THE TENSION: Redacted: Hollywood Hates the Troops

Director Brian De Palma: Reality, but fictitious
On the Home Front:

A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family "stunned" the Venice festival with graphic images that left some viewers in tears, Reuters reported Friday.

"Redacted," by American director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition.

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," De Palma told reporters after a press screening.

However, De Palma admitted he fictionalized events in the film and blamed legalities for forcing him to do so.

"Everything that is in the movie is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued," De Palma said.

"So I was forced to fictionalize things that were actually real."

By late Friday, the editors of The Weekly Standard, a conservative publication, protested what they called, "The slanders of Tim Robbins and Brian De Palma."

"We've killed over 400,000 of their citizens." That's what actor Tim Robbins thinks U.S. troops have been doing in Iraq. He made the claim last week in an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

He's wrong, of course. American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years. Even for one of Hollywood's most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops.

The Iraq Body Count is an antiwar Web site that tallies all civilian deaths in Iraq as reported in the news media. At the moment, the site lists the "maximum count"at 77,555. That's one-fifth the number concocted by Robbins's overactive imagination.

Just as we were inclined to dismiss Robbins as a lonely voice of idiocy, news came of director Brian DePalma's Redacted, one of eight new movies about the Iraq War due out in the coming months, according to Reuters. "Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across."

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How about the reality of what's happening in Hollywood? Says Pete Hegseth of Vets for Freedom: "These statements reflect the utter ignorance of Robbins and DePalma about what American soldiers are actually doing in Iraq. At every opportunity, they use their celebrity status to bash the very soldiers and Marines who are fighting for them. They reflexively side with radical Islamic terrorists rather than take an honest look at the situation in Iraq."

De Palma was quoted in Sky News:

"It is un-American to criticise the government... Personally, I am not scared. I am the man they love to hate. I am sure they will say; 'It's another De Palma misogynist saga'."