OT-Movies do a better job covering the war than the news media do.
- From: "Elected Newsgroup leader Chuck" <chuckadams05@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 15 Sep 2006 06:58:08 -0700
Movies do a better job covering the war than the news media do.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, September 15, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
"An event of this consequence is very hard to understand." The event
former
Congressman Lee Hamilton was describing earlier this week is September
11,
2001. But of course September 11 itself is not hard to understand. They
came, they killed.
For many people this is sufficient understanding of 9/11. They believe
the
job now is simple: Resist and stop more of their killing. However,
unlike
the proponents of apocalyptic Islam, most normal people in time seek a
degree of understanding, even of an enemy who fights by the rules of
pre-civilization. Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11
Commission,
was commenting on ABC's now-controversial movie, "The Path to 9/11."
The
hard-to-understand path to which Mr. Hamilton alluded is obviously not
a
single event but the origins and organization of the Islamic terrorist
movement that began years back and besets the U.S. and the world today.
One can only agree with Mr. Hamilton. The war on terror is more
complex,
nuanced and indeed more interesting than the general public has been
given
to believe.
For instance, one oft-cited benchmark of its progress is the status of
Osama
bin Laden. That he is presumably still alive and at large is taken to
mean
that President Bush's offensive against the post-9/11 terrorists has
"failed," as John Kerry noted this week on the eve of September 11. The
Bush
administration, Mr. Kerry told CNN, "failed to capture and kill Osama
bin
Laden when they had him in the mountains of Tora Bora. And that's why
we are
more threatened today with an al Qaeda that has reconstituted itself in
some
65 countries."
This is the Alien vs. Predator model of fighting terror. Bin Laden
himself
has picked up on the tendency of our political culture to reduce
complexity
to melodrama. For 9/11, al Qaeda released a propaganda documentary on
al-Jazeera this week, depicting masked men training, while Bin Laden
walks
among them. The New York Times described bin Laden in the 9/11 tape as
"looking almost regal."
As to the war in Iraq, daily readers of first-line Internet news
services
such as Yahoo News know that this event has been reduced simply to
body-count headlines. Yahoo News's homepage at mid-day Wednesday:
"Bombings,
mortar attacks kill 39 in Iraq."
If this is the available public context, then serious people have to
assemble an understanding of terror as best they can. It isn't easy. In
his
comment on the ABC movie, Lee Hamilton said that "news and
entertainment are
getting dangerously intertwined." But given the alternative, it makes
sense
to me if people seek a better sense of the obsessions and compulsions
inside
Islamic terrorism in movies such as "United 93" or ABC's remarkable
"The
Path to 9/11."
The narcissistic whining of the Clinton coterie over how they're
reflected
in "The Path to 9/11" was an irrelevant diversion from its real value.
The
word "Clinton" isn't heard in the film's first 90 minutes, which
recreates
with startling realism the thunderous basement bombing of the World
Trade
Center in 1993, an explosion stunning to many of us seated at our desks
at
the Journal's offices across the street that day.
Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham deserve
thanks
not obloquy for trying to give us a palpable feel for the terrorist's
terrain--Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brooklyn--the world of Ramzi Yousef,
the
1993 bomber, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or "KSM," identified
in
the 9/11 Commission Report as the main architect of September 11 and
some
3,000 deaths.
KSM is one of the 14 al Qaeda captives whom President Bush revealed
last
week had been transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo to
await
trial. Congress, in the wake of the Hamdan decision, is now arguing
over
which panoply of legal rights given to accused U.S. soldiers at court
martial will be extended to these prisoners if tried by a military
commission.
Read through the 14 Guantanamo detainee biographies posted on the White
House Web site, and one gets a rare feel for the events that
distinguish the
lives of these individuals from the daily goals of everyone else in the
world--lives simply dedicated to the mass murder of innocents, and not
just
in lower Manhattan. Indeed, the narrator of Bin Laden's 9/11 tape
conveys
their milieu: "Planning for September 11 did not take place behind
computer
monitors or radar screens . . . but was surrounded with divine
protection in
an atmosphere brimming with brotherliness . . . and love for
sacrificing
life."
Here are some of the brothers, now at Guantanamo:
.. Hambali. Indonesian. Learned radical Islam in Malaysia. Co-planned
Bali
resort bombing (200 killed); financed Jakarta Marriott bombing; tried
to
assassinate Philippine ambassador; involved in bombing 30 Indonesian
churches on Christmas eve.
.. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Tanzanian-born forger. Complicit in 1998 East
Africa embassy bombings (well-depicted in "The Path to 9/11"). He was
also
Osama's cook.
.. Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, a k a Lillie. Architecture degree,
Polytechnic
University Malaysia; later studied bombmaking with Dr. Azahari bin
Husin
(deceased). Hoped to achieve martyrdom in post-9/11 attack on Los
Angeles.
.. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Planned 2002 bombing of USS Cole. Involved
in
planned attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, the Strait of Hormuz,
the
Strait of Gibraltar and Port of Dubai.
Read all 14 of these histories devoted to "sacrificing life" to put in
context the denunciations of warrantless wiretaps and the Swift
financial
monitoring program.
These and the others await the divine protections of American law that
Senators Warner and Graham wish to give them. Republicans are also
arguing
among themselves over the degree of access to classified intelligence
this
group should receive at trial. Democrats, other than saying they'll
support
the more liberal version, are contributing almost nothing to the new
system.
If a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, we may assume she or he
will
receive, as payback, a similar level of limp support from the GOP in
the
same war on terror.
Say this for the Guantanamo 14: They have unity of purpose. Long term,
our
disunity could prove to be a big advantage to them.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110008949
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