See David Small’s article on the Zaoui case elsewhere in this issue. Since this was written, Ahmed Zaoui has been released on bail. Ed.

Right from the start of this sad affair it was hard to believe that Ahmed Zaoui could be a security threat. He entered the country in late 2002 as a refugee and the NZ authority whose job it is to assess such things confirmed that Zaoui’s claim was legitimate. There was no known reason to think he endangered us, and plenty of reason to suppose he faced death if he was returned to his native Algeria. Since then, no-one in authority has challenged the finding of the Refugee Status Appeal Authority (and yet he remained in prison for more than two years, never having been charged with anything or brought to trial. Nearly half of that time was spent in solitary confinement, in maximum security. Ed.).

The few available facts, as presented in this important monograph, suggest that Zaoui’s situation is unusual. The authors cite three direct parallels, the examples of colleagues of Zaoui’s, leaders like him of an Algerian political party overthrown by a coup. One arrived in the US in 1992, spent the years from 1996 to 2000 in jail, but was then released by an immigration tribunal as there was no evidence against him. He has continued to live privately in America since. A second Algerian went to Australia in 1993 without exciting the State. In 1995 a third man was refused asylum in Switzerland, but allowed to stay.

As it happens, all three of these countries are connected to the Zaoui case. Switzerland, along with Belgium and France, is said to be an origin of the complaint against Zaoui. Australia is the most likely candidate for any foreign pressure to have been applied on Wellington on security grounds. And then there’s America. If they can live with an Algerian democrat, why can’t Godzone?

The authors make it clear that Zaoui’s political grouping, the Islamic Salvation Front (known by its French acronym, FIS), was a moderate and popular influence in Algeria, which threatened the military. At the time our media portrayed FIS as a bunch of crazed zealots. Since then of course we’ve become accustomed to linking Islam with expressions like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but, like most systems of thought, Islam contains a range of viewpoints, from fundamentalist to agnostic.

The NZ government has said that imprisoning a refugee who trusted our values was necessary to keep onside with our mates. In that milieu it seems this is an OK justification. Noted researcher and writer, Nicky Hager, has apparently suggested that the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, is anxious to get back in the good books of the US (Sunday Star Times, 21/11/04). At the time of writing most of us are unaware of the evidence for this, but it certainly makes sense. The eagerness of our leadership to abrogate national policy to France has been odd. We think of France as the country which sank the Rainbow Warrior and now upsets Washington for its cheese-eating-surrender-monkey cowardice. They’re not even Echelon partners (Echelon is the code name for the programme operated by the five-nation spy network that systematically listens in to civilian telecommunications sent by satellite. Echelon involves searching for keywords in the oceans of electronic chatter. New Zealand is the junior partner in the super-secret UKUSA Agreement, whereby the electronic spy agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand divide up the world for electronic spying purposes. The biggest Big Brother is the US National Security Agency. There is a global network of electronic spybases. The one in New Zealand – effectively a US spybase, albeit one manned by and paid for by New Zealanders - is at Waihopai, in Marlborough, and is operated by the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau, which is NZ’s biggest spy agency. Ed.).

"I Almost Forgot About The Moon" is the only full account of the tawdry story of what is publicly known. Zaoui was detained on arrival at Auckland Airport because an inexperienced official did not understand Zaoui’s French and supposed him to have said that he had come here at the bidding of the outfit he was fleeing. From then on, in the more than two years that followed those few "Pink-Panther"* minutes, Zaoui has not been permitted a hearing. That’s how petty bureaucracy likes to work. *Afficionados of the classic "Pink Panther" series of movies know that Inspector Clouseau is the archetypal bumbling policeman. Ed.

As a related story emerged that "our" spies had targeted a whole range of Maori organisations in general, Clark said that it’s "laughable" to imagine that the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS) would do so. No, it’s not. Why would our snoops be different from their role models? What else would they do with their working days? (Watchdog readers will be thoroughly familiar with the track record of the SIS in spying on New Zealand citizens. I need only mention the names of our good friends and colleagues, Aziz Choudry and David Small. Ed.).

