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Fahrenheit 9/11: The Sequel a review by 9/11 skeptic Mark Robinowitz http://www.oilempire.us/michaelmoore.html
Watching Fahrenheit 9/11 was a bittersweet experience for me.
It is nice that a small taste of the evidence compiled by the 9/11 skeptics movement has finally reached a mass audience. But Moore's blockbuster documentary is a weird mix of extremely good and extremely bad, falsely blames Saudi Arabia as the perpetrator of 9/11, and missed blatantly obvious opportunities to provide the audience with tools to understand why the Bush regime allowed 9/11 and invaded Iraq.
The "blame the Saudis" campaign is really a sophisticated effort to lay the ground work for the forthcoming US invasion of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were merely a subcontractor in 9/11 (at most), since they do not control the Air Force and NORAD's fighter planes that are supposed to intercept off-course jet liners within minutes. While it is unknown whether Moore realizes that he is playing into the "Project for a New American Century" strategists (who seem eager to declare Saudi Arabia an enemy of the US and put it toward the top of the "Countries We Must Invade" list), his film "Fahrenheit 9/11" will certainly be seen as the "dissident" view of 9/11. The film did not actually probe into the complicity of the Bush administration in the event, it is merely a "Limited Hang Out" that blames Bush for "intelligence failures" while pointing out (accurately) that the Bush and Bin Laden families have business ties that date to the 1970s.
Bush at Booker Elementary: proof the usurper is not really the President
The footage of Bush reading "My Pet Goat" to second graders while people burned in the towers is new to most people because of self-censorship by the media that has avoided the issue for nearly three years. This scene is particularly damning because his aide did not ask the "President" for a response when he told him that the second tower had been hit. A commander-in-chief would have replied with inquires about the scrambling of fighter planes to intercept the remaining off-course jets, but Bush continued with the bland photo-op rather than make decisions that could have saved lives. The Secret Service also let Bush stay in the school for crucial minutes, which was either unprecedented incompetence or proof that they knew that Bush was not in danger from any of the hijacked planes. Moore's commentary suggested that Bush, while looking dumb and detached in the schoolroom, might have been wondering if his friends the Saudis had done this. It is much more likely that Bush was thinking that he had been told this event was coming, and now it was here.
The bittersweet aspect of Moore's inclusion of this key issue is the likelihood that if the mainstream media - or even the so-called alternative press - had discussed the strange behavior of George W. Bush when told of the attacks, it could have empowered many more citizens to break free of the post-9/11 trance, potentially strengthening efforts to prevent the invasion of Iraq when it would have saved many more lives. How many Iraqi deaths are partially responsible to the fear in the US media to expose the lies behind the official story of 9/11?
Evidence Ignored in F/911
The most basic dichotomy for understanding 9/11 is whether it was a surprise attack or allowed to happen. Fahrenheit 9/11 carefully steers clear of documenting the overwhelming evidence that at the very least, 9/11 was deliberately allowed to happen to enable long-planned efforts to seize the Middle East oil fields and impose the Homeland Security police state.
Moore says that "This movie is perhaps the most thoroughly researched and vetted documentary of our time. No fewer than a dozen people, including three teams of lawyers and the venerable one-time fact-checkers from The New Yorker went through this movie with a fine-tooth comb." Despite this claim, he makes some severe mistakes that are hard to explain with an incompetence theory, given the high quality of the film's good parts.
F/911 does not discuss the urgent warnings that came from at least 15 countries that the attacks were imminent, some of them were extremely specific. It also avoids the thorny issue of whistleblowers, especially those at the FBI, who complain that their surveillance of the flight schools was suppressed by top level managers in the Bureau, especially Mr. Dave Frasca, who ran the Radical Fundamentalist division in the FBI and was promoted after 9/11 despite his suppression of investigations by honest FBI agents.
