We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks Page #10

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REPORTER:
Will there be anything

more coming from WikiLeaks

in the next two

or three weeks?

ASSANGE:
You never have a

good reason to be paranoid.

You have good reason

to be careful.

Stakes are high so you need to be

meticulously careful every day.

DAVIS:
He'd been trained for

this moment, in evasive tactics,

and changing phones and taking out

batteries and changing computers.

May have been

a fantasy before,

but it served him well

because it became real.

He was the focus

of intense enemies.

REPORTER:
Right now the Pentagon

reportedly searching for Julian Assange,

potentially on the verge

of releasing

a huge new stash

of confidential documents.

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.

There is a side to

this guy which is great,

and then there's this hidden side

which has been so destructive.

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 mundane reality that we all live in.

Yes.

[REPORTER SPEAKING]

You talked about an aggressive

surveillance operation

against you and some

WikiLeaks employees?

We certainly were under

surveillance in Iceland.

I, personally,

had chased people

who were surveilling me

with video cameras.

DOMSCHEIT-BERG:
He traveled

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 is no proof.

And this is what got tiring

to a lot of us over time.

Julian was constantly propagating

how much we're in danger

and all of these things.

And this was just lies

and propaganda.

Maybe it's the fame,

maybe it's the attention,

maybe it's the pressures of working

in this kind of environment,

but somehow this

idealist that I met

became something else

somewhere through the story.

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."

INTERVIEWER:
Where did that

language come from?

I think, as much as I can tell, that's

from the Espionage Act of 1917.

NARRATOR:
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.

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.

[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]

WOMAN:
Do you want

to let them in first?

NARRATOR:
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 U.S. military

had purposefully hidden information

about civilian casualties

and systematic torture.

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 you cannot hand over

a prisoner of war

to another authority who

you know commits torture.

But let me just say with

regards to the allegations

of not intervening when

coming across detainee abuse,

not true.

They had 1,300 allegations,

with medical evidence,

of quite horrific torture

by Iraqi army and police

against detainees.

OVERTON:
We're talking

about sodomy,

we're talking about abuse

using rubber hoses

and beating people,

we're talking about murder.

The sort of torture that supposedly

we were "liberating" Iraq from.

The U.S. 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?

- Bradley Manning's

letter to WikiLeaks

NARRATOR:
What

had Manning done?

Was his leak, as the Army had

said, a reckless data dump?

Or was this

the act of a man

who had peeked 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.

There was never

even a possibility

that anyone could assume that

he had a female personality.

INTERVIEW:
You mean that he

wanted to become a woman?

Well, we knew that he was at least

considering hormone therapy,

but no one cared.

It wasn't like,

"Okay, he's going to have to start

showering with the females."

Literally, nobody cared.

EDWARDS:
He would

call me and cry.

Very loud sobbing

like a child just in

a state of just utter loss,

and he kept saying,

"I won't make it,

"I can't make it,

I can't do this."

[GUNSHOT]

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.

NARRATOR:
Manning did reach

out for help at least once,

in an email to

his master sergeant.

Manning attached to the email a picture

of himself dressed as a woman.

Several weeks later,

around dinnertime,

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.

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 'bout you fix your

sh*t before you try to fix mine?"

And he screamed and

punched me in the face

while I was sitting down.

My adrenaline 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 a"guillotine"

and pulled him on the floor,

and laid on top of him and

pinned his arms beside his head.

At that time, I can't

believe he messed 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 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

sergeant in the mailroom.

NARRATOR:
In the mailroom, Manning

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