The time is October 2007, and America is in anguish, rent by the war in Iraq and by a combustive restiveness at home. Leaving a hotel in Chicago after making a speech while a huge antiwar protest rages nearby, President Bush is suddenly struck down, killed by a sniper’s bullet.
That is the arresting beginning of “Death of a President,” a 90-minute film to be broadcast here in October on More4, a British digital television station. And while depicting the assassination of a sitting president is provocative in itself, this film is doubly so because it has been made to look like a documentary.
Using archival film as well as computer-generated imagery that, for instance, attaches the president’s face to the body of the actor playing him, the film leaves no doubt that the victim is Mr. Bush rather than some generic president.
The local news channel here jumped on it with their daily "fool in the mall" segment, and gleaned a predictable level of erudition on the subject. Most people agree straight away that it's "out of line". Even I, as much as I detest Bush, think it's pretty bad form, to say the very least. But what do you want to do about it? From the thumbnail sketch of the film, it does not sound like an inciteful effort. It's an alternate history excursion of sorts; it's not shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. It may turn out to be somewhat problematic to draw and quarter the film makers for sedition; the usual offended parties may just have to go back to screening TV Land for oblique sexual references.
Mr. Dale said that the focus of the film was on the assassination’s aftermath, as the news media rush to judgment and investigators plumb America’s fear and anger, particularly in communities with most cause to be angry at Mr. Bush. Suspicion soon focuses on Jamal Abu Zikri, a Syrian-born man.
The movie, Mr. Dale said, is “a very powerful examination of what changes are taking place in America” as a result of its foreign policy.
“I believe that the effects of the wars that are being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “are being felt in many ways in the multiracial communities in America and Britain in the number of soldiers who don’t come home, and that people are beginning to ask: ‘When will these body bags stop coming back? Why are we there? When will it stop?’ ”
I have no editorial commentary regarding any of this; unlike the kulturkampfers of the right, I see little utility in pretending to review movies I haven't seen yet. Commenting on orthogonal promotional points and the like are one thing (more on that shortly), but it's impossible to sensibly comment on content at this point.
I will say this, though: the above description sort of elides the matter of who actually commits the fictional regicide, talking about whom "suspicion soon focuses on". And I have no idea if this is the actual case in the movie, obviously, but just as a general observation, were such a thing to occur (and let me be clear about this, just so I don't get a visit from the Secret Service -- I am certainly not viewing even the fictional representation of such a thing the least bit favorably), it wouldn't be the stereotypical crazed Arab. It's the Yigal Amirs and the Timothy McVeighs who do such things, more often than not. That's not to say that it couldn't happen, just that there are certain groups in this country who seem predisposed to resort to violence when they don't get their way, and most of them are neither Arab nor leftist.
If the relatively new meta-art of "pseudodocumentary" making strikes your fancy, then perhaps you'll like the new revisionist doc about to be floated by ABC, which distorts facts and concocts scenarios in order to point the finger of blame for 9/11 at -- who else? -- The Clenis.
ThinkProgress has obtained a response to this scene from Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar for Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and now counterterrorism adviser to ABC:
1. Contrary to the movie, no US military or CIA personnel were on the ground in Afghanistan and saw bin Laden.
2. Contrary to the movie, the head of the Northern Alliance, Masood, was no where near the alleged bin Laden camp and did not see UBL.
3. Contrary to the movie, the CIA Director actually said that he could not recommend a strike on the camp because the information was single sourced and we would have no way to know if bin Laden was in the target area by the time a cruise missile hit it.
In short, this scene — which makes the incendiary claim that the Clinton administration passed on a surefire chance to kill or catch bin Laden — never happened. It was completely made up by Nowrasteh.
The actual history is quite different. According to the 9/11 Commission Report (pg. 199), then-CIA Director George Tenet had the authority from President Clinton to kill Bin Laden. Roger Cressy, former NSC director for counterterrorism, has written, “Mr. Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al-Qaeda.”
So Nowrasteh invents an extremely contentious plot point out of whole cloth. Now why would he do something like that? Does he have an axe to grind?
FP: Share some of the details about the development of the project. How important would you say it is?
Nowrasteh: This miniseries is not just about the tragedy and events of 9/11, it dramatizes "how we got there" going back 8 years to the first attack on the WTC and dealing with the Al Qaeda strikes against U.S. embassies and forces in the 90s, the political lead-up, the hatching of the terrorist plots, etc. We see the heroes on the ground, like FBI agent John O'Neill and others, who after the '93 attack felt sure that the terrorists would strike the WTC again. It also dramatizes the frequent opportunities the Administration had in the 90s to stop Bin Laden in his tracks -- but lacked the will to do so. We also reveal the day-by-day lead-up of clues and opportunities in 2001 right up to the day of the 9/11 attacks. This is a terror thriller as well as a history lesson. I think people will be engaged and enlightened.
FP: When you refer to the failed effort to stop Bin Laden in the 1990s, this was obviously the time of Bill Clinton. How much do you think his administration made us vulnerable to 9/11?
Nowrasteh: The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response -- or lack of response -- to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests. The worst example is the response to the October, 2000 attack on the U.S.S. COLE in Yemen where 17 American sailors were killed. There simply was no response. Nothing.
