Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 911
By
Dave Kopel
This is a preliminary version of
an article that will be published on National Review Online. This report
was first posted on the web on the morning of July 1. Since then, I've revised
several sections in response to reader requests for clarifications, and have
added additional deceits which have been pointed out by readers or journalists.
As result, the number of listed deceits has been raised from 56 to 59.
Thanks to the readers who have
written to point out additional deceits or to point out items which need clarification.
Also thanks to the readers who have written in defense of Moore. All writers have been rational and
civil. Moore's
defenders have made two main points:
First, notwithstanding the
specific falsehoods, isn't the film as a whole filled with many important
truths?
Not really. We can divide the
film into three major parts. The first part (Bush,
Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan)
is so permeated with lies that most of the scenes amount to lies. The second,
shorter part involves domestic issues and the Patriot Act. So far, I've
identified only one clear falsehood in this segment (Rep. Porter Goss's
toll-free number). So this part, at least arguably, presents useful
information. The third part, on Iraq
has several outright falsehoods--such as the Saddam regime's murder of
Americans, and the regime's connection with al Qaeda. Other scenes in the third
part--such as Iraqi casualties, interviews with American soldiers, and the
material on bereaved mother Lila Lipscomb--are not blatant lies; but the information
presented is so extremely one-sided (the only Iraqi casualties are innocents,
nobody in Iraq is grateful for liberation, all the American soldiers are
disillusioned, except for the sadists) that the overall picture of the Iraq War
is false.
Second, say the Moore supporters, what
about the Bush lies?
Well there are plenty of lies
from the Bush administration which should concern everyone. For example, the
Bush administration suppressed data from its own Department of Health and Human
Services which showed that the cost of the new Prescription Drug Benefit would be much larger than the administration
claimed. This lie was critical to passage of the Bush drug benefit bill.
Similarly, Bush's characterization of his immigration proposal as not granting
"amnesty" to illegal aliens is quite misleading; although the Bush
proposal does not formally grant amnesty, the net result is the same as
widespread amnesty.
But two wrongs don't make a
right, and the right response to Presidential lies is not more lies from his
political opponents. Moreover, regarding the issues presented in Fahrenheit
911, the evidence of Bush lies is extremely thin. Moore shows Bush claiming
that a particular day at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, was a working vacation,
but Bush appears to be dissembling. Later, after Osama bin Laden was driven
into hiding but was not captured, Bush unconvincingly claims not to spend much
time thinking about bin Laden. Within Fahrenheit 911, most of rest of
alleged Bush administration lies actually involve Moore's
fabrications to create the appearance of a lie--such as when Moore chops a Condoleezza Rice quote to make
her say something when she actually said the opposite.
The one significant Bush
administration lie exposed in the film involves the so-called Patriot Act; as
Fahrenheit accurately claims, at least some of the material in the Patriot
Act had nothing to do with 9/11, and instead involved long-sought items on the
FBI agenda which had previously been unable to pass Congress, but which were
enacted by Congress under Bush administration assurances that they were
essential to fighting terrorism.
If you look up the noun
"deceit" in the dictionary, you will find that the definitions point
you to the verb "deceive." According to Webster's 9th New Collegiate
Dictionary, the main (non-archaic or obsolete) definition of
"deceive" is "to cause to accept as true or valid what is false
of invalid." Although the evidence in this report demonstrates dozens of
plains deceits by Moore,
there are at least a few "deceits" in this report regarding which
reasonable people may disagree. So if you find me unpersuasive on, for example,
three alleged deceits, consider this article to have identified "Fifty-six
Deceits" rather than fifty-nine. Whether or not you agree with me on every
single item, I think you will agree that the evidence is undeniable that Fahrenheit
911 is filled with deceit.
There are many articles which have
pointed out the distortions, falsehoods, and lies in the film Fahrenheit 911.
This report compiles the Fahrenheit 911 deceits which have been
identified by a wide variety of reviewers. In addition, I identify some
inaccuracies which have not been addressed by other writers.
The report follows the approximate
order in which the movie covers particular topics: the Bush family, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan,
and Iraq.
This report focuses solely on factual issues, and not on aesthetic criticism of
the film.
To understand the deceptions, it
helps to understand Moore’s
ideological position. So let us start with Moore’s
belief that the September 11 attacks on the United States were insignificant.
Edward Koch, the former Democratic
Mayor of New York City, writes:
A year
after 9/11, I was part of a panel discussion on BBC-TV’s “Question Time” show
which aired live in the United
Kingdom. A portion of my commentary at that
time follows:
“One of the panelists was Michael
Moore…During the warm-up before the studio audience, Moore said something along the lines of “I
don’t know why we are making so much of an act of terror. It is three times
more likely that you will be struck by lightning than die from an act of
terror.”…I mention this exchange because it was not televised, occurring as it
did before the show went live. It shows where he was coming from long before he
produced “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
Edward Koch, “Moore’s propaganda film
cheapens debate, polarizes nation,” World Tribune, June 28, 2004. By the way, I don't disagree with
the point that it is reasonable to consider the number of deaths from any
particular problem, including terrorism, in assessing how serious the problem
is. Moore's
point, however, was willfully oblivious to the fact that al Qaeda did
not intend 9/11 to be the last word; the organization was working on additional
attacks, and if the organization obtained the right weapons, millions of people
might be killed. More fundamentally, even if Moore's
argument in London is conceded to be legitimate,
it contradicts Fahrenheit 911's presentation of Moore as intensely concerned about the
September 11 attacks.
As we go through the long list of
lies and tricks in Fahrenheit 911, keep in mind that Michael Moore has
assembled a “war room” of political operatives and lawyers in order to respond
to criticism of Fahrenheit 911 and to file defamation suits. (Jack Shafer,
“Libel Suit 9/11. Michael Moore’s hysterical, empty threats,” Slate.com,
June 12, 2004.) One of Moore's
"war room" officials is Chris Lehane; Lehane, as an employee of
Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark (who was also supported by Moore), apparently spread rumors to the
press about John Kerry's alleged extra-marital affair.
Of course if there are any genuine
errors in this report, the errors will be promptly corrected. On July 5, I
removed a complaint about a Presidential approval poll number, which I had
wrongly thought was not supported by data.
Conversely, because Moore has a
paid expert staff which is monitoring criticism of the movie, it is reasonable
to assume that—unless I have specifically retracted some item in this
report—Moore and his staff have not offered a persuasive rebuttal.
