CNN's "Winning the War on Terror" - Directed by David Lewis - reviewed by Dorothy Rabinowitz By David Lewis

Believe it or not this intrepid reporter just found out about a decent review my last film got from the Wall Street Journal.  Since TV documentaries rarely get reviewed this is quite nifty. 

15 July 2005
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- WEEKEND JOURNAL
TV Review: The World at War
By Dorothy Rabinowitz

"Winning the War on Terror"
Produced and Directed by: David Lewis
Correspondent: David Ensor
Written by: David Lewis and David Ensor
Camera: Rich Brooks
Editor: Mike Chedwick
Executive Producer: Sid Bedingfield
Managing Editor: Kathy Slobogin

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to watch the preview tape of CNN's "Winning the War on Terror" (airing Saturday, 8-9 p.m. EDT) without a surge of mordant concentration at the point where correspondent David Ensor raised civil-libertarian concerns about all those surveillance cameras on the streets of London. (The film was made before last week's terror attacks.) Were people concerned about the intrusiveness of those cameras? No, Mr. Ensor is informed by authorities -- the British people understand the government's need to employ such measures in the effort to keep them safe.

Seen now -- after July 7, that is -- the images of those cameras (there are a half million of them operating throughout London) only underscore the point made by a former head of MI-5 who appears in the film to predict, with no-nonsense certainty, that increasing security requirements will undoubtedly take precedence over privacy concerns. And indeed, after the subway and bus bombings and attendant horrors, it's doubtful that Londoners are worrying themselves about privacy intrusions. It won't go unnoted, either, that it was those closed-circuit cameras at King's Cross Station that enabled the police to zero in on the identities of the four prime suspects -- British citizens of Pakistani descent.

England is just one of the countries whose response to terrorism comes under scrutiny in this ambitious and mostly absorbing work. It is also a program burdened by a determinedly benign even-handedness -- with an occasional exception reserved for references to the U.S. anti-terror operations in Iraq, which a Northern Ireland police official disdains as ineffective. It would be much better, he blandly explains, to follow Belfast's example -- by making arrests with well-trained local police. If it occurred to this authority, or, perhaps, his interviewer, that there might be a difference between the nature of Northern Ireland's terrorists and that of the fanatical armies in Iraq who have made it their business to try to murder every Iraqi lining up to become a member of the local police, that consciousness is nowhere in evidence.

The film's most compelling parts are found in its focus on two European countries following decidedly different paths in their response to terrorism. One is Spain, which elected a new Socialist government immediately after the March 2004 terrorist bombings that killed 191 of its citizens. Before blowing themselves up as the police closed in, the bombers had left a note explaining their cause: namely, revenge for the crimes against Islam committed by Spain in the year 1492. They demanded, in addition, that Spain remove the troops they had sent to Iraq. The newly elected Spanish government promptly did just that.

In his interview with Mr. Ensor, Spain's current Minister of Justice allows, sorrowfully, that there is no way to undo the injustices committed against Islam in the 15th century. On the other hand, the new government could and did undertake a charm offensive, as the film calls it. By way of response to the slaughter committed by the terrorists -- immigrants from North Africa -- the government relaxed immigration laws and declared amnesty for all illegal aliens. According to one happy merchant interviewed, and various others claiming to see signs that the threat of Islamic terror is disappearing, the country is now awash in peace and understanding.

Unlike Spain, wed to the golden promise of appeasement, France is unremittingly tough on terrorists -- a fact, the film rightly suggests, that may come as a surprise to some given its reputation for appeasement, its softness with regard to Saddam Hussein, and the like. In France, Mr. Ensor notes, merely to be acquainted with a terrorist is a criminal offense. There, terror suspects can be held incommunicado, with no access to a lawyer. France, in fact, is the last place in which terrorists would want to be caught. As Daniel Pipes, Middle Eastern scholar, has pointed out (though not in this film), where the war on terror and radical Islam are concerned, "France is the most stalwart nation in the West, even more so than America, while Britain is the most hapless."

This is a work, on the whole, that picks its way through interviews with police, former terrorists, terror victims, and intelligence heads -- those with the Israelis are exceptionally powerful -- crisply, with scarcely a dull or empty moment. That's if you don't count the final pronouncement offering the film's solutions to terrorism -- the main one of which seems to be that America follow the policies of Spain's new government. The writers would have been well advised to think that one over.