http://www.dustcircle.com

Note: The title ("We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks") is false. It directly implies that WikiLeaks steals secrets. In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks. This an irresponsible libel. Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.

TITLES

The film starts with the launch of the rocket Gallileo and the WANK worm introduced into NASA's system by unknown hackers prior to the launch.

Footage of launch of Gallileo.

Note: Selective editing. The interview is edited to cut out the NASA scientist's punch line--no files were, in fact, deleted. It is apparent that the "worm" was a practical joke. The whole episode is extensively documented in the book "Underground" by Julian Assange and Suelette Dreyfus.

Source: Click here.

NASA scientist:

It was a Monday morning a few days before launching Gallileo. My manager rang me as soon as I came in and they said that there was a worm that had been detected somewhere out on the network. A worm is a self-replicating program that actually breaks into a computer and jumps from system to system. At the time they were still very uncommon. We didn't know what it would do. We knew it was malicious. If a worm got into a machine it would change the announcement message and spelled out in little lines and little characters W.A.N.K - Wank, Worms Against Nuclear Killers - and below that "You talk of times of peace for all and then prepare for war". Oh my god, what the hell is this? Most people didn't know what the word 'wank' meant. The word meant 'F'. You would be logged into your machine and you'd get a message: Someone is watching you, vote anarchist. And suddenly they'd see "deleted file 1, deleted file 2, deleted file 3" and just keep going and going and going. And it would change the passwords, so you couldn't get in to stop it. Scared the hell out of a lot of people. They were afraid that Wank would cause the launch failure, where this nuclear battery was suddenly flying away from an exploding spacecraft…

Audio voiceover of NASA launch countdown

NASA scientist:

How in the hell are we going to stop it? How far's it gone already?

Footage of launch of Gallileo.

Note: No person has ever claimed responsibility for the WANK worm. Gibney's "key clue" is merely that Assange, along with most of his generation, had also listened to the internationally famous Australian rock band Midnight Oil.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The shuttle launched without incident. But the WANK worm continued to spread, affecting over 300,000 computer terminals around the world. Its purpose, as a warning, weapon or political prank was never discovered. Investigators traced the origin of the WANK worm to Australia. National police suspected a small group of hackers in the city of Melbourne, and then the trail went cold. But a key clue turned out to be in the message itself. There was a lyric from the Australian band, Midnight Oil, a favourite of the man who would become the country’s most infamous hacker.

Note: Selective editing. Assange is quoting the lyric in relation to his book, written with Suelette Dreyfus, which includes a chapter on the WANK worm.

Source: Click here.

Cuts to voice of Julian Assange quoting this line from the Midnight Oil song over the song itself

Collage of videos about WikiLeaks and various public comments about WikiLeaks, some positive, some scaremongering, over Midnight Oil song.

Stock footage from a July 2010 interview with Julian Assange conducted by ABC Nightline's Jim Sciutto.

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Journalist:

What drives you?

Julian Assange:

Well, I like being brave. I mean, I like being inventive, I've been designing systems and processes for a long time. I also like defending victims. And I am a combative person so I like crushing bastards. And so this profession combines all those three things, so it is deeply, personally, deeply satisfying to me.

Journalist:

But is crushing bastards, in its own right, a just cause?

Julian Assange:

Depends on the bastards.

Mark Davis:

I see this story entirely as one man against the world. One man against the world.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

Julian as this very radical visionary.

Gavin MacFadyen:

Julian was onto something really extraordinary.

Nick Davies:

He is extremely clever, brave, dedicated, hard-working guy with a brilliant idea that he managed to execute.

Note: WikiLeaks is a publisher. It does not "enter where it is not supposed to go".

WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation. Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth. We are a young organisation that has grown very quickly, relying on a network of dedicated volunteers around the globe. Since 2007, when the organisation was officially launched, WikiLeaks has worked to report on and publish important information. We also develop and adapt technologies to support these activities.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian Assange was obsessed with secrets, keeping his own and unlocking those of governments and corporations. The internet is not a good place for secrets. Cyberspace is like a galaxy of passage ways, constantly moving streams of data. With a simple computer anyone can enter and explore. That's what Julian Assange liked to do: explore. He liked to use trap doors to enter where he wasn't supposed to go. To find secrets and expose them. He built a machine for leaking secrets and called it WikiLeaks. The website boasted an electronic drop box and could receive secrets sent by people who didn't want to reveal who they were. Once WikiLeaks had the secrets it would publish them across servers, domain names and networks so numerous that the information could never be taken down.

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Julian Assange:

So this is what you’ll see if you go to the front page of the website. This is WikiLeaks, we help to get the truth out. We want to enable information to go out to the public that has the greatest chance of achieving positive political reform in the world. To get things to the public you need to protect sources who want to disclose and you also need to protect your ability to publish in the face of attack.

Robert Manne:

His thinking is: how can we destroy corruption? It's the whistleblower. Julian Assange is neither a right-wing libertarian nor a standard leftist. I think he is a humanitarian anarchist. A kind of John Lennon-like revolutionary, dreaming of a better world.

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Julian Assange:

If we are to produce a more civilized, a more just society it has to be based upon the truth.

Heather Brooke:

When I heard Julian speak I was struck by his vaulting idealism and forthrightness about what he believed in. Totally uncompromising about freedom of speech. I agreed almost entirely with everything he said and I had never experienced that before. So I thought he was amazing.

STOCK

Julian Assange:

Every week we achieve major victories in bringing the unjust to account and are helping the just.

Note: Gibney collapses four years of publishing history, touching on nearly every country in the world, into "some smaller successes" -- because his documentary does not cover them. In fact, WikiLeaks has been making front pages since 2007. Legal attacks on the organization started immediately. WikiLeaks won a significant battle against the largest private Swiss bank in US federal courts in 2008. That fight was the subject of extensive discussion, including New York Times editorials.

There were many significant WikiLeaks releases and conflicts prior to 2010.

For a comprehensive list, consult the archives at Wikileaks.org. The archives can also be browsed by country or by year of release.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Before WikiLeaks was frontpage news, there were some smaller successes. The website published evidence of a tax-avoiding Swiss bank, government corruption and murder in Kenya and a secret company report on illegal toxic waste dumping. One early leak was from the National Security Agency: frantic text messages from desperate workers trying to save lives on 9/11. 9/11 turned out to be the watershed moment for the world of secrets – both for the leakers and the secret-keepers.

Michael Hayden:

After 9/11 we were accused of not being willing to share information rapidly and fastly enough and we’ve pushed that very far forward.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Michael Hayden is an expert on secrets. He’s been the director of the National Security Agency and the CIA.

Michael Hayden:

In terms of our focus the default option in a practical sense has been to share it, rather than caging in information and making it more difficult to flow.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In the years after 9/11, facing enemies it didn't understand, the US government started sharing more information between different agencies. At the same time, the US also started to keep more secrets from its citizens. In data centers that sprang up all over the country the US launched a massive expansion of its operations to gather secrets. The amount of classified documents per year increased from 8 million to 76 million. The number of people with access to classified information soared to more than 4 million and the government began to intercept phone calls and emails at a rate of 60,000 per second. Nobody knows how much money is involved – it’s a secret. Not even Congress knows the entire budget.

Bill Leonard:

The classification system can be a very effective national security tool when it is used as intended; when it is used with precision.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

During the Bush administration, Bill Leonard was the classification czar - the man charged with overseeing what information should be secret.

Bill Leonard:

The whole information environment has radically changed – just like we produce more information than we ever produced in the history of mankind, we produce more secrets than we ever produced in the history of mankind and yet we never fundamentally re-assessed our ability to control secrets.

Note: Gibney's choice of words, “Fishing,” “Bait”, implies solicitation.

Throughout the film, Gibney propagates the idea Assange had been “fishing” for the leaks or that Manning had been “persuaded” to leak. This is factually incorrect but also buys into the dangerous proposition that journalists and publishers can be conspirators by virtue of their interaction with confidential sources. The US government is attempting to argue that any news organization that deals with confidential sources can be put into prison for engaging in "conspiracy".

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Gibney makes a careless error that shows poor fact-checking. WikiLeaks makes clear on its website that, like "other media outlets conducting investigative journalism, we accept (but do not solicit) anonymous sources of information".

Source: Click here.

Gibney falsely attributes the 2009 "Most Wanted Leaks" list to Julian Assange. It was compiled by human rights NGOs, activists, lawyers, journalists and historians nominating the censored documents they considered the most important to uncover.

WikiLeaks requests nominations for 2009's Most Wanted Leaks—the concealed documents or recordings most sought after by a country's journalists, activists, historians, lawyers, police, or human rights investigators.

You may securely and anonymously add your nomination by editing this page. WikiLeaks will then prioritize the list and seek to obtain the leading candidates directly, through the legal system, or indirectly through its network of journalists, intelligence sources, volunteers and readers.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In this environment of expanding secrecy, Assange went fishing for secrets to publish. To bait whistleblowers, he published a list of the most wanted leaks.

Michael Hayden:

Those of us who've been in this business a long time knew that this day would come. Knew that because we'd removed all the watertight doors on the ship, once it's started taking on water it would really be in trouble.

Cut to footage of newscaster reading report of Icelandic bank crash.

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Newsreader:

In Iceland winter is never easy but this year much of the pain is manmade. Last October all three of Iceland's banks failed. Normally stoic and proper, Icelanders have started protesting.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In July 2009, WikiLeaks fuelled a growing popular rage when it published a confidential internal memo from Kaupthing – the largest failed bank in the country.

Heather Brooke:

WikiLeaks had got hold of the Kaupthing loan book, which showed what was going on in a lot of those Icelandic banks. They had credit ratings which were completely at odds with their actual credit-worthiness.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

It was all insiders, they took out billions of dollars out of this bank and bankrupted the thing, shortly before it went bankrupt anyways.

Note: It is false that Daniel Domscheit-Berg was the second full-time employee of WikiLeaks. He volunteered full-time for WikiLeaks during 2009. He was uninvolved in WikiLeaks for most of the significant events of 2010, until he was suspended in September of that year.

Gibney lacks access - WikiLeaks staff declined his interviews - and therefore tries to boost the CVs of those he was able to interview, no matter how peripheral their actual role.

Source: Click here.
Translation: Click here.
More: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

A German IT technician, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, became the second full-time member of WikiLeaks.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

We met online first and then we met personally in December 2007 at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. He was not the stereotypical hacker you would expect. He looked completely differently, he was interested in completely different topics.

Note: False. Here Gibney shapes the narrative to fit his access. For example, in 2007 WikiLeaks uncovered billions of dollars' worth of corruption in Kenya, a leak that made front pages around the world, and is widely viewed to have changed the results of the Kenyan 2007 Presidential Election. In 2008 WikiLeaks defeated the largest private Swiss bank in US courts after revealing its Cayman Islands trusts, costing the bank hundreds of millions as it cancelled its scheduled US IPO. However these leaks pre-date Domscheit-Berg's substantive involvement.

For a comprehensive list, consult the archives at Wikileaks.org. The archives can also be browsed by country or by year of release.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

For Daniel and Julian, the Kaupthing leak was their biggest success to date.

Smari McCarthy:

Loan book came out and took the country by storm. The national broadcaster was going to do a big segment on it and they got slapped with an injunction.

Footage from Icelandic television with subtitles.

Birgitta Jonsdottir:

It was the first time in our history that a gag order was placed on the state TV not to produce the news just before they were supposed to produce it. So instead of doing nothing, they decided to put the website up.

Footage of Icelandic television announcement about WikiLeaks.

Smari McCarthy:

Up pops WikiLeaks.org with the Kaupthing loan book front and centre and everybody goes online and checks it out. And the guys at WikiLeaks definitely got massive props for that.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Later that year, a group of young cyber activists from Iceland invited representatives of the WikiLeaks organisation to come speak at a conference in Reykjavik.

Birgitta Jonsdottir:

Iceland and WikiLeaks really fit. This is something we really need in our society. The media failed us so we decided to meet them.

Smari McCarthy:

Up until the day before the conference we didn't know who was going to come. It could be a massive organisation or it could be a tiny organisation.

STOCK

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

Doesn't it work? Ok.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

In the beginning we had no funding at all. We were not set up with manpower nor organisationally so there was a lot to improvise.

STOCK

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

WikiLeaks, we have to mention that what we are doing right now is still a proof of concept so in technical terms we are in the Beta stage, so it's just...

Julian Assange:

[Jumps in] But, wait, we're not in a Beta stage. We're not in a Beta stage as far as... we're in a gmail Beta stage, but we're not in a Beta stage in terms of our ability to protect people. In terms of...

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

[Cuts in] If you could let me finish my sentence...

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

It was really an off-world experience in some way because we were just so famous over there.

STOCK

Interviewer:

You work for WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is now very famous in Iceland because of the big Kaupthing leak.

Julian Assange:

You know, we got this letter from the Kaupthing lawyers telling us that under Icelandic banking secrecy law we deserved one year in prison, so we thought we would come to Iceland

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

And see for ourselves.

Julian Assange:

And see for ourselves.

Footage of Julian Assange at a protest in Iceland.

STOCK

Julian Assange:

The bankers should be put on public trial and given the justice they deserve. More power to you, Iceland.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian teamed up with Birgitta Jonsdottir, a poet turned politician, to hatch a plan to turn Iceland into a haven for freedom of information. But Julian was also preoccupied with a new source, one with access to classified US government materials and a willingness to leak them.

Footage of Collateral Murder.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

It was an onboard video of an Apache helicopter gunship on patrol in Iraq.

More video footage from Collateral Murder.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

A half-mile above the ground, it was invisible to the people below.

More video footage from Collateral Murder.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Two of the men killed worked for the Reuters news agency. What had looked like a weapon from the sky, turned out to be the long lens of a camera.

More video footage from Collateral Murder.

Note: Alex Gibney does not mention that the Collateral Murder video contains clear evidence of a war crime. In the aftermath of the first attack a passing van stops in order to render aid to the injured. The Apache helicopter crew is eager to fire on the van and its occupants, including two children. The ensuing attack kills a further four people. None of them were armed.

A US soldier who was present, Ethan McCord, states:

This is where I start to have a problem. This is not following the rules of engagement, they’re embellishing information and it’s wrong; this constitutes a war crime.

Source: Click here.
Video: Permission to Engage: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Inside the van were two children who were wounded in the hail of cannon fire.

More video footage from Collateral Murder.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In March 2010, Assange and a team of Icelandic activists holed up in a rented house in Reykjavik to edit and prepare the video for publication.

Footage of Birgitta Jonsdottir visiting the house where it took place.

Birgitta Jonsdottir:

We did most of our work here. This was the operation on the table.

Stock video footage of the WikiLeaks team working on Collateral Murder inside the house together.

Smari McCarthy:

It was chaotic and hectic and also sort of very varyingly frayed nerves. Eventually, I went out and bought a bunch of post-its and kind of... [laughs] tried to figure out what it was we needed to do.

Birgitta Jonsdottir:

My horrific task was to go through the entire movie and pull out the stills to put on the website, and at the same time I was learning who these people were that I could see their flesh being torn off their bodies.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The army claimed it was engaged in combat operations against a hostile force. But it also began a criminal investigation. It turned out that the driver of the van had been a father taking his children to school.

More video footage and sound from Collateral Murder.

Birgitta Jonsdottir:

The curtains were drawn. But I never had any sense that we were being watched, not physically. But we joked a lot about it. We were like all becoming super-paranoid.

Smari McCarthy:

It wasn't really cloak and dagger stuff, it was just, you know, yes, another cool project.

Birgitta Jonsdottir:

Everybody thinks it was all huddled, you know, with the computers, and it was all very serious, but we actually had an incredible time. The second last night we all went out and we were all wearing the same silver snow suits [laughs]

Stock footage of Julian Assange with Jonsdottir and others at a volcano. Jokes about “lava leaks”.

Birgitta Jonsdottir:

It was an incredibly intimate time because we were all working closely. We were working on something that we knew that could get us into serious trouble and we were all willing to take that consequence.

Stock footage of Washington DC press conference.

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Julian Assange:

So, my name is Julian Assange. I am the editor of WikiLeaks. [Someone asks Assange to spell his name] Julian with an A. Assange...

Robert Manne:

What's clear about him is he became a public figure extraordinarily quickly. It was really April 2010 where he went from relative obscurity into an absolutely central world figure and he did it deliberately, I mean he knew what he was doing. He decides to take on the American state, in public.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The team posted the unedited video on the WikiLeaks website. They also posted a shorter version, edited for maximum impact. Julian titled it “Collateral Murder".

Cuts to footage of reaction to Collateral Murder release.

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Newsreader:

No surprise it's getting reaction in Washington.

White House press spokesperson Robert Gibbs

STOCK

Robert Gibbs:

Our military will take every precaution necessary to ensure the safety and security of civilians.

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Julian Assange:

The behaviour of the pilots is like they are playing a computer game. Their desire was simply to kill.

Montage of news reports on Collateral Murder inquiry.

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Newsreader:

The Pentagon says that it sees no reason to investigate this any further.

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Newsreader:

An internal inquiry found that the journalists' cameras were mistaken for weapons but the rules of engagement were followed.

Cut to footage of Julian Assange from 2010.

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Julian Assange:

If those killings were lawful under the rules of engagement, then the rules of engagement are wrong – deeply wrong.

