The lies of Michael Moore
 

Michael Moore is a lop of shit as far as I am concerned.

Here is the proof :|

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/

I guess than don't go watch????lol..thanks for stiring shit up, I think im gonna go catch the movie to see what the big deal is about...

You do that and be sure to heckel our troops as well.

I won't go see the movie.
Moore IS a big gross pile of crap.
I can hate Bush enough on my own without putting money in his pockets.

since when is being anti war the same as being anti troops

Since Neo-Cons have decided to try to bully and call people names if they don't agree with The Fuhrer...I mean Bush.

I agree with Hal, I hate Bush enough, don't need Good Ol' Mikey Moore telling me why as I line his pockets so he can tell me how bad off we are. If the man truly cared and believed in what he said he'd offer up his movies and books at cost. He wouldn't be about the money.

FYI, I havent seen the movie but I've seen the men in uniform and read their descriptions of being anti-war.... but they can expect reprisals for their actions.

Being in uniform they *officially* hold the opinion of their superior commander.. the Commander in Chief. Under the UCMJ you are allowed to state publicly any opinion about anything you want... outside of uniform. But while in uniform, or publicly stating you are a member of the services, you are only allowed to state the official opinion of the Navy.

Court Marshalled? no. Passed up for promotion? most likely.

Very mature, you must be a Kerry supporter

I didnt say he was anti troops, he just seemed like the type that would do that, so does Moore.

I respect your opinion, I don't hate Bush but at least you are smart enought to make up your own mind.

Michael Moore thinks he should make up every bodies minds for them, and he will lie, cheat, and steal to make sure of it.

I'd be careful with your attitude or this won't be going far.

Who said anything about "our troops"..They are your troops, I live in a country with a government smart enough not to invade somone elses country for reasons that god only knows..

And if I did meet any of your troops, I would not heckle them, I would salute them, they are risking (and GIVING) their lives for George Dub and his administrations lies...

Can we just get a close please? This can only lead to a good ol' bon fire.

To be honest, it's usually pretty lame to make analogues with your political opponents and nazis. Unless, they of course are in a fact national socialists.

yes, der Führer had a moustache ;)

no, i agree with you there, jus' kiddin

i agree with Halx and pan who said the Moore is a bit of a tosspot, and it's not difficult to find your own reasons to disagree with Bush. Moore pisses me off for some reason, maybe it's because he's so self-righteous...

Impugning the maturity of a member in the course of argumentation is not a way to proceed here.

The thread will continue as a single error isn't it's full measure.

Raise the level of your dialog.

Reading this thread has given a rare opportunity to show how flamebait works.

Queedo, please refrain from the one liners, and attempts at trolling. Fortunately the replys have kept this thread from degrading too far, but if you continue it is likely to be shut down.
The only result of such blatant negative statements is thread failure, and a loss of respect on your part.
Everyone has opinions, we can respect them all without attacking the individual.

Now: the thread topic.

Much of the Movie is "Hollywood Truth", in that Moore embelishes the facts to get an emotional reaction. To call them lies would be, in my opinion, incorrect. To call this a documentary of truth would be equally incorrect. It was quite entertaining, and enlightening though.

True...yet I believe it HAD to be in this cinematic format because Americans in GENERAL don't get to the independent sources for information. If not a movie it would have had to be a HIP HOP video or something, the mass of Americans are too brainwashed and this is the medium (cinema) they (we, embarrassed) flock to.
Funny, look how quiet this weekend was about the movie in the press....

I went and seen this movie this weekend. I really enjoyed it. I can't honestly say I am big into politics but I don't like how Bush does things and presents himself in such a way that he appears to be a freakin idiot. The movie is an eye opener that is for sure. Bad tatics? Not sure, maybe just one side of the story. We all know the government controls what we hear/see. Even if ONE thing from that movie is true then people need to stand up and question just what the hell he is trying to acomplish.

Well...Art is being a little more benevolent than I would've been. I'd have locked this troll fest as unredeemable. However...I do see that the topic is beginning to go back on course. Let's keep the discourse civil, and the conversation fresh. Okay?

