We Steal Secrets, The New Movie About Wikileaks Infuriates Wikileaks
By Danny Schechter
Every documentary filmmaker begins with deciding on the story to be told, and, then, how to sustain audience interest.
If your goal is to inform the public or take a stand on an important issue by explaining its origins and exposing wrong doers then you go one way. If your goal is to entertain and shroud your motives by exploring murky personality contradictions, you go another.
We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney's latest documentary (or is it a docudrama?), skillfully made with the backing of major media company tries to do both.
Ironically, that company, Comcast-Universal, owners of NBC, is at the same time having a major success with another movie, Fast and Furious6, glamorizing a criminal gang that relies on speedy cars.
You
could say that Wikileaks, the subject of We Steal Secrets also began with a
fury -- a fury against war and secrecy, and was moving as fast as it could to
challenge media complacency in the digital realm.
Now, it is being ganged up on by a media that invariably builds you up before tearing you down.
The
docu-tract uses slick graphics to creatively report on the origins and impact
of Wikileaks, the online whistleblower collective, but then, for "balance" and perhaps
to pre-empt any criticisms of any bias, especially too much ideological
sympathy, opened the tap on endless criticisms by Wiki-dissidents who have turned on founder
Julian Assange, as well as the pathetic
patriot hacker turned informant who ratted out Manning.
The movie revels in all the negatives that surround him, and his chief and gutsy leaker, Private First Class Bradley Manning who is on the eve of a trial that could land him behind bars for life under the 1917 Espionage Act.
On June 1 st , Manning supporters will rally at the Virginia base at which he is being held. ABC News reports, "ABC News reports: "A large crowd is expected at Fort Meade this weekend for a mass demonstration in support of Army Private First Class Bradley Manning." His trial begins June 3.
Says Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights: "The Manning trial is occurring in the context of perhaps the most repressive atmosphere for free press in recent memory. It was bad enough that the Obama administration prosecuted twice the number of whistleblowers than all prior administrations combined. Then it went after logs and records of journalists and publishers""
Manning's recent and widely unreported statement in Court explaining his reasons for making the secret documents public is not in the film.
The film mentions, but does not explore, Manning's claim that he offered his data first to mainstream newspapers including the Washington Post that showed no interest.
Their failure to publish the story was one of the reasons the soldier turned to Wikileaks. And, also, one of the reasons that validates Wikileaks claim of having a journalistic mission.
So,
the stakes are high, and its surprising that the film's very title, " We Steal
Secrets, an idea that many might be taken as a Wiki-boast, was really an
admission by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden about what the U.S. government,
not Wikileaks, is all about. Balancing his espionage boosterism is a former
Republican Justice Department hack.
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