Did you see "Fahrenheit 911" ?

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2004
Did you see "Fahrenheit 911" ?
522
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 1:31pm

Did you see "Fahrenheit 911" ?



  • No
  • No, but I plan to
  • Yes


You will be able to change your vote.


 

The last time anyone listened to a Bush, they were lost for 40 years!   Looks like we're doomed to "wander" ano

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iVillage Member
Registered: 06-16-2004
Thu, 07-15-2004 - 2:18pm
They have been discredited. By now, millions of people who have actually seen the movie can attest to what the media incorrectly claims is said in the movie.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/smackdown/

http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/

And before you 'slam' this source as being from Michael more, I should remind you that in any lawsuit or court proceedings, the 'accused' or his proxy (lawyer) gets to rebutt. You don't ask some unknown person to testify who hasn't had a clue as to what really happened. And since you accuse him of lying, then you should at least look at what he ACTUALLY says.

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-16-2004
Thu, 07-15-2004 - 2:22pm
"You don't shut down the entire federal government because 2 commercial buildings have been hit."

First of all, we're talking about ONE or TWO cities in the US. Second of all, don't they shut down the government for statutory holidays?

There are such things as emergency measures, and alternate locations for people to do mandatory government business in such cases. I've done some consulting work for organizations responsible for emergency preparedness and emergency measures and your argument just doesn't hold water. No offense intended.

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Thu, 07-15-2004 - 2:43pm

<>


Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-23-2004
Thu, 07-15-2004 - 2:50pm


First of all, I try not to slam sources in general, I refute the facts themselves, unless someone is attempting to quote an "opinion" piece as fact. But that aside, if you read your site carefully, Unger says a lot but he really doesn't dispute many of Isikoff's statements all that much. He makes a huge deal that Isikoff got someone's name wrong, but aside from that he blathers on with more conspiracy theories but never really disputes the facts in question. The fact is, the 1.4 billion was awarded when neither Bush Senior nor W was associated with the company-in an attempt to show that the Bush's were still pulling the strings even in their absence, much is made of the fact that other Bush "associates" were involved with the Carlyle Group at the time, but the fact is lots of government figures from both sides of the aisle have connections to the Carlyle Group-Moore never refutes that. It (and its parent company Halliburton)is a huge government contractor, and has been for decades-of course lots of people in Washington have some kind of ties to it. Moore hints and insinuates that somehow the Bushes made lots of money from the deal, but offers NO evidence of a single dollar going into either of their pockets. No, he never SAYS they profited from it, but that's certainly what he's trying to imply. Is it an outright lie? OK, maybe not, but it IS a distortion of the facts.

As far as the Bush's association with the Saudis, sorry, anyonein the oil business has associations with the Saudis. And Unger vaguely refers to Texas and Bush associates under the umbrella of the "house of Bush", as if somehow the Bush family is the mastermind behind all connections between the Saudis and oil companies. The bin Ladne family itself is a large Saudi family that has NO proven ties to terror save one of its members who the family has disowned. Moore's sinister conspiracy attempts simply use the bin Laden name to cast aspersions on the Bushes without any evidence whatsoever that there was anything wrong or improper about the "relationship". I really don't have the time to go into too much more detail, but I will agree with you that it is to a large extent about subjective interpretations of actual events, but one ought to at least have SOME factual basis for making their interpretations, IMO.

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Thu, 07-15-2004 - 2:58pm
Grrreat post! ITA!

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 07-15-2004 - 5:52pm
<> If only this were true. (see WMD reports...)

I don't disagree with him giving a statement. I disagree with him sitting there rather than finding out what's happening. First reports are better than no reports. I know I didn't turn off the news that day figuring..."well, by 3 o-clock they'll be able to give me a better picture of what's going on."

