FAHRENHEIT 9/11

[lester1/2jr]

you conservitives and your links.   Your sort of like health food nuts.

[Vermin Boy]

I don't really think it's fair to say that making a movie with a clear slant is "just plain wrong." Moore's stuff is different from something you might see on the History Channel, but that doesn't mean that something like that doesn't have the right to exist.  I see it as the difference between newspaper journalism and people like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson; you wouldn't want to replace one with the other, to be sure, but there's certainly room for both.

[AndyC]

I see what you mean. It's just hard to reconcile with my sense of journalistic integrity. I've seen too many people do what Moore does, and call it news reporting. The average person doesn't know the difference. And regardless of whether a Michael Moore film is something different, a lot of people take it as completely acurate. They don't make the distinction.

I think that is where I have a problem. The line too often gets blurred.

I don't see it as so much of a problem if it's essentially harmless, like the fabrications in Pumping Iron for example. The worst thing that came from that was Ken Waller getting booed at contests because people thought he stole a t-shirt, and he had, to some degree, willingly played the villain. But Moore is out to destroy careers and influence people's political choices, and his deceptions can do real damage. That's why I take issue with it.



Post Edited (07-15-04 09:18)

[Kory]

We get it, now move on with your life and embrace a new obsession.

[Eirik]

VX agent was found in the Euphrates River - it was reported briefly by most news outlets.  You also had the artillery shells with blister agent and now sarin gas in the IED on the roadside that fortunately did not activate.  Bush's two great failures in this war were allowing Saddam six months to hide and dispose of his stuff (VX agent does not occur naturally in the Euphrates River and Syria is a nice big country with no Americans to hide stuff); and also allowing the left to defne the terms.  "WMD" seems to mean (to the left and the media) a big giant rocket with radiation and biohazard symbold all over the nose cone and the words "New York Buster" on the side.  The other stuff we've found doesn't seem to count.  And I don't recall Rumsfeld saying anything about "huge stockpiles" - as I recall the reasoning was that a suitcase full was too much to risk Hussein having.

I'd also like to say that the whole "duped and deceived" thing is ridiculous.  Bush received intelligence that there were WMD in Iraq-that's established.  Colin Powell outlined the evidence to the UN and based just on what he showed the UN, the CIA - in my opinion - had no choice but to assess that there were WMD.  All the defectors were saying it was there; all the imagery showed very suspicious activity; the history was there - we found many intact programs after the Gulf War that we dismantled.  If the CIA had ignored all this and it turned out that there were WMDs, they'd have been tarred and feathered.

Hussein's ties to Al Qaida are documented facts.  Mohammad Atta met with Iraq's intel chief in Prague - something Vaclev Havel actually flew to the US to confirm in a press conference.  There's also all kinds of evidence that Hussein sent WMD guys to Sudan when bin Laden was waging his war from there in the 1990s.  Finally more evidence of the connection has popped up in Iraq, but that seems to be overshadowed by the story of some soldiers who put bags over some Iraqi prisoners' heads and took pictures of them naked.  Glad Amnesty Interational is all over it, but I can't wait to see their next report on Al Qaida's treatment of prisoners (yeah right).

As for Halliburton, it is the only company in the world that had the resources for the contract the US required.  It wasn't some Cheney money-making scheme.  Halliburton has been around for 100 years and has a great reputation.  Sorry, but you're just on crack if you think that multi-milionaire Cheney would risk public disgrace, possible jail, and a seat at the bad guy table in the history books just for a few million more dumped somehow into his very public and closely wtched finances.  Think, for god's sake.

The whole Bush-binLaden connection in this truly Bad Movie is also a crock as outlined in a post I wrote earlier on this subject in another thread...  Go look it up if you're interested.  My bet is that the supporters of this film aren't the slightest bit interested in hearing any more reason.

[lester1/2jr]

B O R I N G

BUSH SCREWED UP

DISCUSS, GEEKS!!!

[K-Sonic]

First of all, 23 experienced intelligence officers retired because they were forced to make the evidence lean towards Iraq & Saddam when it didn't. For some reason, the documentary made on that seemed to go unoticed. Look it up.

It was proved BEFORE Colin Powell went to the UN that what he called "mobile chemical weapon units" were really weather balloon installations. HE LIED!!!!

This is a bulls**t, illegal war and the facts are there.

Don't you realize that the more you want to take over the world, the less you have of living the "American Dream".

