How does Moore's case stand up to cross-examination?
Deep Down in Florida
"Fahrenheit 911" begins with the 2000 presidential election. Before a legitimate count had been done in Florida on election night, Bush's cousin John Ellis gave the go-ahead for Fox News to call the election for Bush. The major networks followed suit minutes later, creating the premature impression in most voters' minds that Bush had won the election, and thus that Gore was trying to steal it in the weeks to follow.
As investigative journalist Greg Palast (who covered Florida for the London Guardian and the BBC) has pointed out, the Bush family shenanigans in Florida were front-page news--in Great Britain, and all the countries that saw a prime time BBC segment covering the same. Back in the United States, the major American media simply cleaned up after their extended hit on Al Gore by maintaining a stoic silence as they shoveled the dirt on Gore's political casket following Bush's 5-4 Supreme Court victory.
Moore pointedly mentions that African-Americans were disenfranchised, but leaves out much of the backstory that gives weight to his case. According to Greg Palast: 1) in 1998, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature and governor Jeb Bush revived a law from the Reconstruction period that denied felons--mostly minority and 90% Democrat--the right to vote; 2) Republican Secretary of State (and eventual co-chairperson of the Bush-Cheney Florida operation) Katherine Harris then awarded a no-bid contract to Choicepoint, a private firm with Republican ties, to draw up a list of felons for use by the state of Florida; 3) when Choicepoint discovered that there were numerous errors on the list (people who had committed felonies in other states whose voting rights had been restored, non-felons who had the same name as felons, people who were accused of committing felonies in the future), the firm sent a letter to Katherine Harris offering to verify the legitimacy of the names on the list before passing it along, but Katherine Harris said her department would handle the task; 4) Harris failed to verify the names, and tens of thousands of people on the list were unable to vote, other than the small number who went through the rigorous appeals process to have their rights restored before the election. Ninety percent of the names on the list were erroneous in a BBC sample. Considering that the list was composed of 55% Gore-leaning minorities, it's a fair bet that had the law been correctly implemented, with full verification, Gore would have bested Bush's 537-vote margin many times over.
Another thing Moore didn't explore in much detail was the number of people who did vote, but had their votes disqualified. In Palm Beach County alone, Gore lost 6,600 votes because of a flawed ballot design. The outdated punchcard voting systems that served minority districts across the state helped invalidate 95,000 black votes statewide, at ten times the rate of white votes, according to the US Commission on Civil Rights. The ACLU sued after the election to make voting systems uniform.
When the invalidated overvotes (ex: voters who punched Gore's name and wrote his name on the write-in section of the ballot) were tallied after the election, Gore's victory margin swelled to a minimum of 15,000 votes, which is why election night exit polls showed a clear Gore victory. Florida law states that votes are to be counted based on the "clear intention of the voter." Moore is not stretching the truth to say that the clear intention of the voter was not honored in Florida.
Bush's War on Terror, pre-9/11
Faced with the worst job growth since Herbert Hoover and record deficits, and unpopular--although not highly publicized--stances on most major issues, Bush has made national security the touchstone of his re-election campaign. Moore contends that Bush did little to stop terror in the months prior to 9/11.
The charge of pre-9/11 national security inadequacy on Bush's part has engendered howls of derision on the right, but is backed up by mountains of evidence too vast to bear full inclusion in Moore's movie. At the end of the Clinton Administration, counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke had weekly meetings with the heads of the Justice Department and the FBI to sift through intelligence and coordinate responses; these meetings were discontinued under Bush. Clarke, based on his long and competent experience, was head of the Clinton counter-terror effort, but under Bush, Clarke was demoted and forced to go through Bush National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice with his many urgent and specific proposals. Clarke repeatedly asked for meetings with the principals (i.e. key decision-makers) in the Bush Administration, but was not able to get a meeting until one week before the attack, on September 4, 2001. In fact, prior to 9/11, Al-Qaeda was the central topic of only two of the roughly 100 Bush team national security meetings. The morning of September 11, Rice was set to give a national security speech--on the imminent need for missile defense.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, the top law enforcement official in the U.S., had numerous oversights: switching the Justice Department focus from counter-terrorism to drugs and pornography; downsizing a program designed to monitor Al-Qaeda suspects in the US; and denying an FBI request on September 10, 2001 for more anti-terror agents. Ashcroft did not mention Al-Qaeda as one of his department's top priorities in a list drawn up in the months prior to 9/11, though he was concerned enough for his own safety to stop flying commercial airliners in the summer of 2001. Rice and other Bush officials have claimed that they were re-creating the counter-terror response from the ground up, but one must question sacrificing day-to-day vigilance in favor of a comprehensive overhaul on an issue of such immediacy.
