Ace In The Hole (DVD)

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These days, you have to take almost every purported news exposé or "real" story-behind-the-story with a whole shaker full of salt. With a New York Times reporter falsifying information, Dan Rather backing off a story that turned out to be bogus, and Time magazine throwing up its hands and saying, in effect, that there are TWO truths—red state and blue state—rather than investigating to discover the real truth, it's pretty easy to be jaded about news documentaries. You begin to question—and rightly so, I think—the source behind the information and the validity of the source. You begin to wonder about how balanced the reporting is, and how many different sources or incidents are used to make a point. You begin to be wary of intended audiences and journalistic shorthand. Or subliminal messages.

"Ace in the Hole," a 50-minute "story of how U.S. troops captured Saddam Hussein," aired on the Military Channel, and it's unabashedly in the mold of the Yankee pride propaganda-style films that were produced during the early years of World War II. "The success of the hunt for Saddam means that Iraquis are guaranteed a future free of their former dictator," the narrator says, and there are plenty of moments like that. There's a lot of between-the-lines flag waving, and, for military historians, not nearly enough behind-the-scene details—undoubtedly because military clearance wasn't forthcoming.

We see footage of Saddam at his last documented public appearance, then listen as a narrator tells us that moments later the dictator orders his aides to steal one billion dollars from the Central Bank, "then he sends home his bodyguards, gets into his Mercedes and disappears."

That stands in marked contrast to the "bonus episode" included on this disc: "Hunting Saddam: Wanted Dead or Alive," which was a Discovery Spotlight show of equal length. On that superior show, we get the same "take" on the bank withdrawal, but we see also footage of anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress member Ahmad Chalabi and an investigative reporter for The New York Times describing in greater detail how at 4 a.m. Saddam ordered three trucks to drive up to the Central Bank of Iraq and withdraw a large amount of money. More importantly, for balance, we see Fauk Dawod Salman, the Deputy Governor for the Central Bank, saying, "This was not a heist. The safes were opened by official, valid orders."

Unfortunately, that level of perspective, detail, and accountability is missing from "Ace in the Hole," which advances plenty of conclusions without showing much in the way of hard evidence. A statue of Saddam is toppled, but there's no explanation of the events—only the image, with all its inherent implications. It's more summary than a study of all the complex factors that combined to thwart and eventually reward the U.S. efforts. Filmmakers relied mostly upon soldiers from the involved divisions and the author of a popular history, rather than the usual smattering of scholars and insiders that we've come to expect with shows like this. For those, once again, you have to turn to the "bonus" feature, which has more scholars and, in addition to overlapping footage of Saddam, additional film of the Iraqi people and more gruesome events—such as a firing squad dispatching it's blindfolded victims.

Occasionally, on "Ace in the Hole," one of the on-camera interviewees says something that seems off-script—as when one officer says that when insurgent activity increased the day after the U.S. killed Saddam's adult sons and presumed successors, "I was so frustrated at the time that I drank three quarts of water and paid my respect to the graves of Uday and Qusay Hussein." But most of the time what the soldiers have to say is unsurprising and feels according to plan. Though some footage is taken from Al-Arabya and Abu-Dhabi TV, the bulk of it is approved Defense Visual Information Center Footage, with very little that we haven't already seen on CNN or other news networks. Now, there is some nice summary of details, where we're told that the U.S. raided 70 percent of the houses in the Al Ouja village of 3500 where Saddam was born, that the house where Uday and Qusay were killed was made of 2-foot thick marble and took quite a few missles to "soften," and that the overkill blasting of the building by 200 men (using 20 missiles over a four-hour siege) was triggered by an advance man who was angry that the Iraqis shot and killed his dog. "Light 'er up," he urged.