[K-Sonic]

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=6228#1

More Proof They Knew

This morning's Los Angeles Times uncovers an explosive document buried at the end of the recent Senate Intelligence report. It shows that before Colin Powell's now-discredited U.N. speech justifying war in Iraq, State Department analysts told Powell and top administration officials about "dozens of factual problems" in the address (which was written by Vice President Cheney's staff). According to the Jan. 31, 2003 memo, there were problems with 38 of the claims made in the speech draft, which was crafted at the behest of the White House. (It was "intended to be the Bush administration's most compelling case" for war in Iraq.) In response, 28 were either "removed from the draft or altered" â€" but the others were left in. Powell was reportedly irate when first given the speech: According to the 9/3/03 U.S. News & World Report, Powell threw the speech in the air, yelling, "I'm not reading this. This is bulls--t." This past May, he reiterated his displeasure with the speech, saying, "It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading."

ADMINISTRATION WAS WARNED: Analysts advised Powell that many of the claims were "weak" and "warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible." They also warned Powell that he "was being put in the position of drawing the most sinister conclusions from satellite images, communications intercepts and human intelligence reports that had alternative, less-incriminating explanations."

DISCREDITED INFORMATION MADE IT IN, PART I: In the speech to the U.N., Powell "showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site." The State Department explicitly warned against using this claim. "We caution that Iraq has given … what may be a plausible account for this activity â€" that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives." They concluded that the presence of a water truck "is common in such an event."

DISCREDITED INFORMATION MADE IT IN, PART II: The State Department disagreed that the aluminum tubes imported by Iraq could be used in a nuclear weapons program, a claim also made by President Bush in his State of the Union speech. The State Department memo said, "it is taken out of context and is highly misleading. Meantime, we will work with our IC colleagues to fix some more egregious errors in the tubes discussion."

[Acidburn]

K-Sonic wrote:


>
> It was proved BEFORE Colin Powell went to the UN that what he
> called "mobile chemical weapon units" were really weather
> balloon installations. HE LIED!!!!
>
   
Weather Balloons........you have got to be kidding.  I suppose you would believe when somone told you that the lights that you saw in the sky last night was just swamp gas refracting off of Venus.

[K-Sonic]

Sorry dude, look at the facts:

http://www.house.gov/reform/min/features/iraq_on_the_record/


Statement by Secretary of State Colin Powell
"The imminent threat is that suddenly, this biological warfare lab, for example, could have been put to use."Source: Interview on NPR's All Things Considered, NPR (6/27/2003).

Explanation: This statement was misleading because it claimed the purpose of the trailers was to produce biological weapons without disclosing that engineers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who examined the trailers concluded that they were most likely used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.

[K-Sonic]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0716-02.htm

 
    
Published on Friday, July 16, 2004 by the Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)
Fahrenheit 911 is Fair and Balanced
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
 
We've come to expect poisonous and unbalanced attacks from the paid far right propagandists denouncing Michael Moore's documentary "Fahrenheit 911."  But more disturbing are the scolds from tepid moderate mainstream journalists who often fail to read their own newspapers. New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof attacks the film because "Moore hints that the real reason Bush invaded Afghanistan was to give his cronies a chance to profit by building an oil pipeline there." Kristof attacks Moore for even raising this issue,.  But he conveniently ignores volumes of information readily available to back up Moore's claim.

Perhaps Kristof, like President Bush, refuses to read. At least that would explain why he missed the raging international debate surrounding the Bush administration's well-documented, then-secret oil negotiations with the Taliban in the summer of 2001.

The book FORBIDDEN TRUTH:  U.S.-TALIBAN SECRET OIL DIPLOMACY AND THE FAILED HUNT FOR BIN LADEN was an international bestseller. Written by French Intelligence experts Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, the book asserts that the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with the now- infamous words: "Either you accept our carpet of gold or we'll carpet you with bombs."  The threat was made about a month before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Kristof and his ilk prefer the simple-minded version offered by President Bush: the Taliban and Al Qaeda hate our freedom and liberty. That the world's largest military power in search of new oil supplies for the 21st century would threaten carpet bombing is something the mainstream corporate media simply refuses to consider. Kristof also ignores the fact that the U.S. government installed Unocal advisor Harmid Karzai as the President of Afghanistan and provided him U.S. Special Forces as his praetorian guard. Moore mentions this in the film, but Kristof leaves it out of his column, saying the "Administration's huge errors aren't because of deceit." But that statement itself is very deceitful.

Kristof also fails to acknowledge National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's THE GRAND CHESSBOARD.  Brzezinski calmly outlines a thesis that U.S. domination of the globe in the 21st century depends on its control of Central Asian oilfields. He also says the American public would not back an attack unless there was a terrorist attack that galvanized public opinion to seize the foreign oil.

Tom Teepen, syndicated columnist for the Cox New Service suggests that "Fahrenheit 911 is a polemic, not a documentary." Teepen says Moore "weaves conspiracy theories in part by conveniently leaving out key information." Teepen belongs to that most despicable class of columnists known as "coincidence theorists." He also doesn't understand the true meaning of "polemic."

