Fahrenheit 911-dering
Philip Shenon, in The New York Times, wonders if Michael Moore's facts will check out:
Mr. Moore is on firm ground in arguing that the Bushes, like many prominent Texas families with oil interests, have profited handsomely from their relationships with prominent Saudis, including members of the royal family and of the large and fabulously wealthy bin Laden clan, which has insisted it long ago disowned Osama. Mr. Moore spends several minutes in the film documenting ties between the president and James R. Bath, a financial advisor to a prominent member of the bin Laden family who was an original investor in Mr. Bush's Arbusto energy company and who served with the future president in the Air National Guard in the early 1970's. The Bath friendship, which indirectly links Mr. Bush to the family of the world's most notorious terrorist, has received less attention from national news organization than it has from reporters in Texas, but it has been well documented.Mr. Moore charges that President Bush and his aides paid too little attention to warnings in the summer of 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to attack, including a detailed Aug. 6, 2001, C.I.A. briefing that warned of terrorism within the country's borders. In its final report next month, the Sept. 11 commission can be expected to offer support to this assertion. Mr. Moore says that instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, the president spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation; the figure came not from a conspiracy-hungry Web site but from a calculation by The Washington Post.
The most valid criticisms of the film are likely to involve the artful way that Mr. Moore connects the facts, and whether he has left out others that might undermine his scalding attack. A great many statistics fly by in the movie ó such as assertions that 6 percent to 7 percent of the United States is owned by Saudi Arabians, and that Saudi companies have paid more than $1.4 billion to Bush family interests. But Mr. Moore doesn't explain how he arrived at them, or what these vague interests comprise. Mr. Moore and his team say they have news reports and other evidence to back up the numbers and that it will be posted on his Web site (www.michaelmoore.com) after the film's release.
Mr. Moore may also be criticized for the way he portrays the evacuation of the extended bin Laden family from the United States after Sept. 11. As the Sept. 11 commission has found, the Saudi government was able to pull strings at senior levels of the Bush administration to help the bin Ladens leave the United States. But while the film clearly suggests that the flights occurred at a time when all air traffic was grounded immediately after the attacks ("Even Ricky Martin couldn't fly," Mr. Moore says over video of the singer wandering in an airport lobby), the Sept. 11 commission said in a report this April that there was "no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace" and that the F.B.I. had concluded that no one aboard the flights was involved in Sept. 11.
In conversation, Mr. Moore defended the scene, saying his goal was to show how the White House was eager to bend and break the rules for Saudi friends ó in this case, the extended family of the terrorist who had just brought down the twin towers and attacked the Pentagon. And as reporters have found, the White House still refuses to document fully how the flights were arranged.
Moore shoots himself (and those of us who support the removal of the fundamentalist, anti-science George Bush from office) in the foot if he includes distortions and apparent lies like he was shown to in previous pictures.
Then again, you can't beat footage like this -- the president really showing his presidential stuff. (I guess Cheney and Co. weren't close by enough to pull the strings.) In Shenon's words:
For the White House, the most devastating segment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers. Mr. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.
Moore may not be distorting anything regarding the Bin Laden family evacuation:
http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_06_13.html#001609
at the very least, if it turns out not be true, it seems he has some credible reasons to believe it, as opposed to making it up.
LYT at June 21, 2004 11:10 AM
First of all, is the final claim of this passage true? Contemporary reports said he walked out from the school as soon as the report of the second plane strike was made (it was delivered with the words "America is under attack"). I suspect it's more likely that seven minutes describes the interval between _reports_ of the first and second attacks. This is the sort of detail Moore likes to fudge. But Moore is Ann Coulter's kissin' cousin: If you rely on such people for insight, you deserve what happens to you.
The greater scandal is, why was the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES sitting in front a a bunch of 8-year-olds on a perfectly good Tuesday morning anyway? Why do we imagine local education needs are served by his office? Education spending at the federal level went up 300% in his first three years in office, which is more than Ted Kennedy ever imagined in his wettest dream of an NEA rally. It's PARTICULARLY shameful for a Republican president.
Crid at June 21, 2004 12:12 PM
So now we find Michael Moore's source: Tom Tomorrow. Gee, how could I have been so blind as to doubt him?
Richard Bennett at June 21, 2004 1:42 PM
"My pet goat" is an important story. I read it to myself all the time.
chris at June 21, 2004 5:06 PM
GOD BLESS MICHAEL MOORE!
Lena at June 21, 2004 8:54 PM
Hitchens: http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/
"More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse."
Crid at June 21, 2004 9:00 PM
One more quote of Hitch (who thrives without blessings of any man's God) for Lena and LYT:
"...Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except thatóas you might expectó Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration."
I love Christopher Hitchens. Like Paglia and Zappa, his faults are human and plain while the muscle in his work is supernatural.