As far as Michael Moore goes...I have no use for him, or his ilk. In my opinion, he gives Liberalism as bad a name as Ashcroft to Conservatism. Either side can be carried too far. That said, I probably will go see it. Only because you almost have to, in order to hold any sort of intelligent dialouge about it.

Bookman, I hope to hell that you are wrong. I fear, however..., that you are not. So sad for us.

And another thing. Yes. You absolutely can be anti-Bush, and even anti-war, and still support the troops. They are not intrinsically connected.

Why is it that people who go and see the movie haven't made up their own minds? I'm not the biggest fan of Dubya but I still intend to see the movie. How can you say everything he says is lies without actually seeing the movie?

Thank god for that, the smartest thing our government did, and yes all the soldiers coalition, Iraqi, anybody fighting in this unjust war deserve a debt of gratitude.

IMHO.

Most everyone on this thread either did not read the article posted or is blatantly ignoring it. The man writing this story is no conservative and is not beholden to the right. He is simply stating facts. Facts that so many liberals typically choose to ignore. I cannot say that I love George Bush. I voted for him and regret my choice sometimes on a few levels (Stem cell research, This FCC nonsense). But at least he chooses not to ignore the facts and makes unpopular decisions based upon them. As unpopular as they may be he at least has taken some action to protect us. I do not know if Gore or Kerry would make such choices. They seem to be indebted to popular opinion and in times like this it takes a braver man to be seen as unpopular for the sake of the people’s safety.

Why not see the movie, form your opinions, THEN read the thoughts of others? I try to avoid reading reviews of a movie before seeing it because I find myself conditioned to look for the things the reviewer did. This is true for movies as unimportant as Harry Potter -- I intend to stick with it for a film that's actually about real life, in whatever degree.

Respect, but how can you really state that he is protecting us, even now when all that is under scrutiny? We have yet to see the 'WHY' he is making the moves he has.

I'm with BOR and I would have locked this sucker after I read the third nasty comment.

But if you guys can redeem this thread, go ahead.

See? Even in the pits of the darkest trollfest, redemption can be found.

I haven't seen F9/11, and I'm not sure I want to. If the remainder of the movie is anything like the trailers, I expect to see a lot of well-cut edits that overemphasize relatively minor points. For example, the whole "now watch this drive" clip. You ask the President a question while he's golfing, and you get mad when he continues what he's doing?

I had similar problem with Columbine; Moore seems to emphasize a lot of individually minor events or points to bring about a major opinion.

Then again, maybe those are the exact reasons why I should see it.

It doesn't anger me that he's golfing, as lame as I personally think that sport is. It angers me that the nation was facing a crisis, Bush was telling us that we were in a crisis, yet he was still out golfing. BTW the press doesn't get to follow the President on to a golf course unless the President wants them there.

Personally I can't wait to see this movie. It's opening here on Friday. I'm sure I'll have to pre-buy tickets. The chain theaters here passed on the movie but there's a city-owned theater that will benefit from their mistake. They'll probably make their year's budget on this one film.

The conservative response to this film has been truly sick and disgusting. For some reason it's fine for them to sit back and make attacks at Clinton, devote book after book to bashing Liberals, and sit on talk radio show after talk radio show bashing liberals but when someone has a different opinion they do everyhing they can to stop it.

First Disney doesn't want to distribute it, then the cons try to bully theaters away from showing it, then there's con groups trying to say it violates election law (it never once mentions any candidate running against him), and then there's all these articles that try to bring Moore down.

The conservative response to this movie has been immature and un-American.

You are neglecting to note the difference. The criticisms about Clinton are true. Moore is fabrication lies.

I agree this movie is more Hollywood than fact.

And yes I agree we all are entitled to our oppions as long as they are factual I have no problem with them. So lets try to keep them that way guys, and you too Moore!

Sorry if I was trolling a bit.

Moore had extensive fact checking done on the movie. The article at the top doesn't show any "lies" made by Moore.

What he says is true. It's completly his view of the truth, but he does not lie in the movie. Read the rebuttal piece shown earlier in the thread.

Can you imagin the stress of being the President of the U.S.?

Even Clinton messed around during crisis, he just did it with interns.

