“We Steal Secrets”: Film Commissioned By Comcast-Owned Studio Tries To Smear, Discredit Wikileaks, Assange, Manning

Oldspeak: “The smear campaign is on. And corporate media is on point. In a macabre irony The Corporatocracy has shrewdly co-opted a formerly independent anti-corporate filmmaker responsible for such gems as “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room” and “Taxi To The Dark Side”, and chosen him to produce a glitzy propaganda film that assassinates the characters of a government whistleblower and the anti-corporate journalist who dared expose to the public, the evil and anti-democratic actions that are being perpetrated by our government in our names. While corporate media is dutifully focused on diversionary “news scandals”, “immigration reform” (a.k.a. National Biometric Database Implementation),  It’s getting harder and harder for citizens to be informed about the increasingly secret actions of our government. Meanwhile there is no discussion in corporate media of the Orwellian absurdity of secretly inditing a journalist and prosecuting a whistleblower  with the longest and harshest punishment possible, while allowing those whose murder, torture, theft, waste, and a constelation of  wrongdoing they exposed to continue unpunished and unknown. Do not be fooled by this spurious agitpop. It’s purpose is to protect and maintain empire. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.” –Leni Riefenstahl

By Chris Hedges @ Truthdig:

Alex Gibney’s new film, “We Steal Secrets,” is about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. It dutifully peddles the state’s contention that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate publisher and that Bradley Manning, who allegedly passed half a million classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, is not a legitimate whistle-blower. It interprets acts of conscience and heroism by Assange and Manning as misguided or criminal. It holds up the powerful—who are responsible for the plethora of war crimes Manning and Assange exposed—as, by comparison, trustworthy and reasonable. Manning is portrayed as a pitiful, naive and sexually confused young man. Assange, who created the WikiLeaks site so whistle-blowers could post information without fear of being traced, is presented as a paranoid, vindictive megalomaniac and a sexual deviant. “We Steal Secrets” is agitprop for the security and surveillance state.

Rebels are typically a bundle of contradictions and incongruities. They are often difficult people whom the dominant systems of power abused at a young age. They have the intelligence needed to dissect the workings of power, and to devise mechanisms to fight back. German Jewish intellectuals in the Nazi era such as Hannah Arendt, writers such as James Baldwin, who was gay as well as black, and the revolutionary Frantz Fanon, a black writer and psychiatrist raised in the French colony of Martinique, all were outsiders, even outcasts. Like these three, Manning and Assange rose out of personal troubles to ask the questions traditional rebels ask, and they responded as traditional rebels respond.

“The initial presentation of the story was that Bradley Manning was a pure political figure, like a Daniel Ellsberg,” Gibney told The Daily Beast in an interview in January. “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.”

Gibney is unable to see that humans are a mixture of hubris and altruism, cowardice and courage, anger and love. There are no “pure” political figures—including Daniel Ellsberg. But there are people who, for reasons of conscience, discover the inner fortitude to defy tyranny at tremendous personal risk. Manning did this. Assange did this. They are not perfect human beings, but to dwell at length, as Gibney does, on their supposed psychological deficiencies and personal failings, while glossing over the vast evil they set themselves against, is an insidious form of character assassination. It serves the interests of the oppressors. Even if all the character flaws ascribed by Gibney to Manning and Assange are true—and I do not believe they are true—it does not diminish what they did.

The film at many points is a trashy exercise in tabloid journalism. Gibney panders to popular culture’s taste for cheap pop psychology and obsession with sex, salacious gossip and trivia. He shows clips of Assange dancing in a disco. He goes through an elaborate ritual of putting a wig and makeup on one of Assange’s estranged paramours, Anna Ardin, to disguise her although she is a public figure in Sweden.

“When the women went to the police to try to force Assange to take an HIV test, their testimony raised questions about possible criminal charges,” Gibney says in speaking about a Swedish case in which allegations of sexual misbehavior have been made against the WikiLeaks publisher. “The police, on their own, decided to investigate further. The refusal to use a condom took center 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.”

