WikiLeaks musings

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What should we make of this?

Steven Spielberg‘s Hollywood studio looks set to oversee WikiLeaks: the Movie after securing the screen rights to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange‘s War on Secrecy, the book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding.

Reportedly conceived as an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President’s Men, the film will be backed by DreamWorks – the studio founded in 1994 by Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Leigh and Harding’s book charts Julian Assange’s life and times, from his itinerant childhood through to the creation of the WikiLeaks website in 2006. It also provides the inside story of Assange’s explosive partnership with the Guardian and the release, last December, of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables.

You look at Assange and you think “James Bond villain,” so do you cast Daniel Craig as his nemesis? But the stuff coming out of the WikiLeaks is fascinating and you think, do you cast Daniel Craig as Assange?

Who can ever figure out what Hollywood will do with a current event that’s controversial?

And how will the WikiLeaks movie address the following?

Military jailers are forcing Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old soldier accused of passing classified documents to WikiLeaks.org, to strip naked in his cell at night and sleep without clothing, a requirement his lawyer says was imposed after Manning made a “sarcastic quip” about his confinement.

As Digby points out, this is a standard CIA interrogation technique:

Establishing the baseline state is important to demonstrate to the HVD that he has no control over basic human needs. The baseline state also creates in the detainee a mindset in which he learns to perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort, and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting. The use of conditioning techniques do not generally bring immediate results; rather, it is the cumulative effect of these techniques, used over time and in combination with other interrogation techniques and intelligence exploitation methods, which achieve interrogation objectives. These conditioning techniques require little to no physical interaction between the detainee and the interrogator. The specific interrogation techniques are:

a. Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.

–CIA memo describing combined interrogation techniques, December 30, 2004.

But around the same time this memo was written, a study on the sexual behavior of Americans revealed this:

In other personal predilections, men are twice as likely as women to sleep in the nude (31 percent of men, 14 percent of women).

Just some observations. Nothing more.

Related Articles

• Spielberg gets rights to WikiLeaks book for film (cbsnews.com)