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Old 10-25-2004, 10:49 AM   #1 (permalink)
tspikes51
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Findings on "Fahrenheit 9/11"

Recently, I had to write a report on the truths/fallacies in Fahrenheit 9/11. I cited a portion in another thread, and somebody PMed me and wanted me to share this report, in its entirety, on the forums. I only had to write on 5 points in the movie, so that's all I have here. Mind you, that until I began my research, I had only been skeptical about the movie, and didn't care if I found things true or false. Here is the report, unabridged and in its entirety:

Many of history’s greatest films have generated quite a bit of controversy, but none have attained the same level of controversy that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) has. Many wonder if the information presented in the movie holds up to any standard of truth. Many have tried to prove the falsity or truth of the claims made by Moore in his political “documentary. There seems to be nothing that is completely true or completely false in the movie, however many things are presented as such. Differing degrees of truth can be found by examining just five of Michael’s claims in the movie:
1. African-Americans in Florida were not allowed to vote because Bush hired a company to get them off of the voter rolls.
2. Bush was on vacation 42% of the time in his first eight months of office.
3. Bush took insider trading tips and sold Harken stock shortly before they lost money.
4. Bush proposed closing veteran hospitals and increasing drug costs for veterans.
5. One hundred and forty-two Saudis, including twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to fly out of the country while all flights were closed, just two days after the attack.
One of Moore’s first, and more bogus, claims is that some of Bush’s friends and workers hired a private company, Data Base Technologies (DBT), to purge voters who may have voted for Gore, specifically African-Americans, from the Florida voter rolls. This was generated, according to an article in the Palm Beach Post (Hiaasen, Kane, & Jaspin, 2001) from a 1998 Miami, Florida mayoral election that went haywire because convicted felons were allowed to vote, which is against state law. To prevent this sort of disaster in the future, the Florida legislature ordered the executive branch to remedy the problem by purging all convicted felons from the voter rolls. The executive branch decided to hire Data Base Technologies, a private company, to take care of it. They made a list of 19,398 people who could not vote, and the election officials in each county were expected to use the list. However, DBT wrongly purged around 1,100 eligible voters who’s names either matched that of a convicted felon, felons convicted in other states that restored their civil rights after their sentence was served, or people whose crimes were only misdemeanors, but were shown by records to be felonies. Twenty counties in Florida completely ignored this list, which permitted thousands of felons to vote.
Where then, does Moore draw his conclusion that blacks were disenfranchised when this took place, and how does he know that they would vote for Gore? Moore most likely draws his conclusion from a couple of statistics. First, as published in the same article in the Post (Hiaasen, et. al., 2001), “Blacks make up nearly 49 percent of the felons convicted in the state…so any purge of felons would include a disproportionate number of blacks.” Second, he probably based it on the fact that the NAACP filed a lawsuit claiming disenfranchisement. However, race couldn’t have been a factor in putting names on the list of because the people denied their voting rights, in many cases, did not match the race of the felon that DBT was targeting in the purge. Michael most likely based his claim that the people improperly purged would have voted for Gore from a study conducted by the American Sociological Review, (American Sociological Review, 2003) that 68.9% of felons vote Democrat. Therefore Moore draws his conclusion from a weak combination of sources.
Moore also attacks the President by saying that, according to an article published in the Washington Post shortly before September 11, 2001, Bush spent 42% of his first eight months in office on vacation. According to an article published by Dave Kopel, (Kopel, 2004), “Shortly before 9/11, the Post calculated that Bush had spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en route, including all or part of 54 days at his ranch.” So Moore’s citation of the Post is correct. However, that percentage includes time that was spent traveling to and from vacation spots, which Moore fails to mention. Moore also does not say that much of this time was weekends spent at Camp David, which is common practice among presidents. According to FOXNews.com (The Truth About 'Fahrenheit 9/11', 2004) if you subtract the amount of time that Bush spends at Camp David, which is equipped for presidential work, you get that Bush was only on vacation 13% of those eight months.
Moore proceeds to show several shots of Bush relaxing and having a good time, suggesting that Bush didn’t get much work done while he was on vacation. One of the shots, in particular, briefly shows Bush with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. This most likely means that Bush was doing presidential work with the Prime Minister, as anyone could see. However, the clip was only shown briefly, so that the audience was not likely to recognize the figure. In his article, “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11,” Dave Kopel cites a “random week of Bush's August 2001 ‘vacation,’” (Kopel, 2004) (August 20 through August 25) as taken from public documents on the White House’s website. In this citation of what Bush did during that week, it seems that Bush spent plenty of time working. Among his schedule are such tasks as “spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien on the matter of free trade and tariffs on Canadian lumber,” “signed six bills into law,” and “met with Andy Card and Karen Hughes, talking about communications issues;” all of which are activities that are similar to those conducted in a conventional presidential workweek.