The film does not show how selected political, military and corporate officials were warned not to fly or to get out of the way, even though this information is mostly sourced to mainstream media sources. One example was the Sept. 12, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle article that said that SF Mayor Willie Brown was warned not to fly to New York the night before 9/11. Newsweek mentioned that top Pentagon brass canceled their 9/11 flights the day before. Bush's cousin Jim Pierce relocated his business meeting on 9/11 from the top of the towers to a nearby building (source: Barbara Bush!). These and many other pieces of evidence would have strengthened Moore's argument that Bush must be removed from the White House, but they would also have pointed toward official complicity.
Moore ignored the insider trading on Wall Street and international stock markets that bet the values of United, American and companies with a large presence in the towers would drop immediately before 9/11. The insider trading scandal was a huge story in the international financial press in the weeks after 9/11, with numerous speculations that Osama had made the sickest stock trade in history. However, these trades are monitored in real time by the CIA, and would have been a huge clue that a bad thing was about to happen to those airlines and the World Trade Center for anyone paying attention inside the government.
This story disappeared down the "memory hole" after From the Wilderness published an article in October 2001 that linked the trades to a Wall Street company whose previous director is now the number three official at the CIA. In a more just world, FTW would have won the Pulitzer Prize for this scoop. Instead, FTW was attacked by foundation funded "liberal" groups such as The Nation, Norman Solomon, and Chip Berlet's Political Research Associates, but none of the attacks dared mention the stock trades story. It is curious, too, that two years ago, at the Toronto International Film Festival, Moore mentioned that he was starting work on F/911 and was asked if he was aware of the research of Michael Ruppert (who publishes FTW). Moore stammered, claimed he didn't know who that was (even though his company had been in touch with FTW), and quickly changed the subject.
The Saudi connection to the Kean Commission
A Saudi business connection that somehow Moore did not discuss is the curious business partners of Thomas Kean, the chair of the official 9/11 Commission. Kean is the former Governor of New Jersey, and replaced the notorious Henry Kissinger, Bush's first choice to head the investigation. If Kissinger had been kept on board, it would have been easier for average citizens to understand this "investigation" was a scam -- since few are aware that Kean is a business partner of Osama's brother in law. Even Fortune magazine has connected the dots between Kean, his seat on the board of Amerada Hess petroleum, their investment in a Saudi consortium that was planning the pipeline across Afghanistan, and Khalid bin Mafouz, a shady Saudi investor who reportedly is married to Osama's sister. It's curious that a film so focused on exposing corrupt Saudi influences in American politics ignores this part of the puzzle.
Kean's commission will recommend at the end of July that the US create a new "Homeland" spy agency to snoop on the citizens and to give bigger budgets to Big Brother, with the false claim that this would help prevent a repeat of 9/11. Reversing the assaults on our civil liberties will require exposing the deceptions of September 11th.
The Pakistan connection
Early in the film, Moore interviews CIA agent and Florida Representative Porter Goss, and pokes fun at him by printing his phone number at the bottom of the screen. Moore's investigators did not include in the film that on the morning of 9/11, Rep. Goss, Republican from Florida and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, was meeting with General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA. According to the FBI, Gen. Ahmad was the "moneyman" behind 9/11, and sent $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 9/11 terrorist group. Why didn't Moore ask Rep. Goss what he and General Ahmad were talking about that morning. Rep. Goss is probably going to be the next Director of the CIA (appointed by Bush). If one of Moore's expert factcheckers had performed a websearch on "Porter Goss" and 911, they would have found lots of articles on this connection - and if only a few of them are close to the truth, it would be an enormous scandal.
A key part of Moore's "blame the Saudis" argument is the flight of the Bin Laden clan in the days after 9/11. However, a similar, but more damning flight occurred that fall -- the flights of al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan to Pakistan, which were allowed by the US military. Pakistan's participation in 9/11 will have to wait for the sequel.