It's possible that Bush could not have stopped 9/11, even if he had paid closer attention to the growing Al-Qaeda threat about which he was repeatedly warned, but his strong opposition to formation of both the congressional and independent investigations of 9/11, his penny-pinching on the funding of the investigations once he gave in to their existence, his opposition to extending the independent commission in the final months of its investigation, his stonewalling on producing documents, and his unwillingness to testify publicly (or alone, in private) leave him pretty defenseless. Had the Bush Administration had little culpability, one would think they would have briskly authorized an investigation, as FDR did immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Bush/Saudi connections
The events of 9/11 gave Bush the political capital he needed to push the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moore asks why Iraq was targeted--when it had no ties to 9/11--instead of Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers. What follows is a lengthy accounting of long-standing business ties between Bush family and friends and the Saudis, including an account of the Saudi nationals (among them two dozen members of the bin Laden family) who were swiftly cleared to fly out of the U.S. in the days immediately after 9/11, when American commercial airspace was in lock down. We learn, among many other things, that Saudi money helped bail W. Bush out of a bad business venture, that Bush's good friend in the National Guard (whose name was blacked out of the military records released by the White House) had been a financial manager for Osama bin Laden's parents, and that Bush recount spokesman James Baker's law firm is representing the Saudis in a trillion-dollar lawsuit filed against them by families of 9/11 victims. With these and many more connections drawn, is it any wonder that Bush redacted 28 pages of the 9/11 congressional investigation report that dealt with alleged Saudi connections to 9/11?
At the same time, the U.S. has had close relations with the Saudis for decades because America's profligate auto-based lifestyle depends on Saudi Arabia's largest-in-the world oil reserves. The Saudis play a key role in the oil market, pumping up the volume when prices increase to subsidize low prices and stabilize the U.S. market. Undoubtedly Bush has especially-close relations with the Saudis, but that in itself is not so crucial as whether Bush's intimacy with the Saudis compromised national security.
Greg Palast, author of the indispensable The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, asserts that suspicions of Saudi ties to Al-Qaeda existed in the Clinton Administration, but the investigative approach was "go slow," not least because the Saudi royals refused to cooperate. When Bush came into office, investigations died entirely.
Part of the difficulty in assessing the importance of the alleged Saudi-Al-Qaeda ties is that the Saudi royal family is several thousand large. If there was a connection, how many Saudi royal family members were in on it, and how high up the ladder were they? Gerald Posner, author of Why America Slept, claims, based on two unnamed government sources, that four Saudi princes (including the long-time head of Saudi intelligence, Turki Aziz) and the former head of Pakistan's air force had ties to two Saudis in the U.S. who were linked to two of the San Diego-based 9/11 hijackers, and that, strangely enough, all but the untouchable Aziz died within months after the Saudi royal family heard through the grapevine that these connections were under investigation. If connections did exist, would a more aggressive posture by the Bush Administration have stopped 9/11? By presenting a gaggle of facts Moore sets up this vital question, without giving a clear answer. Many "Fahrenheit" detractors have criticized Moore for not nailing his case shut on the Saudis, but no one can know for certain without Saudi cooperation, and it's possible that Moore set out to do no more than stir up a dialogue over a potentially vital (and very under-discussed) piece of the 9/11 puzzle.
The War President
In Osama bin Laden, Bush inherited a vicious and low target to go to war with. Moore doesn't spend much time on Afghanistan, other than to drop some intriguing tidbits into the mix: the Taliban had visited Texas in 1998 when Bush was a governor, to try to cut a deal with Texas-based Unocal, a company wishing to build pipelines across northern Afghanistan; and former Unocal representative Hamad Karzai became the U.S. hand-picked leader of Afghanistan, a not-so-enviable position after Bush siphoned military resources from Afghanistan and redirected them to Iraq.
What Moore didn't go into much detail about was that the Taliban, in addition to being brutal and uniquely backward, were harboring Al-Qaeda training camps and refused to give up Osama bin Laden, and that the Afghanistan operation, unlike the invasion of Iraq, had broad international support. As proposed placement of U.S. military bases has since shown, building and securing the pipeline was likely one of the incentives, but not the only one, or necessarily even the most important one.