Michael Hayden:

You've got this scene, somebody evidently troubled by the scene - frankly, I'm not - but I can understand someone who's troubled by that, and someone who wants the American people to know that, because the American people need to know what it is their government is doing for them. I actually share that view - when I was director of CIA there was some stuff we were doing I wanted all 300 million Americans to know. But I never figured out a way about informing a whole bunch of other people that didn't have a right to that information who may actually use that image, or that fact or that data or that message, to harm my country.

Bill Leonard:

From a national security point of view, there was absolutely no justification for withholding that videotape, not one. Gunship video is like trading cards among soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's freely exchanged back and forth.

Bill Leonard:

What's even more disturbing is that it was one in a series of efforts to withhold images of facts that were known.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Reuters knew its employees had been killed. The news agency requested the video but the army refused, claiming the video was classified.

Bill Leonard:

The fact that innocent people were killed in that helicopter attack, that was a known fact that was not classified.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

A record of the incident and a word-for-word transcript of the pilots' conversation had already been published in a book called “The Good Soldiers” by a writer embedded with the army. The army later confirmed that the information was not classified, yet the army would prosecute the man who leaked the video to WikiLeaks. What kind of games was the army playing? Why was a transcript less secret than a moving image?

Bill Leonard:

Clearly the government recognizes the power of images. But the ultimate power of image is that it helps people understand what it is, this fact is that we all know. Flag-draped coffins help us understand the consequences of sending our children off to war. Pictures of detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib help us understand exactly what was taking place. Video of that unfortunate occurrence where innocent people were killed helps us understand that this is an inevitable consequence of war.

News footage of press conference

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Julian Assange:

We can't discuss our sourcing of the video.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Adriam Lamo is known as the homeless hacker, a couch-surfing computer infiltrator who had been convicted of hacking into the New York Times. In 2010, not long after the release of the Collateral Murder video, Lamo used twitter to urge his followers to donate to WikiLeaks. Only one day later he was contacted by someone with the screen name “bradass87”.

Adrian Lamo:

Frankly, I didn't find what he had to say all that interesting at first, not until he started making references to spilling secrets.

Text from the alleged chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning appears on screen.

Note: In fact, the alleged chatlogs between Lamo and Manning show that Lamo started slyly manipulating and exploiting Manning immediately. Lamo was a researcher for WIRED magazine (owned by Conde-Naste). He claimed that he could protect Manning under journalist-source confidentiality laws then also claimed he could additionally protect Manning under Californian Confessional laws (as he was a registered priest). When WIRED magazine first published the alleged logs, these references were censored, allowing Lamo to lie to the press about what they contained. Later publication of the alleged logs make the duplicity clear.

Source: Click here.

WIRED's censorship of the logs has been attributed by journalist Glenn Greenwald to the close personal relationship between Adrian Lamo and WIRED section editor Kevin Poulsen.

Source: Click here. Source: Click here. Source: Click here.

Adrian Lamo:

At that point I knew that this wasn’t some kind of game. It was for real and that I was going to have some very hard choices. In Star Trek every prospective commanding officer is expected to pass a test called "Kobayashi Mari".

Footage from Star Trek movie.

Adrian Lamo:

The test cannot be passed. It is there to see how they deal with a no-win situation.

More footage from Star Trek.

Adrian Lamo:

In this case, it was a no-win situation deciding what to do with it. No matter what you do, you're gonna screw somebody over.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Unsure what to do, Adrian contacted Tim Webster, a friend and former army counter-intelligence agent.

Note: In fact, as the alleged chat logs make clear, Manning had already lost his security clearance, his access, and was being discharged from the US Army in relation to another issue. Despite this and Lamo's promises of confidentiality, Lamo not only became an informer, but immediately pushed the story out through WIRED magazine, issued nine press releases, gave dozens of interviews, and campaigned for Assange's extradition.

Court records show that Lamo actively attempted to inform on other people well after the Manning arrest, including Jason Katz, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who he alleged helped WikiLeaks decode the encryption on a US Air Force massacre video. Katz was fired and swept up into the ongoing FBI investigation against WikiLeaks as a result of his alleged contribution to uncovering a war crime. People close to him were forced to testify against him at the WikiLeaks grand jury. None of this is covered by Gibney.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Timothy Webster:

Adrian called me and he said "What would you do if somebody had approached you and said hey, I'm leaking secrets". I thought it was a pretty stupid question because of course Adrian knows exactly what I would have done in the situation.

Alex Gibney:

What would you have done?

Timothy Webster:

Well, of course turned him in. There's nothing else you can do in that situation. But Adrian was on the fence about it ethically. On one hand, here was this kid leaking all this classified information - could potentially cost lives - on the other hand, he was this kid who reached out to Adrian in confidence and trusted him. And Adrian took that pretty seriously. He indicated he didn’t know who this person was, there was just a screen name. So very quickly of course the first thing anybody would be interested in is: who is this guy?

Jason Edwards:

I first met Bradley Manning at a New Year's Eve party. It was a 1930s theme party. I was the Prince of Wales and Brad showed up without any kind of costume or persona. I looked at him and he was small and had this kind of ingenue expression on his face, this bright blonde hair so I said, oh, Jean Harlow.

Note: Selective editing. By introducing Bradley Manning in this way, Gibney establishes Manning's character in the context of an alleged gender confusion. This context is reinforced through constant repetition over the next few minutes of the film, in order to leave a lasting impression on the audience. This is Gibney's frame for Manning's alleged acts throughout the entire documentary: that his alleged acts represent a failure of character, rather than a triumph of conscience. In an interview, Gibney stated that:

The initial presentation of the story was that Bradley Manning was a pure political figure, like a Daniel Ellsberg. I don’t think that’s a sufficient explanation of why he did what he did. I think he was alienated; he was in agony personally over a number of issues. He was lonely and very needy. And I think he had an identity crisis. He had this idea that he was in the wrong body and wanted to become a woman, and these issues are not just prurient. I think it raises big issues about who whistleblowers are, because they are alienated people who don’t get along with people around them, which motivates them to do what they do.

Source: Click here.

This "crude gay caricature" is a version of a classic attack on whistleblowers,once used on Daniel Ellsberg: to distract from acts of conscience by focusing on sexuality, character, psychology and alleged "issues," rather than conscience, motive and morality. In order to carry out this attack, it is necessary for Gibney to ignore the explicit statements as to motive given or alleged to be given by Bradley Manning himself. From the alleged chatlogs between Manning and Lamo:

god knows what happens now. hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. if not... than we’re doomed as a species. i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens. the reaction to the video gave me immense hope... CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed... Twitter exploded... people who saw, knew there was something wrong. [...] i want people to see the truth... regardless of who they are... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public

Source: Click here.

From Bradley Manning's plea statement of February 28, 2013:

...the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely "good samaritans". The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote "dead bastards" unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass. While saddened by the aerial weapons team crew's lack of concern about human life, I was disturbed by the response of the discovery of injured children at the scene. In the video, you can see that the bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew – as soon as the individuals are a threat, they repeatedly request for authorization to fire on the bongo truck and once granted they engage the vehicle at least six times. Shortly after the second engagement, a mechanized infantry unit arrives at the scene. Within minutes, the aerial weapons team crew learns that children were in the van and despite the injuries the crew exhibits no remorse. Instead, they downplay the significance of their actions, saying quote "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle" unquote. The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the parents. Later in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team verbalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body – or one of the bodies. [...] For me it's all a big mess, and I am left wondering what these things mean, and how it all fits together. It burdens me emotionally. [...]

I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public, who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled – if not more troubled that me by what they saw. [...]

For me, the SigActs represented the on the ground reality of both the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. [...] I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as [missed word] as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan. I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the affected environment everyday. [...] [I] stated I had information that needed to be shared with the world. I wrote that the information would help document the true cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [...] I considered my options one more time. Ultimately, I felt that the right thing to do was to release the SigActs. [...]

The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that should become public. I once read and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other. I thought these cables were a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy. Given all of the Department of State cables that I read, the fact that most of the cables were unclassified, and that all the cables have a SIPDIS caption. I believe that the public release of these cables would not damage the United States, however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations.

Source: Click here.

On the screen Bradley Manning's face is morphed onto Jean Harlow's.

Jason Edwards:

Wrote that on a name tag, slapped it on his chest and we went on with the rest of the evening. When I met him at the party, he made no mention to me that he was in the army. This came as a surprise to me.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

To get government money for college, Bradley Manning enlisted in the army. In 2007, he began basic training. He was 19 years old. Just weeks after he started he was sent to a discharge unit to determine if he should stay in the army.

US Army colleague:

My locker was next to his and that's when I met him. Nobody puts their sister's picture - with him posing next to his sister - there. It was kinda weird but we knew right away that he was gay, it was like so obvious. So... Not that I have a problem with it.

US Army colleague:

He was small, a little bit effeminate and that made him like public enemy one for drill sargeants to beat that marching into him. We're talking professional army - 30, 40 year old people that would pick on him just to torment him.

Alex Gibney:

And what happened? Did he get discharged?

US Army colleague:

No. The funny thing is, he was the least army material of anybody there and they all got discharged and he didn’t.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Instead of discharging Manning, the army decided to make him an intelligence analyst.

US Army recruitment video for intelligence roles

US soldier:

There's a lot of points that go with the job. I'm in charge of security, document security, physical security, personnel security, like people's clearances. Does it make me feel like James Bond a little bit? Yeah, to some degree. What would I like the public to know about the army? We love what we do.

Interview with Jihrleah Showman, a prosecution witness at Manning's pre-trial hearing

Jihrleah Showman:

He was definitely what society would label as a computer nerd. He was constantly up all night building specific computer programs.

Alex Gibney:

So he was unusually adept at computers?

Jihrleah Showman:

He was probably the first person in the military that I had met that is as talented as he was with computers. But I had to pull him aside several times for his lack of sleep. He was desperately addicted to soda. He drank approximately a litre to two litres every night, so he literally did not sleep, ever. One time he was late for formation and he had a very public display physically. He was jumping up and down, flailing his arms, screaming at the top of his lungs, and to me, I had never seen a soldier do that before. It had to be something else, a seizure or something like that because it was very radical body movement. But it wasn’t something else. He didn’t like messing up. He had to have everything perfect. I actually recommended three times that he not deploy.

Audio of Bradley Manning's voicemail greeting.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In October 2009, Bradley Manning was sent to Iraq, posted to Forward Operating Base Hammer just outside of Baghdad.

Jihrleah Showman:

We were the furthest FOB east that you could go out of the Baghdad area. It was definitely the best, most uneventful place you could have been deployed to. We never had any enemy fire. We could walk around without battle gear. We had a full gym, there's pool tables, basketball court. We had a little movie theatre, we had a Pizza Hut, a Burger King, a place to get your hair cut, a place to get a massage. We had air-conditioned living quarters - you could actually get cable and internet in your room. It was literally just a home away from home.

Footage of cheerleaders performing at Forward Operating Base Hammer.

Jihrleah Showman:

When you receive intel in it's extremely raw. A lot of the times it's even in Iraqi so we have to actually get it translated and build a product so the commander can actually make military decisions.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

But much of the information available to Manning’s intelligence unit had nothing to do with day-to-day combat operations. All of the analysts had access to central computer networks for the armed forces and the State Department. With a few keystrokes a skilled user could gain access to vast streams of classified emails, memos and reports from around the world.

Alex Gibney:

Why was it that Private Manning had access to all that information?

PJ Crowley:

Now look, firstly the mindset changed after 9/11 from a need-to-know to a need-to-share, and the database that he had access to was a representation of the need for one hand of government to share broadly information about its activities with another agency of government.

Alex Gibney:

How many people had access?

Michael Hayden:

It's a hard question to answer.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Manning was regarded as one of the smartest intelligence analysts in the unit, but more than others he became increasingly distressed by the reports he was seeing.

Chat logs between Adrian Lamo and "Bradass87" on screen.

Jihrleah Showman:

He back-talked a lot. He constantly wanted to debate. He wanted to be the person that disagreed with everybody. We had a separate little conference room, it had a doorway but it didn't have a door that you could close and he'd go in there and just scream.

More chat logs on screen.

Footage from Mark Davis' documentary "Inside WikiLeaks".

Mark Davis:

I was trying to trace him after the Collateral Murder video, but he's a pretty evasive guy. He doesn’t have a home, he doesn’t have an office, so it was no easy task. I’d been chasing him for weeks and had one phone contact with him but I heard that he was speaking in Norway so I jumped on a plane. Turned up in Oslo and sort of, you know, shadowed him for a few days until things started to click.

Footage of Julian Assange's speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

STOCK

Julian Assange:

This is not the virile democracy that we had all dreamed of, this is an encroaching privatised censorship regime. [applause]

Footage of Julian backstage after speech.

STOCK

Julian Assange:

So embarrassing

Mark Davis:

What's that?

Julian Assange:

Having that camera in my face.

Mark Davis:

At that time he had an underground following, of which I was aware. He's Australian, he's from Melbourne, but he had no public profile really.

STOCK

Mark Davis:

WikiLeaks is not the first time you've come to the attention of the Australian public. Of course you had another controversial period when you were involved with a group that was essentially trying to penetrate military computer systems. What was the motivation there?

Julian Assange:

Well, there was two motivations for it. One was just the intellectual exploration and the challenge to do this, so if you're a teenager at this time so the government... This was before there was public access to the internet – this was an incredibly intellectually liberating thing, to go out and explore the world with your mind.

Footage from an Australian news programme about hackers

STOCK

Interviewee:

They're not someone who kills their victim, dismembers them and cuts them into small pieces, hackers do far more damage than that.

Newsreader:

Hackers, the mystery operators of the internet. In the eyes of the law, they're criminal, but who are they?

Robert Manne:

There was a really interesting period in Melbourne in the early 90s. There was a few places on earth that really clicked into the internet, pre-internet. There was also a sense of rebelliousness, a sort of an alternative political culture in Melbourne. All those things converged and Julian was absolutely the core part of it. It was almost a cliché – the teen hacker.

Footage from the movie War Games.

STOCK

Actor:

72,000,000 people dead? Is this a game, or is it real?

Robert Manne:

Their struggle was against the state and they thought the triumph of intelligent individuals over the possibility of state surveillance - that's the heart of what they were doing. And Julian Assange, who at that point was a young hacker, got into that world and he became the central figure.

Note: Here Gibney fabricates the significance of one of Julian Assange's teenage screen names "Splendide Mendax" (from the classical author Horace). He does so throughout the film. The screen name is a joke. In Latin it means "Nobly untrue", but as a pseudonym it describes how handles protect an author's identity even though being inherently "untrue". It is a phrase which describes itself, not its author, just like the word "word".

"Claims my teenage nickname was Mendax, “given to lying”, instead of Splendide Mendax, “nobly untruthful”, which is a teenage joke on handles being inherently untrue. It is self-referential, not a psychoanalysis 20 years ahead of its time!"

— Julian Assange, Complaint to Ofcom regarding the Guardian co-produced Secrets & Lies documentary, January 9, 2012.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The group was called the International Subversives. Among them was Julian Assange, known by the online name of Mendax, short for a Latin phrase meaning “noble liar”.

Hackers in Melbourne were also suspects in the Wank worm attack but their involvement was never proven. Two years after the Wank worm Assange was implicated in another hack.

Footage from Australian news coverage of Assange's 1994 court case for hacking into Nortel.

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Newsreader:

Julian Assange allegedly accessed computer systems around the world through weak links in the internet system, meaning the whole computer opened up to him and he could walk around like God Almighty.

Ken Day:

Hackers have this belief that we are getting a police state, that information is being hidden from the broad community, that...

Editing abruptly cuts off.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Ken Day was an Australian expert on hackers and the first person to investigate Julian Assange as part of an undercover sting called Operation Weather.

Ken Day:

It was a difficult case because it was only the second time we had done an investigation in this particular style, so we were still learning. What we did was capture the sound going across the telephone line so we could see what was typed and the signal coming back.

Note: Julian Assange set out his group's Golden Rules as follows:

Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.

At his eventual trial, the judge recognised that Assange's actions had not been malicious, had caused no damage and had been motivated by intellectual curiosity.

Source: Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier, by Suelette Dreyfus: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The hackers had broken into the US Air Force, the Navy and the US Defence network that had the power to block entire countries from the internet.

STOCK

Julian Assange:

We had a backdoor in the US military security co-ordination centre. This is the peak security, or development of security, of mil.net, the US military internet. We had total control over this for two years.

Ken Day:

The internet was a new frontier for people to go out and express themselves, that "I'm there, I'm the first, I'm the all-powerful". This is a common theme with people that are hackers. It was all ego-driven, I'm the best.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian was charged with 29 counts of penetrating, altering and destroying government data. The defence asked the court to be lenient because Assange had lived a difficult childhood, continually moving from city to city with no lasting relationships.

Robert Manne:

His only constant connection with the outside world was the internet.

Note: In fact, the judge said:

There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to — what's the expression — surf through these various computers.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

After a five-year investigation and trial, Julian pled guilty to 24 hacking offences. He was sentenced to 3 years on probation.

Ken Day:

He believed that what he was doing was not wrong and probably rues the day that he pled guilty. Julian does not like being judged. His rationalization is yeah, I've been convicted but it was unjust, it's unfair, I'm a martyr. He didn’t accept it.

Robert Manne:

Julian once had quite a rigid political view. He's always believed that there's these secrets that need to be discovered, and at 17, 18 Julian was looking at stuff that he couldn't quite understand – it's all in acronyms, it's descriptions of movements here and there, of weapons or of troops. He wasn't ready to do anything with it. Indeed, he waited 20 years to see it again and when he saw it again he knew what to do with it this time.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Months before he received the helicopter video, Assange was trawling through hacker conferences looking for leaks.

