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In 2010, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released a secret video of a U.S. helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians. U.S. authorities charged him with disclosing state secrets and demanded his extradition to the U.S. Assange took refuge inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London and spent a dozen years first inside the embassy and later jailed in the U.K.’s high security Belmarsh Prison. He was released last year after pleading guilty to a single charge under the Espionage Act and now lives in Australia.
Last week, Julian Assange returned to the international stage, walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival alongside Vermont filmmaker Eugene Jarecki. Jarecki’s new film, “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” chronicles Assange’s crusade to reveal inconvenient truths that governments seek to bury. Jarecki’s new film has been garnering awards, receiving the first-ever Golden Globe Award for best documentary, and taking the special jury prize of the L’Oeil d’or, or Golden Eye award, the documentary film prize at Cannes.
The Golden Globes recognized Jarecki for “combining the skills of a journalist with the voice of a poet.” The statement added, “At a time when truth is under pressure, Eugene’s work reminds us of the power of storytelling to provoke, enlighten, and ultimately defend democracy itself.”
Eugene Jarecki has won Emmy and Peabody awards for his previous films, including documentaries about Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and the military-industrial complex.
Jarecki lives in Vermont and co-founded the Big Picture Theater in Waitsfield. I caught up with him in Europe.
What follows is an excerpt of our Vermont Conversation edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation at the audio link at the top of this article:
David Goodman
You are speaking to me from Berlin. Why are you there?
Eugene Jarecki
The story of why we are in Berlin is the story of our time. I came to Berlin some years ago to make this new film, and coming to Berlin is no small matter for me because my father fled Berlin in 1939 at the age of six at the last possible moment you could get out of Germany in the prelude to the Holocaust and World War II. My father fled to America to go to a freer country. And I often note what a tragic descent it represents in America for us to have gotten to a point where his son, in order to make a project which is rather politically sensitive, had to leave the country that he fled to — the supposedly freer America — to go back to modern day Germany. Why? Because the protections for journalists and truth seekers like myself, documentary makers and others who want the world to know what is happening to us all and what matters to us all, life here is protected for such people in a way that is no longer true in America. It’s a sad irony.
David Goodman
Let’s go into the subject of your film. Who is Julian Assange?
Eugene Jarecki
Julian Assange is a tall Australian albino-haired man, characterized on Saturday Night Live as Dr. Evil, because he was a computer visionary who at the dawn of the Internet age in the early 2000s saw something that no one else had seen. And out of that vision that he had he built something called WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was a simple idea. Prior to WikiLeaks, people who wanted to tell the world what their organization was doing, a so-called whistleblower, had to take great risks to tell the world what their organization might have been doing, whether they were a polluter or a corrupt government, corrupting elections, or dirty little secrets about war and killing. What Julian Assange discovered was that the digital age, which was going to give enormous new powers to governments and corporations, also had a certain promise for individuals. All WikiLeaks was was an encrypted dropbox that would allow a whistleblower to tell the world the thing they needed to know and not have to risk life and limb for it. This quickly led to the most significant leak of military and diplomatic documents in US history, which came because of single Army private, Chelsea Manning, who came into possession of a vast amount of secret material which revealed war crimes committed by America. That immediately made Julian Assange and WikiLeaks public enemy number one for America for having given the whistleblower that protective space in which to release that material.
David Goodman
Your film includes some of what Chelsea Manning released. What did it show?
Eugene Jarecki
What Chelsea Manning shared with WikiLeaks and what WikiLeaks then released to the world came to be known as the Collateral Murder video. It showed US helicopters firing on Iraqi civilians and journalists. Two journalists from Reuters were killed when helicopters fired on a group of men chatting on a sidewalk in Baghdad. That extraordinary act of killing and brutality was suddenly on every television screen in the world, and it happened because a whistleblower shared it with an organization. It was at that moment that an international campaign run by the United States to destroy WikiLeaks and the person of Julian Assange began.
David Goodman
When did you meet Julian Assange?
Eugene Jarecki
It was about 10 days ago that Julian Assange suddenly joined us at the Cannes Film Festival, a free man walking the red carpet in Cannes having emerged triumphant over the US government despite their 15 year campaign to destroy him. And the story of how Julian Assange got free and won his battle against the US government in one of the most definitive episodes for the defense of press freedom in history is part of what we tell in the film. It’s also a story that everyone needs to know, because it’s true that fights for press freedom, fights for the human rights that we all hold dear, can be won. We live at a time where most fights look unwinnable, partly because those in power are in the business of scaring us. They’re in the business of showing us these dreadful ICE videos where the effectively SS that Trump has turned ICE into is grabbing people in broad daylight off the street, off of aircraft, out of their places of work, places of worship, places of education, and scaring us all into silence. The story of Julian Assange, who warned us that we were headed for that world and they then tried to destroy him, is a story of how what Margaret Mead said is true: “Never doubt that a small group of people properly organized can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Well Julian Assange and his team of young dreamer bandits, pirates working at WikiLeaks and wanting the public to know the truth, they won. The only charge left to which Mr. Assange had to plead guilty was journalism. The charge that Julian Assange had to admit he was guilty of was the act of doing something protected by the First Amendment. It shines an incredibly dark light on the way the US Espionage Act is being used to damage the US Constitution and to do things to people that the Constitution was created to protect them from having done to them.
