The junior college I attend recently had a showing of "Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War". To the school's credit, the presenter (someone from the philosophy department) noted that the title was a lie; nobody knows the Whole Truth and you're not likely to get it from a 60 minute film.
I was afraid that this was going to be histrionic far-left propaganda from one of those anti-war organizations tied to Stalinist and Maoist groups. To my pleasant surprise, it was merely moderate-left propaganda and actually worth watching. The documentary was produced and directed by Robert Greenwald (who recently directed and helped produce a biography of Abbie Hoffman) with funding provided by Democratic Party loyalist group MoveOn.org and the left-leaning Center for American Progress founded by Leon Podesta, Bill Clinton's chief of staff. An interview with Greenwald provides additional background.
It starts off by appealing for legitimacy by showcasing "The Experts", the two dozen or so people interviewed to make the film. Notable inclusions are Nixon's lawyer John Dean, Bush's former Army Secretary Thomas E. White, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Blair's cabinet member Clare Short who resigned in disgust at the war, and former arms inspector Scott Ritter. The film flips back and forth between public statements from the Bush Administration and the inverviewees refuting them. It might seem like one of those roundtable evening talk shows, but it's not -- the Administration is not presented the opportunity to rebut the rebuttals.
This isn't a film that will convince anybody who already supports Bush. The right wing is going to ignore the film's arguments for the mere presence of Ritter, Wilson, Short, and Nation editor David Corn. Ritter has discredited himself by claiming Iraq didn't have nonconventional weapons at a time few believed this -- in other words, by being right -- and by associating himself with the aforemaligned fringe groups. Wilson is considered "discredited" because he had the audacity to call Bush a liar for lying about information that Wilson, working as Dick Cheney's operative, had reported to the White House. Short is seen by many as a traitor for not standing by Blair as he, in her eyes, acted to flush the country down the toilet. Corn authored the book "The Lies of George W. Bush" and is known for partisan ranting in his colunns.
Another reason to dismiss the film's content for its mere appearance is the background of some of the Wilson interview scenes, where he is positioned in front of a poster showing a judge's gavel smashing a flag-painted map of the United States, striking in Florida. This overt reference to the Supreme Court's decision in the 2000 elections, besides being the main reason I'm calling this a propaganda film, can be used to accuse Wilson of having an anti-Bush agenda dating back to 2000 which could have influenced his report on Niger uranium. Other notable backgrounds were that Dean was placed in front of a banner showing various monetary symbols (dollar, yen, pound, etc) and was later placed in front of a People Magazine whose headline began "DEA- RAD-", the later letters obscured by his head.
Beyond these trivialities of appearance, there is serious information in the film: direct statements by people in a position to know which contradict direct statements by the Bush administration. The film shows Bush, Rumsfeld, et al saying things that the mainstream media now insists they never said: that Iraq had al-Qaeda ties and was trying to build nukes, that Iraq had hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and we knew where they were, and so on. By going back to these public statements, the show blows away a year of spin muffling the current debate on the war.
The most important new information in the film (new to me, anyway) is the thorough debunking of Colin Powell's famous presentation before the United Nations. Powell claimed there was an alliance between Ansar al Islam and Iraq, and most of the current claims that Abu Zarqawi was connected to Iraq stem back to Powell's presentation; while many of the individual claims about Zarqawi were not refuted, the film cited Ansar's leader saying of Iraq that "they are our enemy" for being "outside of Islam's zone". Powell claimed that Iraq had lots of anthrax left over from before the 1991 war, and held up a tiny tube of white powder as an example of how deadly the stuff would be; Ritter noted that Iraq's anthrax had a shelf life of three years and was so unrefined that it looked more like Coca-Cola than white powder. Powell claimed trucks photographed at a site were decontamination vehicles; Ritter identified them as Iraqi fire trucks. It was pointed out that the reason Powell only had artists' conceptions of mobile laboratories was because there was no proof they actually existed and to this day nobody has found one. Powell claimed there were chemical weapons in facilities which Ritter's team had been through numerous times and never found anything in. Powell showed off footage of a Mirage jet modified to spray chemical weaponry; the prototype had been destroyed in 1991. Powell claimed Iraq's posession of 100-500 tons of chemical weapons to be a "conservative estimate", which McGovern notes would fill 16,000 warheads that have yet to be found.
For all the Experts they used, they only came away with an hour's worth of film, making me wonder what ended up on the cutting room floor. It looked like a lot of people only had one or two lines end up in the final film. It must also be noted that the individuals' claims are their own, and the other experts are not necessarily backing each other up on their statments. I don't know if the people interviewed ever rebutted each others' rebuttals, or if the lesser-used Experts saw and approved the final version of the show.
Also, the movie's heavy reliance on Ritter, Wilson, and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity co-founder Ray McGovern exposes a weakness in the movie's methods: since there is generally only one rebuttal shown for each Administration charge, finding any of these major Experts' information to be unreliable would shoot a big hole in the movie's attempt at being a documentary.
The movie's webpage has a transcript. If you don't think you'll ever see the film, it's worth reading at least once and filing in the back of your head for future reference. In sum, I could say the same thing about the film. It's not great or conclusive, but it's a fair attempt and it's worth knowing the information presented in it.
Posted by Warrior Tang at March 18, 2004 09:45 PM