Bradley Manning Admits Providing Files to WikiLeaks

Appearing before a military judge for more than an hour, Private Manning read a statement recounting how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain files should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about foreign policy, downloaded them from a secure computer network and then ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.

“No one associated with WLO” — an abbreviation he used to refer to the WikiLeaks organization — “pressured me into sending any more information,” Private Manning said. “I take full responsibility.”

Before reading the statement, Private Manning pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the huge amount of material he leaked, which included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and a quarter-million cables from American diplomats stationed around the world.

The guilty pleas exposed him to up to 20 years in prison. But the case against Private Manning, a slightly built 25-year-old who has become a folk hero among antiwar and whistle-blower advocacy groups, is not over. The military has charged him with a far more serious set of offenses, including aiding the enemy, and multiple counts of violating federal statutes, including the Espionage Act. Prosecutors now have the option of pressing forward with proving the remaining elements of those charges.

That would involve focusing only on questions like whether the information he provided counted as the sort covered by the Espionage Act — that is, whether it was not just confidential but also could be used to injure the United States or aid a foreign nation.

Private Manning described himself as thinking carefully about the kind of information he was releasing, and taking care to make sure that none of it could cause harm if disclosed.

The only material that initially gave him pause, he said, were the diplomatic cables, which he portrayed as documenting “back-room deals and seemingly criminal activity.”

But he decided to go forward after discovering that the most sensitive cables were not in the database. He was also motivated, he said, by a book about “open diplomacy” after World War I and “how the world would be a better place if states would not make secret deals with each other.”

“I believed the public release of these cables would not damage the United States,” he said. “However, I did believe the release of the cables might be embarrassing.”

Private Manning said the first set of documents he decided to release consisted of hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Afghanistan and Iraq. He had downloaded them onto a disk because the network connection at his base in Iraq kept failing, and he and his colleagues needed regular access to them.

Those reports added up to a history of the “day-to-day reality” in both war zones that he believed showed the flaws in the counterinsurgency policy the United States was then pursuing. The military, he said, was “obsessed with capturing or killing” people on a list, while ignoring the impact of its operations on ordinary people.

Private Manning said he put the files on a digital storage card for his camera and took it home with him on a leave in early 2010. He then decided to give the files to a newspaper.

“I believed if the public — in particular the American public — had access to the information” in the reports, “this could spark a debate about foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

Private Manning said he first called The Washington Post and spoke to an unidentified reporter for about five minutes. He decided that the reporter did not seem particularly interested because she said The Post would have to review the material before making any commitment.

He said he then tried to reach out to The New York Times by calling a phone number for the newspaper’s public editor — an ombudsman who is not part of the newsroom — and leaving a voice mail message that was not returned.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

‘We Steal Secrets’ Is First of WikiLeaks Films

“He was found guilty of TK, and sentenced to TK years” in prison, the line says.

“TK” is journalistic shorthand for facts yet to come. The syntax suggests that Mr. Gibney doesn’t see much ahead.

But it is Private Manning, even more than Mr. Assange, who has the breakout role in this first of several Hollywood films about the little-known people who grew larger than the most powerful of governments by using the Internet to broadcast their secrets.

Set for debut at the Sundance Film Festival next month, “We Steal Secrets” is a collaboration between the producer Marc Shmuger, who until 2009 was a chairman of Universal Pictures, and Mr. Gibney, a prolific documentarian who won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side.”

After leaving Universal, Mr. Shmuger started a film company, Global Produce. But he spent much of 2010 transfixed by reports about Mr. Assange, an Australian computer hacker who stepped into the limelight as a self-appointed czar of government and corporate transparency — and ultimately as a fugitive from authorities in Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning related to allegations of sexual assault. He is avoiding extradition from Britain by claiming asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London.

Mr. Shmuger found an e-mail address for Mr. Gibney, whom he did not know, and proposed a documentary. Mr. Gibney, who had just finished “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” and always has prospective projects to pursue, recalls trying to avoid adding this one.

“It couldn’t have come at a worse time,” said Mr. Gibney, who spoke from New York this week in a joint interview with Mr. Shmuger, who is based here.

