WASHINGTON - At the start of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” filmmaker Michael Moore shows a clip of CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin saying that if ballots had been recounted in Florida after the 2000 presidential vote, “under every scenario Gore won the election.”
What Moore doesn’t show is that a six-month study in 2001 by news organizations including The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN found just the opposite. Even if the Supreme Court had not stopped a statewide recount, or if a more limited recount of four heavily Democratic counties had taken place, Bush still would have won Florida and the election.
The inclusion of Toobin’s minority view and exclusion of mainstream documentation typifies the shaky case Moore builds against President George W. Bush in his two-hour film.
The movie unearths nothing new. It is a cinematic lawsuit, not a verdict, that skews and omits events for its central charge: that Bush was soft on terrorism because his family is financially tied to wealthy Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden.
Moore cites well-documented links centering around The Carlyle Group, a high-powered international investment firm. Bush himself had been an adviser to a Carlyle subsidiary before becoming Texas governor in 1995. His father became a Carlyle adviser after leaving office in 1993. The bin Ladens, a family of wealthy industrialists, were major Carlyle investors, though they and the elder Bush cut ties with Carlyle after Sept. 11.
Does that link the Bushes to terrorists? Not exactly. Osama bin Laden has been estranged from his family for a decade. Moore barely suggests otherwise, though he does try to link the incumbent president directly to the bin Ladens.
Relying on a book by former New York Observer editor Craig Unger, Moore cites the case of James R. Bath, a friend of Bush’s from the Texas Air National Guard. Bath had managed the Texas investments for the Saudi BinLaden Group, run by Osama’s older brother Salem, and invested money in Bush’s oil company, Arbusto Energy.
Moore implies the bin Ladens wanted to curry favor with Bush while his father was CIA director. But Unger’s reporting - omitted by Moore - says that Bath denies putting bin Laden money in Arbusto. A link remains unproven.
Moore suggests Bush’s conflict of interest was manifest shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks when the White House “approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis” who, fearing reprisals, were flown out of the United States. Embellishing the well-known scenario, Moore interviews a retired FBI agent who says authorities should have first questioned the bin Ladens.
But the bin Ladens were questioned. The commission investigating the attacks reported in April that the FBI interviewed 30 passengers: “Nobody was allowed to depart on these six flights who the FBI wanted to interview in connection with the 9/11 attacks or who the FBI later concluded had any involvement in those attacks.”
Moore also tries to paint Bush as sympathetic to the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan until its overthrow by U.S.-led forces shortly after Sept. 11. Moore shows a March 2001 visit to the United States by a Taliban envoy, saying the Bush administration “welcomed” the official, Sayed Hashemi, “to tour the United States to help improve the image of the Taliban.”
Yet Hashemi’s reception at the State Department was hardly welcoming. The administration rejected his claim that the Taliban had complied with U.S. requests to isolate Osama bin Laden and affirmed its nonrecognition of the Taliban.
“We don’t recognize any government in Afghanistan,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on the day of the visit.
Moore finds much stronger footing when he focuses on Bush’s presidency. He accurately quotes a front-page Washington Post story from August 2001 noting that Bush had spent 42 percent of his presidency on vacation.
Moore’s statement that Bush never met with White House counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke to discuss terrorism before Sept. 11 is echoed by the commission finding that Clarke “never briefed or met with President Bush on counterterrorism.”
And Moore repeats the commission’s finding that the Justice Department cut FBI terrorism funding just before Sept. 11, though Moore blames Bush where the commission cites Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Yet Moore can hardly restrain himself with the commission. He juxtaposes a clip of Bush saying he has given it “extraordinary cooperation” with a clip of chairman Thomas Kean saying, “We haven’t gotten the materials we needed.”
It’s unclear whether Kean is criticizing the White House or any of the federal agencies that were slow in providing documents. And his criticism is old: Kean has recently praised the commission’s access to records as “unprecedented.”
Perhaps Moore’s most damning accusation concerns what Bush did the morning of Sept. 11.
Moore shows Bush sitting in a Florida elementary school classroom for seven minutes after his aide Andrew Card told him a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. “Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read ‘My Pet Goat’ to the children,” Moore says in a voice-over, “nobody doing anything.”
As a recent commission report noted, federal aviation and military authorities were overwhelmed during this time, unable to coordinate a response that might have stopped a plane from hitting the Pentagon.
When Bush left the classroom, “the focus was on the president’s statement to the nation,” the commission said. “No decisions were made.”
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