Fahrenheit 9/11" is just the tip of the iceberg

[Deborah]

From someone who supports the main thrust of Moore's film, but who, doesn't support either major political party:

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/whatm ... issed.html
 
If Michael Moore didn't quite do all his homework with regard to who may have been behind the 9-11 attack, that does not change the fact that the people of the United States were lied to to trick them into wars. And it is THAT message of the film which is the important one. But the hard fact remains that Michael Moore did not get ALL of the story of 9-11. Not by a longshot. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is just the tip of the iceberg.

"Fahrenheit 9/11 is not an indictment of just George Bush. Fahrenheit 9/11 is not an indictment of just Republicans. Fahrenheit 9/11 is an indictment of the entire US Government that had to know Bush was lying to the American people to initiate a war and stood there smiling blandly while he did it. Like Hitler, Bush could not do what he did without a lot of cooperation by the entire government and the media. Look at the voting records for the authorization for the use of force in Iraq and in the draconian assaults on our freedoms. Both parties voted those "Ayes". The
rush to war and dictatorship was a bipartisan one, worthy of bipartisan blame. Everyone is spinning Fahrenheit 9/11 to attack their own favorite scapegoats, but the truth is there is more than enough blame for the current state of the nation to share all around."

[SyN]

::cheers::

[Anonymous]

It is no longer safe to be an American.  We are a country divided.

Who is to blame?  

Everybody and Nobody.

Remember this when you cast your vote on November 4, 2004, whoever is elected the next president of the United States of America better be a really good liar because the truth is killing us.

 :smokin:

[Anonymous]

On 2004-06-27 20:58:00, Deborah wrote:

"From someone who supports the main thrust of Moore's film, but who, doesn't support either major political party:



http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/whatm ... issed.html

 

If Michael Moore didn't quite do all his homework with regard to who may have been behind the 9-11 attack, that does not change the fact that the people of the United States were lied to to trick them into wars. And it is THAT message of the film which is the important one. But the hard fact remains that Michael Moore did not get ALL of the story of 9-11. Not by a longshot. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is just the tip of the iceberg.



"Fahrenheit 9/11 is not an indictment of just George Bush. Fahrenheit 9/11 is not an indictment of just Republicans. Fahrenheit 9/11 is an indictment of the entire US Government that had to know Bush was lying to the American people to initiate a war and stood there smiling blandly while he did it. Like Hitler, Bush could not do what he did without a lot of cooperation by the entire government and the media. Look at the voting records for the authorization for the use of force in Iraq and in the draconian assaults on our freedoms. Both parties voted those "Ayes". The

rush to war and dictatorship was a bipartisan one, worthy of bipartisan blame. Everyone is spinning Fahrenheit 9/11 to attack their own favorite scapegoats, but the truth is there is more than enough blame for the current state of the nation to share all around."

"

Deborah I don't always agree with you but I do on this one, very well said

[thepatriot]

That was me

[Anonymous]

Now here's a guy that "gets it" and should be running for President instead of The Three Amigos (Bush, Kerry and Nader).
----------------------------------------

Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now
By Stephen Schwartz
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 8, 2002

Numerous parallels are visible between the totalitarianism of Soviet Communism and that of Wahhabism, the Saudi-funded movement to seize control of world Islam. Aside from their ideological similarities and the common elements in the struggle of each for power, there is the striking matter of their identical tactics in penetration of the United States.

The Communist Party, USA, claimed to lead and, in effect, represent the entire labor and left movement, when its constituency was restricted to a narrow band of fanatics and agents of a foreign regime.

The Wahhabi lobby - the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), American Muslim Council (AMC) and Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) - claim to lead, and, in effect, represent the entire community of American Muslims, when its constituency is restricted to a narrow band of fanatics and agents of a foreign regime, the Saudi kingdom.

