[Video Link: teaser for Frontline's "Wikisecrets" episode. Watch the full documentary here.]
PBS Frontline aired an episode on the Wikileaks saga tonight: "WikiSecrets," produced by Martin Smith. You can watch the video online here, and you can also buy a DVD or download via iTunes. Casual reactions I'm reading from journalists on Twitter who have followed the story closely, and from Wikileaks supporters, are generally negative.
Greg Mitchell describes it as a "yawner," but notes an interesting cameo by Adrian Lamo's pet fish:
The mountain labored, and in the end, it gave birth to a mouse. Or rather, a goldfish. One of the only bits of new information in the much-ballyhooded PBS Frontline program on WikiLeaks, Assange and Bradley Manning which aired tonight was: The man who fingered Manning, Adrian Lamo, secluded in California, has a large goldfish in his apartment. The other scoop: It was Manning's aunt who made the final update to his Facebook page, announcing his arrest. Come to think of it, maybe that one came out before. But we've still got that goldfish. The rest of the program, from beginning to end, was nothing but re-hash, much of it from news reports going back to last June or a ltitlle later.
Wikileaks and Julian Assange published a "behind the scenes" and "unedited" version of the Assange interview portion here. Wikileaks and Assange take the position that the Frontline story "is hostile and misrepresents WikiLeaks' views and tries to build an 'espionage' case against its founder, Julian Assange, and also the young soldier, Bradley Manning."
Frontline's redacted reconstruction of accused leaker Bradley Manning's Facebook page is here.
Other voices in the piece include Wikileaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg, New York Times executive editor Bill "Twitter Makes You Stupid" Keller, and Bradley Manning's father, Brian.
In related news, Adrian Lamo has been summoned to testify in the case against Bradley Manning. Wired News:
Almost one year to the day Army investigators arrested intelligence analyst Bradley Manning on suspicion of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, the ex-hacker who turned him in is set to meet with the chief prosecutor on the case for the first time.
"I'm finally going to meet with the JAG officer to go over the preliminaries for the actual testimony and how they want to play out my role," Lamo said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "It's the first time I've met with them."
The meeting is set for June 2 and 3 in Washington, and marks the first outward sign that Manning's court-martial case is proceeding apace now that a lengthy inquiry into his mental health has concluded.
