[news] REVIEW: movie--hijacking catastrophe

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 http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2004/07/27890.php

REVIEW: movie--hijacking catastrophe

<mailto:montfu65 at hotmail.com>

    As Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 cleans up in movie theaters
    nationwide, and with antiwar documentaries all the rage these days,
    I went to see another, less heralded account of how and why we were
    lied into war: Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, & the Selling of
    American Empire, and it is (almost) everything I hoped Moore's opus
    would be. Narrated by Julian Bond (yes, that Julian Bond), this film
    zeroes in on a subject completely neglected by Moore: the key role
    played by the neoconservatives in agitating for and rationalizing
    the invasion of Iraq. 


REVIEW: movie--hijacking catastrophe
=================================


"By helping us understand how fear is being actively cultivated and 
manipulated by the current administration, Hijacking Catastrophe stands 
to become an explosive and empowering information weapon in this 
decisive year in U.S. history."
Naomi Klein


KERRY AND THE 'ANTIWAR' LEFT
'HIJACKING CATASTROPHE' IS A GREAT MOVIE

By: Justin Raimondo

As Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 cleans up in movie theaters 
nationwide, and with antiwar
documentaries all the rage these days, I went to see another, less 
heralded account of how and why
we were lied into war: Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, & the Selling 
of American Empire,
and it is (almost) everything I hoped Moore's opus would be. Narrated by 
Julian Bond (yes, that Julian
Bond http://www.naacp.org/leadership/bond.shtml), this film zeroes in on 
a subject completely neglected by Moore: the key role played by the
neoconservatives in agitating for and rationalizing the invasion of Iraq.

But before they let us see the movie – it was some kind of a benefit for 
something called "No
American Left Behind" – the sponsors of this showing at San Francisco's 
Roxie Theater subjected
us to endless harangues, "poetry" readings, and other "entertainment," 
which was so maddeningly
predictable and boring that it was almost enough to send me running from 
the theater, screaming.

First up was some guy who I thought I recognized – hey, wasn't he 
panhandling outside the theater
when I bought my ticket? At any rate, it was hard to tell, since he was 
wearing sunglasses and a
cheap suit: he was supposed to be a CIA agent, ya see, and …. Well, you 
had to be there, really,
because this was the Left's idea of "humor" – and was about as funny as 
one of Fidel Castro's three-
and-a-half-hour marathon speaking jags.

The MC – a 20-something woman who said "Um," "Ah," and "you know" a lot, 
punctuated by
bouts of baffling silence – then stepped up to the microphone, to give 
us her take on things:
yesterday, she mournfully informed us, was July 4th, but "it wasn't 
really a day for celebration."
Hey, so what about all those fireworks they shot over the Bay, and those 
crowds of rollicking
party-goers getting rowdy in the streets? Oh well, never mind, they were 
all probably evil
reactionaries, because, as Ms. PC lectured us, "fireworks were 
inappropriate" when bombs were
raining down on Iraq.

Helloooooooooooooo! Earth calling San Francisco lefties – the bombing of 
Iraq is (pretty much)
over, but, aside from that, Independence Day is a celebration of an 
anti-imperialist war in which
the Good Guys won. I realize they don't teach American History in 
schools anymore, but those feisty
Americans, you may have heard, rose up, kicked out the British king, and 
started a country all their
own….

Oh, well, never mind: I don't think this well-meaning and quite 
attractive Comrade Ninotchka
had the faintest inkling of the true meaning of Independence Day, 
because in her very next breath
she opined that the race for the White House "is a global election."


I think the president's neocon advisors and cheerleaders would agree, to 
a certain extent: their
perspective, too, is global in scope, albeit coming from a somewhat 
different direction, as the film
we were about to see made all too clear. Oh, but they weren't going to 
let us see it quite yet. Not
by a long shot….

Next up was a poetess of some energy, but little relevance and even less 
talent, who went into a
long, convoluted rap about her grandfather and all his many problems, 
her father and all his many
problems, all of which seemed somehow traceable to George W. Bush and 
those e-vile Republicans.

