Death of a President
Broadcast in the year 2008, the film is presented in a TV documentary style format, combining talking head interviews, news coverage clips and video surveillance footage surrounding the assassination of U.S. President George W. Bush in Chicago around a year earlier on 19 October 2007. The president is fatally shot by a sniper after he addresses an economic forum at the Chicago Sheraton Hotel, before which an anti-war rally had taken place. News outlets immediately begin reporting on the incident along with its political ramifications. After authorities earlier arrest and interrogate war-protesting detainees, Jamal Abu Zikri (Malik Bader), an IT professional of Syrian origin, becomes the prime suspect.
Vice President Dick Cheney, now president, uses the possible al-Qaeda relationship in connection with the suspected assassin, Zikri, to push his own domestic political security agenda. He calls for the legislation of PATRIOT Act III, trying to increase the investigative powers of the FBI, the police, and other government agencies over U.S. citizens and resident aliens as he contemplates attacking Syria.
As his wife Zahra (Hend Ayoub) listens to the verdict with family attorney Dawn Norton (Patricia Buckley) in a packed courtroom, Zikri is convicted of killing the U.S. President and sentenced to death based upon dubious forensic evidence. Meanwhile, a new report which surfaces, substantiated by interviews with Marianne Claybon (Chavez Ravine), indicates that the perpetrator is most likely her husband Al Claybon (Tony Dale), a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, who lived in Rock Island, Illinois, and who also was the father of David Claybon, a U.S. soldier recently killed in the Iraq War. The assassin, who blames President Bush for the death of his son, killed himself after Bush's assassination. Claybon's suicide note, addressed to a second son, Casey Claybon (Neko Parham), an Iraq War veteran living in Chicago who was previously considered as a suspect, reads:
Ten months after President Bush's assassination, Zikri remains on death row at the Stateville Correctional Center, because government officials are deliberately delaying his legal appeal. Moreover, in his dead father's Rock Island house, Casey Claybon finds evidence of his father's planning of the shooting. The most incriminating piece of evidence is a copy of a top secret presidential itinerary outlining, to the minute, President Bush's Chicago whereabouts on 19 October 2007. The news report ends while the U.S. Government continues investigating how presidential assassin Al Claybon obtained that top secret document.
The final closing titles of the film inform the viewer that President Cheney's USA PATRIOT Act III was signed into permanent law in the U.S., stating the following: "It has granted investigators unprecedented powers of detention and surveillance, and further expanded the powers of the executive branch".
anti war, revenge, alternate reality, murder, violence