Oliver Stone’s 9/11 Movie

Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie
By Ruth Rosen

Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los
Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, teaches at the
University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the
Longview Institute. A new edition of her most recent book, The
World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed
America(Penguin, 2001), will be published with an updated
epilogue in 2007.

[This is a review of the movie by Oliver Stone, which according to
the reviewer has gaping omissions which can only fuel further the
misunderstanding about the event and its aftermath, which the
world is still suffering. You can read it all at Tomdispatch.com]

As it ends, a written postscript appears that describes what
happened to the buried Port Authority policemen, their families,
and the ex-Marine who helped rescue them (whose last line is:
"We're going to need some good men out there to revenge this").
We learn that the two men survived an unbearable number of
surgeries and are living with their families. Next we read that the
ex-Marine re-upped and later did two tours of duty in Iraq. At that
moment, I wanted to shout out, "Don't you mean Afghanistan?"
Then I imagined the satisfaction Dick Cheney and sore-loser
Senator Joseph Lieberman would take in this not-quite-spelled-out
linkage of 9/11 and Iraq.

I kept waiting for what never came -- even a note in the postscript
reminding the audience of those who had actually committed the
crime. This is where, by omission, Stone's film ends up reinforcing
the administration's Big Lie. You could easily have left the theater
thinking that the saintly ex-Marine had gone off to fight those who
attacked our country.

That evening, I wrote the words that should have appeared in the
postscript: "Government officials later confirmed that the
organization which plotted the destruction of the World Trade
Center was al-Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian,
and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian. Nineteen men executed the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen of
them came from Saudi Arabia; the remaining four from Egypt, The
United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon. None of them came from Iraq."

What happened to Oliver Stone, the filmmaker who gave us
Platoon,Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street, and Nixon? Despite
his conspiratorial foibles in JFK, he has long been a movie-maker
dedicated to raising tough questions about our American past.
Where did his commitment to opening historical subjects for
debate go? He was right not to politicize this film, but truth-telling
required that he identify the terrorists. Truth-telling would have
resulted in his helping to dismantle the Big Lie that has resulted in
the deaths of so many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and
has plunged Iraq into chaos and civil war.

How could Oliver Stone leave it up to viewers to discover for
themselves who committed this crime? And how could he leave the
audience with the impression that there was a connection, as Dick
Cheney has never stopped saying, between 9/11 and Iraq?

This is the tragic failure of Stone's World Trade Center. It undercuts
the historical value of the film and reinforces the Biggest Lie of the
last five years, still believed by far too many Americans -- that in
Iraq, we are fighting those who attacked our country.

The Big Lie, first coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925
autobiographyMein Kampf,was made famous by Joseph Goebbels,
propaganda minister for the Third Reich. The idea was simple
enough: Tell a whopper (the larger the better) often enough and
most people will come to accept it as the truth. During World War
II, the predecessor of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services,
described how the Germans used the Big Lie: "[They] never allow
the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede
that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for
alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a
time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will
believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it
frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

This is, in fact, just what the Bush administration has been doing
ever since 9/11. As a result, in 2005, an ABC/Washington Post poll
found that 56% of Americans still thought Iraq had possessed
weapons of mass destruction "shortly before the war," and 60% still
believed Iraq had provided "direct support" to al-Qaeda prior to the
war. In June 2006, Fox News ran a story once again dramatizing the
supposed links between 9/11 and Iraq. And, as recently as July,
2006, a Harris pollfound that 64% of those polled "say it is true that
Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda."

The Bush administration's Big Lie has worked very well. Dick
Cheney, the point man on this particular lie, has repeated it year
after year. In a similar way, George Bush has repeatedly explained
his 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with
9/11, by insisting that we must fight terrorists in that country so
that we don't have to fight them here. (It turned out to be
something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.)


You might say, "But everyone knows it was al-Qaeda." And you'd be
right, but do most Americans really know just who those terrorists
were or that they had no connection to Iraq -- that not a single one
of them even came from that country? It doesn't sound very
important until you realize that various polls over the last five years
have reported from 20% to 50% of Americans still believe Iraqis
were on those planes. (They were not.) As of early 2005, according
to a Harris poll, 47% of Americans were convinced that Saddam
Hussein actually helped plan the attack and supported the
hijackers. And in February, 2006, according to a unique Zogby poll
of American troops serving in Iraq, "85% said the U.S. mission is
mainly �to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks'; 77% said
they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was �to
stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.'"


Neither these, nor so many other administration statements had a
shred of truth to them. Even the President, who repeatedly linked
Saddam Hussein to the terrorist organization behind the September
11th attacks, admitted on September 18, 2003 that there was no
evidence the deposed Iraqi dictator had had a hand in them. But
that didn't stopped the Vice President from endlessly repeating the
Big Lie that justifies this country's invasion and occupation of Iraq.