The PM, who is also the Minister in Charge of the SIS (a portfolio always held by the PM), would not personally know. From what we hear of the tactics of dirty tricksters in places where these things are better known, like the US and UK, they prefer what they call "plausible deniability". If the head person doesn’t know, then that person doesn’t have to lie.

Modern NZ spying came to public notice in the 1960-72 Holyoake National government era. An agent in a political science class at Victoria University was identified through his habit of taking notes when students asked questions when everyone else was writing down the lecturer’s answers. It’s the background of such Inspector Clouseau antics, here and overseas, that have lead to the common view that the Zaoui affair is more cock-up than conspiracy.

Nothing essential has changed since the spooks targeted students in the disciplines that the conventional wisdom deemed radical, and therefore subversive. At the time they were in the grip of a Cold War hysteria which encouraged lazy stereotypes. This was reinforced by a crude behaviourism that has never really gone away. The Zaoui affair has shown us fleeting glimpses of the spymasters at work. It hasn’t been much, but it’s enough to see that the key people are there because they share the prejudices and assumptions about the world held by many older, conservative, well-connected conformists. Zaoui, the bearded mad Muslim, is the child of the Vic longhaired hippie.

Something else that hasn’t changed is the Intelligence service’s reliance on foreigners. Given the source of their information, and the purpose for which it is gathered, this had always been inevitable. But, unless we credit the SIS with a dispassionate wisdom - which the evidence tells us would be unwise - this serves only to reinforce cultural biases. Intelligence services are the last strong bastion of colonial cringe. Unfortunately there is a theme in recent NZ history of the State refusing to admit it has done wrong when available evidence says that it has. Several guilty verdicts in criminal trials come leaping to mind. The Zaoui scandal fits this pattern too.

We still aren’t allowed to know why Zaoui languished in jail, so the injustice mounts. It is most likely that there is no case against him, and if so, the longer the affair goes on, the deeper will be the Government’s embarrassment. Shame would be a more fitting emotion. The Government made the rules that it now hides behind. It was their idea to suspend habeas corpus to accommodate foreign governments, so, even in the event that Zaoui once knew someone who knew someone bad in Algeria, he’s not being allowed the basic rights that we all expect in a civilised democracy. He may have been just released on bail, but the fact remains, that his imprisonment has lessened us all.

British Petroleum, which sometime ago became BP, has reputedly spent $US600 million in rebranding itself as bp*. In their mind (and we must remember that while we think about these things not at all, the management of BP - sorry, bp - does little else) this will make us like them a lot. It’s partly the lower case letters, which are funky where capitals are clunky, and it’s partly an attempt to get us to ignore the elephant in the dining room. Big B was "British"; little b is "beyond". The oil giant wants us to believe that it has moved beyond petroleum, that its oil wells and tankers aren’t there. Neither is it a foreign transnational. The corporation has some more ethereal, if inexplicable, purpose. *See Jeremy"s review of "Battling Big Business", Watchdog 103, Aug 2003. It can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/03/09.htm. Ed.

Kevin Roberts’ subtitle uses the same gimmick. His thesis is that brands are everything. As he explained to a New Zealand interviewer, a brand is a lovemark and love is "loyalty beyond reason". We buy because we want to buy. Hungry for love, passionate and horny, we see brands and we are lost. Buying the big name brands is our human affirmation, "the exercise of emotional choice. People want to participate in a society" (Listener, 1/504).

It’s also beyond belief and any residual sense of good taste. "The idealism of Love," gushes Kevin, "is the new realism of business. By building Respect and inspiring Love, business can move the world". So the use of capitals is not stylistic after all. Early societies, confined by a morality based on the production and exchange of goods, by agreed religious and civil authority, capitalised all the wrong things. In Kevin’s Utopia, Buying Cool Stuff is God. Won’t that lead to the evils of consumerism? Isn’t debt and waste getting out of hand for some people? Aren’t some countries in too deep? You bet, gushes Kevin. It’s true, we can’t pay our bills. "The next generation will. Great. Terrific".

