For more than a year now, we’ve been writing about the lies and distortions used by the Bush Administration to shove the invasion of Iraq down the throats of the American people. There were the stories of the mobile labs that weren’t, the uranium yellow cake that wasn’t, the aluminum tubes that couldn’t. There were the warnings about terror alerts and threats to national security that became justifications for war and the suspension of some of our most basic freedoms.
Finally, the mainstream media interrupted their program of relentless war drums, partly due to the “suicide” of a British weapons expert, partly due to the bravery of people who left the administration in disgust, and partly because it was impossible to look the other way any longer.
If you are interested in learning about the scope and scale of the deception, go to one of the upcoming showings of the new documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War by filmmaker Robert Greenwald. It’s a joint effort between MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank created by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, and features diplomats, military intelligence officers, scientists and spies who talk about the misrepresentations that led us to war. More than 30,000 copies of the DVD have been sold so far from on-line sites such as MoveOn.org, Alternet and the Nation Institute, Variety reports.
The Independent is sponsoring a free showing at 7 p.m. Monday night at The Carolina Theatre in Durham. There’ll be a discussion afterward led by Rania Masri, a human rights advocate and environmental scientist who is the program director at The Institute for Southern Studies, which is leading its own fight against war profiteering. She has been studying Iraq for more than eight years and is working on a documentary about the Iraqi people.
And other showings are scheduled Sunday night in Raleigh and Durham; see Act Now and the Movie Spotlight.
But, of course, the deceptions don’t end with the film. Now, we’ve got a ban on photos of coffins being unloaded at military bases, the squelching of outrage over the religious rantings of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, and news of a top-secret CIA report that warns problems are so bad in Iraq that growing numbers of Iraqis might turn against the U.S. and we could lose the war. And we’ve even got former Ashcroft justice officials concerned about abuses of the Patriot Act, and a confidential FBI memorandum asking local police to keep an eye on protesters “who use the Internet to recruit, raise funds, and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations.”
So stay tuned for the next installment of Uncovered. And let’s hope when you go to this one, you’ll look as if you’ve recovered from the Indy‘s Holiday Bash on Friday night (which benefits Peaceful Tomorrows: 9/11 Family Members Seeking Alternatives to War) if the police show up with surveillance cameras
