The Lies of Michael Moore's F. 911

T

Tess Steckle

Guest
fighting words
Unfairenheit 9/11
The lies of Michael Moore.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 21, 2004, at 12:26 PM PT

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.

Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.

Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:

1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States.

3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.

6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal.

He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies."

A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.

The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box.

But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)

That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)

Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable "warnings."

The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warnings—not exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic "security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments that don't h
ave the me
ans or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.) So—he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing. Again—simply not serious.

Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist.

I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others. Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground. There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I won't dwell on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated Army that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this: In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.) Well, where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft—the most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think—as he seems to suggest—that parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do? Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians to pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported the antidraft (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one realizes that it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It would be too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once and see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer.

Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how many black passengers were on those planes—we happen to know what Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a trolley, fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the White House or the Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything.

Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.

However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of.

Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Correction, June 22, 2004: This piece originally referred to terrorist attacks by Abu Nidal's group on the Munich and Rome airports. The 1985 attacks occurred at the Rome and Vienna airports. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, is out in paperback.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/




http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723
 
I read thru the first third (approx) of your post, ok Moore is no saint (U.K. in-joke - 60's kids).
I went to the flicks to see that film, ok Moore is left of centre & exposes your (are you of U.S. origin?) right wing shite (media led etc) so who gives a toss if he (da-dadly-der-der "Moore more more") gives a biased view of the right wing American led world (got Blair in pocket - Pretenders, but we see thru it). Kerry will be much of a muchness, I love your hyped up 'discussions' 'who can have who' malarky, but underneath they are all the same (insane) shit. You by your critique shows your stance, me by reply shows mine, I'm left, you are right (yet in my opinion one of us is wrong) & Moore stands betwixt us, I could call Moore equally if not more (hee hee) than you but I'd rather condemn that idiot you didn't elect yet still you let 'rule' over you & send kids to their death (I make that statement about all the kids of all Nations that are dead needlessly because of our lack of getting off 'our' collective arses & saying "f*** you Bush/Blair/Hussein/et al").
Viva Me n You, we have the power, just need a nudge in the right 'left' direction.

GrimO

> fighting words
> Unfairenheit 9/11
> The lies of Michael Moore.
> By Christopher Hitchens
> Posted Monday, June 21, 2004, at 12:26 PM PT

> One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the
> American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too
> solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.
> How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful
> and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who
> will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if
> the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not
> the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and
> lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was
> infinitely slight.

> Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally
> beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air
> America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days.
> There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and
> tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and
> smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael
> Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck.
> Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of
> MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of
> Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.

> To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to
> promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film
> as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would
> never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in
> facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister
> exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in
> seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking
> itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

> In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American
> society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film
> Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama
> Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he
> said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained,
> had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something—I cannot guess
> what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently
> persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama
> is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any
> other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against
> him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.

> Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about
> Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:

> 1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if
> convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle
> Group.

> 2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment
> in the United States.

> 3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline
> across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

> 4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan
> and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

> 5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely
> risible in that its non-army was purely American.

> 6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine
> from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated
> ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

> It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's
> direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these
> discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run
> U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or
> they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either
> opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal,
> all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their
> soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or
> were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as
> 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or
> al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless
> than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these are simply
> observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts
> that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging
> Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus
> under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it
> has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a
> general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former
> refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being
> constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a
> highway from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a
> condition of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and
> risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like
> the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime
> change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal.

> He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the
> distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening
> of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members
> of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on
> about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention
> to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar,
> which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to
> our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the
> release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found
> nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And
> Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward
> to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing
> those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of
> Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented
> throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11
> moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about
> the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in
> the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this
> windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies."

> A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only
> sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up
> by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush
> is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the
> way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive
> wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him
> side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this
> photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't
> recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the
> United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.

> The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf
> course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then
> asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you
> catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he
> often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton
> had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. More
> interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the
> infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole
> minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say
> that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance,
> and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any
> such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead
> or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community
> would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed
> impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew
> the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and
> couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore
> Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of
> FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the
> shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box.

> But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many
> other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In
> fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by
> international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its
> noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom,
> according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are
> flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle
> rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the
> terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and
> recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military
> and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not
> identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day,
> have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led
> to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in
> the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at
> Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight
> answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the
> "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably
> outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression
> and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right.
> It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period
> when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah
> Khomeini.)