The content of Kevin’s offering, the customary supercharged adman pictures and quotations, need not detain us. It’s a comic book collage of the sorts of "deep" inanities that impress the naive and inexperienced. Probably deliberately, the format will repel old-fashioned book lovers. So why bother with Kevin’s book? Because it’s as close as we’re likely to get to the opposite of "The Corporation" (see Jeremy’s review of this, below. Ed.). Both argue that business is becoming dominant, that its values swamp alternative moralities, but where Kevin says we should marry it and forsake all else, Bakan says the corporation is a sociopath.

Kevin’s right about one thing. To accept his self-promotion takes us beyond all sorts of things. Beyond reason. Beyond logic. Beyond experience. He’s into breaking boundaries and all that and loves to remind us of his jetsetting lifestyle with his houses in trendy rich places. Certainly Kevin is beyond countries.

That doesn’t stop Kevin from acting as a loud promoter of NZ (where he has one of his houses) about whose branding he’s confused. He told the Listener that NZ had been a "lovemark" but now it "has lost respect globally", but the next month he was saying that "NZ is again a hot dinner topic in LA and NY. We must capitalise on this and not let the opportunity (provided by "Lord of the Rings" slip)". It depends on the marketing needs of the moment (Press, 15/6/04).

In Kevin’s comic of course NZ has lovemarks all over its body. Most references are to do with Maori culture or the All Blacks, the former because people overseas think of Maori as exotic, and thus for Kevin a point of difference for some niche marketing, a good reason to visit; the latter because Kevin was recently prominent in the NZ Rugby Union. Rugby fans, who have put up with a bewildering sequence of stupid decisions by the unnatural persons who run the game, now have some perspective as to why. Kevin, by the way, is a promoter of the proposed new flag, of a silver fern on a black background.

If you remember Kevin, it might have been from the time he made the news for not having a dinner with the 1997-99 Prime Minister Jenny Shipley so as not to discuss how she and NZ might best "brand" themselves. Possibly as an unrelated coincidence, it was about this time, approaching the 1999 election, that Shipley mused about how her Government might be returned if NZ won the Rugby World Cup and retained yachting’s America’s Cup. She was right! All three lost! QED!

The big thing we have going for us in NZ, Kevin says, is that we’re on the "edge". This is where it’s all happening. We’re outside the mainstream, full of edgy entrepreneurs, unconventional, untainted by the stodgy Old World. That sort of thing. We’d best exploit this distinctive status, this edge, says Kevin, by subordinating our entire culture to the McBlandness of the world’s biggest foreign corporations. Self-congratulatory "rebels" (think Mike Moore, who is definitely not to be confused with filmmaker Michael Moore) like to pose simultaneously as rejected prophets and as darlings of society.

In Max Barry’s sci-fi satire the title character, Jennifer Government, is dedicated to preserving law and order. Although the US Alliance has replaced most of the world’s nation states, it is but one source of regulatory power. In Barry’s privatised near future, corporations broker contracts and recruit armies. Corporations being the inspiration for morality and taste, the novel’s characters have names like John Nike and Buy Mitsui.

Some European editions are entitled "Logo Land", testimony to the relevance of Naomi Klein’s 2001 polemic, "No Logo"*. Klein has argued that branding was so pervasive, so pernicious in its effect on the ideal of society that a successful reclaiming of public space will have to start with a rejection of brands themselves. *You can read Jeremy’s review of "No Logo" at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/98/12.htm or, in hard copy, in Watchdog 98, December 2001. Ed.

Klein analysed the extent to which corporate values dominate all aspects of contemporary existence, and Barry plays with the idea of where that could lead. Jennifer Government and John Nike surrender their individuality to power elites in much the same way as medieval monks merged their identities with that of the Church. "The Corporation", which was brought out also as a book, takes as its starting point the same idea from the perspective of the corporation. What sort of person would it be?

This version of the conceit is literally accurate. Legally corporations are persons, the notion apparently being that, in law, contracts are entered into by persons. Now, when treaties like the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) are drafted or governments make laws for the voters who put them in office, corporate persons have to be distinguished from men and women, so contracts now routinely refer to "natural persons". That’s us, people.

Bakan’s definitions of a person are taken from psychiatry, from which evidence is adduced that if a corporation is indeed a person - an unnatural person? - then that person is a psychopath. Necessarily so, you come to think as the evidence mounts: corporations have to compete against each other for market share and against their employees for lower costs. They have to be anti-social.

