When
World Trade Center ended, I left the
theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb
directing and acting, coupled with still hardly
imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had
sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked
tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and
indelible images of that hellish morning of
September 11, 2001.
I felt disoriented in
the bright sunlight of a northern California
afternoon. As my mind regained its critical
faculties, however, another kind of shock set in.
I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone's movie
reinforces the Big Lie - endlessly repeated by
Vice President Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified
by the right-wing media - that the attacks of
September 11 were somehow linked to
Iraq
or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
It might surprise you that this Stone film
is neither ideological nor conspiratorial, which
in my view is just as it should be. Instead, it is
a portrayal of what the men who braved hell and
the families who anguished over their survival
experienced.
World Trade Center
gives September 11 a distinctly human face by
following two New York/New Jersey Port Authority
policemen and their families. We watch the men
muster their courage to help evacuate people in
one of the towers; we gasp as they are buried
alive; we wince as heavy slabs of concrete crush
their bodies; and we hold our breath as they
struggle to keep each other going in the face of
imminent death.
NOTES
AND QUOTES "You'd never know it from the
news reports, but our enemy in Iraq is al-Qaeda,
the same terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans
on 9/11, the same terrorists from the first
World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole,
Madrid, London and many
more." - From a TV advertisement
placed by the American organization Families
United for our Troops and their Families, in
early 2006.
"We rejected the ad because it's
not true about our station ... We don't see a
reason to let someone take an unfair shot at
us." - TV station KSTP in
Minnesota, rejecting the ad not because it was
nonsense but because it was critical of the
media.
Expert editing brings us
the anguish suffered by their wives, children and
relatives. Some are in denial, others in shock.
Some have faith; others are resigned to the men's
deaths. They live in their own hell and we
empathize with their wrenching agony.
With
a subtle touch, Stone shows us people all over the
planet horrified by television images of the
aircraft crashing into the towers. He reminds us
that the people of the world expressed an
outpouring of sympathy (since squandered by the
administration of President George W Bush).
Meanwhile, Stone introduces us to one
ex-marine who feels called by God to help rescue
those buried alive. He gets his hair cut short,
puts on his old uniform, and with all the
authority of a former staff sergeant, does what he
knows best - uses his military skills to save
people's lives. Determined and angry, he insists
that we must avenge this horrendous attack.
We also watch a group of Wisconsin police
officers viewing the terrorist attacks on
television. One screams out, "The bastards!"
Stone, in other words, captures the desire for
revenge already in the air.
And yet in
none of these profoundly moving scenes is there
even a mention of who might have committed this
atrocity. Neither the name al-Qaeda nor Osama bin
Laden is so much as whispered.
You might
say, "But everyone knows it was al-Qaeda." And
you'd be right, but do most Americans really know
just who those terrorists were or that they had no
connection to Iraq - that not a single one of them
even came from that country?
It doesn't
sound very important until you realize that
various polls over the past five years have
reported that from 20% to 50% of Americans still
believe Iraqis were on those planes. (They were
not.) As of early 2005, according to a Harris
poll, 47% of Americans were convinced that Saddam
actually helped plan the attack and supported the
hijackers.
And in February, according to a
unique Zogby poll of US troops serving in Iraq,
"85% said the US mission is mainly 'to retaliate
for Saddam's role in the [September 11] attacks';
77% said they also believe the main or a major
reason for the war was 'to stop Saddam from
protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq'".
"The Big
Lie", first coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925
autobiography Mein Kampf, was made famous
by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the
Third Reich. The idea was simple enough: tell a
whopper (the larger the better) often enough and
most people will come to accept it as the truth.
During World War II, the predecessor of
the US Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of
Strategic Services, described how the Germans used
the Big Lie: "They never allow the public to cool
off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede
that there may be some good in your enemy; never
leave room for alternatives; never accept blame;
concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him
for everything that goes wrong; people will
believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if
you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner
or later believe it."