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 07-15-2004 - 6:21pm
I've read that there were. I'll admit the chances were slim and it's horrific thing to do anyway, but the point is you've got to try, and the President should have gotten himself in the loop. As a former fighter pilot, maybe he would have been the one to make sure somebody was on top of getting these guys information.

Two F-15's from Otis AFB on Cape Cod were scrambled at about 8:45 and sent to intercept the first hijacked plane. They were both armed, but couldn't fire without orders from Bush, who at that same moment was arriving at the school in Florida.

"As with most of the East Coast that Tuesday morning, the sky over Cape Cod was cloud-free and royal blue. Tucked away in the seaside resort community of Falmouth, Massachusetts, Otis Air National Guard Base was home of the 102nd Fighter Wing. Out on the tarmac, two F-15s sat "cocked and loaded" with weapons and extra gas on board. The two pilots on alert that morning, Maj. Daniel Nash and Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy, were in the control room scanning the charts and schedules that lined the walls, when the traffic control tower at Otis told them of a possible hijacking of an American Airlines flight out of Boston. "

...

"At about the same moment that Flight 11 slammed into Tower One, a Klaxon at Otis Air National Guard Base let out a series of deafening blasts and red lights began flashing in the corner of the alert barns, sending a flock of seagulls flapping into the air. "This is an official military scramble," said the public address system. "Alert pilots report to your battle stations." Already halfway to their jets, Nash and Duffy began racing as crew chiefs quickly pulled protective covers from the two vintage F-15 Eagles, built in 1977. Chocks were yanked from beneath the wheels and the heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles were armed. At 8:52 a.m., a red light turned green and the F-15s screamed down the tarmac. "

...

"By the time Duffy and Nash were airborne, they were already too late for Flight 11. Nevertheless, the fighter pilots still had a chance of catching up to United Flight 175. But distance and time were critical factors. Cape Cod was nearly two hundred miles from downtown Manhattan. Duffy pushed his throttle to Mach 1.2, nearly 900 miles per hour. Going at such a supersonic speed was normally something for which they needed permission. Nash called Duffy on the radio. "Duff, you're super," he said. "Yeah, I know," said Duffy. "You know, don't worry about it." Duffy then called for a location of the target. "Your contact's over Kennedy," came the response. "Okay, I know where that is," said Duffy and they turned toward New York's Long Island. At that moment, they were 153 miles from the World Trade Center.

Another Air National Guard base with F-16s was located at Atlantic City, New Jersey — and Flight 175 would pass within just four minutes of the base before turning north to New York City. At the time, two Air Force F-16 jet fighters were simply practicing bombing runs above a scruffy patch of Pine Barrens near Atlantic City, just eight minutes away from Manhattan. But they were not armed for air-to-air combat, and to land, rearm, and get airborne again would take too long.

The two aircraft were based at the Air National Guard's 177th Fighter Wing at Atlantic City International Airport in Pomona, New Jersey. Throughout the Cold War, two scramble-ready jets had always been on alert in Atlantic City. But because of budget cutbacks beginning in 1998, the wing's mission had been changed. Instead of the jets being ready to take off on a moment's notice, they were both assigned to unarmed bomb practice. On September 11, 2001, the entire United States mainland was protected by just fourteen planes spread out over seven bases.

By 8:48, there was no question that a major crisis was unfolding, possibly that the United States was under attack by terrorists. It was known that at least two commercial airliners had been hijacked. Worse, nearly half an hour earlier, at 8:24, a Boston controller had heard one of the hijackers threatening the pilots and saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes." It was then that NORAD and the command's top general in charge of the continental United States had been notified. He authorized a "battle stations" alert and scrambled heavily armed F-15 jet fighters into the air. Should the fighters catch up with the passenger planes, the only defense would be to shoot them down, though only the President of the United States could give such an order. Then a large plane crashed into Tower One of the World Trade Center. "

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5315883/


iVillage Member
Registered: 04-05-2004
Fri, 07-16-2004 - 12:45am
Not all lunatics, however I did receive pleasure from not paying Michael Moore.
Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Fri, 07-16-2004 - 2:50am
“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.”

