Naturally, Brian DePalma's agitprop movie Redacted won him a Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival. The story is about the gangrape of an Iraqi woman, and the murder of her family, by five US soldiers. The premise is that this is a normal activity by soldiers in a combat zone. The movie is paid for by the production company of another fool with too much money, Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban.
Of course DePalma ignores the facts that these men have received punishments that would be decried as excessive by just about any Western European nation and the majority of his Hollywood fellow travelers: five years for the least culpable, 110 years for the primary actors. In other words, some justice has been meted out -- the most culpable will end up dying in a military brig.
As Ralph Peters pointed out, "The military doesn't do warnings and probation. If a soldier does the crime, he or she will do the time or pay the other relevant penalty - court-martials directly reflect the number of crimes committed." For that reason, perhaps, the military's crime rate in Iraq is less than 1% of the crime rate of Santa Cruz, California -- the city that enacted the first resolution denouncing the current War in Iraq.
Worse yet, Redacted is reductive. As Bryan at Hot Air blog notes, the plot is nearly identical to Casualties of War -- a Michael Fox movie about a four-man gang rape in Vietnam, and the fifth man who turns them in. Not only is Hollywood misleading and skewing the truth, it repeats its own plotlines to do so.
Ridiculous.
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