O'Reilly: The All-Sleaze Zone. We Pander. You Decide.
Reported by Marie Therese - September 21, 2004 -
On September 20, 2004 (8:29 PM to 8:33 PM EDT) Bill O'Reilly interviewed Los Angeles Commentator, Mark Taylor and Producer Rob Cartee, who have just released a DVD entitled "Buried in the Sand: The Deception of America."
O'Reilly: "Are you guys conservatives?"
TAYLOR: "Well, I'm absolutely conservative. I hope this DVD, this documentary, will have an impact on the election."
CARTEE: "I'm a fairly moderate Republican, more of an independent...some leanings to the right and some to the left."
O'Reilly: "Now, you're the producer of "Buried in the Sand." What did you want to show people...Why did you undertake the project?"
CARTEE: "When I originally heard about the footage of the beheading of Nicholas Berg, it struck my curiosity that these people would actually go out and film this stuff. I then started doing research. It was some of the projects - I found that the actual insurgents and Moslems and clerics and people like that throughout the Middle East have been taping stuff, not only the beheading, but torture and all the way to bomb making and was real shocked and it was, something I felt that people not only in the United States but around the world needed to know."
(During Mr. Cartee's statement and at various points throughout the show FOX aired censored clips of sadistic and brutal acts, e.g. tongues being cut out, hands being chopped off, mass graves, etc. A review - quoted below - says there are also beheadings.)
O'Reilly: "Alright. What point do you, Mr. Taylor, want people to take away from Saddam's atrocities?"
TAYLOR: "A number of points. Number one: When you have somebody like Michael Moore presenting Saddam's Iraq as an oasis of peace', as John McCain said at the Republican National Convention, when he does that. When Sen. Kennedy can stand up without reproach and compare what American soldiers did at Abu Graib to the mindless torture - and we show this in the video - of cutting off fingers - its unspeakable cruelty not to mention slaughtering at Abu Graib. More [people died under Saddam] than have died since the invasion began. When the German Economic Minister can come out and call it a crime and that this caused terrible human suffering, it is time for the world to see what really happened. I love what Secretary of War Henry Stimson said during World War II. He said it takes - a lie can go around the world seven times before the truth can even get it's pants on."
O'Reilly: "But everybody knows, Mr. Cartee, how bad Saddam was. Nobody - even the apologists, even the Howard Deans of the world, alright - will cede that this was a Hitler light, just a horrible man. What political implication - what good does it do me to sit through your documentary to see how horrible he was? What do you want me to take away from it?"
CARTEE: "Well, Bill, even to this day - for instance, the Nazis in Germany and some of the atrocities - today there are still nay-sayers - there's not a whole lot of them - that say that the actual atrocities committed against the Jewish people through, around Europe didn't happen, which we all - anybody with common sense - realizes that, you know, these atrocities did. But could you imagine if we didn't have the pictures of the Holocaust and everything to go along with it to support the evidence?"
O'Reilly: "You just wanted historical documentation of what happened? How bout you, Mr. Taylor. What do you want people to take away from this? See, I know this guy's bad, so I'm not inclined to go watch a 90-minute documentary."
TAYLOR: "Right"
O'Reilly: " Seein' how bad he is."
TAYLOR: Yeah.
TAYLOR: "I'm sorry. John Kerry came out today and has now said we would better off had we not gone in. Michael Moore and - I've had people on the left say Well, we know this'. Well, then, how bout correcting Michael Moore? How bout correcting Sen. Kennedy? And there's more to it than that. We show what these people, the Islamic terrorists - not only in Iraq but around the Middle East - do to their own people. We've had the left saying what did we do to make them so savage.' We're going to show what they do to their own people. We're gonna show the very kind of Sharia law that they want to enforce in the rest of the world. It's evil. And it's a war that threatens our very civilization."
O'Reilly: "Alright."
TAYLOR: "It's important to understand the reality of it."
O'Reilly: "So, after watching this, I'm getting from both of you that you want people to take the war on terror more seriously and be a little more hawkish about it."
TAYLOR: "Yeah."
CARTEE: "Unavoidably, yeah."
TAYLOR: "Yes, absolutely, I believe that this stuff has been around in the American media - a good portion of it - and they have sat on it, they've embargoed it. That's why we call it the deception of America."
O'Reilly (cutting off Taylor's last few words): "Well, you know it'll be interesting to see ... what other programs book you to talk about it."
TAYLOR: "Yes, it will."
O'REILLLY: "And keep our bookers in - and tell us where you appear and in a couple of weeks, we'll talk about that. Alright? Your experiences there"
Comment
Here are excerpts from two online reviews of this masterpiece of American filmmaking due out today:
Michael Jacobson, DVD Movie Central Since I can't get the link to activate, here's the URL: http://www.dvdmoviecentral.com/ReviewsText/buried_in_the_sand.htm
"I was one of many who were highly offended by Senator Ted Kennedy's flippant remark about how Saddam's torture chambers were re-opened under U.S. management. As an answer to him, this film first shows some of the photos and video footage of the Abu Ghraib abuses we were forced to endure for weeks and weeks. But then, to leave no doubt as to the difference, comes earlier Abu Ghraib video, when it was Saddam's prison. We actually see Hussein's prisoners being beaten to death while listening to them scream and plead for their lives until their bodies slump still from the soldiers' clubbings.
But that isn't all. We see footage of Iraqi citizens getting their fingers chopped off, their hands removed, their arms broken. We hear prisoners scream and cry while getting their bare feet beaten mercilessly. We see Iraqi stonings, where prisoners are tied, covered, buried chest deep in sand and summarily bludgeoned with large rocks until they're blood soaked messes. We see the footage of suicide bombers as filmed by the terrorists themselves for their own purposes, including the carnage of the aftermath of an Israeli bus bombing, showing severed limbs and bodies that appear to have been turned inside out from the force of the blast.
The film accuses the American media of being accomplices in trying to quell the anger of our citizens by NOT showing us the footage of the four Americans in Fallujah who were burned, beaten, and dragged in the streets and eventually hung from a bridge, or the beheadings of Nicholas Berg and the others who preceded and followed him. So Buried in the Sand purports to right this great wrong by showing us all of it." (end of excerpt)
Boo Allen, Film Critic for the Denton Record-Chroniccle (Texas):
"In obvious response to the recent run of liberally-slanted documentaries, such as Outfoxed and Uncovered, this narrowly focused film also looks to preach to the converted. A grim, uber-serious Mark Taylor hosts and narrates this look at various atrocities that supposedly led the United States into wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. To make his point, the film features one atrocity after another: beheadings, suicide bombings, chopped-off hands. Around 71 minutes. Not rated, but full of hard-to-stomach images." (end of excerpt)
An internet search for "Rob Cartee" reveals very little. There is one curious entry, though - a Rob Cartee listed as one of the actors in a hardcore porn film called Carnal Secrets available at orgazmik.com. Could this be the same Rob Cartee?
The DVD is distributed by Westlake Entertainment Group, a company owned by Alan M. Shapiro (go to Fictitious Business Name Statement. Mr. Shapiro lives in Westlake Village, California.