In this report, I number Moore’s deceits. Some of
them are outright lies; some are omissions which create a false impression.
Others involve different forms of deception. A few are false statements Moore has made when
defending the film.
2000 Election Night
Deceits 1-2
Fahrenheit 911 begins on
election night 2000. We are first shown the Al Gore rocking on stage with
famous musicians and a high-spirited crowd. The conspicuous sign on stage reads
“Florida Victory.” Moore creates the impression
that Gore was celebrating his victory in Florida.
Actually, the rally took place in the
early hours of election day, before polls had even opened. Gore did campaign in
Florida on election day, but went home to Tennessee to await the
results. The “Florida Victory” sign reflected Gore’s hopes, not any actual
election results. (“Gore Campaigns Into Election
Day,” Associated Press, Nov. 7, 2000.)
The film shows CBS and CNN calling Florida for Al Gore. According
to the narrator, “Then something called the Fox News Channel called the
election in favor of the other guy….All of a sudden the other networks said,
‘Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true.’”
We then see NBC anchor Tom Brokaw
stating, “All of us networks made a mistake and projected Florida in the Al Gore column. It was our
mistake.”
Moore
thus creates the false impression that the networks withdrew their claim about
Gore winning Florida when they heard that Fox
said that Bush won Florida.
In fact, the networks which called
Florida for Gore did so early in the evening—before polls had even closed in
the Florida panhandle, which is part of the Central Time Zone. NBC called Florida for Gore at 7:49:40 p.m.,
Eastern Time. This was 10 minutes before polls closed in the Florida panhandle. Thirty seconds later, CBS
called Florida
for Gore. And at 7:52 p.m., Fox called Florida for Gore. Moore never lets the audience know that Fox was among the
networks which made the error of calling Florida
for Gore prematurely. Then at 8:02 p.m., ABC called Florida for Gore. Only
ABC had waited until the Florida
polls were closed.
The premature calls probably cost
Bush thousands of votes from the conservative panhandle, as discouraged
last-minute voters heard that their state had already been decided, and many
voters who were waiting in line left the polling place. In Florida, as elsewhere, voters who have
arrived at the polling place before closing time often end up voting after
closing time, because of long lines. The conventional wisdom of politics is
that supporters of the losing candidate are most likely to give up on voting
when they hear that their side has already lost. (Thus, on election night 1980,
when incumbent President Jimmy Carter gave a concession speech while polls were
still open on the West coast, the early concession was widely blamed for
costing the Democrats several Congressional seats in the West. The fact that
all the networks had declared Reagan a landslide winner while West coast voting
was still in progress was also blamed for Democratic losses in the West.) Even
if the premature television calls affected all potential voters equally, the
effect was to reduce Republican votes significantly, because the Florida panhandle is a
Republican stronghold; depress overall turnout in the panhandle, and you will
necessarily depress more Republican than Democratic votes.
At 10:00 p.m., which network took the lead in retracting the
premature Florida
result? The first retracting network was CBS, not Fox.
Over four hours later, at 2:16 a.m.,
Fox projected Bush as the Florida
winner, as did all the other networks by 2:20
a.m.
CBS had taken the lead in making
the erroneous call for Gore, and had taken the lead in retracting that call. At
3:59 a.m.,
CBS also took the lead in retracting the Florida
call for Bush. All the other networks, including Fox, followed the CBS lead
within eight minutes. That the networks arrived at similar conclusions within a
short period of time is not surprising, since they were all using the same data
from the Voter News Service. (Linda Mason, Kathleen Francovic & Kathleen
Hall Jamieson, “CBS News Coverage of
Election Night 2000: Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations” (CBS News,
Jan. 2001), pp. 12-25.)
Moore’s editing technique of the election
night segment is typical of his style: all the video clips are real clips, and
nothing he says is, formally speaking, false. But notice how he says, “Then
something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other
guy…” The impression created is that the Fox call of Florida for Bush came soon
after the CBS/CNN calls of Florida for Gore, and that Fox caused the other
networks to change (“All of a sudden the other networks said, ‘Hey, if Fox said
it, it must be true.’”)
This is the essence of the Moore technique: cleverly
blending half-truths to deceive the viewer.
2000 Election Recount
Deceit 3
A little while later:
…Michael
Moore shows a clip of CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin saying that if ballots had
been recounted in Florida
after the 2000 presidential vote, “under every scenario Gore won the election.”
What Moore doesn’t show is that
a six-month study in 2001 by news organizations including The New York Times,
the Washington Post and CNN found just the opposite. Even if the Supreme
Court had not stopped a statewide recount, or if a more limited recount of four
heavily Democratic counties had taken place, Bush still would have won Florida and the
election.
Thomas Frank, “Film offers limited
view,” Newsday,
June 27, 2004.
Florida Purge of Convicted Felons
from Voter Rolls
Deceit 4
According to Fahrenheit,
Bush cronies hired Data Base Technologies to purge Florida voters who might vote for Gore, and
these potential voters were purged from the voting rolls on the basis of race.
("Second, make sure the chairman of your campaign is also the vote count
woman. And that her state has hired a company that's gonna knock voters off the
rolls who aren't likely to vote for you. You can usually tell 'em by the color
of their skin.") As explained by the Palm Beach Post,
Moore's claim
is extremely incomplete, and on at least one fact, plainly false.
The 1998 mayoral election in Miami was a fiasco which was declared void by Florida courts, because--in violation of Florida law--convicted
felons had been allowed to vote. The Florida
legislature ordered the executive branch to purge felons from the voting rolls
before the next election. Following instructions from Florida
officials, Data Base Technologies (DBT) aggressively attempted to identify all
convicted felons who were illegally registered to vote in Florida.
There were two major problems with
the purge. First, several states allow felons to vote once they have completed
their sentences. Some of these ex-felons moved to Florida and were, according to a court
decision, eligible to vote. Florida
improperly purged these immigrant felons.
Second, the comprehensive effort to
identify all convicted felons led to large number of false positives, in which
persons with, for example, the same name as a convicted felon, were improperly
purged. Purged voters were, in most cases, notified months before the election
and given an opportunity to appeal, but the necessity to file an appeal was in
itself a barrier which probably discouraged some legitimate, non-felon citizens
from voting. According to the Palm Beach Post, at least 1,100 people
were improperly purged.
