Fact-Checking Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'

FACT-CHECKING MOORE'S POLITICAL BROADSIDE
By Philip Shenon
New York Times / International Herald Tribune
Friday, June 18, 2004

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=525560.html
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LOS ANGELES - Michael Moore is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit
9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President George W. Bush and the
war in Iraq. He wants it to be remembered as the first big-audience,
election-year film that helped unseat a president.

"And it's not just a hope," the Oscar-winning filmmaker said in a phone
interview last week, describing focus groups in Michigan in April at which,
after seeing the movie, previously undecided voters expressed eagerness to
defeat Bush.

"We found that if you entered the theater on the fence, you fell off it
somewhere during those two hours," he said. "It ignites a fire in people who
had given up." The movie's indictment of Bush is nothing if not sprawling.
Moore suggests that Bush and his administration jeopardized national
security in an effort to placate Bush family cronies in Saudi Arabia, that
the White House helped members of Osama bin Laden's family to flee the
United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the
administration manipulated terrorism alert levels to scare Americans into
supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Moore's previous films generated a cottage industry of conservative
commentators eager to prove sloppiness and exaggeration in his films; a
handful of mainstream critics have also found flaws. But if "Fahrenheit
9/11" attracts the audience Moore and his distributors are predicting, Moore
may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike anything he - or any other
documentary filmmaker - has ever experienced. After all, White House
officials and the Bush family began impugning the film even before any of
them had seen it.

So how will Moore's movie stand up under close examination? Is the film's
depiction of Bush as a lazy and duplicitous leader, blinded by his family's
financial ties to Arab moneymen and the Saudi Arabian royal family, true to
fact? Moore and his distributors refused to circulate copies of the film and
its script before the film's release on Friday; his production team said
recently there was no final script because the film was still undergoing
minor editing - for clarity, they said, not accuracy.

After a year spent covering the U.S. commission investigating the Sept. 11
attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood screening. Based on
that single viewing, and after separating out what is clearly presented as
Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it seems safe to say that
central assertions of fact in "Fahrenheit 9/11" are supported by the public
record.

Moore is on firm ground in arguing that the Bushes, like many prominent
Texas families with oil interests, have profited handsomely from their
relationships with prominent Saudis, including members of the royal family
and of the large and fabulously wealthy bin Laden clan, which has insisted
it long ago disowned Osama.

Moore spends several minutes in the film documenting ties between the
president and James Bath, a financial adviser to a prominent member of the
bin Laden family who was an original investor in Bush's Arbusto energy
company and who served with the future president in the Air National Guard
in the early 1970s. The Bath friendship, which indirectly links Bush to the
family of the world's most notorious terrorist, has been well documented.

Moore charges that Bush and his aides paid too little attention to warnings
in the summer of 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to attack, including a
detailed Aug. 6, 2001, CIA briefing that warned of terrorism within the
United States. In its final report next month, the Sept. 11 commission can
be expected to offer support to this assertion. Moore says that instead of
focusing on Al Qaeda, the president spent 42 percent of his first eight
months in office on vacation; the figure came not from a conspiracy-hungry
Web site but from a calculation by The Washington Post. The most valid
criticisms of the film are likely to involve the artful way that Moore
connects the facts, and whether he has left out others that might undermine
his scalding attack. A great many statistics fly by in the movie - like
assertions that 6 percent to 7 percent of America is owned by Saudi
Arabians, and that Saudi companies have paid more than $1.4 billion to Bush
family interests. Moore and his team say they have news reports and other
evidence to back up the numbers, and that it will be posted on his site,
www.michaelmoore.com, after the release of the documentary. Moore may also
be criticized for the way he portrays the evacuation of the extended bin
Laden family from the United States after Sept. 11. As the Sept. 11
commission has found, the Saudi government was able to pull strings at
senior levels of the Bush administration to help the bin Ladens leave the
United States. But while the film clearly suggests that the flights occurred
at a time when all air traffic was grounded immediately after the attacks
("Even Ricky Martin couldn't fly," Moore says over video of the singer
wandering in an airport lobby), the Sept. 11 commission said in a report
this April that there was "no credible evidence that any chartered flights
of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening
of national airspace," and that the FBI had concluded that no one aboard the
flights was involved in Sept. 11.

Moore defended the scene, saying his goal was to show how the White House
was eager to bend and break the rules for Saudi friends, in this case the
extended family of the terrorist who had just brought down the twin towers
of the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. And as reporters have
found, the White House still refuses to document fully how the flights were
arranged. "I don't want to get lost in the forest because of a single tree,"
Moore said. "The main point I want people to go away with is that these
people got special treatment because they were bin Ladens or Saudi royals,
and you and I would never have been given that treatment."

Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack, saying he has created a
"war room" to offer an instant response to any assault on the film's
credibility. He has retained Chris Lehane, a Democratic Party strategist
known as a master of the black art of "oppo," or opposition research, used
to discredit detractors. He also hired outside fact-checkers, led by a
former general counsel of The New Yorker and a veteran member of that
magazine's legendary fact-checking team, to vet the film. And he is
threatening to go one step further, saying he has consulted with lawyers who
can bring defamation suits against anyone who maligns the film or damages
his reputation. "Any attempts to libel me will be met by force," Moore said.
"The most important thing we have is truth on our side. If they persist in
telling lies, knowingly telling a lie with malice, then I'll take them to
court."

Joanne Doroshow, a public interest lawyer and filmmaker who shared in a 1993
Oscar for documentaries and who joined the fact-checking effort last month,
said, "We have gone through every single word of this film - literally every
word - and verified its accuracy." That said, Moore's fact-checkers said
they did not view the film as straight reporting. "This is an Op-Ed piece,
it's not a news report," said Dev Chatillon, the former general counsel for
The New Yorker, adding, "The facts have to be right, yes, but this is an
individual's view of current events. And I'm a very firm believer that it is
within everybody's right to examine the actions of their government."

Besides, it may turn out that the most talked-about moments in the film are
the least impeachable. For the White House, the most devastating segment of
"Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a befuddled-looking Bush staying put
for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of
Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren even
after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers.

Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a
secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may
prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.