Michael Walker, from Vancouver’s Fraser Institute and a prominent Canadian propagandist for corporate persons, explains the virtues of international free investment for people in poor countries, where "the only thing they have to offer to anyone is their low-cost labour". If wages were to rise, Walker notes, and "we’ve used up all the desperate people", it’s time for corporations to move on.

Note Walker’s casual use of the first person to identify himself with the ravages of restless capital. "Should everything be privately owned?", he is asked. "Absolutely," declares Walker. "Not for Joe Bloggs but some interest". In this formulation, an "interest", a corporate and impersonal personage, is explicitly favoured at the expense of Joe Bloggs, a stand-in for the billions of us who are not transnational corporations. Walker wants to privilege his "persons" so that the rest of us, hapless natural persons, can be "used up" as and when it helps the mega-rich to get richer by hiring and firing us.

The film backs its case with historical analysis. It’s a matter of providing enough information to make its case - that corporate persons do what they do because its part of their inhuman nature - without getting lost in detail. Bakan does this by linking the origins of the modern economy in the industrial revolution, through the robber barons at the turn of the 20^th Century, to the Nazi era, when some of today’s biggest names got to be big persons. The examples are well chosen.

Sociopathic persons have long been with us, Bakan is saying, because the needs of corporate persons and natural persons are in conflict. It is noteworthy that this, the central tenet of "The Corporation", is not debated. Walker’s view of the relationship is the same as that of critics like Klein, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. The difference is that the latter trio put in a few words for Joe Bloggs.

Having reached a certain stability, Mr and Mrs Bloggs will be interested to hear that a lot of research goes into encouraging their children to nag so that corporate persons can relieve them of any spare cash. Needs are created through what Chomsky refers as "the philosophy of futility". Advertisers exist to induce dissatisfaction with ourselves and alienation from others (see Jeremy’s review, below, of "Super Size Me" for more on this. Ed.). Again, no disagreement. The difference between the champions of corporate persons and the champions of natural persons is whether they think humans can aspire to more.

Acceptance, though, is second best. Corporate persons want us to love them and a big part of branding is a wooing of our approval. According to one publicity hack that Bakan interviews, "corporate" sounds bad. He prefers "company" or "business". That might be the case in the US, where Big Business has a long history of being reviled, but is it true of NZ? Our domestic elites are still enraptured by their Rogernomic lexicon. "Corporate bodies" are everywhere. The average block of flats has a "body corporate" to organise who’s going to put out the rubbish.

Smoother image manipulators prefer a soft-shoe routine. In the case of unnatural persons, that involves an appropriation of the concepts that natural persons employ. I once heard a business school definition: a corporation is a group of "individuals who choose to cooperate". The film’s version is that a company is "individuals working together ... for various aims".

There is, in fact, only necessity that binds employees and only one aim that they share, and that is the making of money for shareholders, another proposition that no one in the film disputes. A head honcho at Shell elaborates on his "various aims". There are times, he says, when the company might "need to be seen" to be doing nice things. The need is tactical. In the case of Shell, it might be an attempt to appease consumers about to boycott your product after an oil spill. You might have to spend a little now to make a lot later. If that happens, the Shell man adds, with commendable honesty, the idea is to "make other people pay the bills". Those other people are consumers and governments. Fair enough too. He’s only doing his job. As he says, Shell will do what it can to maximise profits "if allowed by an unwilling or uncaring public". In his case, that means that the natural persons of Nigeria are in for a rough ride.

I preferred the Bolivian activist who fought successfully against Bechtel’s attempt to privatise rainwater. A victory for the naturals over the unnaturals*. "The people united will never be defeated," he suggested. That’s the chant in La Paz, and it’s the chant of laid off General Motors workers in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan. *See Jeremy’s review of Sharon Beder’s book, "Power Play", at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/04/12.htm or, read it in hard copy, in Watchdog 104, December 2003. What General Motors did to Flint is the subject of Michael Moore’s classic 1989 film, "Roger And Me", Roger being Roger Smith, the then Chief Executive Officer of GM. Ed.