Footage of Julian Assange speaking at 2009 convention.

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Julian Assange:

Why am I talking to you guys at all? Well you know, you haven't captured a flag in the contest here but we have our own list of flags and we want to capture them, and so if you google for WikiLeaks' Most Wanted 2009 you will see a list of documents that if you are in a position or you know someone who's in a position to get this material, you get it, give it to us, no questions asked, and you will help change history.

Note: No evidence has been adduced in the Bradley Manning proceedings to prove the person Manning was allegedly communicating with was Julian Assange. Despite this lack of evidence, in pre-trial hearings the US government prosecutor continually refers to Julian Assange as being the person allegedly communicating with Manning. Julian Assange has been denied formal legal representation in the Manning proceedings. His legal representatives at the proceedings have been denied the ability to object to the US government’s unsubstantiated allegation. Gibney repeats this allegation without supporting evidence.

By using the term “or he was persuaded” the film tries to implicate Wikileaks in a conspiracy to obtain classified material from Manning. The film makes this suggestion without basis – and it has since been proven to be factually incorrect: Manning makes clear in his pre-trial statement that no one at WikiLeaks pressured him into giving any information and that he made his own decision to send documents: From Bradley Manning's plea statement, February 28, 2013:

No one associated with the WLO pressured me into giving more information. The decisions that I made to send documents and information to the WLO and website were my own decisions, and I take full responsibility for my actions."

Source: Click here.

Throughout the film, Gibney propagates the idea Assange had been “fishing” for the leaks or that Manning had been “persuaded” to leak. This is factually incorrect but also buys into the dangerous proposition that journalists and publishers can be conspirators by virtue of their interaction with confidential sources.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

One month into Manning’s deployment, WikiLeaks published the 9/11 pager messages. Manning took notice. Only days later he saved Julian Assange’s contact information to his computer. Then, taking a cue from the WikiLeaks’ Most Wanted list, Manning began searching for CIA detainee interrogation videos on the classified networks to which he had access. Like other whistleblowers, he felt a moral obligation to leak specific information the public should know. In that context, he first offered up a military video. But in online chats with WikiLeaks, Manning’s thoughts changed – either he decided or he was persuaded – that he should capture more flags; a lot of flags.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

While Manning was playing with a new identity, he was also imagining a new role for himself. He visited his boyfriend in Boston and went to a party at a college hacker space, where he was caught on camera. During this period, maybe even at this moment, Manning had in his possession nearly 500,000 classified documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While on leave he contacted the Washington Post and New York Times, but neither showed interest - Manning sent the War Logs to WikiLeaks.

Note: The selection of US news clips used here shows carelessness towards the facts.

The materials allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning were all at the level of Secret or below, comprising low-level classified or unclassified military reports, emails and cables to which up to 4 million federal employees or contractors had the same access. The reference to Top Secret information in the clips obscures this fact.

Source: Click here.

The video of the Apache helicopter gunship attack - now known as Collateral Murder - was found to be unclassified, yet these clips used by Gibney twice state that it was classified material.

Source: Click here.

Montage of US news clips.

STOCK

Newsreader:

Good Morning... how would an army private allegedly gain access to Top Secret information?

STOCK

Newsreader:

The army has detained a US solider in connection with the leak of this classified video.

STOCK

Newsreader:

The prime suspect is 22-year-old army Private First Class Bradley Manning, for allegedly leaking this classified gun camera video of an Apache helicopter attacking...

Note: Human rights lawyer, Renata Avila Pinto, who knows Mr Domscheit-Berg, has stated that when she contacted him to alert him about the arrest of Mr Manning, which had been made public, Mr Domscheit-Berg, despite being made aware of the gravity of the situation, said he was busy on holiday and didn't want to deal with the matter.

Source: Click here.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

Really in the first few days after we heard of this problem with Private Manning, I mean it felt like the worst possible scenario. At that time not really understanding what it means for us and what the hell was actually going on?

STOCK

Journalist:

Private First Class Bradley Manning, he found a former computer hacker in Sacramento, California and that former computer hacker was growing increasingly alarmed, eventually turning him in.

Adrian Lamo:

He needed a friend and I wish that I could have been a better friend. There was a responsibility to the needs of the many rather than to the needs of Bradley Manning.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Lamo met with federal agents and gave them a copy of his chats with Bradley Manning. He also gave a copy to Kevin Poulsen, a friend and former convicted hacker who was now the editor at Wired.com.

Kevin Poulsen:

I had just done a story about Adrian being institutionalised. While he was institutionalised they had adjusted his medications. I almost had kind of a suspicion that maybe these medications weren't agreeing with him and this was kind of A Beautiful Mind situation, that he was imagining all this.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Lamo gave Poulsen the ok to publish the story and days later Wired.com broke the news of Manning’s arrest.

Timothy Webster:

Nobody wanted Adrian to go to the media but apparently it was already done and, well, he ended up approaching a lot of media after that. It just sort of exploded.

Footage of Adrian Lamo TV interview.

STOCK

Interviewer:

Did it make you feel patriotic when you turned Manning in?

Adrian Lamo:

It made me very sad that I could not have interdicted this leak. I believed that his actions were endangering lives

Timothy Webster:

Adrian lives his life as though he's writing it like a novel. And every novelist wants to rewrite.

STOCK

Adrian Lamo:

It's my job to play this role that I'm cast in to the very best of my ability, the same as any other actor. You can't possibly be yourself in the public eye. All the little things that make us human don't stand up under the scrutiny of the camera. I'd like to also point out that I think that this marks the end of WikiLeaks’ ability to say that they have never had a source be outed.

Footage of Julian Assange interview.

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Interviewer:

So, what's going to happen to him? Is Manning going to be accused and made as an example?

Julian Assange:

So, he has been charged with espionage, the allegation being that he has transferred at least 50 classified cables to another party, and the other party is unknown.

Mark Davis:

After Bradley Manning was arrested, attention shifted very much to Julian. It was no longer a secret. The pressure during this period was intense. Julian won’t say where he got that material but he had the material – there was no question about that.

STOCK

Julian Assange:

We try extremely hard to never know who our sources are. All our encryption technology is designed to prevent us knowing who our sources are.

Note: Gibney's rhetorical questions reveal his malicious agenda and poor research. The answers are easy to find: The full phrase is "Splendide Mendax" and it was never used by Assange in this manner. The phrase is a literary joke. In Latin it means "Nobly untrue", but as a pseudonym it is a a witicism about how pseudonyms, which are "untrue", protect the author's safety.

Source: Click here.

WikiLeaks' system uses the Tor onion router across multiple servers in multiple jurisdictions, stripping out submission metadata at each Tor node, meaning anonymisation occurs early in the process and long before information reaches WikiLeaks web servers. WikiLeaks does not keep logs, hence logs cannot be seized.

Source: Click here.

(02:56:46 PM) bradass87: he knows very little about me
(02:56:54 PM) bradass87: he takes source protection uber-seriously
(02:57:01 PM) bradass87: “lie to me” he says
(02:57:06 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: Really. Interesting.
(02:57:34 PM) bradass87: he wont work with you if you reveal too much about yourself.

Source: Click here.

"Our technology does not permit us to understand whether someone is one of our sources or not, because the best way to keep a secret is to never have it." Julian Assange.

Source: WikiSecrets, PBS Frontline documentary.
Full transcript: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Was it really possible that Julian didn't know that Bradley Manning was his source? Or was saying so the old Mendax tactic: telling a lie for a noble cause?

News footage.

Stephen Grey:

Private First Class Bradley Manning is now said to have confessed to passing more than 260,000 documents to WikiLeaks. If he's the leaker that implies there's much more to be released. Stephen Grey, for Channel 4 News.

Footage of Julian Assange.

Note:The question instead is fourfold:

Would halting publication set a precedent that would lead to the "hostage taking" of other people alleged to be WikiLeaks sources?
Would halting publication be interpreted as substantiating allegations that Manning was a source?
Would halting publication be a betrayal of WikiLeaks' promises to publish?
Would halting publication also halt political support for Manning?

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian knew how much more there was. But now that Manning was arrested the question became would WikiLeaks put Manning in greater jeopardy by continuing to release his materials?

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

It's certainly a very problematic situation. This is about as serious as it can get.

Footage of Julian Assange.

STOCK

Julian Assange:

We have a situation where there's a young man, Bradley Manning, who is alleged to be a source for the Collateral Murder video. We do not know whether Mr Manning is our source or not, but what we do know is that we promised the source that we would publish everything that they gave to us.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Even though his potential source had been arrested, Assange was undeterred from WikiLeaks’ mission. And the hundreds of thousands of leaked US government secrets he possessed were burning a hole in his pocket. Julian travelled around Europe plotting his next move. In Brussels, he was tracked down by investigative journalist Nick Davies.

Nick Davies:

My pitch to Julian was instead of posting the secret material on the WikiLeaks website, he shared it with an alliance of the Guardian and other media groups including the New York Times who (a) have the impact of reaching millions of people instantly and also have natural political connections in their own jurisdictions. So we were trying to give him a kind of political immunity so that he could do this - clearly provocative and somewhat dangerous thing - in relative safety and with an assurance of success.

Note: It was not Davies’ suggestion that WikiLeaks partner with other media: WikiLeaks had worked with journalists at the New York Times and at the Guardian many times previously. WikiLeaks first Guardian front page, on Kenyan corruption, was as early as 2007. WikiLeaks had already brought in Der Spiegel and the New York Times and the Guardian were next. That is why Assange agreed to meet with Nick Davies.

Full interview transcript: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Recognising that WikiLeaks could benefit from a louder megaphone, Julian agreed to Nick’s proposal.

Nick Davies:

So, how am I going to get the documents back to London? There was a little bit of a risk that if the authorities were monitoring his communications, as they might well have been, they would be aware of my involvement with him, they would arrest me as I came back into the United Kingdom and take the material if I had it on a laptop. We thought about a memory stick - maybe they might not spot that. He came up with a much better solution. He said that he would create a website. In order to access the website, I would need a password. So he took a paper napkin that was on the table in the café where we were talking in Brussels and he hooked together several of the words in the commercial logo and wrote: No capital letters. I stuffed it in my pocket. In the event that I was arrested people would assume that it was something I was going to blow my nose on - and so it was I travelled back to the United Kingdom and, as it happened, nobody stopped me so it was all cool.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian would also team up with the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism. In a pre-arranged drop point in central London, Julian met Iain Overton.

Iain Overton:

We turned up and Julian was there wearing a bullet proof vest and we had a Middle Eastern meal, and he revealed that he had the largest-ever military leak of documents in the history of leaks.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In the midst of this spy story was thrust Iain’s young colleague – a computer whiz named James Ball.

James Ball:

It was about one o’clock in the morning. I took delivery of a USB stick of 390,000 secret US military records. I made to leave and Julian asked me where I was going and I said, well, I was going to go home. So he paused and goes: No, don’t do that – I don’t want your address linked to this address. Can you find somewhere else to go, at least for 4 or 5 hours? I don’t really think I can go and hit a club – I’d really hate having to try and explain losing 400,000 secret documents because I got a bit drunk.

Gavin MacFadyen:

Nobody had ever done this before. How do you have teams of intelligent people to go through this stuff? Nobody in my experience as a journalist had ever been confronted with a tenth of the mass of material he was.

Iain Overton:

We were talking, you know, half a million lines of data. If, in the old days, you had to take half a million lines of data out, you’d have had 16 wheelbarrows out of the front door of the Pentagon.

Nick Davies:

This was the biggest leak of secret material in the history of this particular planet.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian decided that the first release of material would be the Afghan War Logs, but he had to understand them first. In London, the Guardian set up a secret operation with key military reporters from the New York Times and the German magazine Der Spiegel, veteran journalists who could penetrate the arcane language of the military.

Footage of Julian Assange with reporters in the Guardian's offices.

Nick Davies:

During the 4 or 5 weeks when the reporters were working on the Afghan war logs, all of us became concerned that there was material in there which, if published, could get people hurt on the ground in Afghanistan.

Footage of Julian Assange speaking about the Afghan War Logs data.

Note: Assange has always maintained he never said this and made a formal complaint to the Leveson Inquiry about the veracity of Davies’ evidence. Assange is alleged to have made this remark while discussing the redaction of the Afghan War Diaries with journalists from Der Spiegel and the Guardian during a dinner in London in July 2010. Nick Davies was not present at that dinner. A journalist at that dinner, John Goetz provided a signed witness statement affirming that the remark was not made.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

WikiLeaks 'ambassador' Joseph Farrell emailed the OfCom complaint containing the Goetz witness statement to Gibney, his producer and his executive producer on 14 June 2012.

Nick Davies:

This particularly related to ordinary Afghan civilians who in one operation or incident or another had given information to coalition forces and that was recorded in there in such a way that those civilians were identifiable. I raised this with Julian and he said if an Afghan civilian helps coalition forces he deserves to die. He went on to explain that they have the status of a collaborator or informant. Now...

Alex Gibney:

Are you sure about that? That’s definitely what he said?

Nick Davies:

I have absolutely no doubt about it at all. This was just me and him talking through the detail of how we handled this. And this problem - potential problem - had already come up. (a) It's a moral problem. We are not here to publish material that gets people killed; (b) If you publish information that really does get people hurt, or could conceivably get people hurt, you lose your political immunity – you're terribly vulnerable to the most obvious propaganda attack, which is waiting for us in the wings, that you are helping the 'bad guys'. Julian is a computer hacker – he comes from that ideology that all information is good and everything should be published.

Journalist:

I asked Julian if he would publish information sent to his website that could lead to the deaths of innocents, such as how to release anthrax into the Thames water supply.

Audio of Julian Assange giving a radio interview.

Note: Gibney edits in a single line of audio, with no context, from an unrelated discussion to give a misleading impression of Julian Assange's views on the redactions necessary for the Afghan War Logs publication. Instead of resorting to deceptive editing such as this, Gibney could have talked to Der Spiegel, one of WikiLeaks other media partners on the Afghan release, who raised the issue with Assange in this interview dated July 26, 2010:

Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm-minimization process and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources.

Source: Click here.

For a good overview of WikiLeaks' policy on redactions, see here.

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Julian Assange:

Yes, even if there is a possibility that release may lead to loss of life.

Iain Overton:

This is a man whose primary way of interacting with the world is a digital one. It is to some degree unsullied by the limitations of human nature.

Nick Davies:

He does sometimes reduce human activity to something formulaic – then he doesn’t see the human heart beating in there, he just reduces it to that very, very simple formula: they speak to an occupying force, they must be bad, the informant deserves to die.

Note: The working method agreed at the start of the five-week period during which WikiLeaks' media partners would assess the Afghan War Logs material ahead of publication was that the media partner journalists would provide oversight by flagging up to WikiLeaks any regions or keywords requiring redaction in the individual records as they went through them. This resulted in 1 in 5 documents being witheld from initial publication: some 15,000 documents in total.

Source: Click here and go to p. 7.

No person came to harm and NATO forces in Afghanistan admitted to CNN that there wasn't a single person in the released documents in need of protection.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The coalition of journalists weren't used to working with a transparency radical like Assange. And Assange was still learning the ethics of journalism. They could only agree on one thing: they were going to release the documents. In London, a deadline was set for all the partners to publish at the same time. Julian finally agreed to redactions and blacking out of names. He told his partners he had a special process which would eliminate the identity of sources from the documents. But with less than a week before publication, Assange had neglected to tell Domscheit-Berg in Berlin.

Note: Daniel Domscheit-Berg was not directly involved in any of WikiLeaks' 2010 releases (with the exception of a minor administrative role in booking the venue for the Collateral Murder press conference). These facts have been widely reported, yet Alex Gibney uses Domscheit-Berg as a primary source for this film. Domscheit-Berg has no way of knowing the state of preparedness of WikiLeaks prior to the Afghan War Logs release date, and cannot be considered an authoritative source on the matter.

Due to his increasingly erratic behaviour, in late February 2010 WikiLeaks issued a policy directive that Domscheit-Berg not be permitted contact with source material.

Source: Click here.
More: Click here.

After February 2010 Domscheit-Berg's input within WikiLeaks was restricted to the maintenance of some WikiLeaks back-ups within Germany, and as German spokesperson. His role as spokesperson within Germany was removed after he gave a number of interviews following the 5 April 2010 release of Collateral Murder in which he misdescribed himself to the press.

Source: Click here and go to p. 7.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

So there we were, 4 days before releasing 90,000 documents, and no redactions made.

Footage of Julian Assange discussing the Afghan War Logs release.

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Julian Assange:

It is effectively impossible for us to notify some of these Afghanis and their leaders about this material. It looks like we will have to do a redaction of some of it.

Journalist:

Is that new to you? I mean, you're effectively doing a bit of censorship yourself.

Julian Assange:

Yeah, that would be new for us but remember...

The footage abruptly cuts off.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Time was running out. Just before the release, Assange focused on a section of 15,000 documents that contained the most names. In desperation, he turned to an unlikely source for help.

News footage clips.

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Newsreader:

It was reported that WikiLeaks has asked the Department of Defense for help in reviewing approximately 15,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks obtained in an unauthorized and inappropriate manner.

Newsreader:

Before WikiLeaks releases those classified documents to the public...