But seriously, I can't think of a job that needs to have stress relief more than the President of the U.S. or any other country. Let me ask you this did his golfing change the situation in any way shape or form? No it didn't!

I went to see a movie last night (no not that one ) and they had to have police there because the people who saw this film were getting into fights right after it at alarming rates. This kind of film tears at the very fabric of the U.S. If you don't like the President fine, then don't vote for him, but don't go out and make movies that exagerate Bush's true stances on things so you can influence people to your side. Why does't Mooore Rrun against him this year? For all of Moore's talk about how others should do it, he would be a terrible president based on the facts to date.

You got it my man!:D

Hee hee, gotta love these Moore love/hate fests. Truly an entertaining thread. Thanks.

He is even more fun to hate than Clinton in my opinion:D

Stress relief is one thing. Becoming a virtual telecommuter is another thing.

from the rebuttal piece:
As far as this "Hollywood Truth" stuff is concerned, name a talk show host that doesn't try to distort the issue to show his arguement. Maybe the Right is just pissed because someone is finally beating them at their own games.

Some rebuttals to acusations made against the movie from the michael moore website:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/f911facts/

Asking questions like Moore does... is it any surprise that many want to see him drink hemlock?

I love how each side claims the other is lying and that they are justified in spreading the truth. This is why partisan politics are fucked to hell. Teams work in sports where there is a decided physical contest to determine the winner and loser. Politics is not about winning and losing though, and yet partisan affiliation makes it a team sport anyways. Now you have people gravitating to the closest center of influence (party) and using the human nature of prejudice to bash all others without even a consideration for the other side.

Partison politics teach us discrimination and prejudice.

I disagree. Partisan politics is a neutral process until an ideology is applied. The nature of the ideology will make the results either positive or negative.

There was a time when we had more congenial debate and a civilized manner of reaching compromises to settle competing agendas (politics is the art of compromise in many ways). For this to work, we have to have a fundamental set of values upon which society is based. As we have seen the erosion of our founding values and their replacement by the graven images of dependency and victimhood, it is no wonder we have seen the decline of civil politics.

Agreed. Both "sides" are locked into a habit of knee-jerk reactions - meaningless counterpoints and rebuttals - simply to disagree with and show superiority over one other.

Members of both parties are biased and seem, by their arguments, to not even realize or acknowledge it. Freedom of thought seems to have left the room, replaced by an unmoving, unforgiving wall of separation.

Reading through the article, it seems that the entire thing more or less just says that Moore is wrong. If I'm reading it right though, in the entire thing, there is only one paragraph where he takes offense to one sentence in the movie. The comment on no Iraqi has killed an American. The author then goes on to mention that there were indeed terrorists in Iraq. Fine, that point may be valid. Moore exaggerated somewhat.

Christopher Hitchens doesn't even begin to talk about the allegations of financial ties between the Saudis and the current administration. Coincidences can happen, but there are too many members of the Bush administration who just seem to be too closely tied to organizations that could profit drastically from a constant state of war. That seems like a conflict of interest. Further, several of the paragraphs in the thing just mock Moore without attempting to counter anything in the movie.

"Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? " I don't think Moore ever implied the Saudis were evil, just some were greedy, like some Americans are greedy, which he talks about in more than one or two of his movies and books.

"The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly." Moore's point was that they don't hate it this time because they (royal family and other majour money people in Saudi Arabia) own big chunks of the companies who stand to profit from Iraqi oil.

Anyhow, I have great faith that Moore exaggerated a fair amount of his material, but this article does not counter more than one 'fact' in the movie. It is a criticism of Moore, not his information. And if you want to actually make a point, follow the money and show that it doesn't point at Bush and the current administration.

Okay, I'm done, now I get ripped apart. :)

Do yourself a favor and read some of Christopher Hitchens' other "work". This guy has yet to find any topic that makes him happy. He's not a conservative, he just likes to be pissed about things, apparently.

Moore backs up his facts.