The personal sin is excoriated. The vast structural sin Assange and Manning fought is ignored. The primacy of personal piety over justice is the inversion of morality. It is the sickness of our age. David Petraeus is hounded out of the CIA not because he oversaw death squads that killed thousands of innocents in Iraq or because the CIA tortures detainees, but because he had an extramarital affair. The power elite can draw up kill lists, torture people, wage endless war and carry out massive fiscal fraud on Wall Street as long as they don’t get caught sleeping with their administrative assistants. Assange can lay bare the crimes they commit, but his act of truth-telling is canceled out by alleged sexual misconduct.

Is the most important thing about Martin Luther King Jr. the fact that he was a serial adulterer? Did King’s infidelities invalidate his life and struggle? Do the supposed defects of Assange and Manning negate what they did? Gibney would have us believe they do. Manning, in a just world, would be a witness for the prosecution of those who committed war crimes. Assange would be traveling around the United States collecting First Amendment awards.

The persecution of Manning and Assange is not an isolated act. It is part of a terrifying assault against our most important civil liberties and a free press. Manning and Assange are the canaries in the mineshaft. They did not seek to sell the documents that WikiLeaks published or to profit personally from their release. They are part of the final, desperate battle under way to stymie the security and surveillance state’s imposition of corporate totalitarianism. They and others who attempt to expose the crimes of the state—such as Jeremy Hammond, who admitted in a plea agreement last week that he had hacked into the private intelligence firm Stratfor and who faces up to 10 years in prison—will be ruthlessly persecuted. And the traditional media, which printed the secret cables provided by WikiLeaks and then callously abandoned Manning and Assange, will be next.

The Associated Press recently saw the state seize two months of its emails and phone logs, and the government has admitted seizing Fox News reporter James Rosen’s phone records. Half a dozen government whistle-blowers have been charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act. It is becoming harder and harder to peer into the inner workings of power. And once there are no Mannings or Assanges, once no one is willing to take risks to expose the crimes of empire, there will be no freedom of the press.

The fundamental conceit of “We Steal Secrets” is that Assange’s concern about the possibility of being arrested by U.S. authorities is a product of paranoia and self-delusion. The vast array of intergovernment forces—at least a dozen—dedicated to arresting Assange, extraditing him and destroying WikiLeaks is, Gibney would have us believe, fictional. I detailed these forces in “The Death of Truth.” The refusal to acknowledge the massive campaign against Assange is the most disturbing aspect of the film. There are numerous indications, including in leaked Stratfor emails, that a sealed indictment against Assange is in place. But Gibney refuses to buy it.

“Had the secret-leaker become the secret-keeper, more and more fond of mysteries?” Gibney asks in the film. “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 U.S. Assange claimed that the U.S. was biding its time, waiting for him to go to Sweden, but there was no proof.”

The sage-like figure in the film is former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who in 2001 lied when he told reporters that the National Security Council was not monitoring U.S citizens without court warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He represents, for Gibney, the voice of reason.

“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,” Hayden says of the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks that shows a U.S. helicopter shooting to death civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in an Iraqi street. “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.”

Adrian Lamo, who worked as an FBI informant, faking a friendship with Manning to sell him out, is given a perch in the film to wring his hands like Judas over how agonizing it was for him to turn in Manning. He did it, he assures us, to keep the country safe, although no one has ever been able to point to any loss of life caused by the leak of the secret documents.

“I care more about Bradley than many of his supporters do. … And I had to betray that trust for the sake of all of the people that he put in danger,” Lamo says tearfully. It is one of the most cloying moments in the movie.

Assange, by the end of the film, is the butt of open ridicule. Bill Keller, when he was executive editor of The New York Times, published material from WikiLeaks documents and then trashed Assange, calling him in a 2011 article “elusive, manipulative and volatile” as well as “arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous.” In the Gibney film, Keller adds to his condemnation of Assange by saying: “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.”