PNAC: Perle Harbor and the Saudi pivot
Yet another topic ignored by F/911 is the "Project for a New American Century," a neo-conservative group whose members include much of the current regime -- Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others. In September 2000, PNAC published a report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," which proclaimed that the US should seize Iraq even if Saddam was toppled, and predicted that the transformation of the US empire into a force for complete global domination would be a long one without some "catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." Since Richard Perle was part of PNAC, perhaps 9/11 was "Perle Harbor."
In August 2002, Richard Perle ran the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon. This think tank invited a speaker who gave a presentation that said to reshape the Middle East toward a political order of the US's liking, "Iraq was the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, and Egypt is the prize." Two years later, the US has seized Iraq (although it is finding it hard to hold onto), and is contemplating seizing Saudi oil fields. Egypt is the prize because the bulk of the Arab population lives in that country, and they are acutely aware of the artificial borders that separate the bulk of the Arab people from the tremendous oil wealth of the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms.
Part of this "strategic pivot" shift, according to the Defense Policy Board speaker, would be for the US to seize Saudi oil fields in the eastern part of that country. All of the Saudi oil is along the Persian Gulf coast. Ironically, that area is the where Saudi Arabia's minority Shia population is concentrated, and if they were to be an independent state (they were forceably annexed into the Kingdom nearly a century ago), they would control nearly all of the oil. Militarily, it would be very easy for the US to take over the Saudi oil fields, but politically, it would be much worse than the Iraq disaster. One solution offered by the neo-cons is to partition Saudi Arabia, with the eastern province becoming a new country - on the theory that this would avoid the need for US troops to occupy the same country that contains the holy cities of Mecca and Medina (on Saudi Arabia's western, oil-less side).
Reichstag Fire
Perhaps the reason that F/911 does not delve into these details is that they would be too difficult for the audience to absorb. Even moving beyond the "Saudis did it" paradigm to "Bush deliberately allowed it to happen" is too difficult for many Americans to accept, even though the evidence for this is overwhelming.
Worse, several facets of the attack suggest that it was an "inside job," made possible only by conspiracy of factions within the military-industrial complex and associated corporations. Two of the strongest claims are the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 and the fact the Pentagon was hit in the nearly empty part, which greatly minimized casualties ...
see http://www.oilempire.us/demolition.html http://www.oilempire.us/remote.html for details on these two issues
These two facets show that 9/11 was analogous to the "Reichstag Fire." On February 27, 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power as a minority vote President, the Reichstag (parliament) was burned down, and a Dutch communist was arrested for the crime. The building burned so fast that it was unlikely that a lone arsonist could have perpetrated the whole thing. This incident was immediately used as the excuse for passing the "Enabling Act," which "temporarily" suspended civil liberties in Germany.
Peak Oil
The film's sections on Iraq are much better than the 9/11 chapter. Moore documents atrocities against civilians and the plight of the US troops, but never mentions why the invasion occured. He states a number of secondary reasons, stressing the profiteering from the war that companies such as Halliburton are engaged in. However, the core issue - the global peak of petroleum production - is not even hinted at.
On May 17, a London Guardian article about the movie's controversy quoted Moore saying that future films would be about "the Israelis and Palestinians, and the oil industry and lack of oil we are going to be faced with" While it is nice that the sequel may mention the Israel / Palestine conflict, which is intimately intertwinned with the Iraq invasion, and peak oil, it would have been helpful to place these facts into the context of Fahrenheit 9/11's main story. Perhaps after Bush is out of office and people can pretend that democracy has worked (placing Bush's cousin John Kerry in office), more honesty can be had about these deeper, core concepts.
A final anomaly about F/911: Moore announced this spring that he had footage of US troops abusing Iraqis many months ago but chose not to make it public, waiting instead for the movie's release. It would have helped if Moore had decided that people's lives were more important than the timetable of the movie's publicity campaign. Scooping the "Abu Ghraib" prison scandal would have been a coup for Moore's film, and would probably have drawn more attention to his efforts, not less.