The overbreadth of the purge was
well-known in Florida
before the election. As a result, election officials in 20 of Florida's counties ignored the purge list
entirely. In these counties, convicted felons were allowed to vote. Also
according to the Post, thousands of felons were improperly allowed to
vote in the 20 non-purging counties.
When allowed to vote, felons vote
approximately 69 percent Democratic, according to a study in the American
Sociological Review. Therefore, if the thousands of felons in the
non-purging 20 counties had been not been illegally allowed to vote, it is
likely that Bush's statewide margin would have been substantially larger. (On
the other hand, John
Lott's study of the Florida
fiasco suggests that Republicans and Democrats were purged in approximately
equal numbers, with Black Republicans being disproportionately impacted.)
It seems to me that even if we
presume that the 1,100 wrongly purged Florida voters would have voted
Democratic at the same rate that felons do (even though some of these voters
were non-felons who were the victim of mistaken identity), the net result of
the 2000 purge fiasco harmed Bush: the number of votes which Gore gained as a
result of 20 counties refusing to conduct the felon purge far outnumbered how
many votes that Gore lost as the result of the overbroad purges in other
counties.
Regardless, Moore's claim that the purge was conducted on
the basis of race was indisputably false. As the Palm Beach Post
details, all the evidence shows that Data Base Technologies did not use race as
a basis for the purge. Indeed, DBT's refusal to take note of a registered
voter's race was one of the reasons for the many cases of mistaken identity.
Bush Presidency before September
11
Deceit 5
The movie lauds an anti-Bush riot
that took place in Washington,
D.C., on the day of Bush’s
inauguration. Moore
continues: “No President had ever witnessed such a thing on his inauguration
day. And for the next eight months it didn’t get any better for George W. Bush.
He couldn’t get his judges appointed; he had trouble getting his legislation
passed; and he lost Republican control of the Senate. His approval ratings in
the polls began to sink.”
Part of this is true. Once Vermont
Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican party, Democrats controlled the
Senate, and stalled the confirmation (not “appointment”) of some of the judges
whom Bush had nominated for the federal courts.
Congress did enact the top item on
Bush’s agenda: a large tax cut. During the summer, the Republican-controlled
House of Representatives easily passed many of Bush’s other agenda items,
including the bill whose numbering reflected the President’s top priority: H.R.
1, the Bush “No Child Left Behind” education bill. The fate of the Bush bills
in the Democratic-controlled Senate, as of August 2001, was uncertain. The
Senate later did pass No Child Left Behind, but some other Bush proposals did
not pass.
Bush Vacations
Deceits 6-7
Fahrenheit 911 states, “In
his first eight months in office before September 11th, George W. Bush was on
vacation, according to the Washington
Post, forty-two percent of the time.”
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. That calculation,
however, includes weekends, which Moore
failed to mention.
Tom McNamee,
“Just the facts on ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ Chicago
Sun-Times, June 28, 2004. See also: Mike Allen, “White House On the
Range. Bush Retreats to Ranch for ‘Working Vacation’,” Washington Post, August 7, 2001 (Many of those days are weekends, and the Camp David stays have included working visits with
foreign leaders.)
[T]he shot of him “relaxing at Camp David” shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say
“shows,” even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze
or blink, you won’t recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime
minister of the United
Kingdom, or at least with this prime
minister, is not a goof-off.
The president is also captured in a
well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a
question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well,
that’s what you get if you catch the president on a golf course.
Christopher Hitchens, “Unfairenheit
9/11: The lies of Michael Moore,” Slate.com, June 21, 2004.
By the way, the clip of Bush making
a comment about terrorism, and then hitting a golf ball, is also taken out of
context, at least partially:
Tuesday night on
FNC’s Special Report with Brit Hume, Brian Wilson noted how “the viewer is left
with the misleading impression Mr. Bush is talking about al-Qaeda terrorists.”
But Wilson disclosed that “a check of the raw
tape reveals the President is talking about an attack against Israel, carried out by a
Palestinian suicide bomber.”
"Cyberalert,"
Media Research Center,
July 1, 2004, item. 3.
September 11
Deceit 8
Fahrenheit presents a
powerful segment on the September 11 attacks. There is no narration, and the
music is dramatic yet tasteful. The visuals are reaction shots from
pedestrians, as they gasp with horrified astonishment.
Moore has been criticized for using the
reaction shots as a clever way to avoid showing the planes hitting the
buildings, and some of the victims falling to their deaths. Even if this is
true, the segment still effectively evokes the horror that every decent human
being still feels about September 11.
But remember, Moore does not necessarily feel the same way.
As New York’s former Mayor Edward Koch
reported, Moore
later said, “I don’t know why we are making so much of an act of terror. It is
three times more likely that you will be struck by lightning than die from an
act of terror.”
Like several of the other deceits
identified in this report, the September 11 deceit is not part of the film
itself. Several of the deceits involve claim that Moore has made when discussing the film. Like
some deceits which are identified near the end of this report, the September 11
deceit involves the contradiction between Moore's
purported feelings about a topic in the movie and what appear to be his actual
feelings about that topic. If a Klansman made a film which feigned admiration
for Rosa Parks, that too would be a form of deceit, even if the film were
accurate in its portrayal of Parks as a great American hero.
On the other hand, a person might
feel great personal sympathy for the victim of a lightning strike, but the same
person might feel that, overall, the "lightning problem" is not worth
making a big fuss over. Fahrenheit present September 11 as a terrible
tragedy, and as something worth making a big fuss. On this latter point, Fahrenheit's
purported view does not appear to be the same as Moore's actual view. Although I consider the
disjunction to be deceitful, other people may not.
If you don't find my argument
convincing, don't count this item as a "deceit." If you're not
convinced by this item, you may likewise not be convinced by some of the items
at the end of this report, which involves omissions rather than outright lies.
If you think that this report would be better-titled as "The Fifty-Four
Deceits of Fahrenheit 911," I accept your good-faith criticism. Let
us just remember that whether the precise number of deceits is 54 or 59, it is
unacceptable for a documentary or an op-ed to contain dozens of
falsehoods.
Bush on September 11
Deceit 9
Fahrenheit mocks President
Bush for continuing to read a story to a classroom of elementary school
children after he was told about the September 11 attacks.
What Moore did not tell you:
Gwendolyn Tose’-Rigell, the
principal of Emma
E. Booker
Elementary School,
praised Bush’s action: “I don’t think anyone could have handled it better.”
