Re: Fact-checking Moore's political broadside

From: ClassWarz (Outsourced_at_AmercanWorker.Com)
Date: 06/19/04 

Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 23:58:55 -0500

"Psalm 110" <Melchizedek@USA.com> wrote in message
news:2275a3c5.0406181853.538066d0@posting.google.com...
> http://www.iht.com/articles/525560.html
>
> Fact-checking Moore's political broadside
>
> Philip Shenon/NYT The New York Times
>
> Friday, June 18, 2004
> Viewer finds Moore 'on firm ground'
>
> LOS ANGELES Michael Moore is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit
> 9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President George W. Bush
> and the war in Iraq. He wants it to be remembered as the first
> big-audience, election-year film that helped unseat a president.
> .
> "And it's not just a hope," the Oscar-winning filmmaker said in a
> phone interview last week, describing focus groups in Michigan in
> April at which, after seeing the movie, previously undecided voters
> expressed eagerness to defeat Bush.
> .
> "We found that if you entered the theater on the fence, you fell off
> it somewhere during those two hours," he said. "It ignites a fire in
> people who had given up." The movie's indictment of Bush is nothing if
> not sprawling. Moore suggests that Bush and his administration
> jeopardized national security in an effort to placate Bush family
> cronies in Saudi Arabia, that the White House helped members of Osama
> bin Laden's family to flee the United States after the attacks of
> Sept. 11, 2001, and that the administration manipulated terrorism
> alert levels to scare Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq.
> .
> Moore's previous films generated a cottage industry of conservative
> commentators eager to prove sloppiness and exaggeration in his films;
> a handful of mainstream critics have also found flaws. But if
> "Fahrenheit 9/11" attracts the audience Moore and his distributors are
> predicting, Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike
> anything he - or any other documentary filmmaker - has ever
> experienced. After all, White House officials and the Bush family
> began impugning the film even before any of them had seen it.
> .
> So how will Moore's movie stand up under close examination? Is the
> film's depiction of Bush as a lazy and duplicitous leader, blinded by
> his family's financial ties to Arab moneymen and the Saudi Arabian
> royal family, true to fact? Moore and his distributors refused to
> circulate copies of the film and its script before the film's release
> on Friday; his production team said recently there was no final script
> because the film was still undergoing minor editing - for clarity,
> they said, not accuracy.
> .
> After a year spent covering the U.S. commission investigating the
> Sept. 11 attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood
> screening. Based on that single viewing, and after separating out what
> is clearly presented as Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact,
> it seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in "Fahrenheit
> 9/11" are supported by the public record.
> .
> 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.
> .
> Moore spends several minutes in the film documenting ties between the
> president and James Bath, a financial adviser to a prominent member of
> the bin Laden family who was an original investor in Bush's Arbusto
> energy company and who served with the future president in the Air
> National Guard in the early 1970s. The Bath friendship, which
> indirectly links Bush to the family of the world's most notorious
> terrorist, has been well documented.
> .
> Moore charges that 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, CIA briefing that warned of
> terrorism within the United States. In its final report next month,
> the Sept. 11 commission can be expected to offer support to this
> assertion. 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 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 - like
> assertions that 6 percent to 7 percent of America is owned by Saudi
> Arabians, and that Saudi companies have paid more than $1.4 billion to
> Bush family interests. 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 site, www.michaelmoore.com, after the release of the
> documentary. 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," 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 FBI
> had concluded that no one aboard the flights was involved in Sept. 11.
> .
> 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, in this
> case the extended family of the terrorist who had just brought down
> the twin towers of the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon.
> And as reporters have found, the White House still refuses to document
> fully how the flights were arranged. "I don't want to get lost in the
> forest because of a single tree," Moore said. "The main point I want
> people to go away with is that these people got special treatment
> because they were bin Ladens or Saudi royals, and you and I would
> never have been given that treatment."
> .
> Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack, saying he has
> created a "war room" to offer an instant response to any assault on
> the film's credibility. He has retained Chris Lehane, a Democratic
> Party strategist known as a master of the black art of "oppo," or
> opposition research, used to discredit detractors. He also hired
> outside fact-checkers, led by a former general counsel of The New
> Yorker and a veteran member of that magazine's legendary fact-checking
> team, to vet the film. And he is threatening to go one step further,
> saying he has consulted with lawyers who can bring defamation suits
> against anyone who maligns the film or damages his reputation. "Any
> attempts to libel me will be met by force," Moore said. "The most
> important thing we have is truth on our side. If they persist in
> telling lies, knowingly telling a lie with malice, then I'll take them
> to court."
> .
> Joanne Doroshow, a public interest lawyer and filmmaker who shared in
> a 1993 Oscar for documentaries and who joined the fact-checking effort
> last month, said, "We have gone through every single word of this film
> - literally every word - and verified its accuracy." That said,
> Moore's fact-checkers said they did not view the film as straight
> reporting. "This is an Op-Ed piece, it's not a news report," said Dev
> Chatillon, the former general counsel for The New Yorker, adding, "The
> facts have to be right, yes, but this is an individual's view of
> current events. And I'm a very firm believer that it is within
> everybody's right to examine the actions of their government."
> .
> Besides, it may turn out that the most talked-about moments in the
> film are the least impeachable. For the White House, the most
> devastating segment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a
> befuddled-looking 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.
> .
> 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 said on the Letterman Show tonight that he gets a lot of his facts
from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

I've seen all the Moore films--Bowling eight times! -- and I find Moore uses
stuff that ought to be common knowledge to most of us.