Good lord, I thought, is there to be no end to this? Where in god's name 
is this mooo-vie?!

I realized, then, with some alarm, that the organizers of this shindig 
had hijacked the audience – and
it was fast turning into a friggin' catastrophe that only got worse with 
the introduction of some guy
named Dan Bern, who did a great imitation of Bob Dylan, except for the 
lyrics. His little
ditty, "Talking Al Kida Blues" is all about how the 9/11 terrorist 
attacks weren't all that bad:

"It was a beautiful day in New York town
"Folks jogging, biking, walking 'round
"When a couple of airplanes came around
"Hit the big towers, knocked 'em down
"Worst disaster on US soil ever!
"Course, there's the Indians, a few million slaves...Enron...Anyway, it 
was worse than
Pearl Harbor!"

Ugh.

Gee, I wonder if anyone in the World Trade Center (or even the Pentagon) 
ever owned a slave.
Nah, probably not. And there were probably a few Injuns hanging around 
the WTC and/or the
vicinity of the Pentagon that day. Oh, but don't bother Dan Bern with 
those messy little details:
individuals don't fit into his moral calculus. We're all collectively 
guilty – of being Americans.

Bern had no sooner finished his clueless warbling when the audience 
burst into enthusiastic
applause. That's when I started to act up, booing loudly. Heads turned. 
Well, let them turn, I
thought. These people have to realize the evil of what they're 
applauding: there has to be some
audible dissent. And, believe me, I know how to be audible….

Thankfully for everyone concerned, the warbling didn't go on much 
longer: after torturing
us for what seemed like an eternity, the Commies in charge took pity and 
decided to show the
movie. Yayyyyyyy! And it was great stuff: the opening shows clips of the 
president and his men l
ying through their teeth about "weapons of mass destruction": "We know 
they're there," we're
"certain" they're there, we've seen them as if with our very own eyes
.
There's something about a lie shot in black-and-white that underscores 
the venality and sinister
motives of the liars. After enduring over an hour of pious generalities 
uttered with unbearable
smugness, the opening shots of Hijacking Catastrophe were like a bracing 
splash of cold clear
air let into a stuffy overheated room.

This question is posed directly to the audience at the very beginning: 
Okay, so if "weapons of
mass destruction" and Saddam's alleged hand in 9/11 were propagandistic 
illusions, then what
were the real reasons we went to war? I'm not so sure that we get a 
single answer from the
makers of this film, but we do get a few very interesting and sensible 
explanations, aside from
the usual "it's all about oil" bilge.

After flashing onscreen a quote from Goering about how to manipulate the 
populace into
getting behind a war, the film segues straight into a rendering of the 
"Blueprint for Empire" –
and its authors. Rather than focus on anonymous forces, economic or 
otherwise, the film
homes in on specific individuals, giving us an overview of the 
neoconservative faction embedded
in this administration, and focusing on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul 
Wolfowitz. Particular
attention is paid to the presentiment of the preemption doctrine 
outlined in Wolfie's 1992
memorandum, now infamous, in which the goal of global military hegemony 
was first
advanced in government circles. With commentary from retired Col. Karen 
Kwiatkowski, a
former Pentagon analyst, Chalmers Johnson, Norman Mailer, William 
Hartung, Immanuel
Wallerstein, and a number other well-informed neocon-watchers, the story 
of how a small but
very well-connected sect hijacked American foreign policy and pushed 
relentlessly for war with
Iraq is told clearly and succinctly.

Hijacking Catastrophe points to a key neocon group, the Project for the 
New American Century
(PNAC), founded in 1997, as the catalyst for much of what we are seeing 
unfold in Iraq today.
Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are all associated with 
PNAC, and, during the
Clinton era, the group spent much of its energy issuing open letters 
signed by prominent
neocons (in both parties) calling for war with Iraq and a more hardline 
anti-Arab, pro-Israel
shift in American foreign policy. In 2000 PNAC issued a report 
predicting that their proposed
"transformation" of U.S. military and diplomatic policy in the Middle 
East wouldn't come very
quickly, barring the occurrence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing 
event, like a new Pearl
Harbor."

