‘The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Timely Documentary Shows Julian Assange As Truth Teller Fighting Against Authoritarian Drift
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been the focus of numerous documentaries: Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets explored the website Assange created that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq, an immense cache of U.S. diplomatic cables, and much more. Oscar winner Laura Poitras also took a crack at Assange and Wikileaks in her 2016 documentary Risk. Assange himself directed a documentary short, Collateral Murder, about the 2007 video Wikileaks released that showed a U.S. military helicopter crew opening fire on unarmed journalists and civilians in Iraq.
That may sound like sufficient coverage of Assange, but director Eugene Jarecki shows it's important to revisit him and the work of Wikileaks in light of rising authoritarianism in the U.S. and abroad. At a moment when democracy is in retreat (as author Anne Applebaum has put it), Jarecki's film The Six Billion Dollar Man raises the question of whether government by the people and for the people can function if citizens are denied information on what political leaders are doing in their name.
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The $6B of the title refers to Jarecki's estimate of the amount of money the U.S. government has spent trying to prosecute Assange, going back to the Obama administration. He has faced a variety of charges including conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act for publishing classified information supplied to him by former U.S. Army Spec. Chelsea Manning, and computer hacking. To Jarecki, these all fall under the rubric of killing the messenger – going after Assange because he dared peel back the curtain on government secrets.
The Six Billion Dollar Man addresses many of the criticisms that have been leveled at Assange over the years – for instance, that his website recklessly released unredacted information, without considering possible harm to individuals named in documents. In the case of the U.S. diplomatic cables release, the documentary points out that Wikileaks worked carefully with the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian to scrub the cables of information that would identify sources, but it was a Guardian editor who chose to publicly share the password to the full trove of unredacted cables.
The filmmaker also questions the prosecution of Assange in Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning after two women sought HIV tests after having sex with Assange. For political reasons, Jarecki asserts, prosecutors eventually bandied about the word 'rape' even though the women involved did not accuse Assange of sexual assault.
Jarecki interviews an Icelandic hacker nicknamed Siggi who joined Wikileaks as a volunteer when he was just a teenager. The film reveals Siggi, trying to save his own skin in a pedophilia investigation, agreed to the FBI's request to wear a wire in an attempt to ensnare Assange. But the recordings never found what FBI agents were hoping for – evidence of Assange encouraging people to illegally hack into government computer networks.
Jarecki hints that Assange can be his own worst enemy by displaying a mercurial temperament and superior attitude. One person close to Assange observes in the film, 'He can be arrogant, even cruel.'
But the documentary isn't putting Assange's personality on trial but questioning the lengths the U.S. government would go to shut him down. Ecuador, under then-president Rafael Correa, granted Assange's emergency request for asylum, allowing him to stay indefinitely in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Assange sought refuge as U.K. authorities appeared set to extradite him to the U.S. But Pres. Correa's successor, immediately upon taking office, began to entertain offers of an aid package from the first Trump administration ('bribe,' if you prefer) to dislodge Assange from the embassy.
Jarecki also reveals that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a big Trump backer, had his fingerprints on surveillance equipment installed in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to monitor Assange and record his voice at all times.
The Six Billion Dollar Man is premiering in the Special Screenings section of Cannes. It serves as a companion piece, in a sense, to another film bowing at the festival: Raoul Peck's Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5. Both films cogently argue that ostensible democracies in the U.S. and elsewhere squash anyone who tries to tell the truth – anyone who insists that 2 + 2 = 4. Assange did the math, and paid the price.
Title: The Six Billion Dollar ManFestival: Cannes (Special Screenings)Sales Agent: WMEDirector: Eugene JareckiRunning time: 126 min.
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