Keller was one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the war in Iraq.

Two of Gibney’s previous films, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” were masterful explorations into the black heart of empire. This time, Gibney was commissioned by Universal Studios—owned by Comcast—and paid to make a motion picture on WikiLeaks. He gave his corporate investors what they wanted.

WikiLeaks has published a line-by-line critique of the film’s transcript at  http://justice4assange.com/IMG/html/gibney-transcript.html.

On Memorial Day Good Americans Should Mourn First The Millions America Has Slaughtered In Their Names

Oldspeak: “Memorial Day has been hijacked, just as our nation has been hijacked, by the investment banks of the Military-Industrial-Complex. Its corporate owned media promotes and hails an indiscriminate celebration of all US wars as heroic. These Memorial Day festive celebrations have become a tradition of praising those of us who followed orders to kill designated enemies unquestioningly in more than a dozen nations since 1945 – and of military commanders, politicians and media anchors solemnly professing gratitude for the supreme sacrifice of those who died as a result.” –Jay Janson

“Another freethinking perspective from a veteran on Memorial Day. One need only observe the near constant exhortations to travel, consume, and celebrate to see how thouroughly contorted, comodified and militarized this originally solemn and sacred day remembering the fallen in the U.S. Civil War has become. The Iraq War was started based on lies. The Vietnam War was started based on lies, the War On Terror was started based on lies…. any number of  other U.S. started wars have been started under false pretenses. None was honorable. They were undertaken to protect the interests of elites and ideologues who have little interest in freedom, liberty and justice for all, but quite a lot in maximizing profits for shareholders. Idealistic, patriotic and brave men were lied to, broken, built up again, programmed to kill enemies of the state without question. The slaughter has been global and the true extent of which largely unknown to most Americans. On this Memorial Day, trade in your barbeques, parties and brews for mourning, contemplation and protest. There is nothing to celebrate about war. Carnage and misery are what are remembered by most of its victims.  We should remember them as well.”

By Jay Janson @ Dissident Voice:

This veteran is waiting for the year in which the Veterans For Peace, in its Memorial Day Press Release, states that Veterans mourn first, the lives America took in poor countries, both the civilian men, women and children and the patriots that fought our illegal and criminal invasions since 1945. Only then should come bitterly mourning GIs who were duped by our elected officials and the CIA and Pentagon fed, corporate-controlled war-promoting media cartel fooling them with lies, misinformation, disinformation and psyop techniques that deceived them into proudly following homicidal criminal orders, for which they are obviously liable for prosecution. Orders given, as Martin Luther King Jr. cried out, “for atrocity wars and covert homicide meant to maintain unjust predatory investments overseas.”¹

Your writer’s four buddies from basic training, whose corpses are somewhere in North Korea, would have wanted this kind of a press release. They were normal guys, still kids really. We thought going into the army was just something everyone had to do. They would have been pissed off to see cruelly ignorant Americans praising them on Memorial Day for their sacrifice. Jesus knows they did not want to die for any reason, let alone while killing others for lies. They loved waking up in the morning, loved children, all children, cute Korean children, especially. They were asking themselves, why are we killing Koreans in their own country?

If these four young men knew what I know now, whew! If they could rise up, they would surely be going after those high ranking military with lots of colorful ribbons on their smart uniforms, surrounded by flags and glorifying the US war in Korea and in all the dozens of countries since.

Damn! In 1945, the US Army landed in a Korea that America had recognized as Japanese territory since 1905 and during a forty year brutal occupation, in return for Japan’s acceptance of the US claim to own the Philippines and other islands in Asian waters.² State Department officials quickly shut down the democratic all-Korea government the Japanese commanding general had allowed Koreans to form, once Japan was defeated. Knowing this Korean government would not be pro-US, they set up in its place, a US Army military government; cut the nation in two and installed a brutal Korean from Washington as President. His special services and secret police would account for massacres totaling up to nearly 200,000 men, women, and their children in the years before the army of North Korea invaded and united the peninsula in five short weeks as the army of the Southern dictator defected or went home. These massacres of communists, socialists, unionists, and people that did not accept the US partition of their country and kept secret by American media have now been fully document by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the South Korean Congress.³ The US has recently officially apologized for its own massacres of civilians in the South.