> That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say
> of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing
> falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or
> killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know
> whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly
> possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of
> Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been
> sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna*
> and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose
> "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly
> of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few
> Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a
> large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion
> of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same
> invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and
> Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to
> kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former
> President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son
> should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I
> not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our
> retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way:
> He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist
> "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10
> years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off
> further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain
> Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center
> and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the
> overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the
> region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and
> described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official
> media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think
> one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow
> enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after,
> and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from
> Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal
> design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York
> Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had
> been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in
> a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to
> buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right
> off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of
> Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the
> negotiations.)

> Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you
> can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so
> many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can
> possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all.
> Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been
> allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that
> Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring,
> or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable "warnings."

> The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his
> treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic
> counterterrorist policy. From being accused of overlooking too many
> warnings—not exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly
> taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear"
> if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some
> American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic
> "security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such
> a story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments
> that don't h
> ave the me
> ans or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded
> by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to
> some ridiculous interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't
> enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is
> appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches
> and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.)
> So—he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not
> exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways
> and asserting everything and nothing. Again—simply not serious.

> Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join
> "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the
> United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If
> the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as
> is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses
> replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the
> region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul
> and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991,
> the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their
> near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so
> despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic
> edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the
> pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability
> trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local
> house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange
> position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take
> this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience
> member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial
> isolationist.

> I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush
> for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From
> Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures,
> such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of
> Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of
> "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time
> someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often
> volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others.
> Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground.
> There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black
> who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I won't dwell on the
> fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century and a half,
> from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army and fight in the Civil
> War to the right to have a desegregated Army that set the pace for
> post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this: In the film, Moore says
> loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison
> Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who
> were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.) Well,
> where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come
> from? Does he favor a draft—the most statist and oppressive solution? Does
> he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines?
> Does he think—as he seems to suggest—that parents can "send"
> their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do?
> Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians to
> pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported the antidraft
> (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one
> realizes that it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It
> would be too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once
> and see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer.

> Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one
> of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent
> interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been
> black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably
> cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how many
> black passengers were on those planes—we happen to know what Moore does
> not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his co-passengers,
> shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a trolley,
> fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United Airlines plane,
> in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the White House or the
> Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which
> helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania
> drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is not
> fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being brought to
> our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize
> courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in
> himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is
> everything.

> Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might
> face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that
> he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking
> staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll
> sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack
> groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie
> theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order
> to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means
> go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in
> the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free
> to join in the conversation.

> However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that
> "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary
> lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore
> and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo
> Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made
> of.

> Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only
> a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone.
> It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth
> vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen
> low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother
> Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a
> slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie
> theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must
> have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a
> narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give
> your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that
> might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish
> flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might
> differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon
> your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and
> insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote
> somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear
> on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full,
> would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate
> this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does
> Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does
> he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses
> his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a
> distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But
> then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch
> Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile
> dementia.) Such courage.

> Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore
> concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The
> words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a
> hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The
> clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that
> there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and
> the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore
> had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really
> saying, and in his own voice, the following:

> The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are
> simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow
> their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual
> pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of
> western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda
> usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if
> one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists,
> one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but
> are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

> And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short
> word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are
> already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's
> also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a
> sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

> If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the
> big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have
> been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to,
> Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have
> remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal
> property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the
> slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective
> awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it
> is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry,
> mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

> Correction, June 22, 2004: This piece originally referred to terrorist
> attacks by Abu Nidal's group on the Munich and Rome airports. The 1985
> attacks occurred at the Rome and Vienna airports. (Return to the corrected
> sentence.)

> Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book,
> Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, is out
> in paperback.

> Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/
 
From the LIAR, HYPOCRITE, COWARD, DRUNK man who dissed Mother Theresa

Shall I fill a board full of links?

?There is the tendency, some of it paranoid and disreputable, for the citizens of other countries and cultures to regard President Bush's "war on terror" as opportunist and even as contrived. I myself don't take any stock in such propaganda. But can Congress and the media be expected to swallow the appointment of a proven coverup artist, a discredited historian, a busted liar, and a man who is wanted in many jurisdictions for the vilest of offenses? The shame of this, and the open contempt for the families of our victims, ought to be the cause of a storm of protest.¦

This is what American journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote about Henry Kissinger-s appointment to the position of the chairman of the committee for the investigation of September 11th attacks. PRAVDA.Ru readers know Christopher Hitchens as the instigator of the global campaign to put Kissinger on trial before an international tribunal based on allegations of crimes against humanity. Hitchens believes that Henry Kissinger is guilty of the genocide of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian nationals, as well as of his implication in Pinochet-s crimes. The journalist-s book entitled "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" is an impressive work that shows the true colors of the American imperialism. However, Hitchens underwent a strange transformation a year ago.

