Forget Fahrenheit

[struggle4progress]

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Robert Greenwald’s latest documentary, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, takes on the administration’s pop-eyed rhetoric, intelligence-data manipulation, and low-blow tactics against dissenters. Made in collaboration with MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress, Uncovered is a blistering prosecutorial brief against the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq, though a deeply noncinematic documentary. Talking heads flap away well over an acceptable words-per-minute speed limit, dizzying montages of administration officials flash by, and viewers will wish for a rewind button and a little white space amid the thicket of words. Were it not for the reliable elegance of a chronological structure to carry us through, Uncovered would be an insurmountable slog.

But as a rebuttal to the administration’s version of history, the film is devastating. As he’s proven in Outfoxed, his takedown of the right-wing, “fair and balanced” FOX News Channel, Greenwald is fascinated by the rhetorical battle being fought in U.S. politics, this war of words that shapes our understanding of the uncertain past, shifting present, and wildly contested future. Greenwald sharply delineates his adversaries; his array of experts include diplomatic, intelligence, and security personnel with staggering amounts of experience, going up against the administration and portrayed in collages of sound clips. You could argue that Greenwald stacks the deck by not allowing the administration to speak live as well. But you could also argue that the administration has done such a devastating job of co-opting the mainstream media, threatening and discrediting government opponents, and bamboozling us with its alarmist rhetoric that it’s hogged more than its fair share of the spotlight.
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In contrast, Greenwald’s experts -- from the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, to the man who conducted the fruitless CIA search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, David Kay -- offer scathingly well-reasoned and angry responses to administration claims. Backed up with exhaustive data and field experience, the words have the ring of testimony, which, in effect they are in Greenwald’s mock trial of a movie. There were no weapons of mass destruction, the experts tell us; we looked everywhere, the informants lied to us, intelligence data was cherry-picked to fit a foregone conclusion.

Greenwald goes one step further and explores this dissonance between reality and rhetoric within the neoconservative movement that did so much to push us into Iraq. His experts argue that these civilians -- Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, among others -- were frighteningly out of touch with the interests of the natives of other countries, were burdened by a preening arrogance fed by Cold War fantasies, and had an inability to plan for an outcome that was less than ideal. Afflicted with what Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has termed a Trotskyian obsession with top-down revolution and Hegelian models of history, the neocons urged the administration to go to war and then fiddled as Baghdad burned.
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http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8387

[meti57b]

1. "Uncovered" is an awesome production! Definitely a must-see must-have!!

[Daisey Mae]

2. "UNCOVERED" is Great....but

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is more palatable to people being introduced to these awful facts for the first time....WHAT has happened to us is almost too much to deal with...We are used to the facts and therefore we can go on ahead to the more finely tuned "Uncovered".. They are both blessings and we are lucky for both...

[struggle4progress]

3. Thanks for the feedback. I haven't seen "Uncovered" yet. eom

[Tamyrlin79]

4. I agree

F 9/11 and Uncovered are different movies that appeal to different constituencies/audiences. Both serve a purpose.

For example, go read the letters on Michael Moore's site (www.michaelmoore.com) that he has put up, all of which are from "former Bush supporters" and "ex-Republicans" and people whose "eyes have been opened". It is a great read, and I highly recommend it. Moore did his movie Just Right. His movie is like the "My Pet Goat"-Why-You-Should-Not-Mindlessly-Trust-Bush-and-the-Republicans Primer. It forces people to see things from a different perspective, from a different paradigm. And just as Michael Moore showed the twin towers without pictures, he screamed his truth without actually saying it. He doesn't tell you in the end what to think about the information, but everyone comes out thinking it nonetheless. It leaves viewers with more questions than answers, but the ultimate conclusions are still unmistakeable.

From this perspective, Fahrenheit 9/11 is true art: The most important moments in the movie aren't seen but imagined, the most important points aren't spoken but implied. By doing so, the movie gained the power to turn its mirrored lens into the dark abyss and give people a glance of the true face of the emptiness at its heart.

[fearnobush]

5. Uncovered Turned my sister to the truth. You can't deny over 400 years

of Gov. experience in CIA etc picking apart the lies that led us to war. Greenwald was on Norville last night and CIA Behr and McGovern, they sliced apart the GOP fools who attempted to Fox news them as Greenwald said on the show, "You can't get away with that here, this is not Fox news."