HIJACKING CATASTROPHE
9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
Directed by Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp
Media Education Foundation (2004) 64 min, +161 min
www.mediaed.org

Perhaps if as many people had seen Hijacking Catastrophe as had seen Fahrenheit 9/11, the "election" of 2004 might have turned out differently and the United States could have (at least symbolically) offered to the rest of the world a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine of aggressive dim-wittedness. Michael Moore certainly knows how to make an entertaining film; who can't help but laugh at a montage of George W. Bush on an extended "Vacation" set to the bouncing beat of The Go-Go's, or of Bush pretending to be a rancher, or of Moore hiring an ice cream truck to drive around the capitol as he reads the PATRIOT Act to passing members of Congress who obviously didn't bother reading the trash before they signed it into law. I don't want to suggest that I am bad-mouthing Moore; rather, that if Fahrenheit couldn't convince enough people of the corruption of our political system (and particularly of the current administration), this film could have.

Hijacking Catastrophe details how the Bush administration's response to the events of September 11, 2001, was a calculated attempt to capitalize on public fears to pursue an extremely aggressive and wrong-headed foreign policy. Plans drawn up by The Project for a New American Century in the early 1990s, and dismissed at the time as irresponsible and dangerous, bear an uncanny resemblance to that which is taking place today. Also known as the "Wolfowitz Doctrine," these plans called for dramatic increases in military spending after the Cold War, the cutting back of domestic social spending, aggressive military interventionism—it's all there. The film talks with retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who corroborates the deliberate manipulation on the part of the government to manufacture a "link" between Saddam Hussein and Al Queda. That the Middle East is a region of strategic importance, particularly for U.S. interests maintaining not only access to, but control over, the spigot of these vast oil reserves, should come as a surprise only to the more obtuse. These radical neoconservative designs on empire are creating massive deficits that threaten to bankrupt an already fragile U.S. economy. The film demonstrates how the Bush II administration's macho posturing—especially coming from a group of men who avoided any actual combat experience themselves—is not only embarrassing, but quite lethal both for the troops we place in harms way and for all others who are harmed in the process.

Among the film's interview subjects are: Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon (Institute for Public Accuracy), former Chief UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, Mark Crispin Miller, Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers), Vandana Shiva—over two dozen well-informed perspectives. Hijacking Catastrophe is agit-prop at its finest, offering viewers a reasoned critical framework for understanding how the radical neocon fringe is not just a threat to our individual liberites, but to our immediate safety. –EDWARD BURCH