The Communist Party, USA, claimed it was engaged in protected speech, and, even more, argued that investigation of its conspirative activities in the interest of treason, terrorism, and espionage involved "denial of free thought." Right; it involved investigation of people who spent a lot of time thinking about their loyalty to the Soviet Union rather than the U.S., their support for actions like the assassination of Trotsky, entirely organized from U.S. soil by American Communists, and the need to assist spies like the Rosenbergs, Morton Sobell, and Rudolf Abel. But since their thoughts could not be investigated, rendering a discussion of the morality of such ridiculous, they were investigated for their pursuit of these thoughts, in real, direct actions.

The Wahhabi lobby claims it is engaged in the protected exercise of religion, and, even more, argues that investigation of its conspirative activities in the interest of treason and terrorism involve "denial of religious freedom." But religion per se does not enter into this investigation, which is based entirely on voluntary criminal acts, like September 11.

The Communist Party, USA, used labor unions as cover; the Wahhabi lobby uses charities. The means and the ends are the same: each represents the place where the ideological network encounters and seeks to control the masses. Each is used as a recruitment center and cover for terrorists.

Finally, when national and international developments act irresistibly to strip the benign mask away from each - the seizure of Czechoslovakia and break with Tito in 1948, in the Communist case, September 11 in the Wahhabi example - the alien operatives in charge of the terror network have taken refuge behind popular American sympathy for the underdog. Like the Communists before them, the Wahhabis have presented arrestees, detainees, and indicted suspects as people persecuted because they are "foreign born," or victims of "ethnic profiling."

The classic example of Communist manipulation of this issue was embodied in an organization known as the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB). This was a legal front set up to protect aliens caught in the U.S. while employed as representatives of the Communist International and in other top positions in the clandestine networks. Their ethnicity was varied. Overall, the Kremlin did not feel it could depend, for the real guidance of the American Communists, on lily-livered American ex-Socialists, who might be timid about the really rough stuff, or on former members of the anarchosyndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, who suffered attacks of conscience. While these types dominated the Communist leadership, the clandestine networks were more often run by Slavs, especially Croats, Hungarians, Finns and, in California, Japanese.

The Slavs were tough men, steelworkers and miners, brought up in a tradition of rural social protest that typically led to the Habsburg gallows. The Hungarians and Finns usually had lost brothers or other close relatives in the failed Communist revolutions in those countries. The Japanese were the loneliest: in the 1930s, they were routinely beheaded in Japan, and had no base in China; the Japanese Communist Party was therefore run out of California and Hawaii.

Once in a while a member of one of these bands would fall into the hands of U.S. immigration and naturalization inspectors, military intelligence, or local law enforcement. Nobody in the FBI paid serious attention to the Communists until 1939. Since all these individuals were aliens traveling with multiple false U.S. passports and other forms of fraudulent identity, they were deportable if nothing else. The INS of that time played a heroic role in tracking Communists when nobody else cared; indeed, it was the main engine of pursuit in the long-running attempt to deport Harry Bridges to Australia. Bridges, who had captured control of the West Coast longshoremen?s union, did not disguise his Communist sympathies, and would generally not deny being a Communist. Rather, he challenged the government to prove he was a Communist, knowing as he did that the party apparatus was virtually airtight in California. Proving his membership would be an impossible task, and the government failed in its attempt. At the end of his life, Bridges commented, "of course I was in the party; they just couldn?t prove it." With the opening of the Russian archives of the American Communist organization, all doubt was dispelled forever; internal party documents showed that Bridges was a member of the Central Committee.

The high standard of proof required in such cases, and other legal barriers, provided enough pretexts for ACPFB to conduct decades of work assisting Communist alien operatives. Of course, the organization placed itself under a liberal mantle: its honorary cochairman in 1950 was Thomas Mann, the German novelist who fled to the U.S. and skated back and forth between the Stalinists and anti-Stalinists (this was particularly common among German leftist émigrés). Other signatories of its propaganda that year included Dr. Philip Morrison, nuclear physicist, Hon. Robert W. Kenny, a California attorney general and rank fellow-traveller, the long-serving Soviet tool Dr. Linus Pauling, and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.

