When U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair touted "Iraq's WMD" to persuade Parliament to go to war, he cited a decade-old student essay as if it were strategic intelligence. What if the paper's author hadn't proven who wrote it? Donald Rumsfeld retorted, "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence," but the story's true. Have others been unrevealed, under-reported, or just ignored?

"AfterMath" is among several films that challenge the Bush Administration's findings from September 11th, 2001. Posing eleven important questions about the attacks to a panel of nine researchers, "AfterMath" investigates reportage from conventional media, the White House, and our allies in the so-called "war on terror." The film's split-screen intro, with voice-over by rapper Paris - whose recent "Sonic Jihad" shows a 747 aimed at the White House - covers the most-puzzling aspects: the Air Force's lethargic 9-11-01 response, and the Bush Administration's absurd claim of not foreseeing airplanes as weapons. Filmed between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, "Aftermath" asks what our government's motives could be for invading Central Asia, and sums up the impact of the so-called "war on terror" on Americans' civil liberties.

Lawyer Mary Schiavo, representing victims' families against American and United Airlines, points out simultaneous, multiple-airplane hijackings aren't new: Four planes were hijacked in a single day in 1971. Independent journalist Michael Ruppert reports that in 2000, the Pentagon simulated an airliner crash into a building, and designed security against kamikaze attack on a summit Bush attended in Italy in 2001.

Nafeez Ahmed, author of "The War on Freedom," focuses on FAA requirements that any plane off its flight plan be intercepted within 10 minutes (but doesn't say that the FAA only calls for "contacting" an errant plane and coaxing it to land), and that, on September 16th, the Vice-President said the President struggled with whether to shoot down the hijacked planes. But as Ahmed observes, whether to scramble Air Force jets to intercept the hijacked planes was the first issue. What took the President so long to do that?

The 35-minute "AfterMath" persuades viewers to challenge Bush's version of events. Grasping what happened since September 11th will take all the creative thinking we can muster.