Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report

With the record level of public attention being given to Michael Moore's latest documentary film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," has come an unprecedented level of exposure to the ugly realities of the terrible war that the Bush administration initiated in Iraq last year.

The secretive administration's tireless efforts to cloak and insulate the public from the smell of combat and mass death have undermined by Moore's work, whose most compelling element is its film footage of the war, itself, and its consequences. Rather than antiseptic headlines and press conferences of featuring gloating military and administration officials, the war's ugly realities are revealed.

The first breach of the administration's intensive effort at blocking such images from the American people came with the leak of photos of flag-draped coffins of dead American soldiers arriving at Dover Air Force Base. That drew angry growls from the White House, but that was eclipsed by the first leaked images of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Feigned disgust at those images by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and swift "justice" against a handful of low level prison guards has been subsequently overwhelmed by a flood of more photographs and video tapes and official administration memoranda, combined with an amazing pattern of administrating stonewalling, suggesting authorization for such systematic abuses led right to the Oval Office.

But it's the war itself and its graphic horror, especially in terms of its impact on innocent civilians, which the public needs to appreciate. Never again should an American president be permitted to initiate such hell on earth without an overwhelmingly compelling reason.

An interview with an independent Swedish-Iraqi filmmaker who provided much of the footage in Michael Moore's film indicates that the systematic abuse and humiliation of not just prisoners, but average Iraqi citizens was the practice of U.S. soldiers that he both personally witnessed and filmed. The interview is carried on the DemocracyNow.Org website and footage he filmed of this abuse can be downloaded from the site.

The filmmaker, Urban Hamid, recently returned from Iraq where he spent two and a half months embedded with U.S. troops. The footage included on the website was shot last December 12 in the Sunni triangle.

"What you see," Hamid explained, "is, to me, extremely disgusting and horrible, because we can see how American soldiers go into a house early in the morning, and with no respect for the people, for the women, for the men. I think we can all put ourselves into their shoes: what it would feel like if people came into our house speaking a foreign language with weapons and just took over the house."

Asked by the interviewer about hoods put on the heads of the civilians, Hamid explained, "This is a plastic bag they put over their heads and it's part, as far as I'm concerned, of the process of humiliating the Iraqis..."

"You have very humiliating pictures," the interviewer says. She asks to describe the soldiers' sexual abuse of the Iraqis.

"It's basically when U.S. soldiers touch the penis of one Iraqi man. He's hooded, he's on the stretcher, and totally powerless...It's a way of emasculating the Iraqis. It's a way or really, really humiliating the Iraqis...This is against human nature. This is against religion. This is against human feelings," the filmmaker said. He described his own feeling of being sick to his stomach as he witnessed this. Still, he said, "You also know that you have to film, because this is something that everybody has to know."

"I am hoping that in getting this footage out, people are going to get as outraged as I was and try to stop this," he said.

Hamid said he tried to get the footage to the major networks when he returned to the U.S. but that nothing came of it. "We sent out lots and lots of press releases, and nothing," he said.

Now, he says, when the U.S. administration is trying to pretend it is "doing something about" the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, "it is a red herring."

"It is a red herring to cover up what's really happening in Iraq. It's a red herring to cover up how many civilians are being killed. It's a red herring to cover up what happened in Fallujah, where between 600 and 800 people, most of which were civilians were killed, massacred, where the U.S. snipers shot women and children," he said.

Not only, of course, does all this turn the stomachs of responsible U.S. citizens, but it is fueling anti-American sentiment and insurgencies throughout the Muslim world. Nothing could be fueling the growing ranks of terrorist networks targeting the U.S. than these ugly realities.