In the mid-50s, with support for the Stalinist network way down among dupes, the New York Committee?s troika of cochairs included Hugo Gellert, a Hungarian social-realist painter and leader of the open Hungarian Communists in America, and Hugh Mulzac, a Caribbean-born shipmaster and functionary in the Communist maritime network - the all-important conspiracy of seagoing couriers. Other faces familiar at Stalinist gatherings rallied to the NYCPFB, including Dr. Edward K. Barsky, head medic for Stalin?s American mercenaries in the Spanish civil war, banjoist Pete Seeger, social realist painter Rockwell Kent, and "folk composer" Earl Robinson.

A 1953 advertisement in the Daily Worker listed, as speakers at an ACPFB rally, an illustrious "foreign born" Communist: the Caribbean Ewart Guinier, father of none other than Lani, "quota queen" supreme and advocate of crank voting schemes. Papa Ewart was a leader of the American Communist organization in Hawaii, and he was accompanied at the 1953 event by Carl Marzani, alias Tony Wales, a Soviet spy inside the U.S. State Department. The 1955 letterhead of the national organization sported the name of Dashiell Hammett, former union-busting Pinkerton goon turned Stalinist, and number one "squeezed lemon" among Communist literati.

In the long term, the Communist juridical operation aimed at protecting their terrorist, treasonous, and spying activities was successful. It should therefore surprise nobody that when the Wahhabi lobby came under American investigative scrutiny in the 1990s, their response and that of their defenders (including a considerable number of ultrasecularist and leftist Jews) almost exactly reproduced the effort mounted earlier in American history by Stalinist Communists and their protectors. Aside from the claim that they were victims because they were "foreign born," or were "ethnically profiled," the Wahhabis have recycled a full range of Stalinist techniques for evading the law.

Like the Communists of the 1940s, the Wahhabis claim to be victims of slander while practicing it against their critics. Detailed, factual charges against them are denounced by them as mere allegations, when they are, without exception, based on publicly recorded, voluntary statements made before thousands of witnesses. When the Wahhabis are shown, by their own declarations, to be terror advocates, they insist that their activities are benign and innocuous, involving only fundraising for the relief of children and refugees.

The Communists had used the same methods with extraordinary success. They claimed to be "progressives," not Stalinists; they denounced their critics, including anti-Stalinist socialists and liberals, as "fascists" and "witch-hunters," and when it was demonstrated that they did belong to Communist organizations, argued that they had only been engaged in programs of social uplift, defense of labor rights, and fighting against racism. In reality, their main tasks had not been in the field of trade unionism or civil rights, but rather involved the propagandistic defense of Stalin?s purges, pact with Hitler, and other atrocities.

Furthermore, years of wrongheaded decisions were handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which seemed to want to overlook Communist espionage and terrorism in America (the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 - the most famous terrorist act of the 20th century - was almost entirely organized in the United States by members of the domestic Communist Party). The Court held to the philosophy that suppression of Stalinism was only appropriate if it could be shown that the republic was in danger of immediate overthrow. That the American Communist party was an arm of the Soviet secret police, controlled in its entirety by Moscow, had not been "proven," even though it was self-evident, because the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were unwilling to produce testimony that would reveal to the Russians the extent of American success in decrypting secret KGB and related communications. So the courts, the lawyerly establishment, civil liberties lobbies, and assorted other sectors of the public adopted a hardline attitude: if treason, espionage, and terrorism could not be proven in open court, with full right of cross examination by attorneys hired with Soviet money and intent on assisting the Soviet government, it did not exist. It was for this reason that so many potential codefendants in the infamous case of the Rosenberg couple were never even indicted, and some made their escape from the U.S. altogether.

Until September 11, the Wahhabis in America enjoyed similar success in convincing American investigative agencies, judges, lawyers, civil liberties advocates, journalists, academics, and others that they were, in effect, prosecution-proof. Ludicrous mistakes were made because Americans were concerned to protect the freedom of the enemies of freedom. Sayyid Nosair, assassin in 1990 of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, was only found guilty on a firearms charge. The FBI impeded the investigation of Zacharias Moussaoui, who was arrested before September 11 and later charged as a member of the conspiracy, because it lacked "sufficient" probable cause. The list of such errors could be greatly lengthened. But the traps of moral equivalence were deeper and more dangerous. America?s capacity to defend itself spiritually and intellectually had been deeply harmed by "anti-anti-Communism."

The legacy of this deviation in American political life is audible whenever the claim is made that firm measures against terrorists - the use before September 11 of "secret evidence," or, after that date, denying terror troopers status as prisoners of war, investigating extremist activities that sheltered under the cover of religion, more efficient standards for wiretapping, detention of aliens, higher levels of transportation and communications security, or the failure to provide "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh with a "dream team" of lawyers in the Afghan hinterland - threatened to put America on the terrorists? level. America was told repeatedly it must fight for protection of the rights of its enemies if it was not to become indistinguishable from them. Similarly, apologists for Bin Laden and his accomplices insisted that evidence of his terrorist activities, satisfying absurdly high standards, must be produced before action could be taken against him.

The time has come to end the period in American history when protection of the enemies of freedom was considered more important than protecting freedom. Arab and Muslim residents of the United States whose assistance to terrorists is suspected, based on the doctrine of probable cause, must be thoroughly investigated and, when necessary, punished. The Wahhabi lobby must be barred from continuing its charade as the "representatives" of "the Muslims," as if all Muslims in America were their enthusiastic supporters, which they are not. Groups outside the Wahhabi lobby that have issued aggravated and exaggerated claims about repression of Arabs and Muslims - particularly the Arab American Institute (AAI) and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - should cease emulating entities from the dustbin of history, like the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. Arab and Muslim advocacy groups must cease equivocating; cease providing excuses for terrorists; examine their own pasts, and admit their previous involvement in extremist incitement. To survive, they must take sides, and be seen to be effectively taking sides, against the terrorists. There is no other path.

[SyN]

patriot you are an american and god bless you for it! :tup:

[Deborah]

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 forcibly 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 intertwined 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 consequences 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 http://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 Administration and 9/11," http://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

[Deborah]

At a press conference in Boston yesterday, filmmaker Michael Moore announced he is bringing his cameras to Florida in November to make sure there is what he called a "huge spotlight" on state election officials when voters go to the polls.

The director of "Fahrenheit 9/11" also said he plans to help pay for an "army of lawyers" who will be in target precincts ready to go to court if they spot any voting problems. He encouraged other independent filmmakers to join him in Florida.

Here is Michael Moore speaking yesterday at a press conference organized by Rep. Corrine Brown of Florida:

"We are here this morning to put the Bush administration, both the one in Washington D.C. and the one in Tallahassee, on notice. (applause) Too many people fought for too many years to guarantee that every American citizen would have the right to vote and that their votes would be counted. Too many people died for that right. And we are not going to dishonor those who gave their lives in the Civil Rights struggles by allowing these people to steal a second election. That is not going to happen! That's just not going to happen. (applause).

"And I wanted to stop by this breakfast this morning and tell you personally that I am committed. I am coming to Florida. I will be in Florida. And together, together, we will guarantee to every Floridian, that their vote will be counted this year. Make no mistake about it. I will be there, I will have my cameras there. We will put a huge spotlight on them. They will not get away with it this time." - Michael Moore

[SyN]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/a ... _librarian
SyN

[Deborah]

10/6/04

Friends,

You may have heard by now that the Michigan Republican Party has called for my arrest. That's right. They literally want me brought up on charges -- and hope that I'm locked up.