“What would it have served if he had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the
room?”…
She said the video doesn’t convey
all that was going on in the classroom, but Bush’s presence had a calming
effect and “helped us get through a very difficult day.”
“Sarasota
principal defends Bush from ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ portrayal,” Associated Press,
June 24, 2004. Also, since the President knew he was on
camera, it was reasonable to expect that if he had suddenly sped out of the
room, his hasty movement would have been replayed incessantly on television;
leaving the room quickly might have exacerbated the national mood of panic.
Moore does not offer any suggestion about
what the President should have done during those seven minutes, rather than
staying calm for the sake of the classroom and of the public. Nor does Moore
point to any way that the September 11 events might have turned out better in
even if the slightest way if the President had acted differently. As with the
previous item, people may differ about whether this segment should be
considered deceitful, or perhaps just a very cheap shot.
Pre-911 Briefing
Deceits 10-12
Castigating the allegedly lazy
President, Moore says, “Or perhaps he just should have read the security
briefing that was given to him on August 6, 2001 that said that Osama bin Laden was planning
to attack America
by hijacking airplanes.”
Moore supplies no evidence for his assertion
that President Bush did not read the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief. Moore’s assertion appears to be a complete
fabrication.
Moore smirks that perhaps President Bush did
not read the Briefing because its title was so vague. Moore
then cuts to Condoleezza Rice announcing the title of the Briefing: “Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S.”
However, no-one (except Moore) has ever claimed
that Bush did not read the Briefing, or that he did not read it because the
title was vague. Rather, Condoleezza Rice had told the press conference that
the information in the Briefing was “very vague.” National
Security Advisor Holds Press Briefing, The White House, May 16, 2002.
The content of the Briefing
supports Rice’s characterization, and refutes Moore’s
assertion that the Briefing “said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America
by hijacking airplanes.” The actual Briefing was
highly equivocal:
We have
not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting,
such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted
to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar’ Abd
aI-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.
Nevertheless,
FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in
this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of
attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
(Some readers have wondered how
this short segment qualifies as three deceits: 1. that Bush did not read the
memo, 2. that the memo's title was offered as an excuse for not reading the
memo, 3. omitting that the memo was equivocal, and that the hijacking warning
was something that the FBI said it was "unable to corroborate.")
Saudi Departures from United States
Deceits 13-16
Moore
is guilty of a classic game of saying one thing and implying another when he
describes how members of the Saudi elite were flown out of the United States
shortly after 9/11.
If you listen
only to what Moore says during this segment of the movie—and take careful notes
in the dark—you’ll find he’s got his facts right. He and others in the film
state that 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed
to leave the country after Sept. 13.
The date—Sept.
13—is crucial because that is when a national ban on air traffic, for security
purposes, was eased
But nonetheless,
many viewers will leave the movie theater with the impression that the Saudis,
thanks to special treatment from the White House, were permitted to fly away
when all other planes were still grounded. This false impression is created by Moore’s failure, when
mentioning Sept. 13, to emphasize that the ban on flights had been eased by then.
The false impression is further pushed when Moore shows the singer Ricky Martin walking
around an airport and says, “Not even Ricky Martin would fly. But really, who
wanted to fly? No one. Except the bin Ladens.”
But the movie
fails to mention that the FBI interviewed about 30 of the Saudis before they
left. And the independent 9/11 commission has reported that “each of the
flights we have studied was investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a
professional manner prior to its departure.”
McNamee,
Chicago
Sun-Times. (Note: The Sun-Times article was correct in its
characterization of the Ricky Martin segment, but not precisely accurate in the
exact words used in the film. I have substituted the exact quote. One September
13, U.S.
airspace was re-opened for a small number of flights; charter flights were
allowed, and the airlines were allowed to move their planes to new airports to
start carrying passengers on September 14. Although there is still conflict on
the issue, there appears to have been a charter
flight from Tampa, Florida, which took three Saudis to Lexington, Kentucky.)
Tapper: [Y]our film showcases
former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, using him as a critic of the Bush
administration. Yet in another part of the film, one that appears in your
previews, you criticize members of the Bush administration for permitting
members of the bin Laden family to fly out of the country almost immediately
after 9/11. What the film does not mention is that Richard Clarke says that he
OK’d those flights. Is it fair to not mention that?
Moore: Actually I do, I put up The
New York Times article and it’s blown up 40 foot on the screen, you can see
Richard Clarke’s name right there saying that he approved the flights based on
the information the FBI gave him. It’s right there, right up on the screen. I
don’t agree with Clarke on this point. Just because I think he’s good on a lot
of things doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything.
Jake
Tapper
interview with Michael Moore, ABC News, June 25, 2004.
Again, Moore is misleading. His film includes a
brief shot of a Sept. 4, 2003, New York Times article headlined
“White House Approved Departures of Saudis after Sept. 11, Ex-Aide Says.” The
camera pans over the article far too quickly for any ordinary viewer to spot
and read the words in which Clarke states that he approved the flights.
Some Saudis left the U.S.
by charter flight on September 14, a day when commercial flights had resumed,
but when ordinary charter planes were still grounded. When did the bin Ladens
actually leave? Not until the next week, as the the 9/11 Commission staff report
explains:
Fearing reprisals against
Saudi nationals, the Saudi government asked for help in getting some of its
citizens out of the country….we have found that the request came to the
attention of Richard Clarke and that each of the flights we have studied was
investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a professional manner prior to its
departure.
No commercial planes, including chartered flights, were permitted to fly into,
out of, or within the United
States until September 13, 2001. After the airspace reopened, six
chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed
from the United States
between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight,
departed the United States
on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin.
We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian
nationals departed the United
States before the reopening of national
airspace.
The Saudi flights were screened by law enforcement officials, primarily the
FBI, to ensure that people on these flights did not pose a threat to national
security, and that nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11
investigation was allowed to leave the country. Thirty of the 142 people on
these flights were interviewed by the FBI, including 22 of the 26 people (23
passengers and 3 private security guards) on the Bin Ladin flight. Many were
asked detailed questions. None of the passengers stated that they had any recent
contact with Usama Bin Ladin or knew anything about terrorist activity.
