A Frightening 'Hijacking'

A TV clip of President Bush from the documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe." (Media Education Foundation)

THE LATEST in the growing series of 9/11-themed documentaries, beginning with Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and including Robert Greenwald's "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," opens with by-now familiar-sounding quotes from government officials about our reasons for going to war with Iraq, chief among which is the now-dubious "fact" that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. What follows these quotes is a passage of text that is no less pertinent:

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Sound familiar? That's Nazi Hermann Goering, speaking during the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

It's a powerful introduction to a powerful little film, one that drives home even deeper the message that "Fahrenheit" and its ilk attempted to deliver -- that the American people were lied to about what led us to Iraq, and that our post-Cold War willingness to unilaterally engage in military action is part of a deliberate and long-standing policy espoused by such neoconservatives as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who advocated preemptive regime change in the Middle East and elsewhere as long ago as the early 1990s.

More sober, yet no less sobering, than Moore's alternately clownish and gut-wrenching diatribe, "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire" presents the facts without any funny business. Which is not to say it's dull. This film presents its argument in a way that is both cogent, concise and engaging.

Part of the reason is that the argument, as packaged by filmmakers Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp (with the able assistance of such recent documentary stalwarts as Noam Chomsky, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams) is itself so frightening.

Where "Hijacking" does its job best is in laying out the historical details of what Kwiatkowski calls the "storyline" leading up to the Iraq invasion, a narrative fiction prepared and sold by neocons to a gullible, and scared, public. But for what purpose? As was done in "Fahrenheit" and other films, the emphasis here is, of course, on the urgency of the U.S. need to secure our access to Middle Eastern oil. (Incidentally, I think many viewers would benefit if the film gave a little more background on the so-called "peak oil" theory it puts forward, which holds that from this point forward, fossil fuel will only get scarcer and more expensive as we use up what little is left.)

But it's not all about oil dependence, in Jhally and Earp's view. As its title suggests, "Hijacking" presents an America that is as much about the pathological display of imperial power -- a showmanship of arrogance and violence -- as policy.

Watching the Republican National Convention crowds recently chanting, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!," like jingoistic fans at a global football game, it wasn't hard for me to imagine that there might be some truth to the picture of America as the international bully that this movie portrays.

HIJACKING CATASTROPHE: 9/11, FEAR AND THE SELLING OF AMERICAN EMPIRE (Unrated, 64 minutes) -- Contains images of violence and war casualties. At Visions Bar Noir.