"In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film" liberal columnist Christopher Hitchens says Moore "makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11". As Hitchens notes in a recent article, he too had a problem with this, but changed his position when the facts came out. So why didn't Moore? From Hitchens:
I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights.
Moore interviews former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who, as Newsmax noted, served as a principal source for Fahrenheit 9/11. However, Clarke has gone on record saying that the central premise of Moore's film is "a mistake." From Newsmax:
In an interview with the Associated Press, Clarke took issue with Moore's criticism that President Bush allowed prominent Saudis, including members of Osama bin Laden's family, to fly out of the U.S. in the days after the 9/11 attacks.
Saying Moore's version of the episode has provoked "a tempest in a tea pot," Clarke called his decision to make the bin Laden family flyout a big part of the film's indictment against Bush "a mistake."
Note the word "HIS". Not president Bush's decision...Richard Clarke's (a published Bush critic) decision. Once again, Moore's own source proves him wrong.
"After 9/11, I think the Saudis were perfectly justified ... in fearing the possibility of vigilantism against Saudis in this country. When they asked to evacuate their citizens ... I thought it was a perfectly normal request," he explained.
In May, Clarke confessed that he, and he alone made the decision to approve the flyouts.
A desperate Moore-fan has to really scramble over this one yet again to find some excuse for Moore to somehow not be lying here. But Clarke leave no room for honest mistake here.
"It didn?t get any higher than me,? he told The Hill newspaper. "On 9/11, 9/12 and 9/13, many things didn?t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.?
STILL want to give Moore a free pass for missing Clarke's confession in May and still brush this off as an honest mistake that Moore spends a large chunk of time on in his movie? Not a smart move if you want to keep from looking foolish.
Clarke told the 9/11 Commission the same thing in March, after first detailing the episode for Vanity Fair magazine last August - leaving plenty of time for Moore to adjust his film to the facts as recounted by his primary source.
And back to Hitches:
This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that?as you might expect?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. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies."
But this entire criticism has a huge gaping damming hole in its logic, as if we are to believe Moore's argument that Bush is in an unseemly partnership with the Saudi's, why then didn't they join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Hitchens asks:
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, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, 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?
Logic and historical fact crush Moore's argument to pieces, but Moore's appeal is never with facts or logic, but rather emotion, and thus the audience is tempted to go along with his leaps of believability due to their presentation. The truth is much different:
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." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist.
I could go on and on with this all damn day, but it would waste far too much time and space. The point is, Bow, that YES, there are FACTUAL errors-o-plenty in Moore's film, and his appeal is, as it has always been, to simple emotions and NOT to facts. Moore is not an intellectual, he is an emotionalist, pure as the driven snow.
This is not to say I LIKE Bush; on the contrary I find him to be rather weak as a president in charge of a military operation. His insistence on fighting this war in as politically correct a way as possible is disturbing and has only resulted in the deaths of far too many good soldiers (though statistically speaking, still far less than many other conflicts). His domestic policies are absolutely atrocious as he keeps spending like a liberal Democrat's wet dream only could, gives MORE subsidies to farmers and continuously assaults civilization with his absurd religious proclamations and refusals to fund important science (ie, Stem Cell research) that can save lives and reduce suffering for all mankind. As presidents go, he is a SHAMEFUL excuse of a man, and during the elections I found the Republicans tendency to paint him as Reaganesque (which he most assuredly is NOT) to be offensive in the highest.
Jason