The FBI checked a variety of databases for information on the Bin Ladin flight
passengers and searched the aircraft. It is unclear whether the TIPOFF
terrorist watchlist was checked. At our request, the Terrorist Screening
Center has rechecked the
names of individuals on the flight manifests of these six Saudi flights against
the current TIPOFF watchlist. There are no matches.
The FBI has concluded that nobody was allowed to depart on these six flights
who the FBI wanted to interview in connection with the 9/11 attacks, or who the
FBI later concluded had any involvement in those attacks. To date, we have
uncovered no evidence to contradict this conclusion.
(Deceits: 1. Departure dates for
Saudis, 2. Omission of Richard Clarke's approval for departures, 3. Lying to
Jake Tapper about whether Clarke's role was presented in the movie, 4. Omission
of Commission staff finding that many Saudis were asked "detailed questions"
before being allowed to leave.)
Bush and James Bath
Deceit 17
Moore mentions that Bush’s old
National Guard buddy and personal friend James Bath had become the money
manager for the bin Laden family, saying, [that after the bin Ladens invested in
James Bath,] “James Bath himself in turn invested in George W. Bush.” The
implication is that Bath
invested the bin Laden family’s money in Bush’s failed energy company, Arbusto.
He doesn’t mention that Bath
has said that he had invested his own money, not the bin Ladens’, in Bush’s
company.
Matt Labash,
“Un-Moored from Reality,”
Weekly Standard, July 5, 2004. See also: Frank,
Newsday; Michael Isikoff &
Mark Hosenball,
"More Distortions From Michael Moore. Some of the main points in
‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ really aren’t very fair at all," MSNBC.com, June 30, 2004.
Moore makes a big point about the name of
James Bath being blacked out from Bush National Guard records which were
released by the White House. The blackout might appear less sinister if Moore revealed that many
other names were blacked out, to protect the privacy of former National Guard
members. In fact, federal law required the
Alabama National Guard to black out the names of all other Guardsmen whose
medical information was on the same pages as the records which the Alabama
Guard released regarding George Bush's health records. So what Moore presents as a
sinister effort to conceal the identity of James Bath was in fact the
legally-required compliance with federal law.
Bush and Prince Bandar
Deceit 18
Moore
points out the distressingly close relationship between Saudi Arabia’s ambassador, Prince
Bandar, and the Bush family. But Moore does not
explain that Bandar has been a bipartisan Washington
power broker for decades, and that Bill Clinton repeatedly relied on Bandar to
advance Clinton’s own Middle
East agenda. (Elsa Walsh, “The
Prince. How the Saudi Ambassador became Washington’s
indispensable operator,” The New Yorker, Mar. 24, 2003.)
President Clinton’s former Ambassador
to Saudi Arabia, Wyche Fowler, has been earning a
lucrative living as a Saudi apologist and serving as Chairman of the Middle
East Institute—a research organization heavily funded by Saudi Arabia. (Joel Mowbray,
“Feeding at the Saudi Trough,” Townhall.com, Oct. 1, 2003.)
I am not suggesting that Mr. Fowler
is in any way corrupt; I’m sure that he is sincere (although, in my view,
mistaken) in his strongly pro-Saudi viewpoint. What is misleading is for Moore to look at the web of Saudi influence in Washington only in
regard to the Republican Bushes, and to ignore the fact that Saudi influence
and money are widespread in both parties.
Harken Energy
Deceits 19-20
Bush once served on the Board of
Directors of the Harken Energy Company. According to Fahrenheit:
Moore: Yes, it helps to be the President’s
son. Especially when you’re being investigated by the Securities and Exchange
Commission.
TV reporter: In 1990 when M. Bush was a director of Harken Energy he received
this memo from company lawyers warning directors not to sell stock if they had
unfavorable information about the company. One week later he sold $848,000
worth of Harken stock. Two months later, Harken announced losses of more than
$23 million dollars.
Moore:…Bush beat the rap from the SEC…
What Moore left out: Bush sold the stock long
after he checked with those same “company lawyers” who had provided the
cautionary memo, and they told him that the sale was all right. Almost all of
the information that caused Harken’s large quarterly loss developed only after
Bush had sold the stock.
Despite Moore’s pejorative that Bush “beat the rap,”
no-one has ever found any evidence suggesting that he engaged in illegal
insider trading. (Byron York, “The Facts
About Bush and Harken. The president’s story holds up under scrutiny,” National
Review Online, July 10, 2002.)
Carlyle Group
Deceits 21-23
Moore’s film suggests that Bush has close
family ties to the bin Laden family—principally through Bush’s father’s
relationship with the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm. The president’s
father, George H.W. Bush, was a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group’s Asian
affiliate until recently; members of the bin Laden family—who own one of Saudi
Arabia’s biggest construction firms—had invested $2 million in a Carlyle Group
fund. Bush Sr. and the bin Ladens have since severed ties with the Carlyle Group,
which in any case has a bipartisan roster of partners, including Bill Clinton’s
former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt. The movie quotes author Dan Briody claiming
that the Carlyle Group “gained” from September 11 because it owned United
Defense, a military contractor. Carlyle Group spokesman Chris Ullman notes that
United Defense holds a special distinction among U.S.
defense contractors that is not mentioned in Moore’s movie: the firm’s $11 billion
Crusader artillery rocket system developed for the U.S. Army is one of the only
weapons systems canceled by the Bush administration.
Michael Isikoff,
“Under the Hot Lights. Moore’s movie will make waves. But it’s a fine line
between fact and fanaticism. Deconstructing ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.” Newsweek,
June 28, 2004.
Moore claims that
refusing to mention the Crusader cancellation was alright because the
cancellation came after the United Defense IPO. But the cancellation had a
serious negative financial impact on Carlyle, since Carlyle still owns 47% of
United Defense.
Moore tells us that when Carlyle
took United Defense public, they made a one-day profit of $237 million, but
under all the public scrutiny, the bin Laden family eventually had to withdraw
(Moore doesn’t tell us that they withdrew before the public offering, not after
it).
Labash,
Weekly Standard.
There is another famous investor in
Carlyle whom Moore
does not reveal: George Soros. (Oliver Burkeman & Julian Borger, “The
Ex-Presidents’ Club,” The Guardian (London), Oct. 31, 2000.) But the fact that the anti-Bush
billionaire has invested in Carlyle would detract from Moore’s simplistic conspiracy theory.
Moore alleges that the Saudis have given 1.4
billion dollars to the Bushes and their associates.
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.