Although this paragraph from the June 20th article below doesn’t specifically say that this is a poor reflection on his leadership that day, IMO that is the damage the article predicts.

“For example, audiences are shocked by the now-famous seven minutes, when George Bush knew the nation was under attack but continued reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of children. Nobody had told them that the tales of Mr. Bush's decisiveness and bravery on that day were pure fiction.”

Another reference (complete article below) to the seven minutes which points out the audience shock to find out the President was not decisive and brave on that day. Having seen this film twice in vastly different localities – one comfortably in the red part of my state and the other predominantly blue – I can tell you that both audiences reacted in the same way to those seven minutes. They were shocked!

C


June 20, 2004

Michael Moore Is Ready for His Close-Up

By PHILIP SHENON

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.

MICHAEL MOORE is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit 9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President 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 Mr. 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 the president is nothing if not sprawling. Mr. Moore suggests that Mr. 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 Mr. bin Laden's family to flee the United States after Sept. 11 and that the administration manipulated terrorism alert levels in order to scare Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Mr. 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 Mr. Moore and his distributors are predicting, Mr. 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.

"Outrageously false," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, last month when told about the film's assertion of a sinister connection between Mr. Bush and the family of Osama bin Laden. The former president George H. W. Bush was quoted in The New York Daily News calling Mr. Moore a "slime ball" and describing the documentary as "a vicious personal attack on our son."

So how will Mr. Moore's movie stand up under close examination? Is the film's depiction of Mr. 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?

Mr. Moore and his distributors have refused to circulate copies of the film and its script before the film's release this Friday; his production team said that as of last Wednesday, 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 federal 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 Mr. 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 (indeed, many of them will be familiar to those who have closely followed Mr. Bush's political career).

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 — 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 — 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.

"I don't want to get lost in the forest because of a single tree," Mr. 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."

Mr. Moore may also have to defend his portrayal of Mr. Bush's presidency as sinking prior to Sept. 11, citing an inability to win support for his legislation. But he fails to mention that in May, Congress agreed to Mr. Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut, the centerpiece of his legislative agenda. Mr. Moore said that his review of news coverage before Sept. 11 shows that, with or without the tax cut, the Bush presidency was floundering before the terrorist attacks. Mr. Moore said, "I've read what other people wrote and said at the time, and he was definitely on the ropes."

MR. MOORE usually revels in his role as the target of conservative attacks, and his delight in playing the mischievous, little-guy bomb-thrower has brought him fame, wealth and the devotion of fans more interested in rhetorical force than precision. But with "Fahrenheit" he has taken on his biggest and best-defended target yet, and his production staff says that on his orders they have taken no chances in checking and double-checking the film, knowing Bush supporters would pounce on factual mistakes.

Mr. Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack, saying he has created a political-style "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.

"We want the word out," says Mr. Moore, who says he should have responded more quickly to allegations of inaccuracy in his Oscar-winning 2002 anti-gun documentary, "Bowling for Columbine." "Any attempts to libel me will be met by force," he said, not an ounce of humor in his familiar voice. "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."

As proof of its scrupulousness, the Moore team cites adjustments it made to the film's portrayal of Attorney General John Ashcroft. The film is brutal to Mr. Ashcroft, depicting him as a glassy-eyed architect of efforts to shred the Constitution, who became Attorney General only after he proved himself so unpopular in his home state of Missouri that he lost a Senate race to a former Democratic governor who died in a plane crash a month before election day. "Voters preferred the dead guy," Mr. Moore deadpans in the film, a line that drew belly laughs at recent preview screenings. (In reality, voters knew they were in effect casting ballots for the governor's widow).

