When Robert Greenwood released \Uncovered: The War in Iraq,"" it was an amazingly timely movie. In the height of the public fervor over whether weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq and whether the Bush administration knew they weren't, ""Uncovered"" took both issues on and came out against both. But, as it now opens in Madison, it's amazing how urgent this message once was, and amazing how urgent it no longer is. Since the movie was released, questioning the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has become about as controversial as questioning school children's love of recess.
But there is a new focus at work here. ""Uncovered"" is no longer just the case against the war in Iraq, or even just a thorough documentation of a lie we all believed. ""Uncovered"" is source material against a man in his bid to keep his job. Greenwood's documentary presents Bush at his worst: willfully misleading his country. ""Uncovered"" is very convincing at it, too.
Featuring interviews with congressmen and ambassadors to Iraq, career military and weapons inspectors and enough CIA to overtake a small country, ""Uncovered"" always seems authoritative. Most of its assertions come from two or three sources - the panel of experts all seem to agree with the minutiae and with the film's main thesis: Our president had such substantial and overwhelming evidence that Iraq had no WMDs and took such subversive steps to keep that evidence from the public that he clearly knew he was hoodwinking the public into a war.
""Uncovered"" is a documentary in the old sense of the word, without a Michael Moore to be the focal point. The film benefits from it. Everyone who talks is a bona fide expert, and many of the experts are as charismatic as Moore and as outraged. But without Moore's common-man narrator and sense of fun, the film feels academic.
Greenwood's hoard of interviewees provide a list of Bush indiscretions that should surprise even the most well-researched anti-Bush millitant. There's the weapons inspector who reveals that the unaccounted for biological weapons from Desert Storm would have expired years before the Bush administration and the interview clip where Condoleezza Rice admits that the Bush administration knew it was incorrect to say in the State of The Union that Iraq had pursued buying uranium but ""had forgotten."" ""Uncovered"" explains so much material so well it works as a text than a popularization.
But nothing is more chilling than the immense differences between the classified National Intelligence Estimate the White House saw and the one released to lawmakers. The NIE effectively asked the intelligence community how much evidence each agency had of WMD programs. Qualifiers were classified out of sentences, reducing ""although we have little information on Iraq's [chemical weapon] stockpile, Saddam probably has at least 100 metric tons and as much as 500mt of [chemical weapon] agents"" to ""Saddam probably has a few hundred metric tons of [chemical weapon] agents."" Worse, scores of dissenting agencies had their dissent removed. ""We lack specific information of many key aspects of Iraq's WMD programs"" was deleted, as was ""[The Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the State Department] is not willing to speculate such an effort began"" and ""the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what [The Bureau of Intelligence and Research] would consider an integrated and comprehensive attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.""
""Uncovered"" is certainly not the best documentary this year, let alone about George W. Bush, but it is the most damning. It's the most important movie to see this year before choosing who to vote for.