Like everyone else, Christopher Hitchens was horrified with the September 11th attacks on the United States. All of a sudden, this one-time liberal turned out to be an active defender of George W. Bush and of his anti-terrorist war. PRAVDA.Ru wrote on September 24th, 2001¦: ?We would like to believe that when the pain of the black Tuesday is gone, Hitchens will be horrified about what he wrote. Probably, he will instigate new revealing campaigns.¦

George Bush helped to make our forecast come true, when he appointed Henry Kissinger (79) to chair the committee for the investigation of the September 11th attacks. Hitchens could not help but to react to this. This ?left¦ liberal still worships Bush and his war. However, his article, published in the Microsoft-owned online magazine Slate, contains nothing but a rebellion against the incumbent American president. Below are some exerts from the article.

?We already know quite a lot, thanks all the same, about who was behind the attacks. Most notable in incubating al-Qaida were the rotten client-state regimes of the Saudi Arabian oligarchy and the Pakistani military and police elite. Henry Kissinger is now, and always has been, an errand boy and apologist for such regimes.

?When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the "secret bombing" of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church's commission of inquiry into the abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete and misleading information by Kissinger- In other words, the new "commission" will be chaired by a man with a long, proven record of concealing evidence and of lying to Congress, the press, and the public.

?In his second career as an obfuscator and a falsifier, Kissinger appropriated the records of his time at the State Department and took them on a truck to the Rockefeller family estate in New York. He has since been successfully sued for the return of much of this public property, but meanwhile he produced, for profit, three volumes of memoirs that purported to give a full account of his tenure. In several crucial instances, such as his rendering of U.S. diplomacy with China over Vietnam, with apartheid South Africa over Angola, and with Indonesia over the invasion of East Timor (to cite only some of the most conspicuous), declassified documents have since shown him to be a bald-faced liar.

?On Memorial Day 2001, Kissinger was visited by the police in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and handed a warrant, issued by Judge Roger LeLoire, requesting his testimony in the matter of disappeared French citizens in Pinochet's Chile. Kissinger chose to leave town rather than appear at the Palais de Justice as requested. He has since been summoned as a witness by senior magistrates in Chile and Argentina who are investigating the international terrorist network that went under the name -Operation Condor- and that conducted assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings in several countries. The most spectacular such incident occurred in rush-hour traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., in September 1976, killing a senior Chilean dissident and his American companion. Until recently, this was the worst incident of externally sponsored criminal violence conducted on American soil. The order for the attack was given by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who has been vigorously defended from prosecution by Henry Kissinger.

?Moreover, on Sept. 10, 2001, a civil suit was filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court, charging Kissinger with murder. The suit, brought by the survivors of Gen. Rene Schneider of Chile, asserts that Kissinger gave the order for the elimination of this constitutional officer of a democratic country because he refused to endorse plans for a military coup.¦




LIAR, HYPOCRITE, COWARD, DRUNK
hungover.jpg
 
Bush's lie: Iraq has WMDs. uh...where are they? i know who i'm voting for.
 
Re: From the LIAR, HYPOCRITE, COWARD, DRUNK man who dissed Mother Theresa

> Shall I fill a board full of links?

> ?There is the tendency, some of it paranoid and disreputable, for the
> citizens of other countries and cultures to regard President Bush's
> "war on terror" as opportunist and even as contrived. I myself
> don't take any stock in such propaganda. But can Congress and the media be
> expected to swallow the appointment of a proven coverup artist, a
> discredited historian, a busted liar, and a man who is wanted in many
> jurisdictions for the vilest of offenses? The shame of this, and the open
> contempt for the families of our victims, ought to be the cause of a storm
> of protest.¦

> This is what American journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote about Henry
> Kissinger-s appointment to the position of the chairman of the committee
> for the investigation of September 11th attacks. PRAVDA.Ru readers know
> Christopher Hitchens as the instigator of the global campaign to put
> Kissinger on trial before an international tribunal based on allegations
> of crimes against humanity. Hitchens believes that Henry Kissinger is
> guilty of the genocide of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian nationals,
> as well as of his implication in Pinochet-s crimes. The journalist-s book
> entitled "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" is an impressive work
> that shows the true colors of the American imperialism. However, Hitchens
> underwent a strange transformation a year ago.

