Tomgram: Ruth Rosen on Oliver Stone's WTC and the Iraq War

The attacks of September 11, 2001 remain both an overwhelming and under-considered horror. Tomdispatch [Tom Engelhardt not Tom Maertens] will devote the week leading up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to various reconsiderations of that moment. In the meantime, the anniversary season was inaugurated early by World Trade Center, Oliver Stone's reverent blockbuster movie. Ruth Rosen went to see it recently and explains just why September 11th, which brought out so much that was positive in those who rushed to the scene to help, still brings out so much of the Bush-era worst in so many of the rest of us.

Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie
By Ruth Rosen

When World Trade Center ended, I left the theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb directing and acting, coupled with still hardly imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and indelible images of that hellish morning.

I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californian afternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind of shock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone's movie reinforces the Big Lie -- endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by the right-wing media -- that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

(The rest of Ruth Rosen's analysis is here.)