North Korea today is the most militarized nation on the planet because it was leveled twice by merciless bombing, threatened with atom bombs, and for sixty-three years has suffered US-arranged international sanctions meant to cripple it, and a continual campaign of slanderous attack in US media and never ending threats from Washington, while twice a year, great war game exercises go on so near its coast that the booms of US naval ships’ cannon and missiles are clearly heard in its capital city. Last month saw the largest naval live-fire exercise in history, reportedly with North Korean flags painted on targets. What else could be the explanation of its leader threatening to hit the US with the few nuclear weapons it has, knowing the America that menaces it has 20,000, and the most powerful armed force in the history of the world. But we have seen ‘the crazy North Korean leader story’ on prime time for a month. Last year right after US-South Korean war games, a South Korea warship was blown in two, probably by a US mine, but what is believed all over the Western media dominated world is that was an old North Korean torpedo. Who knows or cares that the Chinese, the Russian Navy and a Japanese investigation found the accusation not credible, that the US and its UN Secretary General stooge refused to consider a North Korea request for a UN investigation of what it was accused of.⁴ No, the torpedo story was featured for weeks to justify tighter that ever sanctions and stronger threats than before, and Libya was a frightening example of what may be awaiting it.

If the media features for nine months, weaponized pick-up trucks run by tough looking hombres as peaceful demonstrators against the government of oil wealthy Libya, a nation with a living standard higher than nine European countries, it becomes ‘truth,’ and the liberator of what was the poorest country in Africa, and leader of African Unity against continuing European exploitation, winds up with a blade up his backside, after being cornered by British and French warplanes. No matter the president of Italy told media, “Gadaffi is loved by his people.”

Not until US world hegemony is overthrown, will ordinary people come to know that almost one million Libyans, out of a total country population of six, were desperately demonstrating for their government and leader outside Tripoli as British and French high tech war planes were finishing off their nation’s army.⁵

Note to US media personalities: Among the generals who were imprisoned or hung after trail at Nuremberg, were five media celebrities.

There are either similar absurd media concocted stories, or no story at all, that excuse US crimes against humanity in the dozens of nations US designated local bad guys have been mass murdered to help a little country out, and protect the American way of life in the US. America is so good to invade and bomb and overthrow violently governments all for the benefit of nearly a billion people.

Greece, Korea, Guatemala, Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Lebanon, Cuba, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Serbia/Kosovo, Bosnia, Libya; the list of countries covertly attacked and government overthrown is longer and contains almost every nation in Latin America, many times over if crimes against peace Nuremberg Principle VI are included.

Note that remember, invading little countries was nothing new for the US before World War II – Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Philippines, China, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and more.

Again, this veteran is hoping that the Veterans For Peace Memorial Day Statement Press Release will say that VFP, or at least many if not all VFP, mourn the patriots of US invaded countries that fell fighting against overwhelming odds, and their civilian countrymen and children who also fell in harms way of those US invading forces. To be polite, we mourn them first before mourning our own soldiers who were killed in the line of duty following our government’s criminal orders. Otherwise how can anyone believe VFP condemns the taking of all these millions of lives of poor people overseas in illegal criminal military action; an illegal use of military that Representative from Texas, Congressman and Republican candidate for president, denounced (but did not call for prosecution).

Nothing less than this can possibly dent the usual Memorial Day adulation for dying for what Martin Luther King called “atrocity wars for maintaining unjust predatory investments on three continents.”

Here is what this veteran would have Veterans For Peace to say to Americans on Memorial Day:

Dear Fellow Americans,

No Americans knows more about US Wars than your veterans, who fought alongside buddies who did not make it home alive and will be mourned throughout the nation this weekend.