Moore shows a clip in this segment—which was taken on August 25, 2001—which showed the President talking about working at his Texas ranch, while Moore says "George Bush spent the rest of the August at the ranch." This is not true, as explained in Kopel’s article (Kopel, 2004), in which he cites Bush’s schedule for the day after the shot was taken, all of which was spent in Pennsylvania. He goes on further to cite some of the President’s accomplishments over the next three days, during which Bush declared part of Southern Ohio a disaster area, spoke at the American Legion’s annual conference in San Antonio, and appointed thirteen members of the Presidential Task Force to Improve Health Care Delivery for Our Nations Veterans.
Another partially-true claim made in the movie was that Bush took insider trading tips, selling $848,000 worth of stock in the Harken Energy Corporation before they announced losses of over $23 million dollars, and that he dodged the SEC. Through the failure and buyout of a few of Bush’s oil companies, Bush ended up on the board of directors of Harken Energy in 1986, who gave him at least $500,000 in stock. Later on, between 1987 and 1988, Bush became involved in his father’s presidential campaign, as well as a group that was planning to buy the Texas Rangers Major League Baseball team. When the team was finally sold in March 1989, Bush was forced to borrow $600,000 in order to pay his share of the team. In order to pay the loan, Bush sold 212,140 shares of Harken stock, worth $848,560 during June of 1990. In August of that same year, Harken announced heavy second quarter losses, and accusations were made that Bush took insider tips, after all, he was on Harken’s audit board. According to Byron York, (York, 2002) an ensuing SEC investigation revealed that “In light of the facts uncovered, it would be difficult to establish that, even assuming Bush possessed material nonpublic information, he acted with…intent to defraud.” They also concluded that most of the information that would have indicated such a monumental loss was not revealed to Bush until after he sold the stock. Bush had sold the stock to a broker who contacted Bush with the intent to buy the stock, and Bush conferred with company personnel to ensure that the sale could be completed. Moore probably tells the audience that Bush evaded the SEC because Bush submitted some papers to them late. So, Bush neither took insider tips nor did he “dodge” the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The film claims that Bush tried to close veteran hospitals, and that he attempted to double the cost of prescription drugs for veterans. If you only listen to those two facts, and don’t look any deeper into it, you will find that Moore is correct on both points. He supported closing Veterans Affairs hospitals, as outlined in his Department of Veteran’s Affairs’ CARES Decision (Secretary of Veterans Affairs, 2004). However, this document also says that the hospitals being closed were in places where the veteran population was decreasing, VA facilities were under-utilized, and where veterans could be served by another hospital, which Moore failed to mention. The decision also ordered that more hospitals be built in places that needed them.
The claim that Bush tried to double the cost of prescription drugs for veterans is also deceptive. While Bush did support this, Moore leads the audience to believe that the increase would be such that veterans wouldn’t be able to afford their prescriptions. What Mr. Moore didn’t tell the audience is that the co-pay for veterans for prescription drugs was only seven dollars, and Bush proposed that the cost be raised to fifteen dollars for veterans whose income was more than $24,000 a year. This around the same cost as civilians with prescription drug plans.
Moore makes further attempts to deceive the audience by saying that on September 13th, 2001, some 142 Saudis—including two dozen members of the bin Laden family, and implies that no one else was allowed to fly at the time. Michael is correct in saying that 142 Saudis, including 24 bin Ladens flew out of the country, as documented by flight records. However, in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Situation Update for September 13, 2001, it clearly states that airspace was open, stating “Some commercial airlines have been authorized flights to reposition aircraft. The FAA anticipates opening the national airspace system today at 11 am. The FAA anticipates opening the national airspace system today at 11 am” (FEMA, 2003). Moore failed to report that some people were allowed to fly.
The departure of the Saudis was cleared, says Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, by the FBI. According to Isikoff and Hosenball, (Isikoff, & Hosenball, 2004) “The 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of them and asked many of them ‘detailed questions.’" This invalidates the film’s interview of Richard Clarke, who says that they should of held the Saudis for questioning.
After examining some main points of the movie, it becomes apparent that while some things in Fahrenheit 9/11 were true, most points were quite deceiving. What is most frightening about this is that the general population will accept this as either absolute truth or fallacy without doing their own fact checking. With the 2004 presidential election coming up, that is a thing that nobody, save Moore and his followers, want to see.

My bib:

Works Cited

Federal Emergency Management Agency, (2003). Fema: national situation update: thursday, september 13, 2001. http://www.fema.gov/emanagers/2001/nat091301.shtm.

FOXNews.com, (2004). The truth about 'fahrenheit 9/11'. retrieved Oct 10, 2004, from
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,124079,00.html.

Hiaasen, S., Kane, G., & Jaspin, E. (2001). Felon purge sacrificed innocent voters. Palm
Beach Post, . Retrieved Oct 10, 2004, from http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0527-03.htm

Isikoff, M., & Hosenball, M. (2004, Jun 30). More distortions from michael moore. Newsweek, Retrieved Oct 12, 2004, from http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5335853/site/newsweek/.

Kopel, D. (2004). Fifty-nine deciets in fahrenheit 9/11, dave kopel,
independence institute. retrieved Sept 20, 2004, from
http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fift...enheit-911.htm.

Moore, M. (Director). (2004). Fahrenheit 9/11 [Motion Picture]. United States: Dog Eat
Dog Films.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs. (2004). CARES Decision. http://www1.va.gov/cares/

Check out the Kopel article for more.
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