FP: So could 9/11 have been stopped?
Nowrasteh: Difficult question. Many experts believe it could not have been stopped.[emphasis in original] Maybe if the FBI had been allowed to look into Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop when he was arrested in mid-August, 2001, or if the terrorists on the watch list living in San Diego under their real names had been picked up. No one can say for sure.
In the miniseries we focus on weaknesses and mistakes so that we can learn from them. So that we can be safer, stronger, wiser. We do, though, highlight the heroes on the ground and the small victories (the break-up of the millennium plot) in the lead up to 9/11. Our harshest criticism in the show is for our enemies.
Note the conflation of events and assumptions there in Nowrasteh's responses, and the selective maximizing and downplaying of politically volatile events. You'd think that nothing at all was done after the '93 WTC attacks, though as pointed out earlier, when the Clenis administration went looking for counter-terrorism superpowers from the Republican Congress in '96, they got turned down. Clenis also lobbed missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan in response to the embassy bombings in '97. Whether Nowrasteh means to imply that perhaps we should have sent ground troops in and/or sent in bombing sorties and the like, killing many innocent people while chasing shadows (kinda like we are now), he doesn't really say.
But the breakup of the potentially devastating millennium plot was merely a small victory; the outgoing administration should have initiated a post-Cole op to immediately hand off to the incoming administration (which worked out just super in Somalia); and if his movie mentions the infamous telltale vacation PDB cryptically titled Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S., he doesn't say so here.
So. We have a contentious movie that is demonstrably revisionist. But irony of ironies, this movie is being broadcast and aggressively promoted, even to schoolchildren, as historical fact (which it is clearly not in at least some parts) by the same corporation that refused flat-out to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11.
ABC is planning a massive free distribution of its planned docudrama The Path to 9/11, including sending letters to 100,000 high school teachers encouraging them to have their students watch the series.
Disney passed on what was sure to be a hit movie -- and turned out to be the highest-grossing documentary ever -- but it's giving this thing away. I still assume that Hollywood is at least mostly about money more than anything else, and perhaps they figure that this sort of viral marketing will translate into fat DVD profits on the back end. They may even be right about that. But they need to be more responsible about what sort of mindless contentious finger-pointing they're pushing They couldn't run fast enough from the former, but they can't hump our legs hard enough with the latter. This is curious, to say the least, especially from librul Hollyweird, who sip their frog Chardonnays from the skulls of people from red states.
Maybe it's good in a back-handed way, as it illustrates just how completely bereft of any cognition the movementarians behind this project are. Clenis-baiting was the sport of the '90s, and I certainly enjoyed my fair share of cheap shots at the guy. But bringing him up now just reminds everyone that we used to have a guy who could speak and think extemporaneously, and didn't talk to his citizens like a fourth-grader who just crammed for a pop quiz.
I take issue with the use of the adjective in the phrase "a combustive restiveness at home" (my emphasis). At this point, in mid- to late 2006, the atmosphere is far from combustive in America. I'm not a prophet, nor do I work for any of the "think" tanks, so here's my devalued twopennorth: with regard to the war, the general atmosphere is rather puzzled-apathetic because (1) for the first time in history, a country can afford to wage two wars with only a minor bump in its industrial output (I guess the 400 or so billions poured down the drain in Iaq will only come to bite America in its ever-expanding behind a few years down the road--but not right now); and (2) it may be far from combustive because it's far from clear what should be done about the Land of the Two Rivers. Neither the Decider's staying the course nor its opponents's calls for am immediate withdrawal come with the prospect of immediate, long-lasting benefits. So maybe people just don't know what to do. Combustion requires a politically significant mass who feel confident they have resort to a feasible solution, but are being prevented from implementing it by the status quo. I don't see that happening on a large-scale in the States (obviously, I am here dismissing wild-eyed British liberals for whom nothing short of violent action would accomplish anything at all).
ReplyDeleteAlso, Heywood: inciteful? I'm just a foreigner, you know that, so I was puzzled by the word. Surely you didn't mean 'insightful,' did you?
--M.
Yeah, I agree with you there, the setup feels a bit contrived, but I suppose that's to speed up exposition and initial narrative. Obviously any restiveness in the U.S. is simply not organized or focused enough to qualify as "combustive", and if it were, it would not be from an Arab cell with an assigned mission. It would be from a disgruntled group of domestics, whether disaffected evangelicals feeling "betrayed" for not getting enough SCOTUS justices to flip Griswold, or the usual separatist cranks perpetually preparing for racial apocalypse.
ReplyDeleteAgain, it's hard to really spank that one without actually seeing the movie or knowing a little more about it, but that phrase does sound a bit gimmicky in the setup. I suppose we'll see, now that the movie has ginned up the requisite controversy.
As for "inciteful", it is something of a neologism, as far as I know, generally used as somewhat ironic contrast with its obvious homophone. The technically correct usage of incite as an adjective is actually "incitable", but that seems somehow incomplete and passive in describing the deliberately provocative, inflammatory rhetoric that drives much of the discourse. A quick googling of the word does show some usage of it, but it's probably not technically correct. Pretty good catch for a foreigner.