The American Spectator

br> In his film-based rant about “the reality of what is happening” in a country he has never seen in his life (and most likely never will), DePalma does get one thing correct: the rape and quadruple-murder in question (which the guilty soldiers attempted to cover up by setting fire to the family’s house) did, in fact, take place. However, the idea that such acts as this are the norm in Iraq, rather than the vast exception, belies not only a profound ignorance of actual events in that country and of the character of the typical serviceman or -woman, but also an intense, irrational loathing for one’s own country, as well as for those who represent it and guard its security and way of life.

Further, those who are so quick to use such scandals and atrocities as evidence that the military tolerates — or even encourages — such behavior in its members completely miss the fact that every single individual who has been caught for such acts has been punished for them, in most cases very severely. From the Abu Ghraib perpetrators to the Pendleton Eight, those who commit atrocities in Iraq (and elsewhere) have routinely seen their actions met with lengthy jail terms.

Although DePalma conveniently left it out of his shock film, the five soldiers who were complicit in the gruesome rape and murder portrayed in Redacted are no different. Far from being a stock example of “the reality of what is happening in Iraq,” the crime committed by those soldiers was so appalling to the same organization that the anti-military left wants to paint as being tolerant of such acts that the young man who simply served as the lookout for his fellow soldiers, while they committed the rape and murders inside the house in question, was sentenced to 110 years in prison by a military court. Another will be facing the death penalty.

That doesn’t sound like an organization that accepts, encourages, or covers up such actions as those portrayed in DePalma’s flop of a film. However, in the big picture, neither Brian DePalma nor his disgrace of a movie is of great importance. After all, for a film to matter to anybody outside of the Academy, somebody has to actually go see it — something which, in the case of Redacted, very few people are in danger of doing.