Moore's facts in F911 aren't in question. His conclusions based on those facts are, and that leaves all of you open to do your own thinking... just don't buy the party line that everything he says is a lie. Hell, the people claiming he's lying likely haven't even read the Patriot Act, the 9/11 Commision's reports...

just out of curiosity...why is it that when i posted this a few days ago it quickly got locked up???

oh well...after reading the rebuttal, I couldn't help but laugh that it was the most read piece in the website's six years. Some of the arguments are just getting stupid now. I'm waiting for hitchens' rerebuttal. What's sad is I'm sure moore is absolutely loving all the publicity caused by someone bashing his film.

also, i recently read a bunch of other of hitchens' work including one where he bashes president reagan pretty bad. He's an interesting character. I think he thrives on arguing more than making points.

Hitchens claims the movie says Iraq under Saddam never attacked or killed an American citizen. This is incorrect, as the addendum to the rebuttal points out. The movie stated that Saddam never threatened America. A small point, perhaps, but, according to the rebuttal, the only discreet "fact" Hitchens seems to successfully call on the film. As it turns out, the film is correct in its assertion. Saddam never publicly aired any threat against America, although his regime may have been responsible for the deaths of American citizens.

This is why I basically refrain from posts about Moore. I find it hard to argue my point without losing my head some. I also think that, when it comes to this and many other issues, the party lines (of which I drift in and out of each, depending on the issue) are so thick and blinding that most people aren't willing to listen to your point anyway; they just insult you for having one. All they seem to do is divide us.

My one point on this movie that I'll make: I think this just strengthens the wall between the Republicans and Democrats. It's annoying in some ways, but it's also fun to sit back and watch the show.

Thanks for keeping the thread up.

I truly agree, the neo-cons in the media take everything too far right, BUT Micheal Moore and others take everything too far left. This is where partisan politics come into play and have destroyed the civility in government.

What we are seeing is our politicians cowtowing to the Limbaugh/Moore side and not the center and moderate area that IMHO the vast majority of people are. Limbaugh/Moore may not even believe half of what they say, BUT sensationalism and taking everything to an extreme sells far more than admitting the truth that the other side may have some good points. This brings about 2 really bad things.

Politicians see how "popular" these people are and what they say, and believe that to be where the people truly are (because the moderates don't have any voice, because of reasons explained above. (ALL politicians are about populist ideas and wanting to be elected . It's easy to say they don't take these mediums seriously, but they see enough people do that the politician has to adjust to them.)

(As a side note, I truly believe what destroyed Clinton was the fact he was too CENTRIST, and refused to bend. Both sides saw that as a threat. So the GOP could hound him and the Dems. did little to take the heat off.)

It's all about what sells not the truth, not honesty, not even a person's own opinion, it's smoke and mirrors and trying to persuade people to see your side. Right now, we live in an "extremist" in everything we do society. Look at the commercials and "new" products advertised. Everything has to be "more" of something.

Anyway that is just my view on the subject. Moore/Limbaugh and those like them are all the same. They just want their product to sell. I can almost guarantee if the nation went as far left as Moore or as far right as Limbaugh talk, they would still be pushing farther that direction. They will never be happy, because they cannot afford to be happy. People would stop buying their product.

Hmm interesting theory pan6467 and I think you might be dead on with the fact that people are more and more split now.

I can remember 10 years ago even when this rift in ideology wasn't so profound.

Nowadays, one can't wear a pro-Bush or pro-Kerry t-shirt without being harassed by the other side. Now it seems as though everyone wants to discuss politics and it grows in conflict. I mean, eating a salad at lunch, I don't think discussing the death penalty or taxes is what I want to do. I'll just enjoy my food, thanks.

While this may be true of the right (since he successfully co-opted plenty of their planks), I don't believe it's true of the left. Clinton was an annoyance to the established Democratic power structure. Clinton forced his way through the process and did it with his own political machine. It (and he) wasn't beholden to the DNC to give him life and they hated that. Look at the speech Clinton gave at the National Convention the election before he ran. There was little to no support for him and plenty of comments afterwards of "who does he think he is"? "He's just the governor of Arkansas and he'll never amount to anything." Four years later he bulled his way through the nominating process and they were forced to accept him. I think part of it was because the Dems didn't honestly think they could unseat the first Bush so they figured they'd offer Clinton up to be the sacrifice so they could focus on winning the next election. Of course, they didn't count on Clinton's charm and charisma. He resonated with voters and that made almost everything he did forgiveable.