An earlier version of the film, however, included a reference to a widely circulated charge, broadcast by CBS News in July 2001, that Mr. Ashcroft had received warning of threats and stopped flying on commercial airlines. Tia Lessin, supervising producer of "Fahrenheit 9/11," said the reference to the CBS report was cut after Mr. Moore's fact-checking team found evidence that Mr. Ashcroft had flown commercially at least twice that summer.

"We have gone through every single word of this film — literally every word — and verified its accuracy," said 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. Ms. Doroshow is responsible for preparing what she calls a "fact-checking bible," with material ranging from newspaper and magazine articles to copies of the Federal Register, that will allow the film's lawyers and publicists to provide backup for its allegations.

That said, Mr. Moore's fact-checkers does not view the film as straight reportage. "This is an Op-Ed piece, it's not a news report," said Dev Chatillon, the former general counsel for The New Yorker. "This is not The New York Times, it's not a network news report. 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. Mr. Moore makes extensive use of obscure footage from White House and network-news video archives, including long scenes that capture President Bush at his least articulate. 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/movies/20SHEN.html



Moore's Public Service

By Paul Krugman

July 2, 2004

Since it opened, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at theaters close to military bases. Last Saturday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. took his Nascar crew to see it. The film's appeal to working-class Americans, who are the true victims of George Bush's policies, should give pause to its critics, especially the nervous liberals rushing to disassociate themselves from Michael Moore.

There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

And for all its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" performs an essential service. It would be a better movie if it didn't promote a few unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren't the reason why millions of people who aren't die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard elsewhere, but didn't. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven't been doing their job.

For example, audiences are shocked by the now-famous seven minutes, when George Bush knew the nation was under attack but continued reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of children. Nobody had told them that the tales of Mr. Bush's decisiveness and bravery on that day were pure fiction.

Or consider the Bush family's ties to the Saudis. The film suggests that Mr. Bush and his good friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador known to the family as Bandar Bush, have tried to cover up the extent of Saudi involvement in terrorism. This may or may not be true. But what shocks people, I think, is the fact that nobody told them about this side of Mr. Bush's life.

Mr. Bush's carefully constructed persona is that of an all-American regular guy — not like his suspiciously cosmopolitan opponent, with his patrician air. The news media have cheerfully gone along with the pretense. How many stories have you seen contrasting John Kerry's upper-crusty vacation on Nantucket with Mr. Bush's down-home time at the ranch?

But the reality, revealed by Mr. Moore, is that Mr. Bush has always lived in a bubble of privilege. And his family, far from consisting of regular folks with deep roots in the heartland, is deeply enmeshed, financially and personally, with foreign elites — with the Saudis in particular.

Mr. Moore's greatest strength is a real empathy with working-class Americans that most journalists lack. Having stripped away Mr. Bush's common-man mask, he uses his film to make the case, in a way statistics never could, that Mr. Bush's policies favor a narrow elite at the expense of less fortunate Americans — sometimes, indeed, at the cost of their lives.

In a nation where the affluent rarely serve in the military, Mr. Moore follows Marine recruiters as they trawl the malls of depressed communities, where enlistment is the only way for young men and women to escape poverty. He shows corporate executives at a lavish conference on Iraq, nibbling on canapés and exulting over the profit opportunities, then shows the terrible price paid by the soldiers creating those opportunities.

The movie's moral core is a harrowing portrait of a grieving mother who encouraged her children to join the military because it was the only way they could pay for their education, and who lost her son in a war whose justification she no longer understands.

Viewers may come away from Mr. Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true. For example, the film talks a lot about Unocal's plans for a pipeline across Afghanistan, which I doubt had much impact on the course of the Afghan war. Someday, when the crisis of American democracy is over, I'll probably find myself berating Mr. Moore, who supported Ralph Nader in 2000, for his simplistic antiglobalization views.

But not now. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02KRUG.html

Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Fri, 07-16-2004 - 3:04am
…a world leader in what? ;-)

BTW I do think Moore made a documentary, albeit a non-traditional one.

C

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