Now playing in 2,600 home theaters: Bush's lies about Iraq

Salon: "Uncovered" has emerged as a kind of liberal master narrative about the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom

It's for sale on several major progressive Web sites, including those of the Nation, Buzzflash, John Podesta's Center for American Progress, and MoveOn.org (both MoveOn and the Center for American Progress helped fund the film). So far, it's sold more than 40,000 copies. Financier and Bush foe George Soros held a screening of it in New York. Podesta, Bill Clinton's chief of staff, showed it to an audience of 100 at the International Spy Museum in Washington, and his center sent a copy to every member of Congress. When Greenwald screened it at a 500-seat theater in L.A., people jammed the aisles, stood in the back, and cheered when it was over.

And on Sunday, people gathered in more than 2,600 American homes, cafes and community spaces to watch "Uncovered" at parties organized through the progressive group MoveOn.org. As Greenwald points out, 2,600 screens is a huge release for an hour-long documentary. Hollywood blockbusters, he says, typically open on about 4,000. The showings were held across the country, from a living room in Clearfield, Utah, to a luxury apartment in a Donald Trump building on Central Park South, where pop star Moby and money manager Boykin Curry hosted about 40 people. At 8:30 p.m. EST, parties nationwide called in to a massive conference where Eli Pariser, speaking from Moby's party, interviewed Greenwald, who'd dialed in from Los Angeles. The questions were submitted by MoveOn members.

There's nothing new in "Uncovered," but there's power in the accumulation of expertise that Greenwald presents, which is one reason Bush's opponents are embracing it. It consists largely of interviews with former American intelligence agents, military officers and diplomats who eviscerate much of the White House's case for war.

"This isn't about being for the war or against the war," said Moby. "It's about a president who lies."

"Uncovered's" weakness isn't that it has a point of view, but that it hardly bothers to take on opposing ones. Frontline's October documentary, "Truth, War and Consequences," is just as damning as Greenwald's -- and covers much of the same ground -- but it's even more persuasive, because it allows players like Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle to make their cases, and arguably to hang themselves. It also suggests the extent to which the administration may have deceived itself even as it was deceiving the nation, a hypothesis missing from the fairly black-and-white world of "Uncovered," in which the administration's possible motives remain opaque.

Still, even if "Uncovered" lacks nuance, it's largely accurate and politically effective.

Director Robert Greenwald: "I think it's legitimate to debate whether to go to war on the neoconservative argument that we need to go in and fix the Middle East," he says. "It's illegitimate nonsense to talk about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism."

Not that the administration is talking about either anymore. On Sunday, White House chief of staff Andy Card appeared on CNN and declared that questions about prewar intelligence are now "moot" given Saddam's atrocious human rights record.