Featured Post

Click Here for Excerpts (and Reviews) for New Book

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Wikileaks-Gibney Battle Intensifies

As I noted in intro to my interview with Alex Gibney, director of the new We Steal Secrets film re: WikilLeaks, he has been slammed by Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks Twitter feed for months, for various reasons, no doubt.  It seems that Assange early on got some kind of leaked script or transcript for the film in process.  Gibney hit back for basing a critique on some words on the page, when a film is a quite different experience. 

This week, with the film's release date in the U.S. approaching--that is, today--the Twitter feed said it had been leaked the finished film and posted a nearly point-by-point "fact check."  Gibney responded by pointing out, among other things, that the transcript was missing a key and substantial part of the film--Manning's words from the chat logs and elsewhere.  These appear in the film typed on the screen but not spoken, so he surmises that someone made an audio copy of the film at a screening and leaked it to WikiLeaks.  This morning he tweets: "WL has published an incomplete and inaccurate transcript based on non-final version."

Anyway:  We likely won't see a Gibney point-by-point rebuttal of WikiLeaks' point-by-point rebuttal.  But here he responds to a fairly critical review of the film by my former colleague Kevin Gosztola, co-author of my book about Manning, Truth and Consequences.  Note: I have not yet seen the film myself.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Gibney is now resorting to lies to justify his treatment of Assange in this movie. This is what he says:

“There is some doubt as to what condom is pictured on screen, so it seemed pointless to add detail about dna.”

There is only ONE picture and only ONE condom in the police forensics report, and Gibney knows that full well if, as he claims, he’s researched the Swedish case. So, yes, if Gibney shows a used-looking condom with a bloody great tear in the top then that's the one that Assange supposedly “deliberately ripped” during sex and the fact it has no trace of any DNA on it – not male, not female either – is a very big deal indeed. A very big deal. And Gibney knows it. (What was submitted to the forensics lab from the other woman is only a fragment of a condom. That does have DNA on it, but she’s the one who claims he DIDN’T use a condom.)

"If a Swedish prosecutor is alleging that Assange may have tried to make the women pregnant against their will (the basis of a possible charge) is it not relevant to understand his past practices?"

The Swedish prosecutor has never said any such thing. And, again, Gibney would know that if he had done any research. This is Gibney's OWN theory, which he expounds at length in his hatchet job of a film. Presumably Gibney believes that Assange - to quote from Fibney's film - can fulfil his "primal urge" to go around the world "spreading his seed" by deliberately damaging condoms "to trick women into pregnancy" without actually exchanging any DNA?

Alex Gibney is a fraud and a liar, and clearly wants to frame Assange using fake evidence.

Wikileaks has leaked a full annotated transcript of the film, with links to documentary evidence proving its many lies. Fascinating reading:

http://wikileaks.org/IMG/html/gibney-transcript.html