Crid at June 21, 2004 9:20 PM
I love Christopher Hitchens too. But that Michael Moore sure is a tough motherfucker, isn't he?
Lena at June 22, 2004 12:47 AM
Richard: read closer. Just because something is on Tom Tomorrow's website does not make him the source. (a) that entry was posted by Bob Harris and (b) he's sourced it, if you're interested in following the links.
I concede it may not be correct, but the point is Moore didn't make it up.
Crid, just curious: Do you also agree with Hitchens' obituary of Reagan, or the way he slams Mother Teresa? I appreciate ol' Chris in general, but find people tend to quote him selectively only when he agrees with their ideology.
LYT at June 22, 2004 3:22 AM
Oops, my mistake. That post was by Tom Tomorrow, not Bob Harris.
All part of my liberal agenda of deception, y'know.
LYT at June 22, 2004 12:21 PM
LYT, long answers follow!
The bright people in High School are just like the others. Guys who play football think it's important to play football, the ones who play drums think it's important to play drums, metalshop people think it's important to weld, and so on. Everyone thinks the realm in which they excel is the center of the universe, and the ones who get good grades earn no exception from this human tendency. What's worse, the whole educational machine nourishes their presumption. It's worth their jobs. (I grew up in a college town, and have some dark energy about this.) Read these:
> http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
> http://www.aldaily.com/hangingjudge.html
Hitchens is what he is, an intellectual. In the Reagan piece he basically flies the team flag. Calling Reagan stupid, he implies that nothing's more important than being smart. Only in the last paragraphs does Hitchens admit, in the smokiest, most obscure and backhanded way possible, that Reagan kicked Commie ass. That was important and good, furthering the human project in a pivotal way. (He also gave me an adulthood full of economic security, but that's another post.)
I will always remember that it wasn't a bright guy who did it. The compassionate, verbal, nuanced academics did shit for the living, breathing people in the communist bloc, while the dunce actor liberated them. Of course, these battles continue with GWB, the alcoholic Christian who's done more for Muslims than anyone in the last six centuries.
THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS IN LIFE THAN BEING SMART.
Hitchens' Teresa book was wonderful. Those who fault it never critique the particulars... They seem to have too much fun clucking about his insolence. Now I sincerely think Amy is casual, short-sighted and often cruel in her dismissal of the comfort that religion has brought to millions of lives. She's nonetheless correct on the larger point.
Last summer Hitchens wrote a piece in a magazine called Daedalus in which he gave made his usual antitheist pitch. But in the opening paragraphs, it was obvious he was sensitive to a fundamental fact that mouthy atheists so often ignore: LIFE IS DARK AND PAINFUL. The piece is not available online, but I'll email you a copy if you want. (I can also send you a recent Sullivan piece chastising Sontag for the intellectual presumption described above.) It's this awareness of life's sorrow that puts teeth in his attack on Teresa. The Cluckers don't have that.
People who quote selectively may be parsing ideas correctly. In the Moore piece in Slate, Hitchens addresses it squarely: "By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (Ö), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance."
What else can we ask for? Anything more is idolatry or groupthink.
Crid at June 22, 2004 12:36 PM
Hitchens is a brilliant polemicist, and even on those rare occasions when I don't agree with his choice of targets (he was right about Mother Terry, wrong about Reagan) I have to admire his facility with language and the depth of his reasoning. This comment on the cheap sensationalist Michael Moore sums him up so well, and with such power and economy of language it practically made me cheer: " Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ìdissentingî bravery."
So much of the so-called "dissent" we see these days is nothing more than sheepish conformism, and the point bears repeating.
Richard Bennett at June 22, 2004 5:07 PM
"Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ìdissentingî bravery."
I like Hitchen's way with words too, but this criticism is so sweeping and vague, he could be talking about anything. Political cowardice masking itself as bravery? No one I know!
People who want to dismantle this film would do well to avoid damning it -- even if it's in a sexy British accent -- and instead focus completely on how the argument is constructed. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to get a few French film theorists to analyze the whole thing as one elaborate special effect ("Michael Moore and the Apparatus of Cinematic Rhetoric," in Cahiers du Cinema, perhaps?)
Lena at June 24, 2004 10:35 PM
Fortunately, the Hitchens piece continues for another 4000 words, allowing for exploration of specifics.
Had Moore been as generous with frames of film, it would probably have been more entertaining.
Can't say for sure though, haven't seen it. Won't. Life is despicably brief, and each hour is a gift to treasure.
Crid at June 26, 2004 9:20 PM
Crid -- Please send me the piece in which Sullivan chastises Sontag. I love her work, especially the books on cancer and AIDS. I love some of Sullivan's work, especially those lovely personal ads about milking cocks dry with his rock-hard muscle buns.
Lenazoid@yahoo.com
Lena at June 27, 2004 9:12 PM