Note: There was no fixed schedule for release of the held-back 15,000 documents for which WikiLeaks sought Pentagon help with redaction. This was confirmed on August 8, 2010 by Domscheit-Berg himself:

"[Daniel Schmitt] rejected allegations that the group’s publication of leaked US government documents was a threat to America’s national security or put lives at risk. “For this reason, we conveyed a request to the White House prior to the publication, asking that the International Security Assistance Force provide us with reviewers,” Schmitt said. “That request remains open. However, the Pentagon has stated that it is not interested in ‘harm minimization’ and has not contacted us, directly, or indirectly to discuss this offer.”

Source: Click here.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

Julian urged the New York Times to send a letter to the Pentagon, asking if they want to help with redactions and they refused. And that was 24 hours before the release, you know.

Mark Davis:

This notion that he didn’t care about what was in that material is not true. I mean, he was actually quite tortured by this material and with very few resources - by himself, day and night - he was consumed with working out what to release and what not to release.

James Ball:

WikiLeaks is a tiny organization, working on this huge scale; it's going to make some mistakes.

Footage of Julian Assange talking about how to spell Der Spiegel on a press release

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Julian Assange:

Aw, fuck that end of the press release then.

Mark Davis:

He was without any support structure, and he was about to do a press conference so, you know, I'd say to him: Julian, you need someone there. I mean, someone's got to write a press release, or at least to answer the phone.

Clip of Julian Assange.

Mark Davis:

So it was just in the couple of days before that launch that a couple of volunteer students came in.

Footage of Julian Assange talking to WikiLeaks staff.

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Julian Assange:

Away you go now, but I'll give you something to think about, which is we've got this press conference on tomorrow - we're going to be totally inundated, completely totally inundated.

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Journalist:

Let's talk about WikiLeaks as an organisation. Is this Apple or IBM, or is this...?

Gavin MacFadyen:

[laughing] Hah! It's a corner gas station with some extremely bright attendants.

Note: False. Later on the same day Davis is referring to, July 25, 2010, at the press conference for the Afghan War Logs which was streaming live all over the world, Assange told a room full of journalists that WikiLeaks is a "small organization."

It's actually a very hard engineering task to supply 2-5% of the entire world internet connected population at a single moment with material. And so we are a small organization trying to understand how to do that and do that in a secure way. As a result we have built up during that period an enormous backlog of whistleblower disclosures.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Mark Davis:

It is true that he tried to create an impression that it was this very large organization. It was Julian Assange, his $300 laptop, ten SIM cards and a very, you know, cheap jacket that he'd put on to get through the interview.

Alarm clock rings.

Note: Poor quality fact-checking. Davies is ad-libbing for the camera, but the footage and dialogue in the next clip makes it clear that, in fact, the situation is such that Assange has worked through the night and still hasn't found time to sleep.

Mark Davis:

He woke up late, of course. Knocking on the door, "Julian, come on man." He gets up, just his normal thing, you know.

Footage of Mark Davis filming Assange he prepares to leave for the Afghan War Logs press conference.

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Julian Assange:

What's the time? What's the time?

Mark Davis:

It's twenty-five to.

Julian Assange:

I need to prepare a little list of things.

Mark Davis:

Alright, I'll be two minutes. How you feeling?

Julian Assange:

Tired. Haven't been to sleep, but good, good. 14 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 ten trucks out there, ten media trucks.

Julian Assange:

Yeah. Yep. There'll be a good outcome.

Mark Davis:

He walked out that door as a sort of ageing student hobo and by the time, you know, he'd made this 50 yard walk, he was a rockstar – he was one of the most famous guys on the planet.

Footage of Julian Assange at press conference for Afghan War Logs.

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Julian Assange:

Most of you have read some of the morning papers. So, this is the Guardian from this morning: 14 pages about this topic. It's clear that it will shape an understanding of what the past 6 years of war has been like, and that the course of the war needs to change.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The war logs revealed a conflict that was very different from what citizens had been told. Civilian casualties were much higher than reported. America’s supposed ally, Pakistan, was playing a double game: taking military aid from the US even while working with the Taliban, to plan attacks in Afghanistan. The war logs also revealed the existence of a secret American assassination squad with a terrible record of wounding and killing women and children.

Bill Leonard:

There is nothing that will have greater consequences for our nation than the unleashing of the brutality of war. To have those types of decisions, those types of deliberations, done in secrecy is a tremendous disservice to the American people – because these are things being done in their name – so, whether you agree with them or not, to have a free back-and-forth airing of these is essential.

Footage of Julian Assange at press conference.

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Julian Assange:

All the material is over 7 months old, so it's got no current operational consequence.

Journalist:

Now, in what circumstances wouldn't you publish information, or are there any circumstances in which you wouldn't publish material?

Julian Assange:

We have a harm minimization process. Our goal is just reform, our method is transparency, but we do not put the method before the goal.

Note: Nick Davies is shown to be lying. He was alreadycompletely aware of the harm minimization procedures implemented by WikiLeaks. An article by Nick Davies in which he himself explained the procedures had been published on the front page of The Guardian, prior to Assange's announcement.

The most famous photograph from the July 25 press conference at which Assange made this announcement shows him holding a copy of the Guardian newspaper from that morning. Embedded Image

The front page headline in the photograph is "Massive leak of secret files exposes true Afghan war". This is an article by Nick Davies and David Leigh.

From the article:

A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its "uncensorable" servers.

Nick Davies' "amazement" at Assange's statement is not credible in light of the fact that had already reported the content of that statement in a front page story in an international newspaper.

Source: Click here.

As is also clear, the claim that "Julian had no harm minimization process in place at all" is also false. The working method agreed at the start of the five-week period during which WikiLeaks' media partners would assess the Afghan War Logs material ahead of publication was that the media partner journalists would provide oversight by flagging up to WikiLeaks any regions or keywords requiring redaction in the individual records as they went through them. This resulted in 1 in 5 documents being witheld from initial publication: some 15,000 documents in total. No person came to harm and NATO forces in Afghanistan admitted to CNN that there wasn't a single person in the released documents in need of protection.

Source: Click here and go to p. 7.

Nick Davies:

To my amazement, Julian announced to the world WikiLeaks always conducts a harm minimization process. Julian had no harm minimization process in place at all.

Alex Gibney:

So, on the WikiLeaks side, were the redactions made?

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

No. There were 15,000 documents in the end were held back, but 75,000 documents were published and they contained about 100 names.

Note: The newspapers published just a few hundred documents. WikiLeaks gave the world 75,000 of these documents, revealing many suspected war crimes in the process. NATO in Kabul had confirmed there had not been a single case of Afghans needing protection because of the leak. The New York Times censored a number of stories that came out of it, such as details of Obama's assassination programme killing children. Gibney tries to make this appalling abuse and failure to document history sound as if it is in the New York Times' favour.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The newspapers published articles accompanied by only a few hundred redacted documents. But even after the hold-backs, and despite Julian’s promises, WikiLeaks published 75,000 documents on its website, without redactions.

US news footage of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Note:This is officially hyperbole. The statement from then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates is from a July 2010 press conference. Just two weeks later, in an August 16 private memo to Senator Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gates said:

[T]he review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure.

Source: Click here.

An internal State Department assessment conducted in late 2010 found that WikiLeaks' releases were "embarrassing not damaging".

Source: Click here.

In a November 2010 press conference, Robert Gates made the following statement:

Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time...

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I thinkthose descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought...

Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

Source: Click here.

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Robert Gates:

The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, for our allies and Afghan partners.

Note: At a briefing to Congress in late 2010 State Department officials admitted they lied about the actual impact of WikiLeaks to bolster the US efforts to bring a legal case against them. As one of the journalists who worked on the release, Nick Davies' claim to not know that the US government has officially confirmed that no individuals in Afghanistan came to any harm as a result of the Afghan War Logs is not credible.

Source: Click here.

Nick Davies:

I do not know whether anyone in Afghanistan did get hurt - the fact that the material was there and identifiable as potentially dangerous did the political damage. When the material was first published, the world was indeed talking about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and about the existence of a squad that was going out and killing Taliban, but the White House managed the news and the story became: WikiLeaks has got blood on their hands.

Montage of US government officials giving media interviews.

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen

Note: Gibney misses the opportunity to give a more nuanced account of the Pentagon-directed media blitz following the publication of the Afghan War Logs. Though clearly orchestrated across the entire US mainstream media, it was not uniformly successful:

The Pentagon initially claimed that it had not been contacted by WikiLeaks for help in identifying vulnerable individuals named in the documents.

Source: Click here.

However, journalist Glenn Greenwald uncovered evidence that it had been, and had refused.

Source: Click here.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates' private August 16 letter to the Senate Armed Forces Committee admitting that the Pentagon's review “has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised” was widely reported.

Source: Click here.

CNN reported that a senior NATO official in Kabul had confirmed there had not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak.

Source: Click here.

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Mike Mullen:

Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.

Senator Lindsey Graham

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Lindsey Graham:

The people at WikiLeaks could have blood on their hands.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey

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James Woolsey:

He definitely has blood on his hands.

Former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee

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Mike Huckabee:

The blood is on their hands.

Heather Brooke:

This is where we get into the information war - that speculative blood became more important than the actual blood. We already can see all that terrible stuff – we know about that. Let's focus on your nightmares, how all these people might die because the government's secrets have been unleashed.

Note: Julian Assange:

We saw the New York Times as, yes, influential within its market, but on the other hand so corrupting of the material that we were trying to get out, and so hostile to us as an organisation in order to save itself, in order to distance itself, that we were not only betraying the impact of the material, but we were shooting ourselves as an organisation every time we work with the New York Times, because the way they try to save themselves from the lash-back by military apologists in the United States was by attacking us, and therefore increasing the perceived separation.

Source: Click here and go to p. 49.

Nick Davies:

As soon as they pick up this line about who's got blood on their hands, it's WikiLeaks being isolated and that, from a political point of view, was a clever move by the White House. They stepped all around any kind of argument with these big media organisations and isolated Julian.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

By creating a distinction between Assange and the newspapers, the government avoided a war with the mainstream media and invented a perfect enemy: the guy Bradley Manning called “a crazy, white-haired Aussie”.

Footage clips from Mark Davis' documentary "Inside WikiLeaks"

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Julian Assange:

Not what it was, but what it is.

Mark Davis:

Julian, is this taking some getting used to? You've been pretty much in the shadows as far as the media's concerned, until recently.

Julian Assange:

We've grown a bit, so it's just our time, for me to do it.

Mark Davis:

WikiLeaks needs a face?

Julian Assange:

Yeah, well, the public demands that it has a face. And actually we'd much prefer - I'd prefer - that it didn't have a face. We tried to do that for a while and people just, the demands were so great people just started inventing faces.

Montage of clips of media coverage of Julian Assange.

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Newsreader:

Some call him a hero, some see him as a threat to national security. Julian, thank you for joining us.

STOCK

Newsreader:

This afternoon I talked to the man behind the leaks".

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Newsreader:

Julian Assange.

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Newsreader:

Julian Assange.

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Interviewer:

What have the leaks achieved?

Julian Assange:

We have published more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined.

Interviewer:

So, it's journalistic?

Julian Assange:

Well, I'm fond of the phrase 'Lights on, rats out'.

Interviewer:

Do you feel that you have accomplished what you wanted to with the release of these documents?

Julian Assange:

Not yet.

Footage from Mark Davis' documentary of Julian and WikiLeaks staff discussing his media coverage.

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Julian Assange:

(laughing) Jesus Christ!

WikiLeaks Staffer:

Two of you on the front and then you have a double page spread.

WikiLeaks Staffer:

I think that's the best photo.

Julian Assange:

That's not a bad photo.

WikiLeaks Staffer:

I mean, you've got your own banner at the top there, and you've got three pages in the Times.

Julian Assange:

Well, I'm untouchable now in this country.

Mark Davis:

Untouchable?

Julian Assange:

Untouchable.

Mark Davis:

That's a bit of hubris.

Julian Assange:

Well, for a couple of days. It can wear off, but the next few days, untouchable.

Another news montage.

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Newsreader:

The founder of WikiLeaks found himself making news again today – Sweden issued a warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange

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Newsreader:

Swedish authorities are looking to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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Newsreader:

Swedish authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of molestation and rape in two separate cases.

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Newsreader:

Just last month WikiLeaks published more than 75,000...

Note: Nick Davies has no first-hand knowledge of the events in Sweden but Alex Gibney uses him to relate (inaccurately) much of the story. Donald Bostrom is a Swedish journalist. He has never been an employee of WikiLeaks or co-ordinator for WikiLeaks.

Nick Davies is a partisan adversary of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had informed The Guardian, through Nick Davies, from the start that in order to maximise the impact of the release WikiLeaks would bring TV into the release. Davies did not accept that the Guardian would not have total exclusivity in the UK, not just print exclusivity, and became antagonistic to Assange. None of this context is given by Gibney.

After his fight over exclusivity, Davies published an error filled sex article about Assange. He was criticised by other journalists for unprofessional conduct. In response, he physically attacked one of them.

Nick Davies has also internalised and repeated the falsehood, first spread by his colleague at The Guardian David Leigh, that Julian Assange said "Afghan informers deserve to die". Leigh falsely claimed Julian Assange had made this statement at a dinner at which Davies was not present. An American journalist working for Der Spiegel, who was present at that dinner, John Goetz, has said this is untrue and has written a witness statement to this effect.

Note: Click here.

Gibney and his producer Alexis Bloom were provided with the witness statement. Gibney nevertheless chooses to keep Davies quote - without qualification - and altogether ignore Goetz's witness statement. This can only encourage the audience to accept the prosecution of WikiLeaks and other media organisations.

Nick Davies:

Saturday, August the 21st I woke up, another journalist had sent an email with a link to the website of the Swedish newspaper, Expressen. I went to this website and I thought like “well, this is a joke, this is a spoof newspaper". These huge headlines, including one which claims that Julian Assange had sexually assaulted two women. What is this about? So I phoned a guy in Stockholm who is the main co-ordinator for WikiLeaks in that city and so I came on to this guy and said: "What on earth is going on?"

Note: Gibney's interview with Donald Bostrom is selectively edited. This can be ascertained by consulting what Bostrom has said elsewhere, both in his witness statement to police and in press interviews.

Source: Donald Bostrom witness statement: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The man in Sweden was Donald Bostrom, an investigative journalist who had agreed to help Julian Assange while he was in the country.

Donald Bostrom:

It was kind of the new Mick Jagger. And, yeah, really, really - groupies, stalkers, media - everyone had a big interest in Julian at the time. And he liked it.

Alex Gibney:

He liked it?

Donald Bostrom:

Of course.

Note: In fact, WikiLeaks kept its servers in many countries, among them:

WikiLeaks continues to distribute its web presence across multiple jurisdictions. This is an explicit undertaking designed to make WikiLeaks uncensorable.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Assange had thought of moving his base to Sweden where WikiLeaks kept its servers. Laws were more favourable to press freedoms and where Assange had a growing fan base. Fame offered Assange a platform, but it also made him a visible target.

Donald Bostrom:

I said: "Julian, I think you are on the list of undesirable people for some governments. Recently in Russia some journalists were compromised by girls in short skirts, it’s a very easy trick, it's dead easy." That was exactly one week before everything happened.

Another news montage of reports on the allegations against Assange, including a Chinese cartoon video of the allegations.

Note: It is surprising, given Gibney's reference to a report on the burst condom that he fails to mention its other, rather more sensational, finding: the absence of any chromosomal DNA. This has been widely reported:

Source: Missing DNA evidence in Julian Assange sexual assault case

Narration by Alex Gibney:

An unknown source leaked the police report to the press. It included the testimony of Assange, the two women and, surprisingly, a picture of a torn condom. There were other peculiar things going on. The case of one woman was dropped and then re-opened.

Gavin MacFadyen:

The general sense was that it's awful curious that these charges would emerge just after a very embarrassing, damaging leak.

Nick Davies:

There were various possibilities here. One was that some women who wanted to sell a story to the newspapers had set him up. Another was that a really nasty right-wing group in Sweden had conspired to set him up. Maybe, maybe some dark agency from the United States had done this. And, way out on the extreme ranges of possibility, well maybe he did it, I don’t know.

Footage of Julian being interviewed.

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Interviewer:

Did anything happen between you and these two women that could be construed as sexual coercion or rape?

Julian Assange:

No words, no actions, no violence – there is nothing that could be construed as rape. Nothing at all.

Interviewer:

Or sexual coercion?

Julian Assange:

Well, I don’t know what the hell that means.

Footage: Julian Assange in various interviews.

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Julian Assange:

Well, there's no doubt that this organisation is under siege.

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Julian Assange:

It was clearly a smear campaign.

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Julian Assange:

This was clearly a smear campaign, the only question is who is involved.

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Julian Assange:

We were warned by Australian intelligence that we would receive such an attack.

More footage of news reports about the Swedish allegations.

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Newsreader:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is calling it a smear campaign.

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Newsreader:

His supporters claim that the warrant is a way of silencing him.

Footage of Michael Moore talking about the case.

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Michael Moore:

Are you telling me this isn't a witch hunt? This isn't a smear job? Come on, the accuser apparently worked with the Cuban exiles and there's a story around that she's a CIA operative. This whole thing stinks to the high heavens, I gotta tell ya. I've seen this enough times where governments or corporations they go after people with this kind of lie and smear. This is a whole bunch of hooey as far as I'm concerned.

