ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Ploydsge just watch it!

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Roland E. Zwick In the wake of "Fahrenheit 9/11"s phenomenal box office success, a flurry of similarly-themed documentaries hit movie theatres in late 2004, all making the case that the Bush administration's war against Iraq was ill-advised, opportunistic and based on intelligence and evidence that turned out to be, at best, faulty, and, at worst, deceptive and manipulated. "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," produced by the liberal organization MoveOn.org., is one such documentary. The preposition used in the title - "on" as opposed to "in" - reveals right up front the political leanings of those who made the movie.The basic thesis of the film is that the neo-cons in the Bush administration had decided, even before 9/11, that the U.S. would eventually have go to war against Iraq to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime. 9/11 merely provided them with the pretext they needed to sell the idea to the American public. By painting Iraq as a viable terrorist threat, the Bush administration was able to win over Congress and the nation's people to their cause, resulting in a war that is entering its third year now, having already cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.The film does an impressive job of what opponents would call "Monday morning quarterbacking," juxtaposing comments made by members of the Bush administration before the war with current statements by mainly key CIA and former CIA officials about what we know now. Through a series of largely familiar news clips, we see Bush, Condaleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others all lining up to present the case for war against Iraq by arguing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, harbored terrorists within his nation's borders, and had known links with the Al Qaeda operatives who perpetrated the attacks on 9/11 - all "facts" we now know to have been either woefully unsubstantiated or completely fabricated. The movie includes interviews with Joe Wilson, the ambassador whose wife was "outed" as a CIA operative by a member of the Bush administration when Wilson publicly questioned the validity of some of the "evidence" being touted around town that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. Another key figure in the movie is weapons inspector David Kay, who is given ample screen time to declare his mea culpas for initially supporting the Bush administration's assertions that WMD's would ultimately be found once U.S. forces had invaded and subdued the country.The film also takes aim at the American news media for allowing itself to be essentially co-opted by the neo-cons in the run-up to the war. Rather than challenging the White House's spin as it should have, the media, according to the filmmakers, simply went along with what it was being told by the Bush administration, thereby failing to fulfill its function as the independent Fourth Estate. It became, essentially, complicit in misleading the American public - a scandalous dereliction of duty which should concern patriotic citizens on both sides of the political spectrum."Uncovered" doesn't pretend to offer a "fair and balanced" view of the events leading up to the Iraq War; it doesn't offer opposing viewpoints or interview people from the other side of the political equation. As a result, it opens itself up to charges from the Right that it is every bit as propagandistic as the administration it is attacking. Yet, the fact remains that those on the Left, who opposed the war and questioned the administration's motives even before the conflict started, turned out to be largely correct in their assessment of the facts. And the film makes a compelling case that the people who were labeled "unpatriotic" and "un-American" before the war for daring to raise these objections may actually have been the most patriotic and pro-American people of all."Uncovered" is, essentially, a talking heads documentary, but one that will have you shaking your own head (or pulling your hair out) in dismay and frustration - especially when one considers how astonishingly blasé and indifferent the American public seems to be about the whole thing.Barbara Tuchman, in her book "The March of Folly," writes that, "Wooden headedness, the source of self deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian's statement about Phillip II of Spain, the surpassing woodenheaded of all sovereigns: 'No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.'" In the case of the Bush administration and the Iraq War, truer words were never spoken.

Michael Daly The second of his two documentaries on the 2003-4 Iraq war, Robert Greenwald continues pushing a case against that war by claiming to expose the "truth" about that war, a case that has become gospel among liberal circles but which is not aging very well.The film centers on two myths about the Iraq war that fall apart upon close scrutiny. The first is on Iraq's building of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Much is made about how "no stockpiles of Iraqi WMDs (weapons of mass destruction, a curious holdover term used by Soviet Russia) were found." To buttress this argument, Greenwald uses David Kay, a chief investigator of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and Scott Ritter, a longtime UN weapons inspector who has been loud and lengthy in attacking the war by claiming Iraq had destroyed its programs in the mid-1990s under UN pressure.This case, though, falls apart when one examines what the US actually found in Iraq - over 500 tons of weapons grade uranium, the beginnings of a nuclear centrifuge buried in the desert, chemical weapons labs, chemical weapons, missile testing sites, missiles, and voluminous documentation on these programs, documentation that Kay himself has admitted proves that Iraq was building WMDs. Indeed, a major point that Kay and others consistently missed (as does the film) was how Iraq was covering its tracks by streamlining its WMD programs away from big centralized programs to decentralized systems that were much easier to hide - Kay for his part stated that Iraq had built "deception and denial" throughout its WMD programs.So this case against the war made by the film collapses. Next is Iraq's support of international terrorism in general and Al Qaida in particular. To argue that Iraq did not back Al Qaida, the film must ignore the voluminous documentation unearthed in Iraq (to be fair, most of it has yet to be declassified) showing that Iraq not only worked with Al Qaida, it showed the two to be closer allies than most could reasonably believe years earlier.The film, like Greenwald's other work, strives to make an argument that can only be made by skillful manipulation of the truth, an argument that time is steadily discrediting the more Iraq recovers from the imperial past of Saddam Hussein.

rbmazess-1 This Greenwald documentary, like Unconstitutional and Outfoxed, is well-composed and remains interesting even for those who are already familiar with the facts, fallacies, and spurious claims. The most remarkable aspect is that the experts are almost entirely very conservative, long-term veterans of the government(Armed Forces, State Dept.Foreign Service, CIA). Their considered, cautionary statements are contrasted with obvious misrepresentations by the administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice). The real-dynamic of the film arises from this "apolitical" stance in a way that could not be achieved if the administration opponents were liberals or peace-activists. Viewers will walk away with deep concerns about how the policies of the US, both domestic and international, can be made in an environment where government propaganda is uncritically disseminated by an increasingly docile media. Rating 9 of 10

erinwestonfilm Do you remember us going into Iraq, supposedly in search of Weapons of Mass Destruction? Do you remember when the failure to find any WMDs caused the purpose of the war to shift to Iraqi Freedom? And now that Iraq is NOT free, and it is clear there never was a connection between Saddam and Al Queda, our President says the invasion was ALWAYS about making America, and the rest of the world, a safer place... Don't you believe it. Robert Greenwald's UNCOVERED: The War on Iraq is a thorough, even-handed dissection of what the Bush administration said; when they said it; how they twisted the truth for their own purposes; and how we, as a nation, were manipulated by our own leaders into invading a country, killing thousands of its people, and (justifiably) incurring the outrage of an entire world. And for what? EVERY American should see this movie before they go to the polls in November. Knowledge is power; get powerful.