The neocons soon had their wish, and they moved quickly to take full 
advantage of the opportunity
9/11 presented. The Wolfowitz Doctrine of imperial preemption was a 
theory waiting for just such
a catastrophe, and the hijacking of the American government was 
relatively easy under the
circumstances. Col. Kwiatkowski goes into the details of how the 
architects of empire, acting under
the rubric of the "Office of Special Plans," built a big lie with bits 
and pieces of isolated "truths."
It wasn't "a failure of intelligence" that landed us in the Middle East 
quagmire, but a conscious
deception carried out by highly placed government officials and their 
media amen corner: the
neoconservative network.

On the motives for the Iraq war, there is dissent in the ranks: some 
come out with the "war for
oil" line, but Wallerstein and Tariq Ali concur that it isn't so much 
oil as an act of pure
intimidation. The makers of this film seem to implicitly agree, as they 
analyze the methods and
meaning of "shock and awe," which is, as they point out, "the practical 
application of the
Wolfowitz Doctrine." There isn't a whole lot of oil coming out of Iraq, 
but there sure does
seem to be a lot of intimidation going on over there, and so I'm with , 
Ali, and, I think,
Chalmers Johnson on this one. As the latter puts it in the film: the 
invasion and occupation of
Iraq was meant as an awe-inspiring "demonstration of imperial power."

I suppose it's unavoidable that a requisite amount of leftist dogma is 
going to worm its way into
a film of this kind, but Hijacking Catastrophe is remarkably free of 
this sort of nonsense: the
worst naturally comes from Mailer, who smirks that the real role of 
government, rather than
spying on U.S. citizens, is to act to "impede" the wealthy at every 
turn. President Mailer would
declare Martha Stewart an "enemy combatant." Why am I not surprised?

But Mailer's inanities take up only a few minutes of wasted footage out 
of a solid hour of hardcore
factual reporting: Hijacking Catastrophe has the narrative tension of a 
good detective story, tracing
the documentary evidence straight back to the neoconservative suspects 
in this case of the War
Party vs. the American People.

Abstract economic interests – oil, Haliburton's profit margin, etc. – 
don't explain the breadth
and depth of the long-term campaign to drag us, kicking and screaming, 
into the Middle East
with an army of 120,000 or so, at a cost of a hundred billion-plus and 
counting. As this excellent
film points out, the blueprint for war was laid down a decade ago, by 
people who knew what
they wanted, and who promulgated ideas that gained currency at the top 
levels of government.

I really really like this movie, but it isn't without faults. Where 
Hijacking Catastrophe falls
down is in its analysis of the Clinton years. They don't mention the 
Iraq Liberation Act, passed
in the Clinton era, and with full Democratic party support, which first 
proclaimed "regime change"
as a matter of official policy. Nor do they mention, even in passing, 
the pioneering role of the
Clintonites in pushing the idea of "humanitarian" interventionism, as in 
Haiti, Bosnia, and the
former Yugoslavia. The neocons may have been largely out of government 
during the Clinton
years, but this is to ignore the neocon network inside the Democratic 
party. If the Weekly Standard
is the flagship organ of the neocon GOPers, then its Democratic party 
equivalent is The New
Republic, which has been practically the house organ of the War Party 
since the days of Woodrow
Wilson. Two of the leading Democratic presidential primary contenders, 
Dick Gephardt and Joe
Lieberman, vocally supported the decision to go to war, and continue to 
do so. All this goes
politely unmentioned, along with the decades-long history of the 
neoconservatives, which is
nowhere even touched on. Yet it's common knowledge they're all former 
"Scoop" Jackson
Democrats, with their intellectual forefathers (Irving Kristol and Max 
Shachtman) coming
straight out of the Trotskyist sects of the 1930s and into the 
Democratic party.