"The Corporation" is dense and didactic, a necessary virtue in an era when fluffy gossip - corporate-style gloss - masquerades as documentary. Despite this, one of the few anecdotal scenes was one of the more telling. Two American students, conventionally good-looking middle class lads, sponsoring themselves to pay for university, made themselves into "walking billboards" by wearing corporate ads. To get paid for what most pay to do was a witty move. Good on them, you might say.

What was more noteworthy was the storm of applause that greeted them on a TV talk show. It was as though the adults were signalling their relief that not all the kids had gone bad. The reaction to the "walking billboards" boys was something like the way televangelical congregations used to greet a sermon by TV evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart. Middle America was finding spiritual confirmation.

If all experience is commodified, and corporate slickness is mistaken for personal integrity, then critics like Bakan, Klein and Barry won’t get far with the generation that has no memory of a previous ideal. Consumerism flatters with its confirmation that you are what you want to be. This raises the question: did the youth play-counter-culture that briefly rallied to Klein do so because it was, momentarily, cool to pretend to be motivated by values at odds with those of corporations?

Fashion is the greatest marketing gimmick of them all. A savvy consumer knows to take nothing seriously - except the primacy of corporate values. As Klein remarked at the start of "No Logo", her own interest in the power of brands originated in an obsession with them. Noam Chomsky reminds us that corporations started life as associations formed for a specific purpose under state rules. They were the tools of society. In this context it seems that their present existence as happy face buddies is a response to a public clamour to reclaim them.

So Spurlock took the judge at his word. Over the 30 days, doctors monitoring him tried to warn him off. His cholesterol zoomed, his liver was ravaged, his weight went from 185 to 210 pounds. Spurlock says he did not fatten his case by ordering the biggest portions, eating the "super size" only if servers suggested it. They usually did.

One reason for the world’s obesity epidemic is that more people eat out more often, guzzling prepared foods. Like most trends, the habit has spread from the States, the home of all the well-known fast food companies. This, a reflection of the more transient, contingent nature of work, is the gift of the neo-liberal economy. Another factor Spurlock identifies is the skill of the fast food companies, which have enlarged their servings to fit their customers’ expanded waistlines. What was once McDonalds’ standard helping is now the smallest of four alternative sizes.

Spurlock chose McDonalds as it is the biggest junk merchant and the leading marketer. With its clowns, its McHappy meals and its play areas, McDonalds has colonised children. When parents bemoan the nagging of children, it’s McDonalds they have in mind (see Jeremy’s review, above, of "The Corporation", where this tactic – known as "pester power"- is discussed. Ed.). A nutritionist claims that there’s another thing that brings them back: fast food menus are addictive. Customers, she says, are hooked not by taste but by additives.

Unfit children aren’t the victims only of junk food. In public schools now, when it is needed more than ever, physical education is almost never compulsory. Young people are less likely to have the opportunity to enjoy school sport, and more likely to spend class time passively at a keyboard. Spurlock hears that even recess play is on the wane as students cram for the usually pointless tests that educrats impose.

Fast food flaks go on about "choice", but Spurlock found that few McDonalds outlets bothered with even cursory dietary information on which a responsible decision could be based. Society is happy to subject the average child to 10,000 TV ads per year, 90% of them for food. It would help our children if the adults entrusted with their care tried to counter the barrage of junk. But most schools - and even some hospitals - themselves serve up junk food.

Fast food outfits allow school boards to lay off cafeteria staff. The more image conscious corporations, like Pepsi, offer a free curriculum as a side order, lessons which slickly erode the boundaries between the unexceptional and overt indoctrination. Corporations expend a lot of time and money co-opting public officials to act as their agents within the system. As they say at the conferences they organise to push their values to educrats, if you get them young when they’re a captive audience, you’ve got a potential lifetime’s consumer loyalty to look forward to. On top of this PR, McDonalds alone spends an annual $US1.4 billion a year on indoctrinating the children of the world. If school administrators want to give them extra help, so much the better for them.