As far as the rest of this thread, I am still enjoying it. Keep it up all. It's fun to see people defending Moore's stretching of the truth or "his versions" of the truth being trumpeted by some of the same people who scream about how GWB "lied" about this or that. The same, of course, can be said for those who say GWB told the truth when it came to WMDs yet say Moore is lying throughout his movie. It's quite illuminating.

Yet another article going over even more of Moore's distortions and lies.:eek:

More Distortions From Michael Moore
Some of the main points in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ really aren’t very fair at allWEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 6:26 p.m. ET June 30, 2004June 30 - In his new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” film-maker Michael Moore makes the eye-popping claim that Saudi Arabian interests “have given” $1.4 billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George W. Bush. This, Moore suggests, helps explain one of the principal themes of the film: that the Bush White House has shown remarkable solicitude to the Saudi royals, even to the point of compromising the war on terror. When you and your associates get money like that, Moore says at one point in the movie, “who you gonna like? Who’s your Daddy?”

But a cursory examination of the claim reveals some flaws in Moore’s arithmetic—not to mention his logic. Moore derives the $1.4 billion figure from journalist Craig Unger’s book, “House of Bush, House of Saud.” Nearly 90 percent of that amount, $1.18 billion, comes from just one source: contracts in the early to mid-1990’s that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country’s military and National Guard. What’s the significance of BDM? The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, the powerhouse private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board has included the president’s father, George H.W. Bush.

Leave aside the tenuous six-degrees-of-separation nature of this “connection.” The main problem with this figure, according to Carlyle spokesman Chris Ullman, is that former president Bush didn’t join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998—five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm. True enough, the former president was paid for one speech to Carlyle and then made an overseas trip on the firm’s behalf the previous fall, right around the time BDM was sold. But Ullman insists any link between the former president’s relations with Carlyle and the Saudi contracts to BDM that were awarded years earlier is entirely bogus. “The figure is inaccurate and misleading,” said Ullman. “The movie clearly implies that the Saudis gave $1.4 billion to the Bushes and their friends. But most of it went to a Carlyle Group company before Bush even joined the firm. Bush had nothing to do with BDM.”

In light of the extraordinary box office success of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and its potential political impact, a rigorous analysis of the film’s assertions seems more than warranted. Indeed, Moore himself has invited the scrutiny. He has set up a Web site and “war-room” to defend the claims in the movie—and attack his critics. (The war-room’s overseers are two veteran spin-doctors from the Clinton White House: Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani.) Moore also this week contended that the media was pounding away at him “pretty hard” because “they’re embarrassed. They’ve been outed as people who did not do their job.” Among the media critiques prominently criticized was an article in Newsweek.

In response to inquiries from NEWSWEEK about the Carlyle issue, Lehane shot back this week with a volley of points: There were multiple Bush “connections” to the Carlyle Group throughout the period of the Saudi contracts to BDM, Lehane noted in an e-mail, including the fact that the firm’s principals included James Baker (Secretary of State during the first Bush administration) and Richard Darman (the first Bush’s OMB chief). Moreover, George W. Bush himself had his own Carlyle Group link: between 1990 and 1994, he served on the board of another Carlyle-owned firm, Caterair, a now defunct airline catering firm.

But unmentioned in “Fahrenheit/911,” or in the Lehane responses, is a considerable body of evidence that cuts the other way. The idea that the Carlyle Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of some loosely defined “Bush Inc.” concern seems hard to defend. Like many similar entities, Carlyle boasts a roster of bipartisan Washington power figures. Its founding and still managing partner is David Rubenstein, a former top domestic policy advisor to Jimmy Carter. Among the firm’s senior advisors is Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, and Arthur Levitt, Clinton’s former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of its other managing partners is William Kennard, Clinton’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Spokesman Ullman was the Clinton-era spokesman for the SEC.

