Nick Broomfield has changed his story. Nearly a year ago, he
touted
"The Battle for Haditha" as an "unflinching
true story". But in the current issue of Premiere magazine, Broomfield says he flinched
after all:
Q. The execution-style killing of the five men in the car that was
pulled over just before the killings is graphic. Did you ever think:
maybe I should not show this, pan away, censor myself? Perhaps for
the families involved?
A. Well the killing was much, much worse. All of it's much, much
worse.
When
Premiere asked Broomfield why the Marines in his
film high-five each other after they shoot a man, he responded:
It's just how it went down. And they don't see anything
wrong with it at all. For them it's like you shot someone who might
be an insurgent. And that's what they're there for. So yeah, they do
high-five it. They did watch it through the scope. That's all based
on exactly what happened. But if you really get into it, it's a
thousand times worse. You might call it harrowing, but it's a very
diluted form of what happened.
Why
the change? Broomfield has declined numerous requests for an
interview with this website so we can only guess. By saying the
reality was worse, he's still
bitterly trying to inflict damage on the Haditha Marines and their
families.
In an
interview posted today on
ComingSoon.net, there's this exchange...
Q: Obviously when you
have a movie based on a real incident where you have to maintain the
facts and all the known information, is there a certain amount of
conjecture involved, because you want to try and keep it balanced? A: Well yeah. I mean if you're talking about the actual
incident, we went through all the government reports and stuff. We
looked at all the witness statements and pretty much put it together
from there.
CS: For instance, some of the things that happened before the
bombing…
A: Yeah, there was a certain amount of license taken there, but once
the Humvee blows up, that's all very much drawn from… I mean we
changed the name of the characters and the characters are slightly
different, but what happened, for example, with the guys in front of
the taxi, the the kind of taxi it was and where the taxi pulls up,
and the clearing of the houses. The to and fro of the radio calls
and stuff, right through to the insurgents filming the witness, it's
all based on what happened.
Broomfield is lying and he knows it. He read the statements by
SSgt Wuterich,
LCpl Sharratt,
and LCpl Tatum. He just
chose to ignore them when he made his movie, relying instead on more
sensational, and dubious, second and third hand stories about Haditha. Forensics and witness testimony have
established that the shootings were nothing like he depicted in his
movie. Broomfield's depiction is wanton murder. The reality was
combat.
Fortunately for Broomfield, the media is easily suckered (an
exception being the
New York Post). Media
critics don’t follow the news about the Haditha. One typically
clueless NPR reporter, Scott Simon,
recently referred to Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi, the insurgent
sympathizer who shot the video tape of the aftermath in Haditha, as
a “journalist student”. NPR doesn’t read Time magazine’s own
corrections.
"The Battle for Haditha" is
opening tomorrow at the Film Forum in New York City.
A great
film could be made based on Haditha, but not by someone who puts
anti-war ideology before the truth.
