‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’
Director: Alex Gibney
Genre: Documentary
Rating: R
2 (out of 5) Globes

There’s rarely a hot topic filmmaker Alex Gibney won’t turn into an expository documentary. In the past — which is to say the past seven years — the absurdly prolific Gibney has tackled Enron, torture, Jack Abramoff, Eliot Spitzer and Catholic Church sex abuse, each cramming mega-scandals into digestible two-hour-plus packages. Working at such a fast clip can lead to simplicity, but he’s a heavy researcher, if one who’s a bit too married to a template format, and one who needs to relax on cutesy pop song cues that would make even Michael Moore flinch.

Though he goes easier on the latter issue, what’s both decent and vexing about Gibney’s work can be found in “We Steal Secrets,” the official doc on WikiLeaks, the online site that enjoyed a brief but loud life proliferating classified information passed on by anonymous sources. It’s a subject that can’t simply be summarized, requiring its teller to take a stance, both on the ethics of leaking and the company’s actions. Gibney has rounded up all of the organization’s members, save Julian Assange, the editor/spokesperson/silver fox stud who became the company’s public face, only to be taken down by sex scandals almost the instant he became a household name.

It’s not a liability that “Secrets” lacks Assange. It has plenty of other people to take up the slack, and Gibney, for what it’s worth, has never being the grilling type à la Errol Morris. But the lack of Assange creates a hole in the film, one that Gibney nevertheless fills with his own, almost certainly simplistic interpretation. In his reading, Assange is the good guy who became the bad guy, helping to expose necessary (or at least debatably necessary) secrets, only to turn secretive himself when accusations of sexual abuse came to light.

It’s on sturdier ground when inquiring into whether simply exposing the truth at all times isn’t inherently problematic. Assange’s viewpoint, others claim, was black-and-white, assuming that ethics never come to play when it comes to his company’s practices. Gibney’s film isn’t strictly about Assange, who disappears for long stretches, or even about WikiLeaks. It winds up tied, at least emotionally, to Bradley Manning, a sexually confused Iraq War soldier who leaked incriminating (though really just embarrassing) documents to WikiLeaks in what appears to be an act of self-destruction, only to wind up the fall guy. (He plead guilty to charges in February, and faces life in prison.) Gibney’s attempts to play with our emotions are thin and desperate, a flimsy attempt to tie up what is otherwise exhaustive research. But what good’s decent intel when the conclusion is weak?

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The U.S. Army private accused of providing diplomatic cables and other secret documents to the WikiLeaks website pleaded guilty to misusing classified material on Thursday, but denied the most serious charge in the case, aiding the enemy.

Private First Class Bradley Manning, 25, entered the pleas prior to his court martial, which is set to begin on June 3, in a case that centers on the biggest leak of government secrets in U.S. history.

He was expected to testify later on Thursday.

Manning pleaded not guilty to the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, through his attorney. Manning, who has been jailed at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia for more than 1,000 days, could face life imprisonment if convicted of that charge.

But he pleaded guilty to a series of 10 lesser charges that he misused classified information at the hearing before military judge Colonel Denise Lind. He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for those charges.

Manning, an Army intelligence officer, was arrested in May 2010 while serving in Iraq and charged with downloading thousands of intelligence documents, diplomatic cables and combat videos and forwarding them to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks began exposing the U.S. government secrets in the same year, stunning diplomats around the world and outraging U.S. officials who said damage to national security from the leaks endangered U.S. lives.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since June to avoid extradition to Sweden for alleged sex crimes.

Manning had offered to plead guilty to various lesser charges in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including the unauthorized possession and willful distribution of information accessed in the Combined Information Data Networks, a military database, for Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is prepared to take the witness stand to read aloud from a 35-page statement defending himself in the espionage case, but only after Lind rules on how much of it he will be allowed to read.

Under a ruling last month by Lind, Manning would have any sentence reduced by 112 days to compensate for the markedly harsh treatment he received during his confinement. While at Quantico, Manning was placed in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day with guards checking on him every few minutes.

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