Free Republic

March 18, 2008 -- Director Nick Broomfield's film, Battle for Haditha, received its world television premiere last night in England--and finished dead last in its time slot. While nearly six million viewers tuned into The Fixer last night, less than a million tuned to Channel 4's presentation of Battle for Haditha. Those viewers represented less than five percent of the viewing public in England, and is equivalent to the audience for a bottom-rated cable news show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, in the United States. Popular Monday night soaps, Coronation Street and EastEnders, drew nearly 11 million viewers each....

Nick Broomfield is making a film about the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians and insurgents by US marines in Haditha. He will begin shooting in Jordan this November using a small film crew and non-actors for the principal roles. On November 19 2005, a roadside bomb in the Sunni town of Haditha killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas. The US military initially claimed that 15 civilians had died in the blast, but then said that the civilians were accidentally shot by marines during a gun battle with insurgents. However, eyewitness accounts and a video shot by a local journalist have suggested...

[Nick Broomfield's] new project, Haditha, [is] a dramatisation of the massacre in November 2005, when a company of US marines shot dead up to 24 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, after a Marine NCO had been killed by an improvised explosive device....[His previous film] was a generic fictionalised narrative, this will be a dramatised reconstruction. Shortly after the screening the team left for Jordan where he is filming now.Surprisingly Broomfield was able to interview some of the Marines involved in the incident. "We spent five days in a motel in San Diego interviewing them for probably 10 hours a...

Nicholas and Barney Broomfield (a father and son film-making team) have begun promoting their film, The Battle for Haditha. The film purports to "reenact" the incident in Haditha by showing deranged Marines slaughtering unarmed civilians in cold blood. In an interview in Britian's The First Post, Barney Broomfield says this... "Spending so much time so close to these guys [the Marine actors in the film] I realised it is much harder to blame the troops for some of the things that happen in war," Broomfield concludes. "It's much harder to point the finger when you know these are just young...

NORTH CASTLE At just age 26, Andrew McLaren has already had many roles in his life - soldier, bodyguard, playboy and, most recently, family man and political candidate. The North Castle man is now trying his hand at another venture - acting. He's starring in "Battle for Haditha," a film scheduled for release in January. It is based on allegations that Marines killed 24 Iraqis - including women and children - during a 2005 rampage in that Iraqi city. "I kind of wanted to live a full life and do whatever I wanted to do," McLaren said recently about his...