The Second Tier Limited Hang Out
It's a shame that F/911 did not probe who was the perpetrator of 9/11. To accurately answer this, one must ask why the Air Force did not follow standard operating procedure and scramble fighter planes to intercept the hijacked planes, especially after the first tower had been hit. Part of the answer is that the Air Force and intelligence agencies were practicing at least five different war games that morning that paralyzed their response for a critical period of time. Much of the evidence for this is archived at http://www.oilempire.us/wargames.html - and it is largely sourced from mainstream sources such as Toronto Star, CNN, USA Today, Aviation Week and Associated Press. Saudi money has bought political influence in America, but it has not acquired the power to schedule multiple military war games to ensure that an attack like 9/11 could succeed.
Intelligence agencies seeking to cover-up their crime have perfected the tactic of a "limited hang out," fessing up to a small crime to avoid the real issues. Blaming the Saudis for 9/11 is analogous to blaming the Mafia for the coup d'etat against President Kennedy. While the Mafia make a great villain and have few supporters, they didn't have the power to re-route the Presidential motorcade closer to the Texas Book Depository (where Oswald supposedly fired the "magic bullet") and the Grassy Knoll, nor did they have the power to cover up the crime afterwards.
Divided Loyalties: Moore's thesis about Bush and dangerous unintended consquences
Fahrenheit 9/11's thesis that the Bush family has divided loyalties between their Saudi paymasters and the United States is similar to the accusations that President Kennedy (a Catholic) would be in the pocket of the Pope and that Jewish politicians have more allegiance to the State of Israel than their own country. It is a simplistic analysis that will be very persuasive for nearly every viewer, since few US citizens know the history of US / Saudi relations, the role of peak oil in US foreign policies, or that the forces behind the Bush/Cheney regime are openly threatening to invade Saudi Arabia.
The insightful weblog at http://xymphora.blogspot.com had this comment about Moore falling for the "Blame the Saudis" campaign on October 20, 2003:
"The propaganda campaign has been so successful, the neocons even have Michael Moore parroting it. The main trick was to leave the Saudi matters out of the published 9-11 report, so people could think the worst of the Saudis, and then slyly make people believe that it was left out because Bush was protecting his Saudi business friends. A brilliant strategy! All of this propaganda works only because Americans are still afraid to admit who was really behind 9-11. "A hint: the Saudis don't run NORAD."
A more recent "xymphora" comment (July 1):
"Moore knows that his American audience has a psychological need for a foreign villain to help deal with the guilt that America itself was primarily responsible for 9-11, and the connections of the Bush Crime Family to the Saudi elites allows him to have his villain and attack Bush at the same time. This would be completely harmless American jingoism except that I guarantee that if Bush gets reelected the neocons will be citing Moore's film and claiming that even the most liberal of all liberals supports their ultimate fantasy, the bombing of Mecca."
Embedded Reporting - and a Remedy
It was a brilliant coup for Moore to get his camera crews "embedded" with the troops in Iraq in order to get damning film that shows atrocities against civilians. Unfortunately, Moore himself is "embedded" in the fall-back cover story of 9/11, the false claim that "the Saudis did it."
As compensation for the missing parts of the story, Michael Moore should consider sharing some of his new found wealth with 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani, who has filed a RICO lawsuit against George W. Bush and others for deliberately allowing 9/11 to happen. She turned down more than a million dollars from the federal government, since that hush money would have required her to waive her legal rights - she wanted the truth more than a payoff. Unfortunately, she had to pay a heavy price for her determination. She is living on Social Security, and had to sell her home. Her attorney, former Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General Phil Berg, is bankrupting himself preparing this case. Citizens who want to help expose what Bush did to New York should consider donating to their efforts (at www.911sharethetruth.com), and ignore appeals by the Kerry Campaign, MoveOn.org, and other efforts that ignore 9/11 complicity (those efforts are already well funded).