F9/11 opens with the 2000 election debacle in Florida.  Moore could have recited from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which documented that 54% of the rejected ballots in Florida were cast by black voters and 93% of African-Americans voted for Gore nationwide. The government report singled out George's brother Governor Jeb Bush, and the Bush brothers' close friend and Republican ally, Katherine Harris, for blame. Moore could have presented investigative journalist Gregory Palast's reports for the BBC documenting that at least 58,000 eligible voters in Florida were denied the right to vote because their names were the same or similar to a felon.

Moore could have shown footage of a roadblock and told how Florida law enforcement officers turned black drivers of vans and buses away from the polls for failure to provide limousine or chauffer licenses. Moore could have detailed how 20,000 Gore votes mysteriously disappeared in Volusia County and were later reinstated.  That gap allowed Fox News analyst John Ellis to project his first cousin, G. W. Bush, to be the winner.

What else did Moore leave out?:

In his AMERICAN DYNASTY, Republican theorist Kevin Philips documents four generations of Bush family war profiteers dating back to World War I.  This includes Samuel Bush's dual role as entrepreneur with Buckeye Steel Casting and government official on the Armaments Board.   George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a key operative in the Union Banking Corporation that was seized by the U.S. government in 1942 and liquidated under the Trading with the Enemy Act for helping fund the Nazi war effort. Granddaddy Bush joined the Board of Directors of Union Bank in 1934 and stayed there as the bank aided Hitler's rise to power. The government liquidation yielded a reported $750,000 apiece for Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker.

The Bush family is close friends of the self-proclaimed Messiah and creepy cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon. In January 1995, Moon's Women's Federation for World Peace paid Bush the Elder at least one million dollars for a speech. Former President Bush was also the principal speaker in the November 1996 opening dinner for Moon's new weekly newspaper "Tiempos del Mundo" of Argentina.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh reported in February 2002's New Yorker that the Bush administration authorized U.S. cooperation with Pakistan in the December 2001 "Kunduz airlift" that sent airplanes and helicopters to rescue Pakistanis fighting with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Note that the Unocal pipeline from Central Asia goes through Afghanistan into Pakistan. A coincidence?

Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter defines "Crimes Against Peace" as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression or war in violation of international treaties . . . or participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive war." The Bush doctrine of "pre-emption" really had nothing to do with pre-empting an Iraqi attack on the U.S. It is simply the widely discredited Nazi doctrine of "preventive war" established by Hitler to claim the right to attack any country that may pose some possible threat at an unspecific time in the future.

FALSE PROFITS:  THE INSIDE STORY OF BCCI, THE WORLD'S MOST CORRUPT FINANCIAL EMPIRE, by award-winning journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, documents in detail that Bush brothers Jeb and George both had close links to the drug-running Bank of Credit and Commerce International (aka "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International," according to the CIA).

Criminal and civil suits against BCCI establish that Bush's good buddy James R. Bath, was a close business associate of Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, terrorist financier Khalid bin Mahfouz.  Moore correctly shows that Bath and Bush were both disciplined by the Air National Guard at the same time.  

Professor Katherine Van Wormer, co-author of the authoritative text ADDICTION TREATMENT, suggests that "George W. Bush manifests all the classic patterns of what alcoholics in recovery call 'the dry drunk.' His behavior fits a pattern of years of heavy drinking and possible cocaine use."

These are just a few facts that Michael Moore left out of his fair and balanced documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Those who hate this moderate, well-documented film may be most bothered by the actual footage of President Bush.  Key scenes include:  Bush's infamous, endless study of MY PET GOAT in an elementary school class while the World Trade Center burned;  Bush's legendary banquet speech referring to "the haves and have- mores" as "my base"; Bush's bumbling, malapropic final warning to "don't be fooled again." What most bugs F911 critics is clearly not the material Michael Moore presents.  It's the fair and balanced footage of George W. Bush revealing who he truly is.  

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of GEORGE W. BUSH VERSUS THE SUPERPOWER OF PEACE (http://www.freepress.org/).  Bob's newest book, THE BROTHERS VOINOVICH AND THE OHIOGATE SCANDAL, is available at http://freepress.org. 'HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE US' is available at http://www.harveywasserman.com/.  

###

[JohnL]

And now we have spiffy new electronic voting machines produced by a company with ties to Bush. Gee, I wonder who's going to win the next election...

Changing votes in the Dibold voting machines

[trekgeezer]

Yaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!  Please let this thread die a natural death.

[The Burgomaster]

trek_geezer wrote:

"Yaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!! Please let this thread die a natural death."

I agree.  I opened a huge can of worms with this one.  Please let the suffering end!!!!  I could close this thread, but I won't.  It would violate freedom of speech.  Oh, well . . .

[Kate Webster]

Does anybody know how to get removed from receiving this endless thread?