Next Moore gives an account of Peace Fresno, a group of California peace activists who have meetings and occasional demonstrations. There don't appear to be any terrorists, or potential terrorists, or even violent or disruptive "elements" in Peace Fresno, but for some reason the local sheriff's office infiltrated their group with a mole who posed as an activist. This sketch serves to illuminate how long the arm of the law has grown since the passing of the Patriot Act, a topic alone worthy of a documentary, or a series of documentaries. Moore's footing on the civil liberties angle is firm but brief in "Fahrenheit," perhaps because he has so much to cover.
The Patriot Act, since opposed by over 200 local governments in 37 states across the country, seems to have directed a fair amount of valuable resources where they don't belong, which is funny, because, as we find out next, the Oregon coastline isn't even secure from attack. Peaceful and unpopulated as the Oregon coastline is, I don't find this vignette to be an effective example of the shortchanging of security resources. Moore's instinct is correct, however, for despite a fondness for talking tough and busting the piggy bank open for top-heavy tax cuts and military hardware (which has starved struggling state and local governments of badly-needed revenue), Bush has often shortchanged homeland security by diverting funds to sparsely-populated red states and away from the cities where attacks are most likely. This effectively dries up funding for first responders/firemen and policemen, port security, border security, airline security, and chemical plant security.
Iraq
After showing that the real enemies of the U.S. lie elsewhere (not mentioned: Pakistan), Moore shifts to Iraq. One big criticism of "Fahrenheit" has been that Moore began this sequence by showing a buoyant wedding party, happy shoppers, and a kid running with a kite on the day of the invasion. These shots can be seen as a ground-level view of the horror of war's disruption, or a whitewashing of the generally grim life in Iraq. One can be against the war and acknowledge that it was done in the name of oil and diversion without writing off Saddam Hussein's inhumanity and the terrible toll it had on the people of Iraq.
Following is now-infamous footage of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, interviews with GIs, and a shift into a more personal place as Moore features a series of interviews with Lila Lipscomb, a super-patriotic Flint, Michigan mother of a soldier over in Iraq. Rather than focus on the parade of administration lies and media complicity that led to the war, as many others have done so vividly, Moore shows the evolution of Lila from a gung-ho military booster to a fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq, with the death of her son. These scenes, as they gather in sadness and intensity, can be seen as compelling or manipulative, depending on the viewer's sensibility, but they cut to the central questions of war, pre-emptive war in particular: assuming such a thing exists, what determines a just war? Who has the human authority to make such a decision? If the decision is made, will anyone be held accountable? And why is it that the poor--those getting the least from the status quo--always seem to put their lives on the line defending the status quo for the comfortable?
On this last question, Michael Moore returns toward the end of "Fahrenheit" to the thing he is best known for: on-camera confrontations with unaccountable elites who mount center stage in our current sociopolitical dysfunction. To many people this may have been old hat: he's done it so many times before, it's staged, etc. Yet the fact remains that while congressional support for the Iraq invasion was overwhelming, only one member of Congress sent a child into harm's way. Can Moore be faulted for pointing out such an obvious disconnect?
Moore concluded with a quote from George Orwell to the effect that the central goal of warmakers is to consolidate power, to disarm opposition by keeping voters paralyzed by fear. Strong stuff, but not exactly a big leap in the face of a court-appointed administration hiding record deficits, unpopular policies on most major issues, and the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover behind two wars, while a confrontation with Iran starts to flame.
In conclusion
Many of the overpaid major media stenographers have predictably pigeonholed "Fahrenheit 911" as a mere partisan grenade, one of the hubs of political polarization in the U.S. Judging Moore strictly by his sometimes heavy-handed tactics and/or his obvious political motivations lets talking heads off the hook by relieving them of the duty of having to weigh in on the matters broached in the movie.
Moore's gift is not as a professional journalist, but as a filmmaker, communicating contemporary history through an intuitive visual medium to millions of people who don't spend all their time glued to the Internet. Based on the voluminous research at hand, it appears that Moore's instincts are mostly right. Whatever his flaws, Moore has performed a vital public service by putting these life-and-death issues front and center, where they deserve to be. Had it been left up to the U.S. mainstream media, many voters would be driving blind into the 2004 fork in the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment