Redacted

Brian de Palma, the famed director of Carrie, The Untouchables and Scarface, has made a "docu-drama" based on the most disturbing act to arise from the American occupation of Iraq: The rape of Abir Hamza and the murder of her family, as perpetrated by private Stephen Green and his accomplices. As I wrote in an earlier piece:

Abir Hamza, the victim of that vicious assault, was born in 1991. She was only 14 when a squad of all-American "Christian" good-old-boys killed her family, raped her, and burned her body. Not a single member of the unit shirked from this task. None of them felt guilty about what they had done to her (although they did regret the retaliatory measures against Americans).

"Our boys," raised within our supposedly enlightened "Christian" culture, considered this girl a sub-human -- a thing to be used. After all, she was Muslim.

I wrote this not to insult the majority of American soldiers, who deserve our deepest sympathy as they try to accomplish an impossible task in a land we had no right or reason to invade. My words were meant to target those right-wingers who consider "Christian" culture innately superior to the Islamic variety.

De Palma has, by all reports, combined a lightly-fictionalized telling of this story with documentary evidence taken from actual events.

To tell the story, de Palma boldly uses a variety of forms: blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the internet and the video diary the soldier is shooting. There are several references to the shortcomings of the mainstream media in reporting the real horrors of the Iraq war; de Palma makes a telling point with these alternative narrative devices.

'Redacted' means 'edited' or 'blacked out,' and the film's first image is a written disclaimer on the screen, with more and more words gradually being deleted. The director calls the film 'a fictional story inspired by true events,' and insists everything depicted has really happened.

This approach makes me a bit uneasy, since it may allow war supporters to call into question not just the film but the actual events. We can already see how the right-wingers are trying to spin away both the film and the reality:

Brian DePalma looks down on the men and women of our military like Senator John Kerry, who considers them the uneducated who rapes and pillages innocent civilians in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan. “Redacted” will be a great propaganda and recruiting tool for al Qaeda and anyone else who’ll take pot shots at our soldiers.

Can you make grammatical sense of the first sentence in the above-quoted passage? Bob Parks, the nearly illiterate writer of the above, appears to be the sort of blinkered Bush supporter who believes that we should ignore any crime committed by "our boys."

At the time this incident first came to light (in July of 2006), I asked if the atrocity were simply the result of Private Green's "communicable psychopathology." The original "official story" placed blame on the Iraqi irregulars fighting the American occupation. This all-too-quick raising of a false flag created suspicion that the rape was a psyop designed to create outrage against jihadist forces. Permit me to quote from an earlier piece:

Here's the part of the story most Americans do not yet know: The authorities soon put a (rather threadbare) cover-up into place.

"After three hours the [American] occupation troops surrounded the house and told the people of the area that the family had been killed by terrorists because they were Shi'ah. Nobody in town believed that story because Abu 'Abir was known as one of the best people of the city, one of the noblest, and no Shi'i, but a Sunni monotheist. Everyone doubted their story and so after the sunset prayers the occupation troops took the four bodies away to the American base.

If Steve Green was the only guilty party -- if we must place all blame on a classic "lone nut" -- then who authorized the official lie? How can we believe the claim that the crime remained unknown until after Green was diagnosed, when an official falsehood went out within hours of the massacre? Are we really supposed to believe that four privates could initiate such a strike and put a cover-up in place?

From a follow up piece:

In sum: We have a group of men playing dress up to pass themselves off as "the bad guys." The officials immediately tell a wild fib that insurgents did the crime. When the fib immediately falls apart, the body is whisked away to an American base, where who-knows-what sort of examination occurs. The poor girl's corpse then heads to an Iraqi hospital.

I should quickly point out that no evidence in favor of the "psyop" theory emerged during Green's trial.

However, in recent months, American war-spinners insist that both Shi'ites and Sunnis have turned against "Al Qaeda in Iraq," which is the chic new label for the insurgency. Do not dismiss the notion that American strategists have undertaken a series of psychological operations in Iraq in order to sway public opinion.