Partisan politics and ideological prejudices are the enemies of truth, 
and, therefore, of good
filmmaking. To the extent that Hijacking Catastrophe indulges in either, 
the camera lens seems
to blur and the narrative tends to meander, and annoy. This movie was 
mercifully without these
deforming characteristics, for the most part: it's just too bad I can't 
say as much about the rest
of that evening.

So you thought because the movie was over that they were going to let us 
go out in to the
night with our own thoughts, unfiltered and unchecked for political 
correctness? Not so fast….

The 20-something mistress of ceremonies again took the stage. I don't 
remember if we had to
listen to another poem about somebody's grandfather, at that point, 
although I believe so. I got
out of there as fast as I could. Never have I needed a cigarette more. 
By the time I got back in
they were already introducing the featured speaker of the evening: Medea 
Benjamin, activist
and author, a founder of "Code Pink," a women's antiwar group, and a 
local Green Party
luminary
.
I call her "Media" Benjamin, since she's so fond of publicity and has no 
trouble generating it
in the lefty-liberal Bay Area. No protest against "Big Oil" or budget 
cuts is complete without
media-savvy Medea stealing the spotlight and performing for the cameras, 
which is why the
MC, in her introduction, averred that the speaker needed none (but gave 
one anyway).

My last encounter with Ms. Benjamin had been at an antiwar rally early 
on in the Iraq conflict.
She was standing around looking important as I told Alex Cockburn that I 
was curious why,
since the platform was festooned with banners from the "Socialist Action 
League" and the
"Workers Anarchist Collective," they had somehow neglected to have a 
single American flag
on stage. Medea sneered and declared that she wouldn't want to see an 
American flag anywhere
near the place. (Cockburn, by the way, agreed with me, and said he had 
always been very
pro-flag.)

All this as a precis to the astonishing content of Ms. Benjamin's 
speech, which had me sitting
there open-mouthed, sputtering with disbelief. She wanted to create, she 
explained, a get-out-
the-vote campaign on behalf of … John Kerry. The only possible purpose 
of "progressive"
politics at this point is to get George W. Bush out of the White House. 
Sure, she admitted, he
has some … uh, deficiencies. She didn't get too specific. Nowhere did 
she so much as mention
his support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Nor did she deign 
to acknowledge that he
is campaigning on a promise to send more troops, and explicitly and 
vehemently opposes
a U.S. withdrawal. But she held out the hope that we might build a 
"movement" that could
"pressure Kerry." And "if they steal this election," she thundered, 
"we'll bring people out into
the streets!" To the barricades for Kerry! That's Medea's battle-cry.

I sat, and listened, in silence, except for an occasional sputter, as 
long as I could. Then I
began to … say things. Loudly. When she got to the part about how we 
must "pressure"
Kerry, I suppressed a number of possible (and highly obscene) responses 
and, instead, let
loose with a skeptical laugh. When she admitted that her hero Kerry 
"isn't perfect" I couldn't
help but agree: "You got that right!" And when she looked at me, and 
complained that she
could use some "respect" from me, I again repressed my Rabelaisian 
instincts and instead
pointed out, in a calm and measured tone, that she is nothing but a 
shill for warmongers
in the Democratic party and she ought to be ashamed of herself. Well, 
she didn't like that,
and thought it was "rude" and "disrespectful" of me to say these things, 
to which my answer
was: chill out, Medea, this is the "participatory democracy" you told us 
you wanted.

That got her off on a tangent, and she went into this whole riff about 
how we can't really
do anything – except, of course, vote for Kerry – until we "reform" the 
entire electoral
process. First, by getting rid of the Electoral College, and then by 
allowing for proportional
representation, "like in Europe." And all of this is to be supported 
with tax dollars: the
parties, the campaign funding, everything. We need "minority voices," 
she wailed – even
as her Democratic party bosses were kicking Ralph Nader off the ballot 
in Arizona,
and challenging his election petitions everywhere in a concerted effort 
to still that
particular minority voice. Is Medea in favor of that? She never even 
mentioned it.

