Suitcase Nuke

Actor Gary Sinise has accused Brian De Palma, who directed him in Mission to Mars and Snake Eyes, of pursuing a political agenda with De Palma's award-winning 2007 drama Redacted, based on the al-Mahmudiyah crimes involving six soldiers who were convicted of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her family. (The film performed poorly at the box office.) "There are 150,000 people serving honorably, but Brian De Palma didn't care to show those stories," Sinise told today's (Tuesday) Chicago Tribune. The al-Mahmudiyah incident, he maintained, was "one particular, horrible episode that happened by, clearly, some criminals who happen to be in the American military." Although acknowledging that he himself had not seen the film, Sinise said that he had concluded that De Palma had intended to create anti-war propaganda with it. "I knew he had a very political agenda with making that film to make the American military look really, really horrible. ... Brian De Palma hates the American military," he said. De Palma declined to respond. Sinise himself has exec-produced his own Iraq war film, a documentary called Brothers at War due to open on Friday. "This movie is not going to be your typical blood-and-guts, negative, depressing thing about Iraq," Sinise said.