Footage of Mark Stephens interview.

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Mark Stevens:

Well, it's certainly a surreal Swedish fairy tale. The only thing which hasn't walked onto stage yet are the trolls, and I'm waiting for them to arrive.

Footage of Julian Assange interview with CNN to discuss Afghan War Logs.

Note: The use of this clip shows biased editing. In the original footage Julian Assange explains the reason he feels questions about the Swedish case "contaminate" the interview is because it had been arranged to discuss the disclosure by WikiLeaks of 100,000 previously unreported deaths, but this context is omitted in Gibney's documentary. The full clip restores the context.

Source: Click here.

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Julian Assange:

It is my role to be the lightening rod to attract the attacks against the organization for our work.

Interviewer:

And one aspect of that has been the legal situation for yourself in Sweden?

Julian Assange:

No, I'm not going to talk about that in relation to this.

Interviewer:

But it does affect WikiLeaks?

Julian Assange:

I will have to walk if you're...

Interviewer:

Do you still, you once...

Julian Assange:

...if you are going to contaminate this extremely serious interview with questions about my personal life.

Interviewer:

I'm not. What I'm asking is if you feel that it's an attack on WikiLeaks?

In the stock footage, Assange takes off his sound mic.

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Interviewer:

Julian, I'm happy to go on to that as the next question, all I'm asking is...

Julian Assange:

Well, look...

In the stock footage, Assange walks out of interview.

Note: On September 15, 2010, the Swedish prosecutor confirmed that "he is not a wanted man" and that Julian Assange was free to leave Sweden. Despite requests to be interviewed during the 5 weeks he remained in Sweden, the reasons given why this was impossible were "it's a weekend", "the investigator is off sick" and "it's too late". He finally left Sweden on September 27 for a pre-arranged business meeting in Berlin. Once in the UK he instructed his lawyers to contact the Metropolitan Police to inform them how he could be reached.

Source: Click here.
More: Click here.

Note: To date, the Swedish prosecutor has refused to give a reason why Julian Assange cannot be interviewed abroad under standard Mutual Legal Assistance procedures, which is both legal and routine in Sweden, or why the need for him to be in custody for questioning is considered essential. The Ecuadorean government has made formal offers to the Swedish Foreign Office to facilitate this questioning in either their London embassy, where Julian Assange has now been granted political asylum, or their Stockholm embassy, but all offers have been refused.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The case in Sweden was still unresolved, while the investigation continued, prosecutors permitted Assange to leave Sweden on the understanding that he reappear for questioning. But Assange never went back, convinced Sweden was a trap, he went underground in London.

Mark Davis:

Julian has a certain paranoia. But, in the time that I was with him, I think that high security awareness was actually relevant; it was appropriate. Mind you, he had been living like that for the past, you know, 5 or 10 years, when it probably wasn’t appropriate.

Footage of Julian Assange.

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Julian Assange:

I never have a good reason to be paranoid; I have a good reason to be careful. The stakes are high so you need to be meticulously careful every day.

Note: The surveillance of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is well documented and is a serious matter. For instance, as far back as 2008 US military intelligence prepared a classified report on how methods to destroy WikiLeaks' "center of gravity". Two of Assange's Kenyan associates, Oscar Kamau Kingara and John Paul Oulo were assassinated on March 6, 2009 in a matter connected to WikiLeaks' publications about extrajudicial assassinations. As a teenager Assange had his phone tapped and had been physically surveilled by Australian Federal Police in Operation Weather.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Mark Davis:

He'd been training for this moment in evasive tactics and changing phones and taking out batteries and changing computers. It may have been a fantasy before, but it served him well because it became real. He was the focus of intense enemies.

News footage

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Newsreader:

Right now, the Pentagon are reportedly searching for Julian Assange, potentially on the verge of releasing a huge new stash of confidential documents.

Nick Davies:

He was putting his head above the parapet. He was putting himself in a dangerous position, and I think on the whole he handled the dangers pretty well. You know, there is a side to this guy which is great. And then there's this hidden side which has been so destructive.

Note: Robert Manne, who has never met Julian Assange, has retracted this statement. The original statement was made in an essay about Assange after reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's error-filled book. Robert Manne subsequently released an updated essay with the statement explicitly removed.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Robert Manne:

He's a natural fabulist and storyteller and lives intensely in his imagination, and to some extent that imaginary world that he inhabits becomes more real than the, as it were, often more mundane reality that we all live in.

Footage of Julian Assange answering press questions.

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Journalist:

You talked about massive surveillance as the US investigation into WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange:

We certainly were under surveillance in Iceland. I personally had chased people who were surveilling me there with video cameras.

Note: In 2011 eight FBI agents secretly flew to Iceland to interrogate a young WikiLeaks ex-volunteer without the permission of the Icelandic authorities. On hearing about the FBI's unauthorised operation in Iceland, the Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, ordered the FBI to leave the country and told the Icelandic police to cease all co-operation, but in fact the FBI agents stayed a further 5 days, interviewing the vulnerable young man in hotel rooms and then flew him back to Washington DC for 4 more days of questioning.

Source: Click here.
More: Click here.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

He travelled to a conference in Oslo and then made these allegations that two State Department officials had been on the airplane to follow him – but there's no proof. And this is what got tiring to a lot of us over time. Julian was constantly propagating how much we were in danger and all of these things, but this was just lies and propaganda.

Smari McCarthy:

Maybe it's the fame, maybe it's the attention, maybe it's the pressures of working in this kind of environment but, you know, somehow this idealist that I met became something else somewhere through the story.

Note: On August 25, 2010 Daniel Domscheit-Berg was caught in the act of sabotaging WikiLeaks mail server. He was suspended the following day. The Newsweek article is dated August 26, 2010.

Source: Inside WikiLeaks, by Daniel Domscheit-Berg Click here.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

This whole topic just headed into a really bad direction. There was this article in Newsweek – that’s what Julian took as a proof that I had been speaking to the press. From that day on, I was a traitor, I was trying to stab him in the back. It boiled down to me being suspended for, as Julian put it, “disloyalty, insubordination and destabilization in times of crisis".

Alex Gibney:

Where did that language come from?

Note: This is a proven libel. Domscheit-Berg uses the qualification "as much as I can tell" to excuse the fact that he is lying. This language is not from the Espionage Act of 1917 or any other year. The phrase simply isn't present. Domscheit-Berg's attribution is easily demonstrated as false by consulting the original text of the Act. Unconcerned that this is an outright falsehood, Gibney goes on to brandish it as a "cruel irony".

Source: United States Espionage Act of 1917 Click here.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

I think as much as I can tell, that's from the Espionage Act of 1917.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

That was a cruel irony. Across the Atlantic, the United States Department of Justice was investigating whether it could use the Espionage Act to put Julian Assange in jail.

Bill Leonard:

The Espionage Act is primarily intended to address situations where individuals pass national defense information over to the enemy in order to allow the enemy to harm us. It would be unprecedented if the Espionage Act was being used to attack individuals who did not do anything more than the New York Times or the Washington Post does every day.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The next big releases were the Iraq War Logs. This time WikiLeaks had worked with volunteers to devise a computer program to solve the redaction problems. There were almost 400,000 documents detailing that the US military had purposefully hidden information about civilian casualties and systematic torture.

Iain Overton:

President Obama sanctioned the mass handover of Iraqi prisoners of war from the American troops over to the Iraqi authorities and one of the things that is against the Geneva Conventions is that you cannot hand over a prisoner of war to another authority who you know commits torture.

News footage of Department of Defense spokesman Geoff Morrell.

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Geoff Morrell:

Well, let me just say with regard to the allegations of not intervening when coming across detainee abuse, well, it's not true.

James Ball:

They had 1,300 allegations, with medical evidence, of quite horrific torture by Iraqi army and police against detainees.

Iain Overton:

We are talking about sodomy, we are talking about using rubber hoses and beating people, we are talking about murder. I mean, the sort of torture that we were supposedly liberating Iraq from.

James Ball:

The US administration under Bush and under Obama continued turning over prisoners despite knowing this. That is against the Geneva Convention. The Obama administration appears to have committed war crimes. Who knew that before?

Note: Throughout the film Gibney attempts to ascribe psychological rather than political motives to Bradley Manning's alleged whistleblowing, trivialising the political significance of Manning's alleged actions. The same tactic has been employed by US military prosecutors at Manning's pre-trial hearings. The film focuses on his alleged sexuality, his alleged gender dysphoria and at one point even super-imposes a picture of his face on that of Jean Harlow. Manning's political and principled motivations for disclosing the information are detailed clearly in the statement he himself made in the court-martial proceedings:

Source: Click here.

Gibney's portrayal of Manning is as a disempowered individual, rather than as someone courageous and principled. Gibney makes no effort to explore the politicizing effects that deployment to a war zone had on the young soldier. As we now know from Manning's plea statement, his discovery of the US military's complicity in Iraqi torture disturbed him greatly. After informing his superiors that some detainees were guilty of nothing more than printing leaflets containing a benign political critique:

"They told me to quote "drop it" unquote and to just assist them and the Federal Police in finding out, where more of these print shops creating quote "anti-Iraqi literature" unquote. I couldn't believe what I heard... I knew that if I continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki, those people would be arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police and very likely tortured."

Source: Click here.

In his plea statement, Manning says that he experienced conscientious alarm after he viewed the Apache helicopter gunship video ("Collateral Murder"). He says:

I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Just what had happened with Bradley Manning? Was this just a data dump? Or was this the act of a man who had peaked behind the curtain of a superpower and decided that what it was doing was wrong? After the leaks, and just before he was arrested, Manning was trying to reckon with what he had done and where he was going.

Jihrleah Showman:

There was never even a possibility that anyone could assume that he had a female personality.

Alex Gibney:

You mean that he wanted to become a woman?

Jihrleah Showman:

Well, we knew that he was at least considering hormone therapy, but no one cared. It wasn’t like ok, he's going to have to start showering with the females. Literally, nobody cared.

Jason Edwards:

He would call me and cry – very loud, sobbing like a child – just in a state of utter loss, and he kept saying: "I won't make it, I can't make it, I can't do this." I constantly asked him – do you have someone, do you have anyone to talk to that's there, that you can see on a daily basis? And he assured me that he did not.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Manning did reach out for help at least once in an email to his master sargeant. Manning attached to the email a picture of himself dressed as a woman. Several weeks later around dinner time, Manning was discovered lying on the ground. With a knife, he had scrawled on a chair the words “I want”. Later that same evening, Manning tried to go back to work.

Jihrleah Showman:

I was off shift and I had to come in to find something that he should have been able to find, and he was pacing back and forth saying smart comments to me, and I blatantly said: “Manning, how about you fix your shit before you try to fix mine?” And he screamed and punched me in the face, while I was sitting down. My adrenalin immediately hit overload. I stood up, pushed my chair back. He continued to try to fight me but I put him in, you know, what UFC would call 'guillotine' and, you know, pulled him on the floor and laid on top of him and pinned his arms, you know, beside his head. At that time, I can’t believe that he'd mess with me. I literally had 15-inch biceps. I was the last person he probably should have punched.

My superiors decided that it was just escalating too much and that he had to be removed and have his weapon taken away from him. At that point he never came back in the office. He had to go work with the first sargeant in the mailroom.

Note: The chronology is manipulated to frame Manning. Here Gibney tries to diminish Manning's alleged ethical motivations and frame him as acting out of petty personal revenge. However prosecution documents state just the opposite--Manning's alleged submissions to WikiLeaks are alleged by the prosecution to have already occurred by the time of the incident described.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In the mailroom, Manning still had an internet connection to military networks. His gun had been taken away but he still had access to millions of classified documents.

US Army security specialist:

We have personnel security programmes and we try to take a look at the folks to whom we give security clearances. Should this young man have been given that clearance? In retrospect, certainly not. In prospect, who knows? And these are the kind of decisions that are difficult to make, but let me put it to you this way - the American army has had incredibly stupid PFCs for more than two centuries, and PFCs occasionally do incredibly stupid things.

Jihrleah Showman:

I didn’t see him get arrested but I saw him walk down the hall with about 4 MPs. He had a grin on his face. Like, I'm on top of the world.

Jason Edwards:

The last communication I received from him was that I was going to hear something that would shock the world.

Telephone by Lady Gaga starts playing. Chat logs appear on screen.

US Army security specialist:

I mean, it’s a pretty simple process – dropping CDs into your tower and downloading large volumes of information. I mean, it wasn't incredibly sophisticated.

Note: There is no evidence that Manning was communicating with Assange. Bradley Manning says he was not even sure who he was allegedly talking to at Wikileaks.

Due to the strict adherence of anonymity by the WLO [WikiLeaks], we never exchanged identifying information. However, I believe the individual was likely Mr. Julian Assange [he pronounced it with three syllables], Mr. Daniel Schmidt, or a proxy representative of Mr. Assange and Schmidt.

As the communications transferred from IRC to the Jabber client, I gave 'office' and later 'pressassociation' the name of Nathaniel Frank in my address book, after the author of a book I read in 2009.

Furthermore, this had been widely reported following Manning's first pre-trial hearing in December 2011.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

But that’s not quite true. Manning turned his computers into efficient exfiltration machines. Over several months, Manning made over 794,000 connections with the State Department server. He downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents without anyone noticing. When he hit a snag, he reached out to another hacker for advice on how to crack passwords. Later, Manning talked to him about the progress of the uploads. In Manning's buddy list, the address was listed under a familiar name: Julian Assange.

On November 28th, 2010, WikiLeaks and its media partners began to publish a small fraction - carefully redacted - of the State Department cables supplied by Bradley Manning. The day-to-day memos of American diplomats revealed a surprising honesty about how the world really worked.

Heather Brooke:

It was that whole Wizard of Oz moment.

Footage from the Wizard of Oz movie.

Heather Brooke:

We all look at these politicans – oh wow, they're so powerful - and then it was the little dog pulling the curtain away.

Gibney:

The cables exposed criminal behaviour and corruption by tyrants in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. That in turn helped to fuel exploding popular anger against repression, the so-called Arab Spring. The cables also told the truth about the faults of America's so-called allies, in ways that were bound to reveal their power and legitimacy were a kind of fraud.

PJ 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 tried to manage the impact of this it will be a wound that just keeps, you know, opening up on a recurring basis.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The behaviour of the United States was also exposed, as the cables exposed 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, I'm going to be very candid, right? 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.

Footage of former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton

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Hillary Clinton:

Disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government. People of good faith understand the need for sensitive diplomatic communications, both to protect the national interest and the global common interest.

Heather Brooke:

So, with the previous leaks, the American government they were obviously angry but they suddenly decided that, right, now it's time to get draconian on their ass.

Montage of various US Government officials speaking about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Rep Candice Miller addressing Congress

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Candace Miller:

It's time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is, a terrorist organisation.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich

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Newt Gingrich:

What we should do is treat Assange as an enemy combatant who's engaged in information warfare against the United States.

Then a rapid succession of derogatory remarks about Julian Assange.

STOCK

"He's a blackmailer"

"extortionist"

"terrorist"

"crackpot"

"alleged sex offender"

Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove

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Karl Rove:

He's a criminal and he ought to be hunted down and grabbed and put on trial.

Footage of US Attorney-General Eric Holder.

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Eric Holder:

We have a very serious criminal investigation that's under way and we're looking at all the things that we can do to stem the flow of this information.

Senator Mitch McConnell

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Mitch McConnell

He needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and, if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.

Fox News analyst Bob Beckel

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Bob Beckel:

We've got special ops forces, I mean, a dead man cant leak stuff, illegally shoot the son of a [beeped out].

Chairman of NY Security Guard Advisory Council Bo Dietl

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Bo Dietl:

This little punk, now I stand up for Obama. Obama, if you're listening today, you should take this guy out now.

Tom Flanagan, Adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister

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Tom Flanagan:

I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.

Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly

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Bill O'Reilly:

That's what I'd like to see, a little drone hit Assange, man.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

All the threats were aimed at Assange. No one called for attacks on the Guardian or the New York Times.

Mark Davis:

I found that astounding. If Julian Assange should be charged with some offence under American law, then absolutely the New York Times editor should be in the slammer with him.

Note: This is false. There are no charges. Julian Assange is not charged and has never been charged in Sweden. The matter, formally, is at the stage of "preliminary investigation". The fact that an Interpol Red Notice was issued for Assange's arrest and extradition, leading to his detention for more than 900 days, all without charging him, is one of the principle abuses in the case. The audience can't possibly understand the abusive nature of the situation after having been misled by Gibney in this manner.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Suddenly, only two days after the release of the first batch of State Department cables, Interpol issued a demand for Assange's arrest for his failure to return to Sweden to answer questions about sex charges.

Footage of Julian Assange's lawyer Mark Stephens being interviewed.

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Mark Stevens:

I'm really rather worried by the political motivations that appear to be behind this. Sweden was one of those lickspittle states which used its resources and its facilities for rendition flights.

Interviewer:

You think if he goes to Sweden he may be sent to the States?

Mark Stevens:

Certainly, my mind's very open about that.

Interviewer:

And you may fight it on that basis?

Mark Stevens:

Certainly.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

There were rumours of a sealed indictment against Assange. Secret subpoenas were served targeting WikiLeaks supporters. Under political pressure, VISA and MasterCard stopped processing donations to the website.

James Ball:

Visa and MasterCard will happily process payments for the Ku Klux Klan, for all kinds of organisations around the world and yet this one – with no charges, no warrants, no nothing – they've not only blocked it themselves, they won't let any intermediaries do it.