Ms. Benjamin and her fellow Code Pinkos are worse than political whores. 
Their strategy
boils down to selling out their alleged antiwar principles in pursuit of 
some vague opportunity
to apply "pressure," with no rational expectation that it will have any 
effect – or any indication
of what this "pressure" will consist of. As the peerless Matt Taibbi put 
it in a wonderful article a
bout how the Greens rejected Nader in favor of some unknown pro-Kerry 
California lawyer:
"But this line of reasoning doesn't make sense for the Green Party. If 
you're going to suck a cock
in a train-station lavatory, you ought to at least get something for it."

So how did Kerry get the leftie "radical" Media Benjamin to stand on 
streetcorners for
him? Do you think she's whoring just for the sheer fun of it, or is she 
somehow getting paid off?
I'm not talking about money payments: that's too clean, too obvious, too 
direct, and far too traceable.
What the Greens-for-Kerry "movement" provides is psychological payment 
via access to power,
either real imaginary.

I mean, how and why do the Medea Benjamins of this world ever think 
they'll be able to
"pressure" Kerry into withdrawing from Iraq, or, for that matter, 
implementing any of the
multitude of domestic projects they have in mind? They like to imagine 
they will have Kerry's
ear, or the ears of his closest advisors. Power is such a strong 
intoxicant that even a saint – or,
perhaps, especially those who imagine themselves saints – can fall 
victim to its temptations even by standing inproximity to it. So that 
even purely imaginary influence is enough to satisfy the aspiring power 
junkie.

Another psychological pay-off comes with the illusion of dissidence: 
these "Greens" can
still maintain the stylistic pretensions of "antiwar" protesters in the 
very act of supporting a
pro-war candidate. But that's what you get with a party named after a 
color: all style, and no
substance.

Oh well, it was an evening well spent. In-person political combat is 
exhilarating, and fun,
every once in a while, and this event sure did get my juices flowing. 
What I found absolutely
outrageous is how this showing of Hijacked Catastrophe was itself 
hijacked by the Democratic
wing of the War Party. This underscores the great danger that this 
election year poses for s
o-called "progressive" activists, especially if the Medea Strategy winds 
up betraying – and killing – their own offspring, which is the antiwar 
movement. The horrible irony is that this represents not only a 
diversion away from the goals of peace in the Middle East, it channels 
the resources of the so-called "peace movement" directly into the ranks 
of the War Party.
Medea Benjamin and her "progressive" ilk play on the sense of imminent 
crisis, and the panic of the American people, much as the War Party 
does, only in reverse. If we don't throw those neocons out of there 
immediately, terrible things will happen. Never mind principles, this is 
an emergency!
Where have we heard all this before?
Antiwar activists looking for immediate results are setting themselves 
up for disappointment, just as Ms. Benjamin and her cohorts are setting 
people up for a President Kerry likely to prosecute the war in Iraq as 
fiercely and unapologetically as Lyndon Baines Johnson prosecuted the 
war in Vietnam. Kerry's vice presidential pick, John Edwards, is no 
peacenik, either: Edwards consistently and aggressively plumbed for 
invading Iraq, echoing each and every lie told by this administration in 
the run-up to war, and has never changed his position. If Medea and her 
friends are so sure of their power to influence and "pressure" Kerry and 
the Democrats, then why didn't they "mobilize" in favor of a pro-peace 
Democrat for the vice-presidential slot?
These people are all talk, and no action, that's why: they're fakes, 
frauds, and liars themselves, just like the neocons, only they're far 
less successful at it (for the moment, at any rate).
When President Kerry puts more troops in Iraq, the blood they shed will 
be on his supporters' hands. For this reason alone, the antiwar movement 
should reject the Benjamin strategy of betrayal and impotence without 
hesitation, or regret.

http://www.mediaed.org/videos/CommercialismPoliticsAndMedia/HijackingCatastrophe

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