A Michael Moore scoop: video of President Bush as he prepares to declare war on March 19, 2003.

Writing in the New York Times, columnist Frank Rich suggests that Michael Moore is “detonating dynamite” with the imminent release of Fahrenheit 9/11, as he presents war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. At first, Moore’s Cannes’ award-winning film offers viewers a brief, tendentious recap of recent Bush history: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, AWOL in Alabama, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, and more.
Then, Rich reports, “the movie veers off in another direction entirely” as Moore sets about to chronicle, with wrenching impact, “the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails.” Next, the viewer is shown footage of events that are a precursor to the torture at Abu Ghraib prison …

Perhaps the most damning sequence in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time.

Rich concludes his powerfully written piece with the argument that: “No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.”