HIJACKING CATASTROPHE: 9/11, FEAR AND THE SELLING OF AMERICAN EMPIRE
Directed & Written by: Sut Jhally & Jeremy Earp.
Produced by: Jeremy Earp.
Director of Photography: David Rabinovitz.
Edited by: Kenyon King.
Music by: Thom Monahan.
Released by: imMEDIAte Pictures.
Country of Origin: USA. 68 min. Not Rated.
With: Noam Chomsky, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Norman Mailer, Scott Ritter, Vandana Shiva & narrated by Julian Bond.

Directors Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp’s Hijacking Catastrophe opens with a montage of the Bush Administration insisting on the existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Viewers are likely to wonder if Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) will have scooped Jhally and Earp entirely, but this documentary does offer something new. As a critique of the administration, it contributes little that urban, media-savvy Lefties, the likely audience, don’t already presume to know. Yet the film’s reason for being does turn up, unlike those much-cited WMDs.

With the help of a foreboding score, Hijacking Catastrophe offers a portrait of the group controlling the White House and the Republican agenda. The film ascribes to Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative zealots a motive for welcoming the attacks of September 11th. In memos across their various government posts going back to the first Bush administration, these neo-cons lamented the end of the Cold War and the absence of another Pearl Harbor - short of which they’d not be able to justify their exercise of power for the sake of power. What the film does then - through interviews with government officials and media pundits (which build mini-profiles of Donald Rumsfield, John Ashcroft and the rest) - is document in detail the worst fears of the paranoid. It builds a strong case through broad strokes what many would prefer unconfirmed - that the government is run by the type of “rogue element” that was blamed for the Iran-Contra scandal. Only now the fringe element has crept out into the mainstream, largely through a systematic manipulation of a very horrid and tragic event.

Will swing voters flock to this film like they have to Fahrenheit 9/11? I doubt it (few Americans have an appreciation for the deadpan delivery of alarming news). The portraits that emerge of this administration would make George Orwell cower at his typewriter, wishing that real life wasn’t such a plagiarist. Joel Whitney, screenwriter/poet, teaches at Fordham University
September 10, 2004