Hijacking the U.S.

“They have weapons of mass destruction, that is what this war is about.” So says Ari Fleischer, the Bush Administration’s former press secretary, at the beginning of Hijacking Catastrophe, the latest in the burgeoning genre of films and videos aimed at helping us comprehend the enormity of what’s happening to our country today. The Fleischer clip is brief but useful: It’s so easy to forget the swagger and assurance with which Fleischer, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush bedecked themselves in the weeks leading to war. Though it seems like a lifetime ago — and, indeed, for countless Iraqis and almost 1,000 American soldiers that’s what it turned it out to be — it’s also easy to forget these words were spoken over a span of just 36 months. This is partly, of course, because, as the film shows, President Bush has a disarming way of lying about what he said in those halcyon days. He now denies he ever claimed that Iraq had WMD — you can see him do it, it’s right there on the videotape.

‘Hijacking Catastrophe’ will be screened at North United Methodist Church Friday.

But Hijacking Catastrophe is less concerned with George Bush than with the larger themes that drive his presidency. This is a sober, straightforward production done in PBS style, which is to say, there’s no Michael Moore figure tagging along and tugging on our sleeves to make sure we get the main points. Instead, Hijacking relies on a spectrum of thinkers and policy analysts, from Norman Mailer and Daniel Ellsberg to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatowski and Chalmers Johnson to talk us through the history of the Neo-Conservative movement, from its beginnings in the Reagan years to the present. In the process, they do as convincing a job as a bunch of liberals can of showing that the war in Iraq is not about a failure of U.S. intelligence gathering, but, rather, part of a deliberate plan to assert and perpetuate a 21st century idea of American empire.

Yes, yes, Hijacking Catastrophe wears its intellectual pedigree on its left sleeve. But those who find the hair on the back of their neck bristling at the sound of Noam Chomsky’s voice will be hard-pressed to remain unaffected by the documentary footage presented here. You may not buy the idea of an imperial America, or, for that matter, you may believe that, as the biggest, strongest country in a dangerous world there’s nothing wrong with our trying to make the most of our manifest advantages. Either way, it must be hard for you to watch the sequence of public statements made by Bush, Inc. without wincing. The video record of their public posturing and dissembling is, put simply, dumbfounding by any political measure. This administration is either incapable of telling us the truth about its intentions or else is indefensibly inept.

The centerpiece of the production, the Catastrophe, is Sept. 11. This, the film makes plain, looms as America’s Reichstag fire, the traumatic event that set loose Germany’s deepest fears in the 1930s and drove its people into the arms of dictatorship. The parallels are chilling. While fear was certainly a legitimate reaction to the horrific attacks on Sept. 11, the film asks us to consider whether the Bush Administration’s response, a cocktail composed of dread, vengeance and an almost pornographic fixation on militarism, was either appropriate or effective — or whether it actually masked another agenda altogether.

Hijacking Catastrophe is available on DVD for $19.95 and can be ordered at www.hijackingcatastrophe.org. For more information, contact the Media Education Foundation at 413-584-8500.