In this country, Tomorrow’s Schools have been funded so that they never have enough money to do their job and must turn to corporations and chocolate bar sales just to get by. If we had something to replace the old Department of Education as an expression of national values and goals, and gave it a decent amount of money, we could give McDonalds a run for its money. The day after tomorrow, schools could concentrate on bringing up children rather than "competing" against each other. We could try the same thing in our hospitals.

McDonalds stopped supersizing soon after the film came out - in response to its charges, Spurlock reckons. It’s part of a trend, another victory by natural persons protesting the unnatural. In Ontario, Canada, where mainstream politicians had not been fussed about serving up students to the corporations, the Liberal Minister of Education says he’s about to legislate an end to vending machines dispensing chocolate. Keen to be bribed by the junk merchants, schools had been slow to enact measures consistent with their rhetoric to do with the importance of health. "Voluntary is taking too much time," the Minister, Gerard Kennedy, said (Toronto Star, 29/9/04). Way to go.

Michael Moore’s title is derived from Ray Bradbury’s book "Fahrenheit 451", a 1950s satire about book censorship which refers to the temperature at which paper catches alight. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the temperature at which freedom burns. The fires that raged in New York that September 11, 2001, Moore is saying, ignited George Bush’s campaign to whittle away at his own people’s rights.

This tenet has been much discussed and the case against it has been hard to mount, which might be why "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been so popular. Moore is in step with liberal opinion, which despises Dubya. Moore seems to hate him. The film even has a prologue to do with the 2000 Florida vote-counting nonsense, which tipped the Presidency to Bush. This is problematic as it implies that the topic is to be the Bush Presidency rather than the US "war on terror".

Were the pregnant chads* in Dade County and West Palm Beach that big a deal? Moore hints at the convenience that Bush’ brother Jeb is Governor of Florida and that a key judge whose rulings helped Dubya’s cause was a Republican mate. But the evidence is less than an inferno; it’s more a damp squib. Sure, there were friends in high places, but it’s not as though Dubya was overthrowing the Constitution. There’s no reason to suppose that other politicians would not have exploited whatever petty opportunities came their way. * The textbook case of electoral incompetence and corruption that was the 2000 US Presidential election, specifically in Florida, gave the disbelieving world a whole new vocabulary. Voting machines were supposed to punch holes to indicate the voter’s choice. Chads were the minuscule bits of paper left when the holes were not fully punched. The fate of a nation and, arguably, the world, hung a dizzying variety of "dangling, dimpled and pregnant" chads. Of course, in 2004, Dubya won fair and square (didn’t he?), without recourse to the Supreme Court. Ed.

The world is not going to rally against the US because the Democrat candidate, Al Gore, was robbed. Moore subsequently endorsed retired General Wesley Clark in the 2004 Democratic primaries, so he has invited scepticism. If he is saying that the Democrats would not have abused September 11 the way Bush has, he might be right - and it’s hard to imagine that Gore or Clark would have been as inept as Bush - but his film doesn’t make that case.

We are shown a series of women protesting the Florida fiasco, all of them black, being stonewalled by a series of Congressmen, all of them white and male. Yes, of course, US history is a series of such relationships, but in this context, the information is confusing. It implies that the power elite is united in its racist, sexist intransigence. That includes Democrats. From this perspective the hanging and pregnant chads were inconsequential.

Is Moore hinting that Bush is notably racist or sexist? We are offered no evidence. Is he saying that as an imperial power, the US is always governed by such values? Not that either. Moore is not given to systemic analysis. So just what is burning? Well, the film is impressionistic and random, the typically quirky Moore stew. In many ways Moore’s method is a strength. He throws up information, some well known, some not, letting us sort it out for ourselves.

The Bush family’s links with the Bin Laden family, sketched here, have generated comment. The friendship between rich Saudis and Texan oil interests should surprise no one. The rush to leave the States by swarms of Osama’s rellies as the dust swirled through Manhattan doesn’t look good, but neither does it surprise. The one vital theme that Moore nails is the class solidarity that informs all Dubya’s actions.

A prolonged sequence in the Florida school is great film. We see Dubya’s face in close-up as he hears the news at story time on September 11. For seven minutes he was blank. Bush’s defenders would prefer to spin his reaction to render it calm or contemplative, but we just know he didn’t have a clue. He still didn’t when he finished story time and let his advisers fly him in panic around the country.

