September 11, 2001, was staged as spectacle as much as attack, and this film follows the propaganda war that followed for the next decade between the United States and Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda withheld footage of the hijackers for release at a later, more damaging moment, then overplayed its hand with beheading videos that terrorized audiences and cost the group sympathizers it had won. The US side fares no better on screen: Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib become the film's central exhibits of a message strategy that backfired, images that did more to recruit enemies than reassure allies. The film moves through both camps' media operations, from spin and censorship to threats against journalists, treating the fight over images as a matter with real casualties rather than a sideshow to the shooting war. Al Jazeera assembles the record largely through archival footage and news imagery, tracking who controlled which pictures and when, and closes without a winner, only a propaganda contest still running.