as they
called it.
AMY
GOODMAN:
But you didn’t get to interview him.
ALEX
GIBNEY: No
interview with Julian Assange.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Well, I -
ALEX
GIBNEY: But
then, I didn’t get to interview the Pope, either.
AMY
GOODMAN:
Alex Gibney, I want to thank you for being with us. Alex Gibney is
the Oscar Award-winning filmmaker.
His latest film has premiered at
Sundance; it’s called We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.
Again, his other films: Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House
of God, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and the
Academy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side.
This is Democracy Now! When we
come back, Jennifer Robinson, legal adviser to Julian Assange,
responds.
And then we look at another film that has just premiered,
Fire in the Blood, and we speak with a Ugandan doctor who
was imprisoned for trying to bring generic drugs into Uganda to deal
with AIDS.
Stay with us.