No, I'm not kidding. The Republican Party, yesterday, filed a criminal complaint with the prosecutors in each of the counties where I spoke last week in Michigan.

My crime? Clean underwear for anyone who will vote in the upcoming election.

Each night on our 60-city "Slacker Uprising Tour" through the 20 battleground states, I've been registering hundreds (and on some nights, thousands) of voters at my arena and stadium events. I then ask for everyone over 23 who has never voted (or didn't vote in the last election) to stand up. I tell these slackers that I understand and respect why they think politicians are not worth the bother. I tell them that I may have been the original slacker, and that I do not want them to change their slacker ways. Keep sleeping 'til noon! Keep drinking beer! Stay on the sofa and watch as much TV as possible! But, please, just for me, on 11/2, I want you to leave the house and give voting a try -- just this once. The stakes this time are just too high.

If they promise me that they'll do this, I give the guys a 3-pack of new Fruit of the Loom underwear, and the women get a day's supply of Ramen noodles, the sustenance of slackers everywhere.

I then close by having them repeat the 2004 Slacker Oath: "Pick nose! Pick butt! Pick Kerry."

It seems to have worked, as each night the volunteer tables are swamped afterwards with hundreds of new and young voters signing up to campaign for regime change for the next four weeks.

The satire of all this seems to have been lost on the Republicans. Or maybe it hasn't. The state of Michigan (where we spent most of last week) reported that over 100,000 young people recently registered to vote, a record that no one saw coming. The Slacker Tour has turned into a huge steamroller with a momentum all its own.

So, the Republican Party, to show their gratitude that so many young people will now be involved in our system, has demanded that I be sent to jail for trying to "bribe" students to vote.

Of course, this would be quite laughable if they weren't so serious about their charges. But they are. I may soon be a wanted man in Michigan -- simply because I convinced a few slackers to change their underwear and eat a healthy meal of artificially flavored noodles.

I thought I'd seen it all this year -- Disney refusing to distribute the film they paid for, right-wingers harassing theater owners who showed "Fahrenheit 9/11," conservative action groups trying to get the FEC to kick our film ads off the air, the unnecessary restrictive R-rating that forced teenagers to sneak in to see it, and all the stupid, crazy attacks on me and my movie that I've had to listen to as I watched the public ignore them and pack the movie houses anyway, where my film was being shown. And when all that failed, five different Republican groups made five different attack dog tapes (oops, "documentaries"!) against me in a period of about six weeks. But they were all so bad, so boring, so right-wing, no one wanted to watch them and they too went away, a sad waste of good videotape.

Now, after enduring all this, with no tricks left in their bag, they've just decided, "Let's toss his sorry ass behind bars -- him and his noodles and his gift of clean underwear!"

My friends, they will not catch me. Though I may be on the run, and I may never be able to return home to my beloved Michigan, I make this solemn vow to you and yours: The slackers of America shall not be denied their noodles, they will proudly wear their clean underwear as free Americans, and they will vote Bush out of office come November 2nd (though they will not show up to the polls until well after noon)!

Stay strong, stay slacker, and please remember to turn the underwear inside out every three days. As for the noodles, add boiling water, stir.

Yours,

Michael Moore
http://www.michaelmoore.com

P.S. My favorite moment of the VP debate: Cheney saying to the moderator that this was the first he heard that that many black women in America had AIDS. Clueless. Cheney, for an entire 90-minutes, only mentioned Bush's name -- that's his running mate, the "president" -- once. They should have called this the "President (Cheney) -- Vice President (Edwards) Debate."

P.P.S. Tomorrow's letter, as promised for today, will be about my new book, "Will They Ever Trust Us Again?: Letters from the War Zone." And thanks, everyone, for sending "Fahrenheit 9/11" on its first day to #1 on Amazon. If you find that your store didn't order enough copies, or to report other problems, please e-mail Sony Home video at [email protected].