"The Siege" . . . 1998 terrorist film is eerily predictive . . . [View All]

[OneBlueSky]

I was channel-surfing tonight and ran across The Siege, a 1998 film with Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Tony Shalub and Annette Benning . . . released three years before 9/11 (and therefore written several years before that), the film was pretty eerie -- almost predictive -- given what's happened since 2001 . . .

the gist of the story (summarized below) is terrorist attacks in NYC, the president ordering the Army in, and mass arrests and confinement of every Muslim male in Brooklyn . . . shades of Guantanamo (and its recent expansion), not to mention the new FEMA camps that Halliburton is constructing . . .

but what really threw me was a torture scene that could have been right out of Abu Ghraib . . . a Muslim man stripped naked and tied to a chair while the Army (and a female CIA agent) discusses which manner of torture might be most effective . . . and his ultimate murder at the hands of the commanding general, who did the torturing himself . . . this was probably written a decade before the disclosures about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which at the time seemed so inconceivable as something the US military would be involved with -- at least to me . . .

I have no doubt that the next terrorist attack will result in a very similar scenario -- martial law, arrests, and confinements, and not just of Muslim men . . . the camps are being prepared as we post . . .

I just found it all very creepy, and all too predictive both of what has already happened and what is likely going to happen . . .

here's the amazon.com description of the film . . .

Amazon.com
A high-profile action/exploitation thriller set in the present, The Siege is really a fantasy that extrapolates from major terrorist attacks. Denzel Washington is FBI special agent Hubbard, "Hub" to his friends, whose anti-terrorist task force must track down the terrorist cells responsible for a spate of bombings in New York. His partner is an FBI agent of Arabian extraction (played convincingly by Tony Shalhoub), proving not all Arabs are bad guys--a point the film should be lauded for making again and again. Thrown into the mix is a CIA spy (played almost kittenish at times by Annette Bening), whose ties to the terrorists appear to be at the center of the conflicts. When the bombings escalate out of control, the President institutes martial law, sending in General Devereaux (played with impenetrable countenance by Bruce Willis) with tanks and troops to ferret out the terrorists. Echoes of Japanese-Americans in internment camps ring out as Arabs, including the son of the Arab-American FBI agent, are herded into a stadium. Periodic audio-montages of "man in the street" sentiments anchor the material in the present and show how serious and relevant the material is. But finally what we have is a taut and entertaining popcorn movie, giving itself the humanistic nod when it can. --Jim Gay