Footage of news reports about Cablegate and Julian Assange from early December 2010.

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Newsreader:

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder is still hiding from the police but today he did speak out online

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Newsreader:

What happens to WikiLeaks if Julian Assange is arrested?

James Ball:

It carries on. This is huge material that's really important and everyone working on it is getting it out there.

Note: The full interviews from which Gibney selects clips of James Ball talking to the media tell a different story. As James Ball makes a number of false statements in Gibney's documentary these are worth watching in full. In one with Fox TV, for example, Ball appears alongside Kristinn Hrafnsson (as he usually did), who is introduced as "WikiLeaks spokesman" while Ball is described as "a journalist working with WikiLeaks". James Ball never "essentially filled in" as "WikiLeaks' principal spokesperson".

At 2.45 mins in, Mark Stephens explains that Julian Assange is not in hiding: "the police know how to get in touch with him, the Swedish prosecutor knows how to get hold of him, so everybody knows where he is - except the media." It is therefore false and misleading for James Ball to suggest that Julian Assange was "in hiding".

Starting at 8.30mins, Ball refutes the suggestion that WikiLeaks has put anyone in harm's way: "We have correspondents from all over – you know, the New York Times Chinese correspondent, the Guardian Chinese correspondent – checking those cables that are published to see what they're like. Of course WikiLeaks takes redactions seriously. It was said on the Iraq War Logs that there were 300 names going to be in them by the Department of Defense. When they were actually published, of course, the whole things were published redacted and safe."

Source: Click here.

Note: In this December 3, 2010 interview with ABC Lateline, James Ball makes the following remarks about Julian Assange being 'in hiding' and his own relationship to WikiLeaks:

"He said it to me on the way to talk to you today"

"Well, I'm a freelancer working for them, for me it's kind of perhaps a little bit of an outside view but from what I've seen working with them this week..." [Ball had been interning at WikiLeaks for 10 days at this date];

Asked what would happen if Julian Assange is arrested, Ball replies:

"Asking me is a little bit like asking a Saturday sub-editor at the Guardian what happens if Alan Rusbridger resigns. It's very obvious, you know, you don't have to work with them for very long to see that Julian Assange is, you know, absolutely core to what they do."

Source: Click here.

James Ball:

WikiLeaks' principal spokesperson has always been Julian but with Julian in hiding, I essentially filled in the gap.

Footage of James Ball giving media interview.

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Journalist:

Well, where is Julian Assange, this mythic character?

James Ball:

I honestly can't remember where I last saw him.

James Ball:

I ended up doing a lot of television, looking pretty much about 16. You really did feel a David and Goliath moment.

Footage of James Ball giving media interview.

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Journalist:

Do you consider your organisation and your website to be under attack?

James Ball:

Yes, all week it's been under attack.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

The WikiLeaks website came under cyber attack and kept falling offline. In response, WikiLeaks supporters began to mirror the site on over 1,000 servers around the globe. It was impossible to remove WikiLeaks from the internet.

James Ball:

The internet in the digital era lets governments get more information and more power and more communication than they ever have before. But it lets citizens do the same. Governments are more powerful and more vulnerable at exactly the same time. The fight on our hands is who gets to control the internet, who gets to control information?

Footage of an Anonymous video message.

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Anonymous:

Hello, this is a classified message from Anonymous. After numerous attacks on the truth-telling platform of WikiLeaks, including the shutdown of its financing, we have already made it very clear that we will fight for freedom of speech and a free press. We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

Note: In fact, thousands of people, of all ages, took part in a popular online protest against the blockade. In response the FBI and Scotland Yard conducted nearly 100 police raids. There are more than a dozen ongoing trials as a result. A number of young people have already been unjustly imprisoned. The European Parliament has proposed legislation to stop the blockade. WikiLeaks has brought a number of victorious court actions against the blockade. All verdicts have found in WikiLeaks' favour. Visa's designated contractor has been ordered to reopen payments as a result. However, a new blockade will start on July 1, 2013 as Visa believes it has found a way to subvert the court order. For two years the European Commission has been investigating a possible prosecution against Visa and MasterCard over the issue.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In response to the financial blockade on WikiLeaks, the hacker collective Anonymous launched cyberattacks, taking down the websites of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

Footage of protesters outside of court hearing.

Note: Julian Assange voluntarily attended a London police station for arrest by appointment and was immediately imprisoned. He was held without charge, in the highest security unit of Wandsworth prison. After appeals he was eventually released into house arrest and an electronic monitoring device was strapped to his leg. After 552 days he applied for political asylum.

Source:: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here, and go to para 30-38.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

One week after the arrest warrant was issued, Assange surrendered to police in London. Deemed a flight risk, he was ordered held in jail pending a bail hearing.

Footage of Mark Stephens speaking to the media outside Westminster magistrates court.

Mark Stevens:

Many people believe Mr Assange to be innocent and many people believe that this prosecution is politically motivated.

Note: The two issues were inextricably linked from the beginning – by the Pentagon. As soon as news there was an arrest warrant for Julian Assange became global on August 21, 2010 the Pentagon immediately launched an aggressive social media smear campaign using official US Army twitter accounts.
Sources: Click here, here, here, here and here.

Note: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told CBS News that Julian Assange's arrest in London "sounds like good news to me".

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Assange’s arrest had become a mythic moment – but what was really going on? Was Sweden acting as an agent of the United States? Would extradition to Sweden mean a one-way ticket to Guantanamo? Or had the mission of WikiLeaks become confused with the private matter between one man and two women?

Interview with Anna disguised in a wig and make-up, using dark lighting.

Note: Manipulative framing. Anna has a high public profile and ran for office in the last national election. She is the Political and Press Secretary of a major section of the Social Democrats--the largest political party in Sweden. The Social Democrats have ruled Sweden for the majority of the last 80 years.

Alex Gibney:

Talk about why we're altering your appearance and filming you in this way?

Anna:

The reason I felt that it was important to be obscured is mainly because of all the threats I've received. And I know that different media have published my face without my consent and other online communities started doing, had wild speculations about who I was and who the other girl was. I feel that the less my face is shown and the less people can recognize me, the safer I will be.

Note: A commonplace falsehood is that the two Swedish women were WikiLeaks volunteers, repeated here carelessly by Alex Gibney. Neither individual had anything to do with WikiLeaks.

Anna helped organise the seminar on behalf of the Social Democrats.

Source: Click here.
Translation: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Anna has been advised not to talk about any of the details of her sexual encounter with Assange until the legal case has been resolved but there are a few facts on which everyone agrees. An organiser for a WikiLeaks seminar in Stockholm, Anna invited Julian to stay in her apartment while she was out of town, then she decided to come back early. The following day at the seminar Julian was approached by another WikiLeaks volunteer, her name was Sofia.

Donald Bostrom:

Sofia wanted to see Julian, wanted to touch Julian, wanted to be close to Julian and, honestly, I think he was a rock star and he was picking the fruit.

Cut to footage of Julian Assange.

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Julian Assange:

Truth is the first casualty of war.

Note: There is no allegation that Julian Assange has HIV. Yet over the rest of the film, Gibney slyly tries to give the viewer the impression that he might.

Donald Bostrom:

One week after the seminar Anna called me and said: "Donald, I was very proud to have the hottest man on the planet in my apartment, in my bed even, but then it happened something I didn’t like – he tore the condom and I feel very uncomfortable about it." And then she told me that Sofia called her about the same thing. She was very concerned if she is pregnant or catch HIV or something because Julian had sex with her without a condom. They said if Julian take a HIV test, we won't go to the police.

Note: Alex Gibney falsely implies that it is Julian Assange's fault that the identities of the two women became known.

Anna's name became public after the Swedish police leaked her name by mistake when redacted copies of the police report were obtained by the press under Sweden's Freedom of Information laws. Anna's name was not removed from the document header (an error by the Swedish authorities). Swedish police unlawfully released Assange's name to the Swedish right-wing tabloid Expressen, which is what made the story public in the first place.

The New York Times was the first to publish Anna's name when it republished her previously anonymous interview from August 21, 2010.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Anna:

I tried actually to tell his friends that we can get this over with fast and with no fuss because I really didn't want this to be in the papers. But he chose to make a big deal out of it.

Note: It is not true that Julian Assange refused to have a HIV test, as is borne out by three witness statements to police:

Johannes Wahlstrom reports phoning Julian Assange on the morning of Friday August 20, who said: "So, no but I, I can test myself but I don't want to be blackmailed to test myself. Um... Because they say that either they go to the police, or, Sofia, that she either goes to the police or so I test myself. So I can give, I can give her that but I'd rather do it out of, out of, uh goodwill like rather than it's a blackmailing situation."

Source: Johann Wahlstrom police statement: Click here.

Donald Bostrom told police: "And then I ring Julian again and then he says, no but now I've had a long conversation with Sofia. He says on Friday. And she, (inaudible) no worries, that's to say she's not going to the police and that was, they were fully in agreement and... I say, is it really true I say because Anna, when I spoke with Anna right now I got a completely different impression, they're on their way to the police (inaudible). No he says, she, we were in complete agreement, it was very friendly, very nice."

Source: Donald Bostrom police statement: Click here.

On August 30, 2010 Julian Assange told police: "We can always continue if it's needed? But the main thing is that I and others got to hear a lot of unbelievable lies. And got to hear I was to meet Sonia [Sofia] on Saturday afternoon to discuss the matter. Anna had no accusations and no one had any intention of going to the police and so forth. That's how I expected things to remain until I heard the news in Expressen."

Source: Julian Assange police statement: Click here.

Julian Assange's "Unauthorized Autobiography", which has not been approved by Assange, recounts the following: "[SW] said she wanted me to come down immediately and have an STD test. I said I couldn't that day, I was dealing with heavy stuff, but I'd come the next day, and she said that was fine. She then asked me if I'd called her off my own bat, or because I'd been speaking to [AA]? It just became too ludicrous at this point. Donald was ringing me again and again, saying that [AA] was trying to look out for me with this [SW] situation, and I was saying, 'No, it's fine, I've spoken to [SW] and we're meeting tomorrow'."

Source: Julian Assange, The Unauthorized Autobiography, p 234-5 Click here.

Note: It is not true that it was too late when Julian Assange agreed to do a HIV test. His conversation with Sofia took place late Friday morning, August 20th, while Sofia was at a Stockholm hospital clinic. By 2pm the two women were at the police station.

Source: Police Memo, Diary No. 0201-K246336-10, dated 22-08-2010 Click here and go to p. 14.

Nick Davies:

Julian had repeatedly refused to have the test. When he had finally changed his mind and agreed to it, it was too late. By that time the women had already got too frustrated and too angry with Julian’s refusals and they'd gone to the police.

A clip from John Humphrys' December 2010 interview with Julian Assange.

Note: Selective editing. Assange actually begins the statement, which is from a BBC interview, with "What they say is that..". Restoring the context we have:

[T]he suggestion is that they went to the police for advice and they did not want to make a complaint. What they say is that they found out that they were mutual lovers of mine and they had unprotected sex and they got into a tizzy about whether there was a possibility of sexually transmitted diseases. A ridiculous thing to go to the police about.

Source: Click here.

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Julian Assange:

They found out that they were mutual lovers of mine, they had unprotected sex, and they got into a tizzy about whether there was a possibility of sexually transmitted diseases. A ridiculous thing to go to the police about.

Note: No one alleges that Assange has HIV or has ever had HIV. Gibney, however, through innuendo alone, tries to manipulate the viewer into believing the contrary. Similarly, Gibney's so-called "fact" about Assange's children is simply false. It is malicious and repeated here without citation, in a documentary supposedly about WikiLeaks. What Gibney does not say, and is a public fact, is that Mr. Assange's mother and eldest son both received death threats from the Republican right, and had to move and change their names.

Note: Click here.
Note: Click here.
Note: Click here.
Note: Click here.
Note: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

When the women went to the police to try to force Assange to take a HIV test, their testimony raised questions about possible criminal charges. The police, on their own, decided to investigate further. The refusal to use a condom took centre stage: if Assange had HIV and knew it, it could be a case for assault.

The testimony of the women raised another issue: did he refuse to use a condom because he wanted to make the women pregnant? Some pointed to the fact he had already fathered four children with different women around the world.

Note: Selective editing. Iain Overton first met Julian Assange in 2010 and knows nothing of Assange's personal life. Here, Gibney has pushed Overton into rather silly speculation on matters he knows nothing about, and then edited out the question to hide this fact.

Overton resigned as editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on November 12, 2012 after his involvement in false sexual accusations led to a victorious libel action.

Source: Click here.

Iain Overton:

This is a man who is elusive, he's always flying around the place, he doesn't have any roots and he's got a number of kids. There may be some sort of primary impulse in him to want to reproduce, to want to have some sort of bedrock in his life. You know, this is the ultimate digital man and actually you can't just live in a digital world.

Another clip from old footage of Julian Assange.

Note: Selective editing. Gibney spins a careful statement by Assange to make it look as if it is something to be debunked. When context is restored, the meaning is clearly the opposite to that insinuated by Gibney

Q: Did you have sex with those women?

JA: It's a matter of public record as far as the courts are concerned but I am not going to be exposing other people's private lives or my own more than is absolutely necessary. That is not what a gentleman does, that why I have also never criticised these women. We don't know precisely what pressures they have been under, exactly. There are powerful interests that have incentives to promote these smears. That doesn't mean that they got in there in the very beginning and fabricated them.

Q: So you're not suggesting that this was a honey-trap? That you were somehow set up by the Americans, by the CIA? You don't buy into that idea because your lawyer's suggested that that's the case.

JA: He says that he was misquoted. I have never said that this is a honey-trap.

Q: You don't believe it?

JA: I have never said that this is not a honey-trap. I'm not accusing anyone until I have proof.

Q: Do you believe it is possible?

JA: That's not how I operate as a journalist because almost everything is possible.

Source: Click here.

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Julian Assange:

I have never said that this is a honeytrap. I have never said that it is not a honeytrap.

Note: Julian Assange found out through the internet he was 'wanted for rape' - he could not know (since he is innocent) who would be accusing him of that. Even the prosecution claims that they did not go to the police to file complaints but to ask for advice about HIV tests. When the press came out with stories of 'rape' he couldn't have known who was behind it. He couldn't have imagined that a HIV test would turn into an arrest warrant for 'rape'. Source: Click here.

Anna:

He was claiming that he didn't know who we were and that's not true. He knew very well who we were and he knew we were going to the police before we went.

Another clip from an old Julian Assange interview.

Note: Selective editing. Gibney changes a careful statement by Assange to make it look as if it is something to be debunked. When context is restored, the meaning is clearly the opposite to that insinuated by Gibney:

Q: No? You deny them completely? But did you have sex with the women?

JA: We know there is all sorts of nonsense in the tabloid press and all sorts of spin conducted for all sorts of reasons.

Q: But you haven't denied having sex with those women?

JA: No, I haven't denied that.

Q: So you did have sex with those women?

JA: I have always tried in this case and in my other dealings to be a private person and to not speak about matters that are private.

Q: This is now public. So I'm asking you the question. Did you have sex with those women?

JA: It's a matter of public record as far as the courts are concerned but I am not going to be exposing other people's private lives or my own more than is absolutely necessary. That is not what a gentleman does, that why I have also never criticised these women. We don't know precisely what pressures they have been under, exactly. There are powerful interests that have incentives to promote these smears. That doesn't mean that they got in there in the very beginning and fabricated them.

Source: Click here.

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Julian Assange:

There are powerful interests that have incentives to promote these smears.

Note: Nick Davies' comment is false as is shown in the note immediately above.

Nick Davies:

What Julian did was to start the little snowball rolling down the hill, that this was some kind of conspiracy – and that was all he had to do at that stage – it rolled and it picked up speed.

Anna:

A lot of rumours were made up and pure fantasies. The wildest story of all was that I was a CIA agent and I was like, I couldn't even believe that anyone would believe such a weird story.

Donald Bostrom:

From outside, I can understand, it must be a conspiracy. But I was in the middle of this all. Sorry to say, it was not two girls in short skirts sent in from CIA, whatever. There was just ordinary nice girls admiring Julian and WikiLeaks.

Alex Gibney:

You've been very careful not to say anything, why?

Note: Anna made a very important public announcement after this interview. On 22 April 2013 she tweeted that she had "not been raped". The other women, Sofia, has stated that she also had not been raped and that the police had "railroaded" her and "made up the charges (sic)".

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Anna has not spoken directly to the press directly since 21 August 2010 (the day after the police complaint). Her counsel, the politician/lawyer Claes Borgstrom, however, appeared continuously in Swedish and international media to push his position on the preliminary investigation against Julian Assange. His media appearances were especially intense in the month leading up to the national elections for which he ran (19 September 2010).

Borgstrom has billed 80 hours for Assange-related media appearances, although he estimated that the amount was greater. This led to a civil rights group filing a complaint against Borgstrom to the Bar Association's discipline commission in June 2012.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Anna:

Because this is a legal case and not a public debate.

Footage of Assange supporters protesting outside court. Chants: "Freedom. Shame on you."

Note: Ball was seconded to WikiLeaks as an intern for a short time during the Cablegate release. James Ball's first day at WikiLeaks was November 23, 2010 and his second last was December 15, 2010, with one further day visit on January 12, 2011. Ball is implying he was party to an alleged discussion at which he could not have been present.

