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May 24, 2004
Fahrenheit 9/11

New York Times article about Michael Moore award winning movie
Fahrenheit 9/11: Frank Rich (NY Times): Michael Moore's Candid Camera.

Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of "news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?

Interesting to note the difference in coverage of the awards given the movie in Cannes in the US and here in Norway. While the US coverage seems to label the movie as "Anti-bush", the norwegian coverage talks about the movie as critical to the war and the U.S. administration.

[Via Dan Gillmor]

Posted by jarle at 01:45 AM | Comments (20)