9/11 And The Big Lie

I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californianafternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind ofshock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone's movie reinforces the BigLie — endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by theright-wing media — that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqidictator Saddam Hussein.

It might surprise you that this Oliver Stone film is neither ideological, norconspiratorial, which in my view is just as it should be. Instead, it is aportrayal of what the men who braved hell and the families who anguished overtheir survival experienced.

World Trade Center gives 9/11 a distinctly human face by following twoPort Authority policemen and their families. We watch the men muster theircourage to help evacuate people in one of the towers; we gasp as they are buriedalive; we wince as heavy slabs of cement crush their bodies; and we hold ourbreath as they struggle to keep each other going in the face of imminent death.

Expert editing brings us the anguish suffered by their wives, children, andrelatives. Some are in denial, others in shock. Some have faith; others areresigned to the men's deaths. They live in their own hell and we empathize withtheir wrenching agony.

With a subtle touch, Stone shows us people all over the planet horrified bytelevision images of the airplanes crashing into the towers. He reminds us thatthe people of the world expressed an outpouring of sympathy (since squandered bythe Bush administration).

Meanwhile, Stone introduces us to one ex-Marine who feels called by God tohelp rescue those buried alive. He gets his hair cut short, puts on his olduniform, and with all the authority of a former staff sergeant, does what heknows best — uses his military skills to save people's lives. Determined andangry, he insists that we must avenge this horrendous attack.

We also watch a group of Wisconsin policemen viewing the terrorist attacks ontelevision. One screams out, "The bastards!" Stone, in other words,captures the desire for revenge already in the air.

And yet, in none of these profoundly moving scenes is there even a mention ofwho might have committed this atrocity. Neither the name al-Qaeda, nor Osama BinLaden, is so much as whispered.

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

The Big Lie, first coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography MeinKampf, was made famous by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the ThirdReich. The idea was simple enough: Tell a whopper (the larger the better) oftenenough 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 theGermans used the Big Lie: "[They] never allow the public to cool off; neveradmit 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 enemyat a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe abig lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough peoplewill sooner or later believe it."

This is, in fact, just what the Bush administration has been doing ever since9/11. As a result, in 2005, an ABC/WashingtonPost poll found that 56% of Americans still thought Iraq had possessedweapons of mass destruction "shortly before the war," and 60% stillbelieved Iraq had provided "direct support" to al-Qaeda prior to thewar. In June 2006, FoxNews ran a story once again dramatizing the supposed links between 9/11 andIraq. And, as recently as July, 2006, a Harrispoll found that 64% of those polled "say it is true that Saddam Husseinhad strong links to Al Qaeda."

The Bush administration's Big Lie has worked very well. Dick Cheney, thepoint man on this particular lie, has repeated it year after year. In a similarway, George Bush has repeatedly explained his 2003 invasion of Iraq, which hadnothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, by insisting that we must fight terroristsin that country so that we don't have to fight them here. (It turned out to besomething of a self-fulfilling prophesy.)

Neither these, nor so many other administration statements had a shred oftruth to them. Even the President, who repeatedly linked Saddam Hussein to theterrorist organization behind the September 11th attacks, admittedon September 18, 2003 that there was no evidence the deposed Iraqi dictator hadhad a hand in them. But that didn't stop the Vice President from endlesslyrepeating the Big Lie that justifies this country's invasion and occupation ofIraq.

Most of the controversy over World Trade Center has focused onwhether, as the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, it is still toosoon for a cinematic depiction of these horrendous events. For some people,perhaps that may well be the case. I myself don't think it's too soon for such afilm; but I do worry that, powerful and evocative as it is, it may, howeverinadvertently, only deepen waning support for the war in Iraq,

Despite thenear flood of documentaries on the terrorist attacks heading toward thesmall screen this September, Stone's film, for many Americans, may end up beingthe definitive cinematic record of what it felt like to be inside the hellishcyclone known simply by the numbers 9/11.

To offer a faithful recreation of that historical catastrophe, however, Stoneowed viewers the whole truth, not merely a brilliant, graphic portrayal of whathappened and how it affected the lives of some of those involved.

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

I kept waiting for what never came — even a note in the postscriptreminding the audience of those who had actually committed the crime. This iswhere, by omission, Stone's film ends up reinforcing the administration's BigLie. You could easily have left the theater thinking that the saintly ex-Marinehad 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 plottedthe 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 theattacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen of them came fromSaudi Arabia; the remaining four from Egypt, The United Arab Emirates, andLebanon. None of them came from Iraq."

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

How could Oliver Stone leave it up to viewers to discover for themselves whocommitted this crime? And how could he leave the audience with the impressionthat there was a connection, as Dick Cheney has never stopped saying, between9/11 and Iraq?

This is the tragic failure of Stone's World Trade Center. It undercutsthe historical value of the film and reinforces the Biggest Lie of the last fiveyears, still believed by far too many Americans — that in Iraq, we arefighting those who attacked our country.

Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the LosAngeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, teaches at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A newedition of her most recent book, TheWorld Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Penguin,2001), will be published with an updated epilogue in 2007. Copyright 2006Ruth Rosen. Courtesy, TomDispatch