Has anyone seen this documentary? Same general theme as F9/11 minus the MM propaganda. I read an op piece in the paper this morning (by a liberal writer) and she says its very good. Sticks to facts for a change. Id consider seeing this one. It was produced by a Muslim woman I believe.
FBR
edited to add
By: Ellen Belcher, Dayton Daily News
Moore's diatribe is avowed propaganda and occasionally funny if you can forget for a moment that the controversial filmmaker is taking you for a dope. To wit: He makes a big deal out of the fact that during his first year in office, President George W. Bush was on vacation and out of Washington for weeks. But presidents don't really take vacations.
They can go golfing or horseback riding, but they don't leave the job in the same way the rest of us do. Moore is just being cinematically juvenile, appealing to the populist instincts that we all have but know are silly when applied to a whole lot of things besides the presidency.
Control Room, on the other hand, won't entertain you or let you leave the theater feeling superior to the idiots Moore would have you believe are in charge. Instead, you might have some doubts about what you thought you know and believe.
Noujaim's 86-minute film is unabashedly anti-war and anti-Bush. But it gets its power not by manipulating the facts, but by honestly showing how truth can be both intentionally and unintentionally illusive in war. Noujaim chronicles events and journalists working at CentCom — the U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar — in the run-up to war and for the first few weeks of combat. Mainly, she focuses on three subjects — two journalists working for the controversial Arabic satellite television channel al-Jazeera and American Lt. Josh Rushing, whose job is to get journalists to report what the U.S. military wants them and the rest of the world to know.
Not surprisingly, al-Jazeera, which the Bush administration has condemned as the voice of Osama bin Laden, sees the war through a different lens than the American media. When U.S. troops were pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, its reporters said that the people chanting in the streets had been brought to the scene by the American military. The channel's footage does looks less overwhelming than what I remembered seeing on U.S. television; and in light of the ongoing and fierce attacks from insurgents, the event does seem to have created at least excessive, if not wrong, expectations about how Iraqis would greet American soldiers.
When an al-Jazeera reporter is killed in a U.S. military attack, the station sees the act as revenge for its coverage. (The military says it was taking fire from the building where the al-Jazeera reporter was staying, a charge it also makes about the Palestine Hotel, which was also fired on. American and international journalists staying at the hotel strongly dispute that anyone was shooting from there.)
Noujaim, a Harvard-educated Egyptian-American, is patient with conversation and conflict. She captures civil but spirited arguments between Rushing and al-Jazeera's Hassan Ibrahim. The Arab journalist is infinitely confident in American democracy even though he thinks the U.S. military is feeding gullible and pliant U.S. journalists information that is wrong and dangerous. He can't get over how the Bush administration has been able to galvanize the Arab world against the United States by overthrowing someone so despised by Arabs. What's wrong with that picture, he asks.
Ibrahim and other al-Jazeera journalists say the Bush administration did not understand how the toppling would be seen as yet another humiliation of Arabs, who already believe Americans are indifferent, if not hostile, to the plight of Palestinians. The argument is a foreign view of things in every sense of the word to most people in this country. But it helps explain the unrest and violence that continues — and it comes not just from the point of view of Saddam loyalists.
The al-Jazeera journalists, who routinely refer to suicide bombers in Israel as martyrs and who aren't ashamed of their ideological and emotional reporting, are by no means treated as infallible. Control Room makes them look silly for refusing to take the military's word that tanks were rolling into Baghdad until they actually saw them in living color. The reporters' nationalism is declared and acknowledged. But the American journalists are shown to have decided loyalties and particular perspectives themselves, even as they struggle for their professed objectivity.
The unsettling upshot is that viewers are left questioning not just the truthfulness of what they see and hear, but whether truth is something that can even be discerned with certainty.
By the end of the film, everybody has learned something from, or conceded something to, the other. Rushing, the Marine spokesman, is ashamed to say that when he saw the al-Jazeera footage of bombed Iraqi civilians he wasn't pained in the same way as when he saw pictures of U.S. POWs who had been brutalized and killed. For his part, Ibrahim candidly bemoans the conspiratorial Arab mindset. And, in an amazing and cynical twist, an al-Jazeera boss confesses that he'd take a job with Fox News in a heartbeat and intends to send his children to American universities, fully expecting them never to come home to the "Arab nightmare."
The truths you learn from Control Room are about the human beings who give it its dramatic life. Its facts about the war, on the other hand, aren't so clear-cut.
Ellen Belcher is editor of the Dayton Daily News editorial pages. Her telephone number is 225-2286; her e-mail address is [email protected].
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