How Michael Bay's 'The Rock' Was Used to Help Justify War in Iraq
By Alex Ritman, The Hollywood Reporter
Want someone to blame for the Iraq War? Blame Michael Bay.
According to the Chilcot report, the exhaustive investigation into Britain’s role in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, British intelligence used the plot of Bay’s film The Rock to help make its case for war.
According to the report, published on Wednesday, the British secret service MI6 took elements of the 1996 action thriller which became part of the “valuable intelligence” they presented arguing for military intervention to topple Iraq leader Saddam Hussein.
The film stars Ed Harris as a rogue Marine who seizes a stockpile of rockets armed with the deadly nerve gas VX who takes control of Alcatraz prison and threatens to launch his arsenal against San Francisco. Nicolas Cage plays a chemical weapons specialist with the FBI who enlists a former prisoner (Sean Connery), the only man ever to escape from the prison island, to help him sneak in and thwart Harris’ plan.
The element of the story that made it into the Chilcot inquiry concerned Harris’ nerve gas, which was famously stored in cylindrical glass containers (perfect for an edge-of-seat scene in which they roll precariously across the floor).
In an MI6 report from September 2002, a “new source” with “phenomenal access” to Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons capabilities claimed that nerve agents VX, sarin, and soman had been produced at a facility in Al-Yarmuk, and stored in containers including “linked hollow glass spheres.”
Eyebrows were soon raised inside MI6 after the report was circulated, with “one recipient” pointing out the similarities to the film.
According to the Inquiry, it was suggested that “glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions; and that a popular move (The Rock) had inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried in glass beads or spheres.”
But despite these doubts, the same source was again cited in a report claiming that Iraq was accelerating its chemical and biological weapons programs and had built more facilities.
The report, claimed the Chilcott Inquiry, played a significant role in the arguments put forth by the British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, in his justification for war, helping the PM make “key judgments about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons capabilities.”
By 2003, however, MI6’s doubts had been confirmed and the “source had been revealed to have been lying,” according to the Inquiry, and after a meeting in June was concluded to be “a fabricator who had lied from the outset.”
But by then, of course, the Iraq War was already in full swing with Hussein — nerve gas in glass spheres or not — already toppled.
Tony Blair is the central figure in the Chilcott report, which offered a damning verdict, asserting that Blair had deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and disregarded warnings about the consequences of going to war.
Related: Michael Bay Casts “Britain’s Loneliest Dog” in Next ‘Transformers’ Film
Watch the trailer for ‘The Rock:’
(Photo: Callaghan Walsh/Getty Images for Paramount)