...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.
Isikoff & Hosenball,
MSNBC.com. (The full text of the article contains the counter-argument
by Moore's
"war room" and the replies by Isikoff and Hosenball).
Saudi Investments in the United States
Deceit 24
Moore
asks Craig Unger: “How much money do the Saudis have invested in America,
roughly?”
Unger replies “Uh, I've heard figures as high as $860 billion dollars.”
Instead of relying on unsourced
figures that someone says he “heard,” let’s look at the available data.
According to the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy (a pro-Saudi
think tank which tries to emphasize the importance of Saudi money to the United States),
in February 2003 total worldwide Saudi investment was at least $700 billion.
Sixty percent of the Saudi investments were in the United States, so the Saudis
had about 420 billion invested in the U.S.—a large amount, but less than half
of the amount that Moore’s source claims he “heard.” (Tanya C. Hsu
, “The United States
Must Not Neglect Saudi Arabian Investment” Sept. 23, 2003.)
Special Protection for Saudi
Embassy
Deceit 25
Moore
shows himself filming the movie near the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C.:
Moore as narrator: Even though we
were nowhere near the White House, for some reason the Secret Service had shown
up to ask us what we were doing standing across the street from the Saudi
embassy….
Officer: That’s fine. Just wanted
to get some information on what was going on.
Moore on
camera: Yeah yeah yeah, I didn’t realize the Secret Service guards foreign
embassies.
Officer: Uh, not usually, no sir.
But
in fact:
Any
tourist to Washington, DC, will see plenty of Secret Service Police
guarding all of the other foreign embassies which request such protection.
Other than guarding the White House and some federal buildings, it’s the
largest use of personnel by the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division.
Debbie Schlussel, “FAKEN-heit 9-11:
Michael Moore’s Latest Fiction,” June 25, 2004.
According to the Secret Service website:
Uniformed Division officers provide
protection for the White House Complex, the Vice-President's residence, the Main Treasury
Building and Annex, and foreign diplomatic
missions and embassies in the Washington,
DC area.
So there is nothing strange
about the Secret Service protecting the Saudi embassy in Washington—especially
since al Qaeda attacks have taken place against Saudi Arabia.
Alleged Bush-Saudi Conspiracy
Deceit 26
Moore asks, “Is it rude to suggest that when
the Bush family wakes up in the morning they might be thinking about what's
best for the Saudis instead of what's best for you?” But his Bush/Saudi
conspiracy theory is contradicted by very obvious facts:
…why did Moore’s evil Saudis not
join “the Coalition of the Willing”? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military
headquarters to Qatar?
If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other’s pockets…then
how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop
Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The
Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq’s recuperated oil industry
might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite
Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the
whole pathetic edifice of the film’s “theory.”
Hitchens, Slate. This
isn't to say that concerns about the wishes and interests of the Saudi rulers
play too large a role in American foreign policy--especially in the U.S. State
Department, which has been notoriously supportive of pro-U.S. Arab
dictatorships for many decades. I would much prefer that the State Department
and other American foreign policymakers spent less time worrying about friendly
relations with the governments of Saudi Arabia,
China,
and other dictatorships, and more time supporting the aspirations of people who
want to free themselves from dictatorship. But complaining about the historic
pro-Saudi tilt in U.S. foreign policy, a tilt which is partly the result of
extensive business relations between the two countries, is not the same as
propounding a tin-hat conspiracy theory that George Bush is servile tool of the
bin Laden family.
Proposed Unocal Pipeline in Afghanistan
Deceits 27-31
Moore
mentions that the Taliban visited Texas
while Bush was governor, over a possible pipeline deal with Unocal. But Moore doesn’t say that they never actually met with Bush
or that the deal went bust in 1998 and had been supported by the Clinton administration.
Labash, Weekly Standard.
Moore asserts that the Afghan war was fought only to enable the
Unocal company to build a pipeline. In fact, Unocal dropped that idea back in
August 1998.
Jonathan Foreman,
“Moore’s The
Pity,” New York Post, June 23, 2004.
In December 1997, a delegation from
Afghanistan’s ruling and
ruthless Taliban visited the United States
to meet with an oil and gas company that had extensive dealings in Texas. The company,
Unocal, was interested in building a natural gas line through Afghanistan. Moore
implies that Bush, who was then governor of Texas, met with the delegation.
But, as Gannett
News Service points out, Bush did not meet with the Taliban representatives.
What’s more, Clinton administration officials
did sit down with Taliban officials, and the delegation’s visit was made with
the Clinton
administration’s permission.
McNamee,
Chicago
Sun-Times.
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.
Isikoff & Hosenball,
MSNBC.com.
On December 9, 2003, the new Afghanistan
government did sign a protocol with Turkmenistan
and Pakistan
to facilitate a pipeline. Indeed, any Afghani government (Taliban or otherwise)
would rationally seek the revenue that could be gained from a pipeline. But the
new pipeline (which has not yet been built) has nothing to do with Unocal. Nor
does the new proposed pipeline even resemble Unocal's failed proposal; the new
pipeline would the bring oil and gas from the Caspian Sea basin, whereas
Unocal's proposal involved deposits five hundred miles away, in eastern Turkmenistan.
Fahrenheit showed images of
pipeline construction, but images have nothing to do with the Caspian
Sea pipeline, for which construction has never
begun. Nor do they have anything to do with the Unocal pipeline, which
never existed except on paper.
According to Fahrenheit, Afghanistan's
new President, Hamid Karzai, was a Unocal consultant.
This is false. Sumana Chatterjee
and David Goldstein, "A lowdown on the facts behind the
allegations in 'Fahrenheit 9/11'," Knight-Ridder newspapers, July 2, 2004.
Bush Administration Relationship
with the Taliban
Deceit 32
Moore also
tries to paint Bush as sympathetic to the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan
until its overthrow by U.S.-led forces shortly after Sept. 11. Moore
shows a March 2001 visit to the United States
by a Taliban envoy, saying the Bush administration “welcomed” the official,
Sayed Hashemi, “to tour the United
States to help improve the image of the
Taliban.”
Yet Hashemi’s reception at the State Department was hardly welcoming. The
administration rejected his claim that the Taliban had complied with U.S.
requests to isolate Osama bin Laden and affirmed its nonrecognition of the
Taliban.
“We don’t recognize any government in Afghanistan,” State Department
spokesman Richard Boucher said on the day of the visit.