James Ball:

The way Julian’s private affairs have been conflated with WikiLeaks I find quite troubling. There was at one point an effort to try and separate the two issues, That was reversed and the decision was made to push the two causes together, and so it just...

Alex Gibney:

How was that reversed? I mean, was there a meeting? Was there, or it just slid in that direction?

Note: It is admitted by the Swedish Prosecution Authority that Julian Assange's case is not being handled in the normal way - but they can't say why.

Source: Click here.

There has been political interference in the case at the highest level, with the Swedish Prime Minister, Justice Minister, Foreign Minister and Prosecutor-General all weighing in with prejudicial public comments:

Source: Click here.

Top Swedish jurists are highly critical of the way the case has been handled, believe questioning should take place in London and recognise the validity of Julian Assange's fears of being transited from Sweden to the US.

Source: Click here.
Translation: Click here.
More: Click here.

James Ball:

Julian reversed it. Explicitly. He very much wanted what happened in Sweden to be seen as part of the transparency agenda - and it works.

Footage of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange protests denouncing Sweden and the politically motivated charges.

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Protester:

I'm here because the US government and the Swedish authorities are trying to gag the truth. These charges are completely politically motivated and have nothing whatsoever to do with the prosecution. It's a persecution and not a prosecution.

Nick Davies:

What is so extraordinary is the way in which the two women have been either completely forgotten as though they had no rights here at all, or caricatured, villified.

Anna:

I've been through 2 years of different kinds of abuses: people coming to my house, people threatening or questioning or following my friends and family. Some death threats but mostly sexual threats that I deserve to get raped. A lot of twitter accounts and blogs that are very close to WikiLeaks have been publishing things that I know Julian know is not true. They admire him very much and he could have easily stopped that.

Note: This is a simple rhetorical trick by Davies. Davies tries to claim Assange lies but avoids giving any details. If details were given, the claim could be refuted.

What Alex Gibney does not tell his viewers is that a 68-page version of the police investigation file was leaked to Nick Davies, on the basis of which Davies wrote a highly skewed and prejudicial article "10 Days in Sweden", published in the Guardian on December 17, 2010. When the full police protocol leaked to the internet in February 2011 people could see for themselves how biased and one-sided Nick Davies' article had been and how much information he had omitted. Hence, for Nick Davies there is an economic and reputational cost to the truth coming out and he is highly motivated to maintain his own skewed version of events.

Note: Julian Assange, in conversation with Eric Schmitt, June 23, 2011:

"Greg Mitchell wrote a book about the mainstream media, So Wrong For So Long. And that's basically it. That, yes, we have these heroic moments with Watergate and Bernstein and so on, but, come on, actually it's never been very good, it's always been very bad and these fine journalists are an exception to the rule. And especially when you are involved in something yourself and you know every facet of it and you look to see what is reported by it in the mainstream press, and you can see naked lies after naked lies. You know that the journalist knows it's a lie, it is not a simple mistake, and then simple mistakes, and then people repeating lies, and so on, that actually the condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so appalling I don't think it can be reformed. I don't think that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and replaced with something that is better."
Source: Click here.

Nick Davies:

There was an enormous amount of hype and misinformation and bullshit that came out of Julian Assange's supporters, and the more that people realise that they were lied to by Julian, the less moral and political authority he has. He's supposed to be about the truth.

Footage of WikiLeaks protests, with protesters chanting "We want free speech, hands off WikiLeaks. Free Julian Assange."

Footage from a fundraising 'dinner with Julian Assange' video from February 2011.

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Julian Assange:

Good evening and welcome to this fundraising dinner for freedom of speech. While I cannot be with you in person this evening because I am under house arrest, I can at least be with you in spirit.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

After nine days Assange was released from prison, his supporters putting up over $300,000 in bail. While Julian appealed his extradition to Sweden, a local journalist named Vaughan Smith offered Julian a place to stay.

Vaughan Smith:

Ellingham Hall is 125 miles north-east of London. It's a house that's been in my family for 250 years or so. We've got livestock, we've got cattle, we've got sheep, we’ve got game obviously – pheasant, partridge - we shoot them and eat them.

Cut to old footage of Julian Assange on Ellingham Hall farm.

James Ball:

Ellingham Hall is a lovely place but it's right in the middle of nowhere and we've packed it with about 15 to 20 people. It was some sort of cross between Big Brother and a spy thriller. Part of Vaughan’s plan to keep things civilized was setting strict rules around meals, and so Vaughan's very lovely housekeeper would cook for us 3 times a day. And even port served at dinner – which was passed to the left, of course.

More footage of Julian Assange in the fundraising dinner video.

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Julian Assange:

But now we are in a position where we are being most aggressively censored by the Washington establishment of the United States.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

To raise money for his legal defence, Assange began selling a compelling package: dinner with Julian. In exchange for a donation, WikiLeaks would provide a link to a video of Julian to be played at home on a laptop placed on a table mat set for the absent hacker.

Another clip of Julian Assange in the fundraising video.

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Julian Assange:

And together we make the world into a place where all our dreams can play.

Note: This is a deliberately false statement by James Ball. Alex Gibney does not challenge Ball on it. The facts are easy to find. The Julian Assange and Wikileaks Staff Legal Defense Fund (JADF) and the various means by which Wikileaks receives donations for its running costs are kept separate.

Donors to "Dinner for Freedom of Speech" were given a choice to donate to WikiLeaks or JADF, and this was made explicitly clear. The different donation bank details were clearly set out. There is no confusion for donors about where their money is going.

Source: Click here.

The original 'Dinner For Free Speech' web page is still available, having beenmirrored by the internet archive on February 10, 2011. It clearly indicates where donors can choose to donate to either the Defense Fund or to WikiLeaks, and also states unequivocally:

By pledging a donation on this day, no matter how large or small, you can help support Julian's defence fund, and/or contribute to WikiLeaks.

Source: Click here.

This fundraising idea was organised in February 2011. James Ball's internship had expired by mid-January 2011 and he had no involvement in this initiative at all.

Source: Click here.

The JADF is administered and audited by Derek Rothera & Co. The terms of the trust and trustees can be found here.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

WikiLeaks has been under an arbitrary and unlawful financial embargo by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union since December 7, 2010, cutting off ninety-five per cent of its funding.

Source: Click here.

The blockade was declared unlawful by Icelandic Supreme Court.

Source: Click here.

James Ball:

This dinner for free speech was, in fact, a dinner for Julian’s sex offence defence fund. No one knows now whether money going to WikiLeaks is going to Julian or elsewhere.

Note: The Guardian newspaper broke all three terms of its contract with WikiLeaks and conspired with the New York Times to cut WikiLeaks out and publish Cablegate without them, despite the obvious danger of doing so to WikiLeaks associates who were still in the United States at the time. Journalists from the third media partner Der Spiegel sided with WikiLeaks and refused to join the plot.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian's legal troubles made him more famous than ever, but they also intensified his differences with his former media partners. They defended his right to publish but began to turn on Assange himself.

Vaughan Smith:

I’ve been close enough to see the sort of, you know, the wasps around the jam here. He stirred the nest and they come to sting him perhaps rather more than he expected.

Footage of New York Times editor Bill Keller being asked a question at a conference. The adjectives used to describe Julian Assange in the following dialogue play in close up over the screen.

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Journalist:

In a January piece you described Assange as 'eccentric', 'elusive', 'manipulative', 'volatile', 'openly hostile', 'coy' and 'obviously a derelict, arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous' um, is that any way for a journalist to talk about his sources?

Footage of an old Bill Keller interview.

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Bill Keller:

He looked like a bag lady coming in. Sort of like a dingy, khaki sports coat, old tennis shoes, with socks that were kind of collapsing around his ankles and he clearly hadn't bathed in several days.

Mark Davis:

The New York Times – I mean, the hypocrisy of this act – they wanted the material, they were fully complicit in the publication of the material, but as soon as the heat came on they wanted to wash their hands.

Note: Julian Assange did not say the market rate for an interview with him was $1 million dollars and Alex Gibney did not decline. This section deliberately distorts the final, lengthy negotiation between Julian Assange and Alex Gibney regarding his and WikiLeaks' possible participation in the documentary, which at the time was unnamed.

WikiLeaks had already been approached by different productions and individuals. Gibney failed to conduct an interview with WikiLeaks--for a documentary about Wikileaks. He now tries to shift blame by misreporting the negotiations. However WikiLeaks kept detailed notes of the conversation.

Assange first explained to Alex Gibney about his previous bad experiences with malicious projects, the most recent had been 'Secrets and Lies', which was the subject of an official complaint, and which had been secretly co-produced by The Guardian's David Leigh.

Source: Click here.

Gibney said that documentary was "practically scripted by Leigh" in an email to WikiLeaks. Julian Assange explained that WikiLeaks was in a position where it may be more in its interest not to participate than to participate, as he did not want to lend credence to a project that potentially missed the big picture, did not accurately grasp the political dimension of the US investigation, misrepresented Manning, overplayed the Swedish investigation, and so on.

He explained to Gibney that four factors played a role in the decision whether or not to participate:

Security: Raw footage of WikiLeaks work could find its way into the hands of the US Department of Justice. This could endanger WikiLeaks staff.
Financing: WikiLeaks had previously received an offer of £800,000 for its cooperation in a British documentary project. WikiLeaks rejected the offer for security reasons. In the film and in interviews, Alex Gibney distorts this conversation by attempting to portray Julian Assange as greedy. Yet in reality Assange rejected these offers because these were not in the greater interest of the organisation, despite the fact that WikiLeaks had already been under an arbitrary financial blockade for a year when this negotiation took place.
Information: Gibney told Julian Assange that he would be interviewing members of the US government for the WikiLeaks film. Assange detailed the different forms that the continuing US persecution of WikiLeaks and its allies had taken. Assange said WikiLeaks was interested in understanding the progress of the US investigation into itself and its sources. Any information that Gibney picked up about the matter in the course of his interviews might be of interest to WikiLeaks.
Impact: In an email pitching the documentary to WikiLeaks from 10th of March 2011, Alex Gibney said "while you know that many docs will be made on this subject, I have a sufficient global reputation (oscar, oscar noms, worldwide fans) and such a substantial budget for production, worldwide distribution and promotion that my documentary will reach an audience that will dwarf the reach of all the other documentaries combined". Julian Assange explained that the impact of the documentary was potentially problematic.

While Alex Gibney is happy to allow the false imputation Julian Assange demanded $1 million for an interview to remain in his film he is careful not to allow the same 'mistake' to appear in the film's pre-publicity material:

New York Times correction: December 21, 2012: “An article on Thursday about the coming documentary “We Steal Secrets” and other films about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange referred imprecisely to a comment that Alex Gibney, the maker of “We Steal Secrets,” says in the film about Mr. Assange’s demands for money in exchange for collaborating on it. While he says that he rejected the demands, and that the market rate for an interview was $1 million, he does not specifically say that he rejected a demand from Mr. Assange for a $1 million fee for an interview.”

Source: Click here.

WikiLeaks has co-operated in other productions, including a film by the well respected Academy Award nominated film maker, Laura Poitras, which will be released later this year. Another film, co-produced with Ken Loach's 16 Films, will be released shortly.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

I tried over many months to get an on-camera interview with Assange. After meetings and emails, I was finally summoned to the Norfolk mansion for a 6-hour negotiation. But Julian wanted money. He said the market rate for an interview with him was $1 million. When I declined, he offered an alternative: perhaps I would spy in my other interviews and report back to him, but I couldn't do that either.

During his time under house arrest he'd become more secretive and paranoid. He railed against his enemies and I knew that he had tried to get all his followers to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The penalty for leaking: $19 million.

Note: James Ball is lying. James Ball signed a non-disclosure agreement with WikiLeaks on November 23, 2010.

WikiLeaks uses non-disclosure agreements to help protect the safety of its sources, its staff and its upcoming publications from informants. The FBI and rival media organizations have previously bribed or pressured persons they believe to be close to WikiLeaks. James Ball understood this, and saw no irony in being asked by WikiLeaks to sign his NDA in November 2010.

WikiLeaks staff suspected Ball was passing information from WikiLeaks onto others: rival media organisations or government agencies. WikiLeaks discovered that Ball had told a colleague he had a job interview with the UK intelligence service MI5 and had interned at the UK Home Office. WikiLeaks also discovered Ball was attending secret meetings with the Guardian journalist David Leigh - his former college professor at City University, and a vocal opponent of WikiLeaks.

While Assange was in prison it was discovered that someone had accessed the Sunshine Press press contacts account using an email client, and had mirrored its archive. Ball had briefly been given access to the account. Documents from the account subsequently appeared in the Guardian. Physical documents went missing, and Ball's behaviour became erratic.

Therefore a second, special non-disclosure agreement was devised for Ball, to test his reaction. After being asked to sign it at WikiLeaks' Norfolk office, Ball became anxious and asked to postpone signing it while he considered it. He then left for London.

It later became obvious to WikiLeaks staff that, showing malicious forethought, Ball had stolen what he thought was WikiLeaks' copy of his original NDA (which would have given him both copies). However the document that James Ball stole was not WikiLeaks' copy of the agreement. Ball had left his NDA out on a desk and it had been filed for security reasons. He had stolen his own copy of the NDA. The other copy had already been removed to a secure location, and is still in WikiLeaks' possession.

Ball became unavailable for work, and stopped returning calls. He lied about his whereabouts, and invented reasons why he could not return, which were confirmed to be untrue by a mutual third party. After several weeks, it became clear that he had cashed in his favours to David Leigh, in return for which he was given a post at the Guardian and the first credit in David Leigh's book.

Ball pursued career advancement at the Guardian by placing himself at the service of The Guardian's institutional vendetta against WikiLeaks, publishing numerous deceitful attacks on WikiLeaks over the last two and a half years, all of which rely on heavily embellishing his role as a freelancer working as a junior intern at WikiLeaks.

During the short time he worked for WikiLeaks he insisted on being called "a journalist working with WikiLeaks" or "a freelancer working for them". Some time after leaving, Ball reimagined his role at WikiLeaks for career advantage, changing his title in order to misrepresent himself to others as a "former spokesperson." James Ball was never a spokesperson for WikiLeaks. Alex Gibney did not secure an interview with WikiLeaks' actual spokesperson, Kristinn Hrafnsson.

Ball has consistently maintained that he never signed the WikiLeaks NDA, and has felt secure enough to lie in print and on camera because he believed he had destroyed the evidence, having stolen the NDA.

Although he lies straight to camera in "We Steal Secrets" about the NDA, in January 2013 Ball admitted that he did sign the WikiLeaks NDA, after having been challenged about it by WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson. In admitting this, he lied again, claiming that he had never denied signing a WikiLeaks NDA. The evidence to the contrary is in the film itself.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here. and go to p. 331.

James Ball:

I found this a little bit awkward - being asked by a transparency organisation to sign exactly the kind of document used to silence whistleblowers around the world. It seemed pretty troubling and so I refused.

Footage of Julian Assange.

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Julian Assange:

All organisations face two possible paths: they can be open, honest, just, or they can be closed, unjust, and therefore not successful.

Note: Throughout "We Steal Secrets," Gibney systematically omits mention or downplays the significance of the US attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. The film neglects to mention that the US investigation against WikiLeaks is, as official accounts describe, "unprecedented in its scale and nature".

The film downplays the serious investigation and prosecution of Julian Assange in the US and what would happen to him were he extradited to the US. It does so to make the argument that Assange is in the Ecuadorean embassy to simply avoid going to Sweden. This is false: he sought asylum based on his concern about being extradited to the US, and Ecuador granted asylum on the basis of the evidence Assange presented.

The cases of Manning and Assange are clearly linked, as was made explicit in the course of the Manning proceedings with reference being made to the parallel DOJ investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks.

There is no “mystery” about the role of the US: there is an ongoing Grand Jury, which has been empanelled since September 2010. This was first confirmed by the US Department of Justice November 2010 and re-confirmed on 26 March 2013.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

The grand jury is, by its nature, secret. It cannot be said that “no charges” have been filed. The film-maker certainly does not know that: it is illegal to disclose whether or not an indictment exists. It is a common practice to issue sealed indictments. Charges would not be made public until Assange is in custody. A former high-level State Department official said in a once-confidential email (Stratfor) that there was such a sealed indictment.

Source: Click here.

Source: Click here.

It cannot be said that there is “no proof that the US was biding its time”. The US ambassador to the UK said this on the BBC in February 2011: the US would wait to see what happened in Sweden. Discussions between the US and Sweden reported that the US would only extradite Assange after the Swedish case was disposed of.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Had the secret-leaker become the secret-keeper, more and more fond of mysteries? The biggest mystery of all was the role of the United States. Over two years after the first leak, no charges had been filed by the US. Assange claimed that the US was biding its time, waiting for him to go to Sweden, but there was no proof.

In fact, members of Assange's legal team admitted that it would be easier for the US to extradite Assange from Britain.

A clip from an interview with Baroness Helena Kennedy QC.

Note: Helena Kennedy has complained that her interview has been misleadingly edited by Gibney to remove the proper context of her remarks. She states that she "did not expect that he [Gibney] would fillet my interview" and also says "I regret thinking I could present a sensible perspective".

Source: Click here.

It is false that it would be easier to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom than from Sweden.

Source: Click here.

Helena Kennedy:

Britain is the one that's done the special deal with the United States on extradition. But Sweden is particularly strong in seeing as sacrosanct that business about handing people over, they would hold to that perhaps stronger than Britain would. We think we've got a special relationship with the United States.