David Goodman
Tell us the meaning of the title, “The Six Billion Dollar Man.” And by the way, I really love the takeoff on “The Six Million Dollar Man,” a TV series that I loved in the 1970s.
Eugene Jarecki
Me too. The movie is called “The Six Billion Dollar Man” because $6 billion is what the United States spent to bribe the country of Ecuador to torture Julian Assange. The goal was to make Ecuador, which had been giving Assange asylum, stop doing so, and make his life so miserable inside the embassy by shattering his human rights, safety and care inside the embassy that he would leave of his own volition so that US and British officials could apprehend him and put him on trial. For the richest country in the world to get one man, the bounty was $6 billion. And we and we have the receipts.
David Goodman
In 2016 Democrats accused Assange of aiding Donald Trump by being the conduit for Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails, which many people believe was part of a Russian operation. Democrats have vilified him. How do you respond to that?
Eugene Jarecki
I looked very closely at this because it troubled me as well, and I wanted to get at the heart of it. We found no evidence at all that links WikiLeaks with any kind of Russian operation. The only place we found that link is in the mouths of people in the Democratic Party, constantly saying it over and over again to explain away why they had lost an election. And what we did see was what WikiLeaks did release: evidence of what the Democratic National Committee was doing to destroy the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who was ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls. The stripping of democratic rights away from the supporters of Bernie Sanders is what WikiLeaks revealed, full stop. This was a very convenient smear campaign.
David Goodman
No link to Russia.
Eugene Jarecki
We found no evidence of any link. And by the way, no news organization has. Everybody in the world tried to find evidence that would link WikiLeaks to Russia, and none has come. Our movie also reveals is that though the US government for years said that WikiLeaks had “blood on its hands” for having released military and diplomatic documents that Chelsea Manning had provided to WikiLeaks, the US government conceded that no single person on the planet was found by them to have been hurt in any way in connection with any WikiLeaks release.
David Goodman
Why is this movie important now?
Eugene Jarecki
We’re living at a time with fascism on the rise all over the world, a crackdown on truth telling by those in power who do not find the truth convenient. They want to destroy the world all around us for profit and have us not know what’s happening. And Mr. Assange was the sort of canary in the coal mine of all this. These are people who don’t believe in democracy. And by these are people, I mean successive administrations of US policy makers. What they fear most is an informed public. Because what they’re doing behind the scenes, the dirty little business of how politics and corporate power intersect at the expense of all of us, they don’t want us to know. And so when someone comes along who threatens to expose that as Julian Assange, we see the clampdown. We saw it against Mr. Assange. We saw it in the killing of the journalists in the video that Mr. Assange released. We saw it throughout the diplomatic cables, in the manipulation of affairs of state all over the world, America doing business with dictatorships, America propping up human rights-abusing regimes. We saw so much crime and then we saw the US try to shoot the messenger. The fact that they failed and that he’s still walking is really a burnt stick in their eye.
We now have to understand that the game is on, because they are ratcheting up that use of force against all of us even higher than in the days of Mr. Assange. They’re cracking down on journalists in a way that he was just the precedent for. But his victory tells us that it can be fought by small groups of people working together to not allow these kind of trespasses to happen. When you see people on the street crowding around the people who are being abducted, kidnapped, illegally taken by the SS that Mr. Trump has created known as ICE, you’re watching community effort at work. It might not work the first time or the second time, but it grows. And before long, they are at war with the people themselves, and that’s ultimately a winning game for the people. The people win when they organize against the abuse of few.
David Goodman
You have made films about Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, exploring why we fight, Elvis Presley, and now Julian Assange. What is the through line that connects your work?
Eugene Jarecki
I’m a true believer in what they told me America was about. It’s the most it’s the most important social experiment in the last half millennium. My parents fled persecution in Europe to come to that promise in America. When I grew up to see that promise violated successively and the way that industrial capitalism has hijacked the American dream, it became the cause of my life to protect democracy from capitalism. I think Julian Assange was a glimmer of hope for whistleblowers and for all of us in the public who have the right to know what’s happening in our world, and the clamp down on him has exploded to be a clamp down on all information available to the public and on all truth seeking. And as such, he has more to say to our time than anyone I can imagine. That truth is that democratic glimmer that I care about and that I was taught to care about as a child, and I’ll fight for that glimmer till I’m dead.