Frank,
Newsday.
Moore Claimed that Osama bin
Laden Might be Innocent and Opposed the Afghanistan War
Deceits 33-34
Fahrenheit 911 attempts in
every way possible to link Osama bin Laden to George Bush. Moore even claims
that Bush deliberately gave bin Laden “a two month head start” by not putting
sufficient forces into Afghanistan soon enough. However:
In late 2002, almost a year after
the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael
Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated
his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven
guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan,
he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something—I cannot
guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently
persuaded Moore
that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty
and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous
“distraction” from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the
convenience of this late conversion.
Hitchens, Slate.
Three days after September 11, Moore demanded that no military action be taken against Afghanistan:
"Declare war?" War against whom? One guy in the desert whom we can
never seem to find? Are our leaders telling us that the most powerful country
on earth cannot dispose of one sick evil f---wad of a guy? Because if that is
what you are telling us, then we are truly screwed. If you are unable to take
out this lone ZZ Top wannabe, what on earth would you do for us if we were
attacked by a nation of millions? For chrissakes, call the Israelis and have
them do that thing they do when they want to get their man! We pay them enough
billions each year, I am SURE they would be happy to accommodate your
request....
But do not declare war and massacre more innocents. After bin Laden's
previous act of terror, our last elected president went and bombed what he said
was "bin Laden's camp" in Afghanistan -- but instead just
killed civilians.
Michael Moore, "War on Whom?" AlterNet,
Sept. 14, 2004.
The next day he wrote:
Trust me, they are talking politics night and day, and those
discussions involve sending our kids off to fight some invisible enemy and to
indiscriminately bomb Afghans or whoever they think will make us Americans feel
good.
...I fear we will soon be in a war that will do NOTHING to protect us from
the next terrorist attack.
"Mike's
Message," Sept. 15, 2001. Although Moore
vehemently opposed the Afghanistan War, Fahrenheit criticizes Bush for
not putting more troops into Afghanistan
sooner.
Are we any safer because the U.S.
military eliminated the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, removed a
government which did whatever al Qaeda wanted, and killed or captured
two-thirds of the al Qaeda leadership? Fahrenheit's thesis that
the Afghanistan War was solely for the pipeline and to distract attention from
Saudi Arabia is inconsistent with the
well-known results of the war. A sincere patriot could have opposed the
Afghanistan War for a variety of reasons, such as fear that the invasion might
stir up even more anti-American sentiment. But the only reason which Fahrenheit
offers for opposing the war is the claim that not enough force was used in the
early stages (a criticism contrary to Moore's 2001 opposition to the use of
any force), and the factually indefensible claim that the results of the
war did not help American security or harm terrorists.
Afghanistan after
Liberation
Deceit 35
we turn to the facts that are
deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that
the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of
the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and
is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least
a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return….[A] highway
from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition of
nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also
discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the
Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not
the sort of irony in which Moore
chooses to deal.
Hitchens, Slate.
John Ashcroft
Deceit 36
Moore
mocks Attorney General John Ashcroft by pointing out that Ashcroft once
lost a Senate race in Missouri
to a man who had died three weeks earlier. “Voters preferred the dead guy,” Moore says, delivering one
of the film’s biggest laugh lines.
It’s a cheap
shot. When voters in Missouri
cast their ballots for the dead man, Mel Carnahan, they knew they were really
voting for Carnahan’s very much alive widow, Jean. The Democratic governor of Missouri had vowed to
appoint Jean to the job if Mel won.
McNamee,
Chicago
Sun-Times.
Rep. Porter Goss
Deceit 37
Defending the Patriot Act,
Representative Porter Goss says that he has an “800 number” for people to call
to report problems with the Act. Fahrenheit shoots back that Goss does
not have such a number; the ordinary telephone number for Goss’s office is
flashed on the screen.
You’d never know by watching Fahrenheit,
but Rep. Goss does have a toll-free number to which Patriot Act complaints can
be reported. The number belongs to the Committee which Goss chairs, the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The number is (877) 858-9040.
Although the Committee’s number is
toll-free, the prefix is not “800,” and Moore
exploits this trivial fact to create the false impression that Goss lied about
having a toll-free number.
As far as I can tell, the slam on
Rep. Goss is the only factual error in the segment on the misnamed Patriot Act.
While there are a few good things in the Act, Moore's general critique of the Act is valid.
The Act does contain many items which had long been on the FBI wish-list, which
do not have real relation to the War on Terror, and which were pushed through
under the pretext of 9/11. Similar
critiques are also valid for the Clinton
"terrorism" bill which was pushed through Congress in 1996. As for Moore's claim that the
motive of the Patriot Act was to terrify the American people, I disagree, but
it's a matter of opinion, and therefore beyond the scope of this report.
Saddam Hussein Never Murdered
Americans
Deceits 38-39
Fahrenheit asserts that
Saddam’s Iraq was a nation
that “had never attacked the United
States. A nation that had never threatened
to attack the United States.
A nation that had never murdered a single American citizen.”
Jake Tapper (ABC News): You declare
in the film that Hussein’s regime had never killed an American …
Moore: That isn’t what I said. Quote the
movie directly.
Tapper: What is the quote exactly?
Moore: “Murdered.” The government of Iraq
did not commit a premeditated murder on an American citizen. I’d like you to
point out one.
Tapper: If the government of
Iraq permitted a terrorist named Abu Nidal who is certainly responsible for
killing Americans to have Iraq as a safe haven; if Saddam Hussein funded
suicide bombers in Israel who did kill Americans; if the Iraqi police—now this
is not a murder but it’s a plan to murder—to assassinate President Bush which
at the time merited airstrikes from President Clinton once that plot was discovered;
does that not belie your claim that the Iraqi government never murdered an
American or never had a hand in murdering an American?
Moore: No, because nothing you just said is
proof that the Iraqi government ever murdered an American citizen. And I am still
waiting for you to present that proof.
You’re talking about, they provide
safe haven for Abu Nidal after the committed these murders, uh, Iraq helps or supports suicide bombers in Israel.
I mean the support, you remember the telethon that the Saudis were having? It’s
our allies, the Saudis, that have been providing help and aid to the suicide
bombers in Israel.
That’s the story you should be covering. Why don’t you cover that story? Why
don’t you cover it?