As for the president’s own Carlyle link, his service on the Caterair board ended when he quit to run for Texas governor—a few months before the first of the Saudi contracts to the unrelated BDM firm was awarded. Moreover, says Ullman, Bush “didn’t invest in the [Caterair] deal and he didn’t profit from it.” (The firm was a big money loser and was even cited by the campaign of Ann Richards, Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial opponent, as evidence of what a lousy businessman he was.)
Most importantly, the movie fails to show any evidence that Bush White House actually has intervened in any way to promote the interests of the Carlyle Group. In fact, the one major Bush administration decision that most directly affected the company’s interest was the cancellation of a $11 billion program for the Crusader rocket artillery system that had been developed for the U.S. Army (during the Clinton administration)—a move that had been foreshadowed by Bush’s own statements during the 2000 campaign saying he wanted a lighter and more mobile military. The Crusader was manufactured by United Defense, which had been wholly owned by Carlyle until it spun the company off in a public offering in October, 2001 (and profited to the tune of $237 million). Carlyle still owned 47 percent of the shares in the defense company at the time that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—in the face of stiff congressional resistance—canceled the Crusader program the following year. These developments, like much else relevant to Carlyle, goes unmentioned in Moore’s movie.

None of this is to suggest that there aren’t legitimate questions that deserve to be asked about the influence that secretive firms like Carlyle have in Washington—not to mention the Saudis themselves (an issue that has been taken up repeatedly in our weekly Terror Watch columns.) Nor are we trying to say that “Fahrenheit 9/11” isn’t a powerful and effective movie that raises a host of legitimate issues about President Bush’s response to the September 11 attacks, the climate of fear engendered by the war on terror and, most importantly, about the wisdom and horrific human toll of the war in Iraq.

But for all the reasonable points he makes, on more than a few occasions in the movie Moore twists and bends the available facts and makes glaring omissions in ways that end up clouding the serious political debate he wants to provoke.

Consider Moore’s handling of another conspiratorial claim: the idea that oil-company interest in building a pipeline through Afghanistan influenced early Bush administration policy regarding the Taliban. Moore raises the issue by stringing together two unrelated events. The first is that a delegation of Taliban leaders flew to Houston, Texas, in 1997 (”while George W. Bush was governor of Texas,” the movie helpfully points out) to meet with executives of Unocal, an oil company that was indeed interested in building a pipeline to carry natural gas from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan.

The second is that another Taliban emissary visited Washington in March, 2001 and got an audience at the State Department, leaving Moore to speculate that the Bush administration had gone soft on the protectors of Osama bin Laden because it was interested in promoting a pipeline deal. "Why on earth would the Bush administration allow a Taliban leader to visit the United States knowing that the Taliban were harboring the man who bombed the USS Cole and our African embassies?" Moore asks at one point.

This, as conspiracy theories go, is more than a stretch. Unocal’s interest in building the Afghan pipeline is well documented. Indeed, according to “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10., 2001,” the critically acclaimed book by Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll, Unocal executives met repeatedly with Clinton administration officials throughout the late 1990s in an effort to promote the project—in part by getting the U.S. government to take a more conciliatory approach to the Taliban. “It was an easy time for an American oil executive to find an audience in the Clinton White House,” Coll writes on page 307 of his book. “At the White House, [Unocal lobbyist Marty Miller] met regularly with Sheila Heslin, the director of energy issues at the National Security Council, whose suite next to the West Wing coursed with visitors from American oil firms. Miller found Heslin…very supportive of Unocal’s agenda in Afghanistan.”

Coll never suggests that the Clintonites’ interest in the Unocal project was because of the corrupting influence of big oil. Clinton National Security Council advisor “Berger, Heslin and their White House colleagues saw themselves engaged in a hardheaded synthesis of American commercial interests and national security goals,” he writes. “They wanted to use the profit-making motives of American oil companies to thwart one of the country’s most determined enemies, Iran, and to contain the longer-term ambitions of a restless Russia.”

Whatever the motive, the Unocal pipeline project was entirely a Clinton-era proposal: By 1998, as the Taliban hardened its positions, the U.S. oil company pulled out of the deal. By the time George W. Bush took office, it was a dead issue—and no longer the subject of any lobbying in Washington. (Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force report in May, 2001, makes no reference to it.) There is no evidence that the Taliban envoy who visited Washington in March, 2001—and met with State Department and National Security Council officials—ever brought up the pipeline. Nor is there any evidence anybody in the Bush administration raised it with him. The envoy brought a letter to Bush offering negotiations to resolve the issue of what should be done with bin Laden. (A few weeks earlier, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had floated the idea of convening a tribunal of Islamic religious scholars to review the evidence against the Al Qaeda leader.) The Taliban offer was promptly shot down. “We have not seen from the Taliban a proposal that would meet the requirements of the U.N. resolution to hand over Osama bin Laden to a country where he can be brought to justice,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said at the time.

The use of innuendo is rife through other critical passages of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The movie makes much of the president’s relationship with James R. Bath, a former member of his Texas Air National Guard who, like Bush, was suspended from flying at one point for failure to take a physical. The movie suggests that the White House blacked out a reference to Bath’s missed physical from his National Guard records not because of legal concerns over the Privacy Act but because it was trying to conceal the Bath connection—a presumed embarrassment because the Houston businessman had once been the U.S. money manager for the bin Laden family. After being hired by the bin Ladens to manager their money in Texas, Bath “in turn,” the movie says, “invested in George W. Bush.”

The investment in question is real: In the late 1970’s, Bath put up $50,000 into Bush’s Arbusto Energy, (one of a string of failed oil ventures by the president), giving Bath a 5 percent interest in the company. The implication seems to be that, years later, because of this link, Bush was somehow not as zealous about his determination to bin Laden.

Leaving aside the fact that the bin Laden family, which runs one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction firms, has never been linked to terrorism, the movie—which relied heavily on Unger’s book—fails to note the author’s conclusion about what to make of the supposed Bin Laden-Bath-Bush nexus: that it may not mean anything. The “Bush-Bin Laden ‘relationships’ were indirect—two degrees of separation, perhaps—and at times have been overstated,” Unger writes in his book. While critics have charged that bin Laden money found its way into Arbusto through Bath, Unger notes that “no hard evidence has ever been found to back up that charge” and Bath himself has adamantly denied it. “One hundred percent of those funds (in Arbusto) were mine,” says Bath in a footnote on page 101 of Unger’s book. “It was a purely personal investment.”

The innuendo is greatest, of course, in Moore’s dealings with the matter of the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the September 11 terror attacks. Much has already been written about these flights, especially the film’s implication that figures with possible knowledge of the terrorist attacks were allowed to leave the country without adequate FBI screening—a notion that has been essentially rejected by the 9/11 commission. 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." “Nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country,” the commission stated. New information about a flight from Tampa, Florida late on Sept. 13 seems mostly a red herring: The flight didn’t take any Saudis out of the United States. It was a domestic flight to Lexington, Kentucky that took place after the Tampa airport had already reopened.(You can read Unger’s letter to Newsweek on this point, as well as our reply, by clicking here.)

It is true that there are still some in the FBI who had questions about the flights-and wish more care had been taken to examine the passengers. But the film’s basic point—that the flights represented perhaps the supreme example of the Saudi government’s influence in the Bush White House-is almost impossible to defend. Why? Because while the film claims—correctly—that the “White House” approved the flights, it fails to note who exactly in the White House did so. It wasn’t the president, or the vice president or anybody else supposedly corrupted by Saudi oil money. It was Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar who was a holdover from the Clinton administration and who has since turned into a fierce Bush critic. Clarke has publicly testified that he gave the greenlight—conditioned on FBI clearance.

“I thought the flights were correct,” Clarke told ABC News last week. “The Saudis had reasonable fear that they might be the subject of vigilante attacks in the United States after 9/11. And there is no evidence even to this date that any of the people who left on those flights were people of interest to the FBI.” Like much else relevant to the issues Moore raises, Clarke’s reasons for approving the flights—and his thoughts on them today—won’t be found in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” nor in any of the ample material now being churned out by the film-maker’s “war room” to defend his provocative, if flawed, movie.


© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5335853/site/newsweek/

How does a movie tear at the fabric of our society?

If any movie does, I can think of much worse movies that would be better candidates by far as tearing some moral fabric.

I've heard people complain about people being influenced by Rush, Fox News, etc,and that being the crux of there problem. Well, the cohort of people that would tune into these types of programs, are already inherantly interested in politics.