> Like everyone else, Christopher Hitchens was horrified with the September
> 11th attacks on the United States. All of a sudden, this one-time liberal
> turned out to be an active defender of George W. Bush and of his
> anti-terrorist war. PRAVDA.Ru wrote on September 24th, 2001¦: ?We would
> like to believe that when the pain of the black Tuesday is gone, Hitchens
> will be horrified about what he wrote. Probably, he will instigate new
> revealing campaigns.¦

> George Bush helped to make our forecast come true, when he appointed Henry
> Kissinger (79) to chair the committee for the investigation of the
> September 11th attacks. Hitchens could not help but to react to this. This
> ?left¦ liberal still worships Bush and his war. However, his article,
> published in the Microsoft-owned online magazine Slate, contains nothing
> but a rebellion against the incumbent American president. Below are some
> exerts from the article.

> ?We already know quite a lot, thanks all the same, about who was behind
> the attacks. Most notable in incubating al-Qaida were the rotten
> client-state regimes of the Saudi Arabian oligarchy and the Pakistani
> military and police elite. Henry Kissinger is now, and always has been, an
> errand boy and apologist for such regimes.

> ?When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress
> and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the "secret
> bombing" of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional
> methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and
> atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church's commission of inquiry into the
> abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and
> the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete
> and misleading information by Kissinger- In other words, the new
> "commission" will be chaired by a man with a long, proven record
> of concealing evidence and of lying to Congress, the press, and the
> public.

> ?In his second career as an obfuscator and a falsifier, Kissinger
> appropriated the records of his time at the State Department and took them
> on a truck to the Rockefeller family estate in New York. He has since been
> successfully sued for the return of much of this public property, but
> meanwhile he produced, for profit, three volumes of memoirs that purported
> to give a full account of his tenure. In several crucial instances, such
> as his rendering of U.S. diplomacy with China over Vietnam, with apartheid
> South Africa over Angola, and with Indonesia over the invasion of East
> Timor (to cite only some of the most conspicuous), declassified documents
> have since shown him to be a bald-faced liar.

> ?On Memorial Day 2001, Kissinger was visited by the police in the Ritz
> Hotel in Paris and handed a warrant, issued by Judge Roger LeLoire,
> requesting his testimony in the matter of disappeared French citizens in
> Pinochet's Chile. Kissinger chose to leave town rather than appear at the
> Palais de Justice as requested. He has since been summoned as a witness by
> senior magistrates in Chile and Argentina who are investigating the
> international terrorist network that went under the name -Operation
> Condor- and that conducted assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings in
> several countries. The most spectacular such incident occurred in
> rush-hour traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., in September 1976, killing
> a senior Chilean dissident and his American companion. Until recently,
> this was the worst incident of externally sponsored criminal violence
> conducted on American soil. The order for the attack was given by Gen.
> Augusto Pinochet, who has been vigorously defended from prosecution by
> Henry Kissinger.

> ?Moreover, on Sept. 10, 2001, a civil suit was filed in a Washington,
> D.C., federal court, charging Kissinger with murder. The suit, brought by
> the survivors of Gen. Rene Schneider of Chile, asserts that Kissinger gave
> the order for the elimination of this constitutional officer of a
> democratic country because he refused to endorse plans for a military
> coup.¦
Hugh, Christopher Hitchens is British, I believe, he's a great friend of Martin Amis and their family. If I'm wrong, I apologize.
 
Re: Bush's lie: Iraq has WMDs. uh...where are they? i know who i'm voting for.

Joey, me too.
 
Let's ask Kerry and the UN...they thought they were in Iraq too,
 
> I read thru the first third (approx) of your post, ok Moore is no saint
> (U.K. in-joke - 60's kids).
> I went to the flicks to see that film, ok Moore is left of centre &
> exposes your (are you of U.S. origin?) right wing shite (media led etc) so
> who gives a toss if he (da-dadly-der-der "Moore more more")
> gives a biased view of the right wing American led world (got Blair in
> pocket - Pretenders, but we see thru it). Kerry will be much of a
> muchness, I love your hyped up 'discussions' 'who can have who' malarky,
> but underneath they are all the same (insane) shit. You by your critique
> shows your stance, me by reply shows mine, I'm left, you are right (yet in
> my opinion one of us is wrong) & Moore stands betwixt us, I could call
> Moore equally if not more (hee hee) than you but I'd rather condemn that
> idiot you didn't elect yet still you let 'rule' over you & send kids
> to their death (I make that statement about all the kids of all Nations
> that are dead needlessly because of our lack of getting off 'our'
> collective arses & saying "f*** you Bush/Blair/Hussein/et
> al").
> Viva Me n You, we have the power, just need a nudge in the right 'left'
> direction.