This Memorial Day 2012, Veterans For Peace is asking their fellow Americans to morn quietly at home. We ask that all sincerely patriotic citizens not take part in military parades and festive open-air observances under flags flying military colors. It anyone asks you why, say you don’t like selective mourning, that is, mourning our dead but not those our soldiers killed.

Memorial Day has been hijacked, just as our nation has been hijacked, by the investment banks of the Military-Industrial-Complex. Its corporate owned media promotes and hails an indiscriminate celebration of all US wars as heroic.

These Memorial Day festive celebrations have become a tradition of praising those of us who followed orders to kill designated enemies unquestioningly in more than a dozen nations since 1945 – and of military commanders, politicians and media anchors solemnly professing gratitude for the supreme sacrifice of those who died as a result.

We, your fellow Americans, who were trained to kill, and later fell in love with the dear people of the countries we were sent to kill, strongly suggest, for the protection of your children, that you tune out network news coverage of Memorial Day.

Corporate owned commercial media, with an unrelenting agenda of deceitful war propaganda has taken the lives of many of your loved ones, luring them into serving a shameful use of military power, while your sons and daughters, in all good faith, sought only to serve their country.

These wars were undeclared and illegal and resulted in the terrible deaths of millions of fellow human beings in their own small and beloved countries – often as not, dying in their very own homes. Last year one of the three present candidates for president firmly denounced these wars as having been illegal, unconstitutional, criminal and a monstrous disaster for America.

Veterans For Peace endorses the Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-Condemened-US-Wars-for-Predatory-Investments-International-Awareness-Campaign. Most members believe Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead because he would have awakened public responsibility and our capability to make such illegal wars unacceptable and inoperable through non-participation, non-support and conscientious objection. That would have crippled investor profits. King is mourned as a victim of US wars for profit.

Rev. King, was dangerous for the elite investing community that rules the 99% of us. He condemned all US wars and clandestinely organized violence “all around the world “created to maintain “unfair predatory overseas investments.” King had the charisma to have prosecuted successfully what he called atrocity wars and crimes against humanity in the street and in the court of public opinion as he prosecuted successfully racist crimes against humanity at home.

Veterans condemn the Militarization of Memorial Day that originally was a sacred day of mourning the civil war that took loved ones of both sides who once passed to the afterlife are reunited in brotherhood.

Veterans For Peace sincerely wishes everyone a peaceful, loving and contemplative Memorial Day.

The above was a draft submitted to Veterans For Peace upon the request of last year’s Veterans For Peace President, but not published.

Members of the Memorial Day Press Release Drafting Committee should realize, if not worrisome, that there are very few people who believe that Veterans For Peace will bring these wars to an end or intends to do so, even though, logically, those who willing did the killing are the Americans who should most be able to lead their being made unacceptable and eventually inoperable.

Leadership of its largest chapters have even opposed the national office statement of support for the impeachment proposal presented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich and others in the House of Representatives. At the same time former VFP president Elliot Adams was in court after indicting President Obama everyone following his criminal orders at the US Air Force Drone base at Hancock, New York.

I am absolutely convinced eventually a renegade faction of Veterans For Peace will constitute itself, and on a future Memorial Day, publish a Memorial Day press release of its own along going further, and calling for the prosecution of not only the government, but war investors, war promoters in media and clergy and the war crimes committed by military personnel.⁶
Prosecute our own before our victims unite and prosecute all of us.

1. See Beyond Vietnam: a Time to Break Silence sermon. [↩]
2. See Diplomacy That Will Live in Infamy, New York Times, James Bradley, 12/5/2009. See also the Taft-Katsura Agreement. [↩]
3. Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [↩]
4. See Independent Media as Mouthpiece for Centers of Power, Dissident Voice. [↩]
5. See One million libyans marching in tripoli in support of gaddafi “million march” or search for many articles and videos. [↩]
6. See Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now. [↩]

Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Jay.