The problem with Michael Moore - his audience targets the lazy. Those who have a prob with AM radio, have no leg to stand on defending Michael Moore.

There are far too many people seeing this movie with the specific intent that it is their "civic duty."

Seriously - any one of you who knows a thing about politics are learning nothing new. You're psyched about it because it influences the ignorant.

How does this work - you guys got Dr. Laura kicked off the air, Limbaugh off Armed Forces radio, but any reaction to this character is an attack on the constitution itself.

From what I've seen, the most frenzied reaction has been from the right side of the camp. some weirdos have attempted to pressure theatres into not showing F911, a remarkably unamerican position. I've argued that M Moore is the lefts version of Hannity or Rush...a semi-blowhard that is a naked propagandist. Whats so upsetting or unusual here?

If there were a frenzied reaction from the right, this movie wouldn't be breaking records all over the place. Wait till Limbaugh or Coulter tries to make a movie, you'll learn the definition of "frenzied".

Hey, the right is frequently pissed off about enormously popular things. Don't you know any "social conservatives?"

I don't think posting political cartoons with no commentary is encouraged. Some were funny, though.
I saw the film tonight. Some parts dragged, some parts were obvious exaggeration, some parts made me angry at Moore. On the whole. it was more good than bad by a comfortable margin.

i'll watch it in due time (i.e.- no liberals around). I just overheard a conversation last night took incredible restraint to keep my mouth shut.

"dude, did you see the Farenheit 9/11"

"no not yet"

"it's amazing, It really made me want to personally strangle Bush"

Moore's film has exposed millions of people to two hours of unrebutted argument -- the most persuasive kind of speech, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Although she says it's "an open question" whether anyone has been persuaded by the film, she points out that the sheer number of people seeing the film is remarkable during a political campaign. "If millions of people came to a stadium to hear an anti-Bush speech, you'd say that was an amazing moment," she said.

The only comparable phenomenon, she said, is talk radio, which is dominated by conservative hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham. "In battle of one-sided communication," Jamieson said, "the right is way ahead."

http://www.washingtonpostcom/wp-dyn/...-2004Jul1.html

Why is that an unAmerican position? Don't Americans constantly try to pressure businesses to stop doing things they don't agree with? Television stations are pressured not to carry certain programs, businesses are pressured not to carry certain products, etc, etc, etc through campaigns targeting them directly and those that target their supporters (be it advertisers or customers). Seems very much American to me. Some of it may be disagreeable to you or me but it's far from UnAmerican.

Although you do have a point in that groups across the political spectrum regularly try to exert control over the national dialogue, I find that it smacks of the subversion of free speech.

This movies is stangling the fabric of America then it will rip this country apart if this kind of retoric of any President (republican or democrat) goes on! What ever happened to respect and honor in the U.S.?

But it's their exercise of their own rights to free speech. Trying to stop the broadcast of something isn't subverting Moore (or anyone else's) free speech it's just forcing them to do it in a different way. As evidenced by Howard Stern syndicating on other than Clear Channel stations, there isn't one way to get your message out there and portraying it as being stifling is a little misleading IMO.

No one is telling them they can't say what they want. They're just saying that the stations (or businesses or whatever) who choose to air things or support things that their customers don't like will suffer economic repercussions.

Whatever happened to free speech? Or is it only free speech as long as your president isn't involved?

I mean come on a movie "strangling the fabric of America, and then ripping the country apart". Just a tad bit over dramatic, it's a movie people should see it if they want and draw their own conclusions.

Won't. Someone. Please. Think. Of. The. Children.

"Whatever happened to free speech? Or is it only free speech as long as your president isn't involved? "

see - i told you...


"How does this work - you guys got Dr. Laura kicked off the air, Limbaugh off Armed Forces radio, but any reaction to this character is an attack on the constitution itself."

Am I the only one who thinks that if you took the overdubbing and switched it around for all of the various screenshots and clips taken you could reverse the political backings of the film. Relatively speaking... yeah, Michael's an ass.

equating bush to Hitler and your mad at his attitude?

Guys,

Do you see the timestamps on this thread? Let it die. Some of these people might not even post here anymore. Geez.

Ditto.....