An 'Uncovered' look at war
Those moviegoers waiting in line for hours at a Santa Monica theater Tuesday night weren't queuing up for the final installment of the "Matrix" trilogy. They couldn't wait to get into the screening of "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War," filmmaker Robert Greenwald's new documentary.
Unlike the glitzy premieres last week in Washington, D.C., and New York, which drew luminaries from Hillary Clinton to Moby, here Greenwald invited longtime local activists, including some who got their start nearly four decades ago protesting the Vietnam War. Among the sponsors: Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, radio station KPFK, Code Pink, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Global Women's Strike.
These fifty-somethings ("Don't put my age in the paper!"), with their bald heads and bifocals, packed the theater, squabbling over seats, sitting on the floor and standing against the walls for an hourlong film that is not in general release, though available on DVD via liberal Web sites like moveon.org, buzzflash.com and thenation.com.
"We've sold 30,000 copies and raised $850,000 for MoveOn since the movie became available a week ago," Greenwald said at the screening. He chose not to distribute the film through theaters, he said, "to avoid the gatekeepers" and to get the movie out as quickly and as widely as possible.
He made the film after listening to the Bush Administration's justification for war evolve from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, including the threat of a mushroom cloud, to the subsequent explanation of evidence of a program to create those weapons.
"We went to war over a program," Greenwald said.
But he doesn't use his own voice to make his argument in the film.
Using interviews and news footage from the major networks, CNN and C-Span (only Fox refused to provide clips), the film quotes old CIA spooks, diplomats and weapons inspectors -- national security types who are typically loyal to the president -- explaining why they believed the White House knew or should have known that no such weapons existed before the first soldier was sent to Iraq. Their comments are juxtaposed with those of the administration all-stars: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
This Veteran Day's audience was not their kind of crowd.