But Mr. Gibney, like Mr. Shmuger, was soon captivated by the unlikely characters and bizarre narrative that are promising to make the WikiLeaks story the subject of not one movie, but many.

“Underground: The Julian Assange Story,” an Australian television film about the young Mr. Assange, was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

In January, DreamWorks Studios and Participant Media plan to begin shooting a dramatic feature film to be directed by Bill Condon. It will be based on a script by Josh Singer and two books: “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website,” by a former Assange colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy,” by David Leigh and Luke Harding.

HBO also had plans for an Assange movie, but Nancy Lesser, a spokeswoman for the channel, said the film has been delayed. Mark Boal, the writer and a producer of “Zero Dark Thirty,” continues to work on a possible Assange drama based on a New York Times Magazine article, “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” by Bill Keller.

In an e-mail, Mr. Keller, a former executive editor of The Times, said Mr. Boal recently asked whether he had any interest in writing the script for that one. “I told him I thought screenplays were outside my skill set,” Mr. Keller said.

“We Steal Secrets” has moved more quickly than the dramas, threatening at times to outpace events. Mr. Manning’s trial, for instance, had been expected by some to occur this year. But it has been delayed — perhaps to keep it out of the presidential campaign, Mr. Gibney suggested this week — and is now scheduled for March.

Focus Features expects to release “We Steal Secrets” through its FocusWorld label in the months after Sundance, which runs Jan. 17 to 27. Mr. Shmuger’s company will have another film, a comedy called “The Spectacular Now,” at the festival.

Running more than two hours, the documentary is a relatively full retelling of Mr. Assange’s story. It ranges from his youthful hacking into a network connected to an American rocket launch, through an arrest for entering government and business computers in the 1990s, to his rise as the overlord of WikiLeaks, the online organization that helped whistle-blowers post documents while remaining anonymous.

The film promises to break ground, particularly with its deep exploration of the sex case in Sweden. Mr. Gibney has asked to avoid spoilers on this point, but his narrative and supporting research are not friendly toward those who would see Sweden’s pursuit of Mr. Assange as cover for a supposed American agenda to prosecute or smear him.

Mr. Gibney tells on-screen of rejecting Mr. Assange’s demands for money in exchange for an interview and says that the market rate for an interview was $1 million.  Instead, that became an example of what one figure in the film calls “noble cause corruption” — a tendency to excuse transgressions supposedly done in the service of good. (A query was sent this week to an Assange representative for comment on this article, but Mr. Assange did not respond.)

But the film also takes issue with what Mr. Gibney considers shabby treatment of Mr. Assange by The Times, which cooperated with him in publishing many WikiLeaks revelations, but later described him with what Mr. Gibney called “derision.”

Mr. Keller, in his e-mail, said “being a source doesn’t buy you reverent treatment as a subject.” Mr. Assange’s release of secret documents, Mr. Keller added, is “entitled to the same First Amendment protection as the stories we wrote.”

Still, it is Private Manning who steals the spotlight in “We Steal Secrets.” Relying in part on information from the legal proceeding against him, the film traces his loneliness and confusion over sexual identity, and his unease with conduct and incidents he saw described in secret documents. The film also deals with communications he had with a cyberfriend who ultimately betrayed him to authorities.

Though widely condemned for perhaps exposing both civilians and government operatives around the world to mortal danger, Private Manning, in Mr. Gibney’s view, deserves empathy.

“We explore him as a human being far more fully than anyone else has,” he said this week.

In fact, Mr. Shmuger and Mr. Gibney have acquired rights to the book “Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American History,” by Denver Nicks, and are hoping to give Mr. Manning a full-blown dramatic film of his own.

“We’re looking for a screenwriter,” said Mr. Shmuger.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2012

An article on Thursday about the coming documentary “We Steal Secrets” and other films about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange referred imprecisely to a comment that Alex Gibney, the maker of “We Steal Secrets,” says in the film about Mr. Assange’s demands for money in exchange for collaborating on it. While he says that he rejected the demands, and that the market rate for an interview was $1 million, he does not specifically say that he rejected a demand from Mr. Assange for a $1 million fee for an interview. And a picture with the article, using information from a publicist, carried an erroneous credit. The picture, showing Mr. Assange seated, is by Focus World, not Focus Features.