Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004)

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This hour-long show featured a number of experts who gave their opinions of the Bush policy regarding Iraq. Between these interview segments were segments of press conferences, testimonies, and speeches by high-level members of the Bush administration.What I found interesting was the complete one-sidedness of this issue. Nothing was mentioned of the Clinton speeches with the same message, nor of the Democrats who also supported an Iraq War. Senator John Kerry said "the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real" on 23 January 2003. I don't have the time to include more quotes, but I can if requested.As far as the "experts" go, history has proved some of these guys to be wrong. For example, Peter Zimmerman stated several times that no WMDs were ever found. That's a total lie! On 18 May 2004, a roadside bomb containing Sarin gas exploded in Baghdad. In addition, news outlets reported just last year that "Defense personnel have completed the transfer of 550 metric tons of Iraqi uranium ore to Canada...", which was transferred from Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center near Baghdad. So, if there were no WMDs, where did they find the YellowCake again? But, this "expert" says there were no WMDs, specifically saying "no Sarin". Simply put, Zimmermann is either a liar or a fool.The Producer of this film also forgets to mention that the intel was identical to that of: UN Security Council, British MI5, and the Russian Intelligence Agency.This film was nothing more than 56 minutes of anti-Bush propaganda. It commits the same sins it accuses the Bush Administration of committing: omitting facts. As a result, it comes across as waste of film. But, anti-war people will gobble this garbage up.

Robert Greenwald does a very methodical job with this film. It's not sensationalist like Michael Moore's Farenheit 9-11 so it goes at a slower pace but it only serves to drive the point home that Bush and his administration were mistaken to invade Iraq and how intelligence was manipulated. This movie definitely brings up several good points and I recommend that everyone sees this. The interview with Robert Kay was the most impressive one for me for seemed very well thought out and was sent by Bush himself to inspect Iraq for its so called WMD. The quotations from Achmed Chalabi are chilling in retrospect. I challenge all supporters of the war in Iraq to view this film.

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.

My brother's girlfriend has a sticker on the back of her car which reads 'If you're not completely appalled, you haven't been paying attention.' This is a movie for those people who are not completely appalled, because if you've been paying attention then you already know most of what this movie has to say. Or maybe I've just been paying attention too much. I never for a second bought the ludicrous story of weapons of mass destruction, not from day one. I had a friend of several years in Fresno that I longer talk to because we got in such a heated discussion about Bush's upcoming war. He thought that at a time of crisis it was important that America supports it's president, I was sure, and still am, that supporting a president as he makes such a massively wrong move could only make it worse. Just because a moron made his way into the White House is no reason to show the world that we are an entire country of morons, because we are not.I like that the movie stays away from the hard line tactics of Michael Moore, placing words in people's mouths and making dangerous assertions in order to get his point across. Moore has good points and its important that people see them, but his methods are not the greatest. Uncovered: The War on Iraq is made up of the testimony of 27 government officials, most of whom were involved in the events that led to this ridiculous war in Iraq, as well as lots of archive footage of top Bush administration officials putting their feet so far in their mouths that they may need to have them surgically removed.It was mere months before Bush gave Hussein his 48 hour warning that both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice stated that Saddam had no weapons and no means of obtaining any weapons. Next thing you know he is an imminent threat who could launch WMDs within 45 minutes of giving the order. How can people be so blind? When Fahrenheit 9/11 was released, the right wing, particularly radio talk show hosts (keep your eye out in Uncovered, by the way, for footage of Michael Savage, one of the most hate-filled and nakedly racist men ever allowed near a radio microphone in the history of the medium), were so shocked and frightened that they immediately denounced it as things like a 'pack of lies' (Rush Limbaugh). My question would be something like, Did Bush ever say 'Some call you the elite, I call you my base'? Did he ever say that or was that another of Michael Moore's lies? In Uncovered: The War in Iraq, Director Robert Greenwald leaves no room for such hollow and weak arguments. The film is literally packed with video evidence of top Bush administration officials stating their reasons for the war, which gradually change as their faulty intelligence becomes apparent. First we went to war to rid Hussein of WMDs, then we were in Iraq to free the Iraqi people, then when that failed too we were there to make America safer, which has also failed. What's next?Oh yeah, Saddam Hussein is a villain and the world is better off without him. Which renders very difficult to explain the footage of Donald Rumsfeld, the SITTING SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, SHAKING HANDS WITH HIM. Hussein was a brutal dictator, that is not a subject of debate, but neither is the fact that Iraq and Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. This has been staring Bush and America in the face since 9/12. Hussein was an ENEMY of Osama bin Laden. But is the world really better off without Hussein in power? I'll be the first to say that the world may very well be better off without him, but there are two things that I can also say for certain – Iraq is not better off without him, and America is not better off without him. Iraq has become a haven for terrorists and insurgents and is massively unsafe for everyone within the nation's borders, and Bush has demolished the image of America as a benevolent force in the eyes of the world. We are no longer a benevolent force, we are the bully that no one likes.Hussein had no weapons on mass destruction and Iraq was not a terrorist nation UNTIL America INVADED AND OCCUPIED IT. As Bush himself said in front of lots of rolling cameras, he wouldn't be happy if he were occupied either. But hey, the first rule of politics is that the man who orders the execution never drops the blade, so Bush's total lack of any kind of military combat experience will make no difference as he sends thousands of young Americans to their meaningless deaths with the flick of a pen and an arrogant smirk for the passing cameras. Bush went to war in Iraq, among other selfish reasons, to finish what his father left undone when he lost in 1992 to Bill Clinton, and the movie ends with a powerful quote from a book by George H. W. Bush himself, which stated that a ground war in Iraq would have led to an occupation that would result in countless American deaths and no end in sight. Evidently his son is so against accumulating knowledge that he doesn't even read books written by his own father. Here's something that really gets me, people attack Clinton because bin Laden was offered to him but he wanted to pursue legal means rather than reckless military action, like Bush, so bin Laden wasn't captured and later attacked us on Bush's watch. Rather than go after bin Laden to clean up what supposedly was Clinton's mess, Bush diverts the vast majority of funds and military force AWAY from the pursuit of bin Laden in order to 'use 9/11 as a reason to go after Iraq' (Rumsfeld's words), attacking and removing from power a man who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Way to go, Bush, because of what you've done, the insurgents planting roadside bombs in Iraq and killing our troops are acting in SELF DEFENSE. The election, which takes place a mere 8 days after the time of this writing, is the most important election in American history. Lives are at stake, and the mere act of voting Bush out of office can perform miraculous work in repairing at least some of the decades and decades of damage that he has done to this country in his four illegitimate years in office. He has destroyed America's image in the eyes of the world, and in the catastrophic event that he wins a second term (whether by being elected for the first time, or by being wrongly appointed again), we will effectively show the world that we as a country agree with his illegal tactics and arrogant foreign policy. It is absolutely IMPERATIVE that this does not happen, and films like Uncovered: The War on Iraq are exactly what we need to stop it.