Note: This is pure hyperbole. Since December 2011 WikiLeaks has released millions of documents, including the SpyFiles series, the Detainee Policies, the Stratfor emails (the GIFiles), the Syria Files and, in April 2013, both Cablegate and 1.7 million Kissinger Cables in an easily searchable PlusD Public Library of US Diplomacy.

Source: Click here.

Note: In December 2012 the Freedom of the Press Foundation was set up in response to the banking blockade against WikiLeaks to raise funds for transparency journalism organisations under threat. The FPF commitment to raise funds for WikiLeaks is ongoing while the blockade remains in place.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Despite that special relationship, Assange desperately fought extradition to Sweden and lost every appeal. His legal battle drained his finances and trapped him at the family farm for over a year. Hoped-for funding didn’t come and WikiLeaks suspended operations. His international organization had blown apart.

In Berlin, Domscheit-Berg had quit the organisation. So did the mysterious figure who had built the secret submission system. Assange no longer had a drop box for new leaks. In London, journalist Heather Brooke was leaked unredacted copies of all the State Department cables by a WikiLeaks insider.

Heather Brooke:

There was the initial people that Julian gave the information to, and then how many people did they give it to? And then how many people did they give it to?

Note: Gibney makes an unfounded statement for which he provides no evidence. WikiLeaks asked those making this claim to provide their information so that an investigation could be commenced into the issue. They did not.

The most comprehensive discussion of the matter can be found here.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Some of the cables were also leaked to a European dictator, who used them to target dissidents and suppress free speech.

Note: In August 2011 Daniel Domscheit-Berg was responsible for the whereabouts of the hidden unredacted cables files and the location of the passphrase to it (a chapter title in Guardian journalist David Leigh's cash-in WikiLeaks book) being reported in the press.

Source: Click here.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

This is at the core of where things went wrong, and where ultimately WikiLeaks has lost control over the spread of these documents.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

In the end, all of the cables leaked across the internet on mirrored versions of WikiLeaks.org. All Julian had left was his celebrity.

Footage of Simpsons episode in which Julian Assange made a guest appearance.

Note: In fact, Julian Assange did not "host a chat show for Russian state television." He produced a 12-part interview series with activists and thinkers from around the world, "The World Tomorrow". The series was produced by Assange's own production company, QuickRoll Productions, in conjunction with the London-based production company Dartmouth Films. The license for the series was sold to a number of regional broadcasters, one of which was Russia Today.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Julian extended his brand by hosting a chat show for Russian state television.

Footage of Julian Assange interviewing Ecuador's President Rafael Correa on talk show The World Tomorrow, which was independently produced by WikiLeaks and licensed to RT (Russia Today) and other broadcasters.

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Rafael Correa:

Where are you? In England?

Julian Assange:

I am in England under house arrest now for 500 days.

Rafael Correa:

500 days?

Narration by Alex Gibney:

One of his guests was Rafael Correa, the President of Ecuador.

More footage of Julian Assange interviewing Correa.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

A month after the program aired, Assange sought asylum from his former TV guest.

Footage of Julian Assange speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy balcony after being formally granted asylum

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Julian Assange:

In the morning, the sun came up on a different world, and a courageous Latin American nation took a stand for justice.

Note: The claim is false. According to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists there are no journalists in prison in Ecuador.

Source: Click here.

The attack on Assange over Ecuador's press freedom record is comprehensively addressed here.

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

It was an ironic choice. Ecuador had a record of putting journalists in prison and had been charged with corruption in a WikiLeaks cable.

More footage Julian Assange speaking from the embassy balcony.

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Julian Assange:

The United States must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks.

Note: This is false and misleading. Assange did not allege a 'secret plot'; he presented an asylum application, backed by voluminous evidence, of a political persecution against him and the WikiLeaks organisation, including public statements acknowledging the existence and unprecedented nature and scope of a US investigation against WikiLeaks.

The government of Ecuador rigorously examined the evidence presented for two months before granting Assange asylum. The government of Ecuador explained the reasons for concluding that "there are serious indications of retaliation by the country or countries that produced the information disclosed by Mr. Assange, retaliation that can put at risk his safety, integrity and even his life".

Furthermore, the government of Ecuador noted that "that the Swedish prosecutor’s office has had a contradictory attitude that prevented Mr. Assange from the total exercise of the legitimate right to defense" and they were "convinced that the procedural rights of Mr. Assange have been infringed during that investigation".

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Throughout "We Steal Secrets," Gibney systematically omits mention or downplays the significance of the US attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. The film neglects to mention that the US investigation against WikiLeaks is, as official accounts describe, "unprecedented in its scale and nature" . The US grand jury has been empanelled in secret since September 2010 (first confirmed by the US Department of Justice November 2010).

US prosecutors in Virginia have been working since 2010 to establish a 'conspiracy to commit espionage" link between Manning and Assange. The ongoing nature of the Grand Jury criminal investigation into WikiLeaks was most recently confirmed on March 26, 2013 by a spokesman for the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Source: Click here.

The FBI investigation into WikiLeaks consisted of "42,135 pages or 3,475 documents", not including Grand Jury testimony, according to the lead prosecutor at Manning's pre-trial hearing. He added that "Private First Class Manning ... represents only 8,741 pages of the file."

Source: Click here.

Correspondence from the ex-Deputy Chief of Counterterrorism for the DSS (State Department's Diplomatic Security Service) leaked to WikiLeaks revealed that the WikiLeaks Grand Jury had issued a sealed indictment for Assange before February 2011: "Not for Pub — We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect."

Source: Click here.

It is a criminal offence for any US government official to reveal the existence of a sealed indictment before it is unsealed, which only happens when the indicted person is taken into custody.

Source: Click here.

The law provides for the possibility for the Swedish prosecutor to question Julian Assange in London. In April 2013, Swedish Supreme Court judge Stefan Lindskog stated: “I would like to comment upon the possibility of the prosecutor to go to London. It is possible that the prosecutor could travel to London and interrogate him there. I have no answer to the question why that hasn’t happened.”

Source: Click here.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

Despite the lack of evidence of any secret plot, Ecuador granted him asylum. The British government pledged to arrest him if he left the tiny confines of the embassy, so Assange prepared for a long stay.

Footage of protests outside the Ecuadorian embassy.

Note: The Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks cases have everything to do with each other. The parallel investigation by the Department of Justice into Assange and WikiLeaks is mentioned explicitly in the Manning proceedings at numerous points. Assange and WikiLeaks are current litigants in the Manning case. In relation to the Swedish matter the intense politicization of the process is clear. Although Assange has still not been charged, the UK admits to spending more than $4.3 million on surveilling Assange at the embassy in the first 7 months alone.

Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.
Source: Click here.

Anna:

I saw these signs Free Bradley Manning and Free Julian Assange and I think it's ridiculous! These two cases have nothing to do with each other. Julian – he's not even imprisoned – he has locked himself up to avoid coming to Sweden to answer a few pretty simple questions.

Note: Ball fabricates the significance of one of Julian Assange's teenage screen names "Splendide Mendax", this time in the mouth of an interviewee. The screen name is a joke. In Latin it means "Nobly untrue", but as a pseudonym it describes how handles protect an author's identity even though being inherently "untrue". It is a phrase which describes itself, not its author, just like the word "word".

"Claims my teenage nickname was Mendax, “given to lying”, instead of Splendide Mendax, “nobly untruthful”, which is a teenage joke on handles being inherently untrue. It is self-referential, not a psychoanalysis 20 years ahead of its time!"

— Julian Assange, Complaint to Ofcom regarding the Guardian co-produced Secrets & Lies documentary, January 9, 2012.

Source: Click here.

James Ball:

There is a phenomenon called "noble cause corruption": essentially, you do things which if anyone else did you would recognise aren't ok, aren't right, but because you know you're a good guy, it's different for you. I suppose you can’t accuse Julian of not setting out from the beginning what he may do: Mendax by name, Mendax by nature.

Nick Davies:

The same extraordinary personality which conceived of and created WikiLeaks is also the same personality that has, effectively, destroyed WikiLeaks.

Note: Daniel Domschiet-Berg is not a reliable narrator. He is in an ongoing legal conflict with Wikileaks over theft of equipment and data left in Germany. He tried to start a now-defunct rival publishing organisation, "OpenLeaks," in August 2010. OpenLeaks did not publish a single document. He also has a pecuniary interest in the anti-Wikileaks film The Fifth Estate.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

WikiLeaks has become what it detests and what it actually tried to rid the world of. We must get away from this understanding that we see Julian as the saviour, as some noble guru, as some new hero or some new pop star or whatever that's going to change all of it. The credit is undue - everybody celebrating Julian as a whistleblower - he is not - Bradley Manning might have been a whistleblower. And if he was, he is the courageous guy. He is the one that took all the risk and, in the end, now is suffering.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

After his arrest, Manning had been held for two months in an 8x8-foot cage in Kuwait, then he was transferred to the Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. For a man who had not been charged with any crime, he was kept in solitary confinement for nearly a year.

TV interview of Adrian Lamo about Bradley Manning.

STOCK

Interviewer:

Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker, is currently sitting in prison and he could be locked up for the rest of his life. How do you feel about that?

Adrian Lamo:

I think that it's a little bit ludicrous to say that Bradley Manning's going to be tortured. We don’t do that to our citizens. [audience boos]

Narration by Alex Gibney:

A high-ranking general authorised Manning’s placement in solitary confinement on suicide watch against the protest of prison doctors. His clothes and blankets were taken from him, lights in his cell were always on. When he questioned his treatment, guards took away his glasses and forced him to stand naked during his morning roll call. At night, guards kept him cold and woke him frequently in a practice that recalled the sleep deprivation programme at Guantanamo. Manning's supporters speculated that the US government was trying to push Manning to turn on Assange and implicate him in a crime.

Alex Gibney:

What was your reaction about Bradley Manning’s treatment at Quantico? I mean, it seemed to me, with its sleep deprivation and these were, you know, whatever you call them, enhanced interrogation techniques, these were being practised on him, and...

Michael Hayden:

[Laughs] No. Look, I don't know the specifics. I don't know the rules of confinement for the Marine Brig at Quantico, but Bob Gates is an incredibly honourable man, General Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen is an incredibly honourable man - I defer very much to their judgement that whatever was done was appropriate.

PJ Crowley:

The treatment that he was receiving at Quantico, the level of solitary confinement, the fact that his clothes were taken away at night, it was inconsistent with our values - and our interests. It was making Bradley Manning a far more sympathetic figure than I see him. When I was asked about it at a forum at MIT, I gave a candid answer.

News footage of Obama being asked about PJ Crowley's comments.

STOCK

Journalist:

The State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said the treatment of Bradley Manning by the Pentagon is 'ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid'. I wonder if you agree with that?

Barack Obama:

You know, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assured me that they are.

Bill Leonard:

I was appalled at that. I was appalled at that with respect to the President's responsibility as Commander-in-Chief. Any Commander - any Commander - knows that first and foremost he or she is responsible for the wellbeing of each and every one of their soldiers, to include the ones sitting in the brig.

More footage of Obama on Manning's treatment.

STOCK

Barack Obama:

I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.

Responds to journalist's question.

STOCK

Barack Obama:

I think I gave you an answer to the substance at issue.

PJ Crowley:

Once my comments were brought to the President of the United States, I felt that the only thing that I should do is resign. I stand by what I said.

Narration by Alex Gibney:

What was unsaid was any consideration of holding Manning's supervisors accountable for permitting the greatest security breach in American history. Manning’s commanding officer only received a minor demotion. The army brought 22 charges against Manning. They included aiding the enemy, without naming just who the enemy was. For these charges, Manning faces life in prison and a possible death sentence.

Note: Nick Davies makes a false assumption that Bradley Manning naively "dump[ed] the whole lot without thinking ahead about how that was going to be handled", which is contradicted by the statement presented by Bradley Manning before the military court:

At this point I decided that it made sense to try to expose the SigAct tables to an American newspaper. I first called my local newspaper, The Washington Post, and spoke with a woman saying that she was a reporter. I asked her if The Washington Post would be interested in receiving information that would have enormous value to the American public. Although we spoke for about five minutes concerning the general nature of what I possessed, I do not believe she took me seriously.

He claims he then contacted the New York Times, but "I never received a reply."

As part of his work as an intelligence analyst, Manning claims he had assessed WikiLeaks to be a credible media organisation, "following it and collecting open source information from it. During this time period, I followed several organizations and groups including wire press agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters and private intelligence agencies including Strategic Forecasting or Stratfor. This practice was something I was trained to do during AIT, and was something that good analysts were expected to do."

Manning noted that "WLO [WikiLeaks] received numerous award and recognition for its reporting activities" and, based on his observations, that "WLO seemed to be dedicated to exposing illegal activities and corruption" and "I would describe the WL organization as almost academic in nature".

Manning states that his sole concerns about WikiLeaks were that "I was not sure if the WLO would actually publish the SigAct tables... I was also concerned that they might not be noticed by the American media. However, based upon what I read about the WLO through my research described above, this seemed to be the best medium for publishing this information to the world within my reach."

Source: Click here.

Nick Davies:

People who don’t like the leak try to say that it was damaging national security. Have you ever seen any evidence that American national security has been damaged in any way by this? And if you look at what the whistleblower is saying in that online chat, and look at what he doesn’t say: He doesn’t say I want money. He doesn’t say I am going to go to Russia or China, I'm going to go to Al-Qaeda to give them this stuff - doesn't happen. He says this is material that the people of the world need to have. And it was naïve to dump the whole lot without thinking ahead about how that was going to be handled. But you don’t have to lock this guy up for decades, and effectively put him through forms of torture – that's a politically motivated act of vengeance on somebody who hasn’t damaged national security; he's caused embarrassment.

Footage of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton press briefing.

STOCK

Hillary Clinton:

Let's be clear. This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community.

Heather Brooke:

The American government said: 'You can't publish this, it's dangerous, it's going to damage world affairs, diplomacy, etc, and then you publish it anyway and it's for the greater good, telling people what they needed to know.

James Ball:

The question becomes: does it matter and what changes? I think really we have to say that something has started, and it's not going to be about WikiLeaks, it's going to be about transparency and accountability and keeping power in check, keeping governments responsible – and who cares who does it, as long as someone does?

Bill Leonard:

Information by its very nature needs to flow. In some regards withholding information is trying to repeal the laws of gravity. You may succeed for a short period of time but sooner or later it's going to break through.

Alex Gibney:

You're talking just like a hacker.

Footage from a hacker conference discussion about Bradley Manning.

Note: Gibney attempts to remake the man who betrayed and exploited Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo, into a tragic figure, unwillingly swept up into the WikiLeaks story, when in reality his aggressive exploitation of the situation for personal benefit is well documented.

Source: Click here.

Adrian Lamo:

I care more about Bradley than many of his supporters do. We had a chance to be friends, however briefly, and he opened up in a lot of ways about his life, his personal life, and he did it in a way that... [garbled] someone that they felt they could trust. And I had to betray that trust for the sake of all of the people that he put in danger. And I wish to hell that it had never happened. [Lamo cries on camera]

Timothy Webster:

It's going to be a question for the ages why Bradley Manning reached out to someone he really didn’t know and then trusted him with such a life-altering secret. The only thing I can come up with is that once he saw the results of the leak, the need just to share that just probably grew and grew. He just needed to tell anybody, and he thought Adrian was the right person to tell.

James Ball:

Whistleblowing is an isolating act. It's a courageous and phenomenal thing to do, but you are essentially doing something that your colleagues and friends would not want you to do, would not understand. It alienates you further from them. A source who needs to talk to someone and explain what they've done and think through what they've done needs someone safe to do that to.

The Adrian Lamo/Bradass87 chat logs are shown on screen again.

Note: This is a now-classic anti-WikiLeaks argument created by James Ball, an attempt to allege that the blame for Manning's arrest lies with WikiLeaks and not with Adrian Lamo, the FBI informant who turned Manning in after telling him that he would protect him.

Ball's allegation that WikiLeaks does not adequately support its sources conflicts with the account that Manning presented before the military court regarding his alleged contacts with WikiLeaks. In a plea statement, February 28, 2013, Manning said this:

After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly relationship with Nathaniel [Manning's designation for his contact at WikiLeaks]. Our mutual interest in information technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work.

Source: Click here.

James Ball:

In the logs Manning says he couldn't talk to WikiLeaks - that's not how they work. Does that protect whistleblowers? Or does it protect WikiLeaks?

A section of the chat logs where Bradley Manning says how isolated and lonely he feels are shown.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg:

In the end, everybody's just lonely. I mean, if you are leaking material to someone, if you are telling a reporter a good story, something that really makes a difference, then I think, just from a human perspective, it's really difficult not to get any credit for it. Because no one can tap you on the shoulder and say "Good job," I mean, "courageous thing you did". And this is the really complicated part about it. How do you make sure that your source does not compromise themselves?

Narration by Alex Gibney

In the chats, Manning sent a link to Pale Blue Dot – a famous photo of Earth he saw while reading an essay by the astronomer Carl Sagan. "That’s home," said Sagan, "that’s us – every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there; on a mote of dust, suspended on a sunbeam. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us."

Pages

Sunday, May 26

@dustcirclenews - via #WIKILEAKS - "We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks" [Transcript] - http://wikileaks.org/IMG/html/gibney-transcript.html

"We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks"

The annotated transcript

19:00 GMT, May 23, 2013