> GrimO
EXCELLEMT GRIMO!!!!!!!! I am so proud.
 
Re: Let's ask Kerry and the UN...they thought they were in Iraq too,

could it be they too were lied to by the Bush administration. And people wonder why the guy "flip flops" when he is given bogus facts by the current prez. Lets get that straight dumbass. When the president and his admistration says this and that, we are supposed to believe them and certainly conress is.

But Bush lied, and yet he's still in office.
 
> EXCELLEMT GRIMO!!!!!!!! I am so proud.

So you are voting for Bush?
 
Let's ask Kerry and the UN if they wanted to go into an illegal war ALONE

I think you are more than the testicle. You under-estimate yourself.




mirror.jpg
 
Re: Let's ask Kerry and the UN...they thought they were in Iraq too,

> could it be they too were lied to by the Bush administration. And people
> wonder why the guy "flip flops" when he is given bogus facts by
> the current prez. Lets get that straight dumbass. When the president and
> his admistration says this and that, we are supposed to believe them and
> certainly conress is.

> But Bush lied, and yet he's still in office.
Bush never fought for this country in Vietnam, YOU KNOW he had help at Yale, and good ol' Jeb in Florida helped him win four years ago. Yeah, good point, Kerry's given bogus *facts* by the Man In The Empty Suit. That would be Bush, if you hadn't guessed. Bush even wore a f***ing wire during the debate, people telling him what to say, he's so godamned stupid.
 
> So you are voting for Bush?
(DEEPLY RED) f*** NO. I take that BACK, Grim.
 
Re: Let's ask Kerry and the UN if they wanted to go into an illegal war ALONE

> I think you are more than the testicle. You under-estimate yourself.
Moz23, you have NO idea how fortunate you are that you are not living in this country at this time. Don't get me wrong, I love my country, but *this* is NOT my country any longer. Bush's hands are dripping with the blood of young men. He doesn't give a f***. When I saw the Bigley beheading, I had to run to the bathroom and vomit. Nothing has ever sickened me more. NOTHING. If W wins, which I am hoping to god he doesn't - I will be an Amerikan no longer. You have NO IDEA what's coming up next. True, the British and American have a lot in common in many ways- Tony Blair. They've planned this so carefully, you have no idea. I appreciate your support and the support of your troops who are in a war which is pretty much about nothing than oil. And Bush trying to get the plebians to understand he's got *balls*- unfortunately, many, like this Tess Sickle are another of their zombies. Testicle, YOU should be in Iraq RIGHT NOW, suffering with all the rest of our men and women. You make me sick.
 
Re: Bush's lie: Iraq has WMDs. uh...where are they? i know who i'm voting for.

But Morrissey supports Bush, then shouldn't we all? A vote for BUSH is a vote for MORRISSEY!
 
Let's not fight amongst ourselves. Morrissey has made it very clear that he supports Bush, so I think that is the end of the conversation. It's only the right way to vote, VOTE BUSH!
 
Colleen1962, it seems you love MORRISSEY as much as anyone. Please just obey him...vote BUSH!
 
Re: From the LIAR, HYPOCRITE, COWARD, DRUNK man who dissed Mother Theresa

I don't know what the point of your post is, but the man in the picture looks horrible and so un-Morrissey-like. I assume then that he must be a Kerry supporter. In anycase, article aside, please vote for BUSH, Morrissey's candidate!
 
Re: Bush's lie: Iraq has WMDs. uh...where are they? i know who i'm voting for.

Morrissey supports Bush, is that why he said in Dublin only a few months ago to a full castle of people on hearing that Reagan had died that it was a shame it wasn't Bush?

GrimO

> But Morrissey supports Bush, then shouldn't we all? A vote for BUSH is a
> vote for MORRISSEY!
 

Similar threads

C
Replies
2
Views
752
seriously flawed-not right in the head
S
T
Replies
13
Views
868
A
Back
Top Bottom