Courage and Election Fraud
Perhaps the most courageous part is the opening sequence showing Al Gore, as President of Senate, suppressing the dissent of the Congressional Black Caucus on January 6, 2001, the day that Bush was made President. Under the rules, one Representative and one Senator must co-sign a complaint about a fraudulent slate of electors, and not a single Senator filed an objection to the racist theft of the election in Florida.
Moore urges a somewhat passive approach to the 2004 election, and merely urges the audience to vote Democratic, ignoring the probability that the election could be stolen again, the numerous threats from elites that there might be an "October Surprise" and possible cancellation of the election under a new "terror threat." Much of the Democratic Party message this time is to urge voters to ignore the threat of vote fraud, especially with computerized ballot machines made by Republicans, blame the 2000 coup on Ralph Nader (despite the documented election rigging in Florida and the fact that Gore won). F/911 probably wouldn't be as popular if it described the sad reality that John Kerry and John Edwards also want to keep the troops in Iraq and support the USA Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security.
Many people who have been compiling the evidence for Bush's complicity in 9/11 feel partially vindicated by the huge public response to Moore's movie. The 9/11 Truth Movement, a social justice effort largely censored in the press, worked hard to publicize damning evidence before the invasion of Iraq, hoping that it would help prevent the attack on Iraq, and instead, lead to the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Perhaps the success of Fahrenheit 9/11 will make it easier for films and books and websites that probe into the specifics of what actually happened and who the perpetrators really were to reach a much wider audience.
for further reading:
stock trades, prior warnings, motivation for 9/11 and the Iraq war: From the Wilderness publications and the forthcoming book "The Truth and Lies of 9/11: America's Descent into Fascism at the End of the Age of Oil" by Michael Ruppert. FTW is probably the most important resource for anyone interested in the truth about 9/11. http://www.fromthewilderness.com
The Complete 9/11 Timeline at http://www.cooperativeresearch.org An amazing resource that is 100% sourced to corporate mainstream media articles. Includes the best collection of evidence about the prior warnings. This timeline is also in the process of being turned into a book.
David Ray Griffin, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Adminstration and 9/11," www.newpearlharbor.com The best introduction to the 9/11 issue in print.
9/11 widow Ellen Mariani's lawsuit is at http://www.911forthetruth.com
The wargames used to paralyze the Air Force response on 9/11 are described at http://www.oilempire.us/wargames.html
More information about the possibility of an October Surprise is at http://www.oilempire.us/northcom.html#martiallaw
Other "oilempire" pages relevant to this review:
http://www.oilempire.us/understanding.html (Understanding 9/11: Incompetence, Blowback, Perle Harbor or Reichstag Fire?)
http://www.oilempire.us/pnac.html (Project for a New American Century needed a "new Pearl Harbor")
http://www.oilempire.us/911why.html (why 9/11 was done - the pretext to seize Middle East oil and impose Homeland Security) http://www.oilempire.us/peakoil.html (peak oil) http://www.oilempire.us/iraqoil.html (Iraq's oil) http://www.oilempire.us/saudioil.html (Saudi demographics and geology) http://www.oilempire.us/saudi.html ("The Saudis did it" -- the excuse for seizing their oil) http://www.oilempire.us/warcrime.html (genocide, war crimes, etc.) http://www.oilempire.us/torture.html (torture is not a new problem) http://www.oilempire.us/2004.html (the 2004 Presidential Selection) http://www.oilempire.us/kerry.html (Kerry is the good cop to Bush's bad cop) http://www.oilempire.us/limited.html (Limited Hang Outs - a tried and tested means of controlling scandals)
The Pakistan / ISI / Porter Goss connection is described at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO407A.html and http://www.communitycurrency.org/Prime.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/wolff06162004.html Torture & Publicity Gimmicks Why Iraqi Detainees Should Sue Michael Moore By DANIEL WOLFF
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