But here comes the Republican Dirty Tricks Machine:

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php

//begin quote

Some People Still Don't Want You To See My Movie... From Michael Moore

Friends,

We're a week away from the nationwide opening of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and not a
day goes by where we don't have some new battle to fight thanks to those who
are still working overtime to keep people from seeing this film. What's
their problem? Are they worried about something?

A Republican PR firm has formed a fake grassroots front group called "Move
America Forward" to harass and intimidate theater owners into not showing
"Fahrenheit 9/11." These are the same people who successfully badgered CBS
into canceling the Reagan mini-series a few months ago. And they are
spending a ton of money this week to threaten movie theaters who even think
about showing our movie.

As of this morning, a little over 500 theaters have agreed to show the movie
beginning next Friday, June 25. There are three national/regional theater
chains who, as of today, have not booked the movie in their theaters. One
theater owner in Illinois has reported receiving death threats.

The right wing usually wins these battles. Their basic belief system is
built on censorship, repression, and keeping people ignorant. They want to
limit or snuff out any debate or dissension. They also don't like pets and
are mean to small children. Too many of them are named "Fred."

This new nut group is the Right's last hope in limiting how many people can
see this movie. All of their other efforts have failed. Let's recap:

1. Roger Friedman at FOX News reported that the head of the company which
first agreed to fund our film "got calls from Republican friends" pressuring
them to back out. And they did. But... Miramax immediately picked up the
film! Except...

2. Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney, then blocked Miramax (a company
owned by Disney) from releasing the film once it was finished. But... public
attention and embarrassment forced Disney to let the Weinstein brothers of
Miramax find another distributor! But...

3. Instead of a new distributor stepping right in -- as all the media
predicted would happen -- it took another month to find distributors who
would take on this movie. A number of other distributors, thanks to various
pressures, were afraid to get involved. It looked for a while that we would
be distributing this ourselves. But then Lions Gate and IFC Films rode in to
the rescue!

So, we have beaten back all attempts to kill this movie, and the only thing
in the way of you now seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" is this Republican big-money
front group trying to force theaters not to show the movie.

Please, contact your local theaters and let them know you want to see
"Fahrenheit 9/11." Tell them that some people don't know that this is
America and that we believe in freedom of speech and the importance of ALL
voices being heard. (The members of MoveOn.org-an ACTUAL grassroots
organization-have done a very cool thing. They are pledging to send a
message to theater owners and are planning to attend a showing of the film
on its opening weekend.)

I appreciate their efforts, but you don't have to be a member of MoveOn to
help stop this effort to keep "Fahrenheit 9/11" from making it to screens
across the country. If a theater in your area is planning to show the film,
just give them a call and thank them for standing up for the freedom of
speech. If your local theater isn't showing the film, call them and let them
know that you would like to see it and you'd like them to show it.

The White House and their minions in our media have presented one distorted
version of the truth after another for the past four years. All we are
asking for is the right to show what they HAVEN'T shown us, the real truth.
The truth that ain't pretty (and is, sadly, damningly hilarious).

On top of all this, the MPAA gave the film an "R" rating. I want all
teenagers to see this film. There is nothing in the film in terms of
violence that we didn't see on TV every night at the dinner hour during the
Vietnam War. Of course, that's the point, isn't it? The media have given the
real footage from Iraq a "cleansing" -- made it look nice, easy to digest.
Mario Cuomo has offered to be our lawyer in appealing this ruling by the
MPAA. Frankly, I would like to think the MPAA is saying that the actions by
the Bush administration are so abhorrent and revolting, we need to protect
our children from seeing what they have done. In that case, the film should
be rated NC-17!

However it turns out, I trust all of you teenagers out there will find your
way into a theater to see this movie. If the government believes it is OK to
send slightly older teenagers to their deaths in Iraq, I think at the very
least you should be allowed to see what they are going to draft you for in a
couple of years.

Finally, some very sophisticated individuals have been hacking into and
shutting down our website. It is an hourly fight to keep it up. We are going
to find out who is doing this and we are going to pursue a criminal
prosecution. I'm preparing lots of cool stuff for the site so watch for new
items on it next week (www.fahrenheit911.com and www.michaelmoore.com).

Thanks again for your support and I hope to see you at the movies on opening
night, June 25.

Yours,

Michael Moore

PS. I am sponsoring a number of benefits around the country next week for
local and national peace and justice groups, including Military Families
Speak Out and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Please check
your local papers and my website next week for further details.

PPS. Also, I am going to be on the "Late Show with David Letterman" on
Friday night. It's on CBS at 11:35 PM Eastern and Pacific. And on Monday
morning (June 21) I will be on "The Today Show" on NBC. Next week, Jon
Stewart and Conan. I'd go on O'Reilly but, like a coward, he walked out on a
screening we invited him to (with Al Franken just a few rows away!). I
personally caught him sneaking out. Embarrassed, he tried to change the
subject. He said, "When are you coming on my show?" and I said, "Turn around
and watch the rest of the movie and I will come on your show." He walked
out. Fair and balanced.

//end quote

CLASSWARZ

> .

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