2013-07-30 Jonathan Cook reviews "We Steal Secrets"

Alex Gibney's film "We Steal Secrets" has been derided from the beginning and it met with disastrous results at the box office in the US. Gibney's attempt to market the film to an international audience fared no better.

But criticism of Gibney's film has heretofore concentrated on enumerating the bewildering number of instances of Gibney's sloppy research.

Now Jonathan Cook, the award-winning reporter who once exposed the hidden agenda of the Guardian, writes for Counterpunch, where he takes things a step further and accuses Gibney outright of deliberately misleading the public.

I have just watched We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney's documentary about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. One useful thing I learnt is the difference between a hatchet job and character assassination. Gibney is too clever for a hatchet job, and his propaganda is all the more effective for it.

Cook sees two major flaws in the "documentary".

The first is that he grievously misrepresents the facts in the Swedish case against Assange of rape and sexual molestation to the point that his motives in making the film are brought into question.

But the most damning evidence against Gibney is his focus on a torn condom submitted by A to the police, unquestioningly accepting its significance as proof of the assault. The film repeatedly shows a black and white image of the damaged prophylactic.

The problem is that investigators have admitted that no DNA from Assange was found on the condom. In fact, A's DNA was not found on it either. The condom, far from making A a more credible witness, suggests that she may have planted evidence to bolster a case so weak that the original prosecutors dropped it.

There is no way Gibney could not have known these well-publicised concerns about the condom. So the question is why would he choose to mislead the audience?

But this, says Cook, is where Gibney steps into his own pathological fantasy world.

Gibney even allows a theory establishing a central personality flaw in Assange to be built around the condom. According to this view, Assange tore it because, imprisoned in his digital world, he wanted to spawn flesh-and-blood babies to give his life more concrete and permanent meaning.

Gibney is careful to take up most "major issues", making it harder to accuse him of distorting the record, writes Cook. But Gibney's dishonesty outside the rape allegations relates not to an avoidance of facts and evidence but to his choice of emphasis.

The Swedish allegations are viewed only in so far as they question Assange's moral character. No serious effort is made to highlight the enormous resources the US security state has been marshalling to shape public opinion, most notably through the media. The hate campaign against Assange, and the Swedish affair's role in stoking it, are ignored.

None of this is too surprising. Were Gibney to have highlighted Washington's efforts to demonise Assange it might have hinted to us, his audience, Gibney's own place in supporting this matrix of misinformation.

Gibney hides the "bigger picture" from the viewer because he himself has a part in it.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.