This is, in fact,
just what the Bush administration has been doing
ever since September 2001. As a result, in 2005,
an American Broadcasting Co/Washington Post poll
found that 56% of Americans still thought Iraq had
possessed weapons of mass destruction "shortly
before the war", and 60% still believed Iraq had
provided "direct support" to al-Qaeda prior to the
war. In June, Fox News ran a story once again
dramatizing the supposed links between September
11 and Iraq. And, as recently as last month, a
Harris poll found that 64% of those polled "say it
is true that Saddam Hussein had strong links to
al-Qaeda".
The Bush administration's Big
Lie has worked very well. Cheney, the point man on
this particular lie, has repeated it year after
year. In a similar way, President Bush has
repeatedly explained his 2003 invasion of Iraq,
which had nothing whatsoever to do with September
11, by insisting that the US must fight terrorists
in that country so that it does not have to fight
them in the US. (It turned out to be something of
a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Neither these
nor so many other administration statements had a
shred of truth to them. Even Bush, who repeatedly
linked Saddam to the terrorist organization behind
the September 11 attacks, admitted on September
18, 2003, that there was no evidence the deposed
Iraqi dictator had had a hand in them. But that
didn't stop Cheney from endlessly repeating the
Big Lie that justifies America's invasion and
occupation of Iraq.
Most of the
controversy over World Trade Center has
focused on whether, as the fifth anniversary of
the attacks approaches, it is still too soon for a
cinematic depiction of these horrendous events.
For some people, perhaps that may well be the
case. I myself don't think it's too soon for such
a film; but I do worry that, powerful and
evocative as it is, it may, however inadvertently,
only deepen waning support for the war in Iraq,
Despite the near flood of documentaries on
the terrorist attacks heading toward the small
screen this September, Stone's film, for many
Americans, may end up being the definitive
cinematic record of what it felt like to be inside
the hellish cyclone known to them simply by the
numbers "9/11".
To offer a faithful
re-creation of that historical catastrophe,
however, Stone owed viewers the whole truth, not
merely a brilliant, graphic portrayal of what
happened and how it affected the lives of some of
those involved.
As it ends, a written
postscript appears that describes what happened to
the buried Port Authority policemen, their
families, and the ex-marine who helped rescue them
(whose last line is: "We're going to need some
good men out there to revenge this").
We
learn that the two men survived an unbearable
number of surgeries and are living with their
families. Next we read that the ex-marine rejoined
and later did two tours of duty in Iraq. At that
moment, I wanted to shout out, "Don't you mean
Afghanistan?" Then I imagined the satisfaction
Cheney and sore-loser Senator Joseph Lieberman
would take in this not-quite-spelled-out linkage
of September 11 and Iraq.
I kept waiting
for what never came - even a note in the
postscript reminding the audience of those who had
actually committed the crime. This is where, by
omission, Stone's film ends up reinforcing the
Bush administration's Big Lie. You could easily
have left the theater thinking that the saintly
ex-marine had gone off to fight those who attacked
the United States.
That evening, I wrote
the words that should have appeared in the
postscript: "Government officials later confirmed
that the organization that plotted the destruction
of the World Trade Center was al-Qaeda, led by
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri,
an Egyptian. Nineteen men executed the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen
of them came from Saudi Arabia; the remaining four
from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon.
None of them came from Iraq."
What
happened to Stone, the filmmaker who gave us
Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July,
Wall Street and Nixon? Despite his
conspiratorial foibles in JFK, he has long
been a movie-maker dedicated to raising tough
questions about America's past. Where did his
commitment to opening historical subjects for
debate go? He was right not to politicize this
film, but truth-telling required that he identify
the terrorists. Truth-telling would have resulted
in his helping to dismantle the Big Lie that has
resulted in the deaths of so many American
soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and has plunged Iraq
into chaos and civil war.
How could Stone
leave it up to viewers to discover for themselves
who committed this crime? And how could he leave
the audience with the impression that there was a
connection, as Cheney has never stopped saying,
between September 11 and Iraq?
This is the
tragic failure of Stone's World Trade
Center. It undercuts the historical value of
the film and reinforces the Biggest Lie of the
past five years, still believed by far too many
Americans - that in Iraq, Americans are fighting
those who attacked their country.
Historian and journalist Ruth
Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles
Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, teaches at
the University of California, Berkeley, and is a
senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new
edition of her most recent book, The World
Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement
Changed America (Penguin, 2001), will be
published with an updated epilogue in 2007.