He makes the case that Dubya is a jerk, with few of the skills that the average person uses to get by in life, but not the case that the Administration as a whole seem to be fools and cowards as well as knaves. We get an indication of Cheney’s Halliburton* connections, a pertinent detail to pick in as much as the company that Cheney headed went on to guzzle at the trough of Iraq "rebuilding" contracts, but again the information is not tied to a wider critique. * Halliburton – a huge US transnational corporation, with close ties to leading figures in the Bush Administration. It is one of the main contractors for the US occupation forces in Iraq and the leading profiteer, so much so that it is embroiled in scandals about its ripping off the US military and the American taxpayer in Iraq and Kuwait. Ed.

The emotional core of the film is Moore’s return to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, scene of his first feature, "Roger and Me" (made in the 1980s), where youths destined for permanent unemployment are targeted by Marine recruiters. A military family loses a son and their faith in the system that they had respected. These scenes work well.

Moore’s personal stuff is his trademark, as is his down home manner. His ambushing gimmick is more appropriate here than his confrontation with a dimmed Charlton Heston in his previous movie "Bowling for Columbine". That movie is about America’s psychopathic gun culture. It features an "ambush" interview with the legendary actor, in his capacity as head of the immensely powerful National Rifle Association. Heston shows all the signs of his age and the impending Alzheimers from which he now suffers. He walks away from Moore, who pursues him. It is not an interview which reflects well on Moore, regardless of what one thinks of the gun lobby, and adds nothing to what is an exceptionally good movie. Ed.

Jehane Noujaim, who directed this discussion of the Arab TV channel Al Jazeera, is an Egyptian-American, so he is possibly well placed to give his impressions of Arab-American relations. We know of Qatar-based Al Jazeera as an alternative news voice to the "embedded" US networks covering Iraq, and as the outlet for announcements from Osama bin Laden and his mates.

It’s not surprising that American officials hate Al Jazeera, and when we hear of the channel, we do so in the context of our media’s coverage of the "war on terror". At a distance it might seem that Al Jazeera broadcasts anti-American propaganda. But as US leaders would oppose any voice that was not part of the chorus they want to conduct, it’s hard to know.

The main impression from this effectively relaxed production is that Al Jazeera is a middle-of-the road outfit staffed by people with little in common with either the fundamentalist Christians in the US or the fundamentalist Islamists in the Middle East. They’re much more like the sort of people you meet in multicultural places like New York or London than the inhabitants of the Texan and Arabian heartlands.

One man talks of his "absolute confidence in the American Constitution and ... the American people". Cynics will suppose he’s playing to the camera and beyond it to American opinion, but there’s likely to be at least residual sincerity in the remark. America is many things to many people. One of them, the great American myth, is its existence as the hope for immigrants from most other places.

This is confirmed when he says that he wants to send his children to school in the States. The tone is secular and liberal, the expression of an internationalist ideology that the bulk of the film’s worldwide audience probably shares. The result is to demystify the whole topic of Iraq, the "war on terror" and the rest of it. There are no cartoon heroes and villains on display, except for some impressions of Sheriff Dubya Bush and his sidekick, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who always pastiche themselves.

A more representative American was the young man responsible for passing on official statements on events in Iraq. When we first hear him, he is repeating the Bush-Rumsfeld line with no apparent discomfort. We assume he is a Republican and a cynic. Later, however, in the weeks after Saddam’s defeat, he confesses to doubt. Perhaps the TV networks, Fox and CNN, are as biased as Iraqis say they are. Maybe Iraqis don’t like being occupied. When he chats off the record with an Arab, both of them less than slick, they resemble the sort of people you see in a cafe discussion anywhere in Europe or North America, so recognisable are the personalities.

The official spokesman becomes doubtful about his job, and we sense that his interviewers, too, are starting to distinguish between their political dislike for the power he represents and their sympathy for him as a person trapped by his role. This is balanced by the way the Arab characters drop their studied objectivity as commentators as they watch TV images of Hussein’s statue toppling. It’s not that they held any brief for the man; more that they were disappointed that the locals didn’t put up a better fight.