Note Moore’s
extremely careful phrasing of the lines which appear to exonerate Saddam,
and Moore’s
hyper-legal response to Tapper. In fact, Saddam provided refuge to notorious
terrorists who had murdered Americans. Saddam provided a safe haven for Abu
Abbas (leader of the hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro and the murder
of the elderly American passenger Leon Klinghoffer), for Abu Nidal, and for the
1993 World Trade Center bombmaker, Abdul Rahman Yasin. By law, Saddam therefore
was an accessory to the murders. Saddam order his police to murder former
American President George Bush when he visited Kuwait City
in 1993; they attempted to do so, but failed. In 1991, he ordered his agents to
murder the American Ambassador to the Philippines
and, separately, to murder the employees of the U.S.
Information Service in Manila;
they tried, but failed. Yet none of these aggressions against the United States “count” for Moore, because he has carefully framed his
verbs and verb tenses to exclude them.
According to Laurie Mylroie, a
former Harvard professor who served as Bill Clinton's Iraq advisor during the 1992 campaign (during
which Vice-Presidential candidate Gore repeatedly castigated incumbent
President George H.W. Bush for inaction against Saddam), the ringleader of the World Trade
Center bombings, Ramzi Yousef,
was working for the Iraqi intelligence service. Laurie Mylroie, The War
Against America: Saddam
Hussein and the World
Trade Center
Attacks: A Study of Revenge (N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2d rev. ed. 2001.)
But even with Moore’s clever phrasing designed to elide
Saddam’s culpability in the murders and attempted murders of Americans, Tapper
still catches him with an irrefutable point: Saddam did perpetrate the
premeditated murder of Americans. Every victim of every Palestinian terrorist
bomber who was funded by Saddam Hussein was the victim of premeditated
murder—including the American victims.
So what does Moore do? He tries to change the subject. Moore makes the good point that the U.S. media should focus more attention on Saudi
financial aid to Palestinian terrorists who murder Americans in Israel.
On NRO, I’ve pointed
to Saudi terror funding, as have other NRO writers. But pointing out Saudi Arabia’s guilt does not excuse Moore’s blatant lie about
Saddam Hussein’s innocence.
Saddam’s Threats
Deceit 40
Moore’s
pro-Saddam allegation that Saddam “never threatened to attack the United States” is true in the narrow sense that
Saddam never gave a speech in which he threatened to, for example, send the
Iraqi navy and army to conduct an amphibious invasion of Florida. But although Saddam never
threatened the territorial integrity of America, he repeatedly threatened
Americans. For example, On November 15, 1997, the main propaganda organ for the
Saddam regime, the newspaper Babel
(which was run Saddam Hussein's son Uday) ordered: "American and
British interests, embassies, and naval ships in the Arab region should be the
targets of military operations and commando attacks by Arab political
forces." (Stephen Hayes, The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration
with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America (N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2004), p.
94.)
Moreover, Saddam did not need to
make verbal threats in order to “threaten” the United States. He threatened the United States by giving refuges to terrorists
who had murdered Americans, and by funding terrorists who were killing
Americans in Israel.
Saddam gave refuge to terrorists who had attacked the United States by bombing the World Trade
Center. In
addition:
In 1991, a large number of Western
hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible
conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having
killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the
meantime and having threatened to kill many more…
….Iraqi forces fired, every day,
for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and
staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a
certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade
Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until
the overthrow of Saddam….On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had
established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the “Dear Leader”
Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of
2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system,
right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition’s
presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)
Hitchens, Slate. The
cited article is David E. Sanger & Thom Shanker, "A Region Inflamed:
Weapons. For the Iraqis, a Missile Deal That Went Sour; Files Tell of Talks
With North Korea,
New York Times, Dec. 1, 2003.
As French Foreign Minister
Dominique de Villepin stated on November 12, 2002, "The security of the United States
is under threat from people like Saddam Hussein who are capable of using
chemical and biological weapons." (Hayes, p. 21.) De Villepin's point is
indisputable: Saddam the kind of person who was capable of using chemical
weapons, since he had actually used them against Iraqi who resisted his
tyrannical regime. As de Villepin spoke, Saddam was sheltering terrorists who
had murdered Americans, and was subsidizing the murder of Americans (and many
other nationalities) in Israel.
Iraq and al Qaeda
Deceit 41-42
Moore declares that George Bush completely
fabricated an Iraq/al Qaeda connection in order to deflect attention from his
Saudi masters. But consider the facts presented in Stephen
F. Hayes's book, The Connection : How al Qaeda's Collaboration with
Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America (N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2004).
The first paragraph of the last chapter (pp. 177-78) sums up some of the
evidence:
Iraqi intelligence documents from
1992 list Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset. Numerous sources have
reported a 1993 nonaggression pact between Iraq and al Qaeda. The former
deputy director of Iraqi intelligence now in U.S. custody says that bin Laden
asked the Iraqi regime for arms and training in a face-to-face meeting in 1994.
Senior al Qaeda leader Abu Hajer al Iraqi met with Iraqi intelligence officials
in 1995. The National Security Agency intercepted telephone conversations
between al Qaeda-supported Sudanese military officials and the head of Iraq's
chemical weapons program in 1996. Al Qaeda sent Abu Abdallah al Iraqi to Iraq
for help with weapons of mass destruction in 1997. An indictment from the
Clinton-era Justice Department cited Iraqi assistance on al Qaeda "weapons
development" in 1998. A senior Clinton
administration counterterrorism official told the Washington Post that
the U.S. government was
"sure" Iraq
had supported al Qaeda chemical weapons programs in 1999. An Iraqi working
closely with the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur was photographed with September
11 hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar en route to a planning meeting for the bombing of
the USS Cole and the September 11 attacks in 2000. Satellite photographs
showed al Qaeda members in 2001 traveling en masse to a compound in northern Iraq
financed, in part, by the Iraqi regime. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, senior al Qaeda
associate, operated openly in Baghdad
and received medical attention at a regime-supported hospital in 2002.
Documents discovered in postwar Iraq
in 2003 reveal that Saddam's regime harbored and supported Abdul Rahman Yasin,
an Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade
Center attack...
Hayes is a writer for The
Weekly Standard and much of his writing on the Saddam/Osama connection
is available there for free; simply use the search engine and look for articles
by Hayes.
Fahrenheit shows Condoleezza
Rice saying, “Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11.”
The audience laughs derisively. Here is what Rice really said: