Fahrenheit 9/11 and its (Dis)contents. posted by Richard Seymour

Creating a Radical Imaginary

It is obvious enough, upon seeing this film, why crowds of film-goers in notoriously Republican areas such as Orange County, California, have been heard to loudly chant "Bush Out! Bush Out!". It is the same reason why this film and its maker have been under attack from the first viewing. This film is a simple, yet sophisticated assault on the Bush administration that completely undermines the emotional and psychological appeal of Bush among his own supporters. You thought Bush was a tough guy, taking on the might of global evil? Wrong - he and his family are deeply implicated in this "evil", and would rather have let the bin Laden family leave America without facing the slightest inconvenience of interrogation than allow the truth about the Carlyle Group to emerge. The Bush administration held thousands of foreigners in prison for months at a time purely on the grounds of appeareance, but the bin Ladens are sent off with the blessing of the State Department and the Whitehouse (according to Richard Clarke's public testimony). The Bush administration, and the Bush family itself, was too beholden to the Saudi monarchy to do otherwise. You thought we "smoked 'em out" in Afghanistan? On the contrary, the attack on Afghanistan allowed the bulk of the Taliban to escape, while Al Qaeda burrowed itself in innumerable fox-holes. President Bush sent fewer ground troops to Afghanistan than there are policemen in Manhattan (so a commentator informs us), and thus allowed the Taliban to escape to northern Pakistan - an impeccably conservative objection to Bush's handling of the 'war on terror', and one likely to have impacted voters who approved of that war. Why was the "smoke 'em out" operation so half-hearted? Because the Bush administration was obsessed with Iraq. Wolfowitz, it seems, didn't even want to bomb Afghanistan, preferring to skip breakfast and move straight to the after-dinner pretzel. The thetic relation in which these facts are proposed does not imply that Moore himself supported the bombing of Afghanistan (for he didn't), but rather that, as he later says, the point of the 'war on terror' was that it was never to be won. On this, he goes deeper in his critique than he has before, but I'll come back to the point. Finally, if you thought Bush was going to make sure attacks like 9/11 would never happen on American soil again, Moore makes the excellent point that one of the first things Bush did was try to prevent and independent 9/11 commission from being formed - unprecedented behaviour in the threat of such a catastrophe. Excellent footage shows a panic-stricken Bush attempting to explain to the media how such a commission would reveal to the evil-doers how America gathered its information. When the report emerged, 28 pages were censored, and those pages related to Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks:

"Top U.S. officials believe the Saudi Arabian government not only thwarted their efforts to prevent the rise of al-Qaida and stop terrorist attacks, but also may have given the Saudi-born Sept. 11 hijackers financial and logistical support, according to a congressional report released Thursday. Those suspicions prompted several lawmakers to demand that the Bush administration aggressively investigate Saudi Arabia 's actions before and after Sept. 11, 2001 -- in part by making public large sections of the report that pertain to Riyadh but remain classified. The passages, including an entire 28-page section, discuss in detail whether one of America's most reluctant allies in the war on terrorism was somehow implicated in the attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the full report." Josh Meyer, "Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Hinted at in Report," Houston Chronicle, July 25, 2003.

The Bush administration's ties to the Taliban (inevitably via Halliburton and Unocal) extend right into 2001, when Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi arrived in the United States as special envoy of the Taliban to butter up the Bush administration and make the case for overlooking its support for Osama bin Laden. (The footage of Hashemi insulting a feminist protester evoked some ominous male audience laughter, I have to note). And, since John Ashcroft, the bible-bashing, warbling US security chief later told FBI director Thomas Pickard that he didn't want to hear any more about this Al Qaeda terrorist threat, we might have grounds for thinking that the Taliban overture was successful.

Again and again, the picture emerges of an administration that was too busy salivating over oil and gas prospects to pay attention to serious warnings of a major terrorist attack planned by Al Qaeda, and too caught up in the dense mesh of Saudi capital to do anything about catching the killers afterwards. We also hear of how Bush is more interesting in terrorising peace protesters and implementing budget cuts than he is in thwarting potential terrorist threats. He is more interested in cutting soldiers pay and rolling back benefits than ensuring their safety. Again, all of these, while they are integrated into a much more radical critique of the administration than I might have expected, nevertheless offer centrists and conservatives many reasons to vote Bush out of office.

So what of the critics? I promised myself I wouldn't bother reflecting on the criticisms made until I had seen the film, although Michael Moore has practically made his empirical case in all its essentials available to visitors of his website. Christopher Hitchens has clearly positioned himself as the most vehement opponent of Michael Moore, having taken every available opportunity in recent months to sharpen his pen against the bearded fat guy. Unfortunately for him, he invites himself to be held up to higher standards than Moore. Moore, a political provocateur, can afford to dabble in conspiracy, adumbrate loosely, connote rather than denote etc. Hitchens offers himself as a serious commentator with an ego the size of the nation-state he is now purblindly defending, "against all comers" as he put it a while back. In two notable reviews , he has served up his usual combination of elevated invective and high octane polemic. May I displeasure you with the exceptional third paragraph of his lengthier review?

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.

This is from an article entitled, Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore. It would have been better to have entitled it, Michael Moore: Why I Hate the Fat, Greasy, Lying Leftie Fucker, merely to avoid false advertising. One of Hitchens' earliest points about the film (inter an awful lot of alia comparing Moore to Rush Limbaugh and Leni Reifenstahl) is that it is incoherent. Moore offers a variety of points which suggest variously that the Saudis have a profound influence on US policy - but then, did not the Saudi royal family oppose the attack on Afghanistan? Why didn't Bush take their orders then? But this is a dishonest criticism, because Moore does not suggest that the Saudi royal family is in a position to oppose each and every operation of the United States government, only such connections and influence as did persist appears to have had the effect of allowing the bin Ladens to escape unquestioned and perhaps of blunting the administration's pre-9/11 action against terrorism. In this, Moore is right on the money. Hitchens also suggests that although Moore claims that the inclusion of Afghanistan in the "coalition of the willing" was risible on account of Afghanistan having no army of its own, Afghanistan does in fact have its own emerging army. And this is true - the only trouble is that the Afghan army insofar it is not a rag-tag outfit is not in Iraq. Has not contributed a single soldier to the war effort - for the excellent reason that they are already deserting in droves. Hitchens also condemns Moore for sins of omission - he doesn't mention the return of Afghan refugees, the attempt to hold a general election there etc. But then Hitchens doesn't mention the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, the swift resurgence of the Taliban (oweing precisely to the factors Moore describes), the multiple crimes of the United States in its continuing operations there. It doesn't get better either.

Moore claims that the White House approved the escape of the bin Ladens. Hitchens cites an article in which Richard Clarke, who had earlier indicated that the White House and the State Department were involved in the decision to allow the bin Ladens to leave America, now takes "full responsibility":

"It didn’t get any higher than me," he said. "On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI."

If this were even remotely credible, Moore would still not be responsible. After all, it is Richard Clarke's own testimony (on two seperate occasions) that either the State Department or the White House or both came up with the idea or approved the idea of sending the bin Ladens home, with the compliments of the US government. Here are both of the quotations cited by Moore:

"Now, what I recall is that I asked for flight manifests of everyone on board and all of those names need to be directly and individually vetted by the FBI before they were allowed to leave the country. And I also wanted the FBI to sign off even on the concept of Saudis being allowed to leave the country. And as I recall, all of that was done. It is true that members of the Bin Laden family were among those who left. We knew that at the time. I can't say much more in open session, but it was a conscious decision with complete review at the highest levels of the State Department and the FBI and the White House." Testimony of Richard Clarke, Former Counterterrorism Chief, National Security Council, before The Senate Judiciary Committee, September 3, 2003.

"I was making or coordinating a lot of decisions on 9/11 and the days immediately after. And I would love to be able to tell you who did it, who brought this proposal to me, but I don't know. Since you pressed me, the two possibilities that are most likely are either the Department of State, or the White House Chief of Staff's Office. But I don't know." Testimony of Richard A. Clarke before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.

And here is Clarke's testimony from the same article Hitchens adduces:

"The request came to me, and I refused to approve it," Clarke testified. "I suggested that it be routed to the FBI and that the FBI look at the names of the individuals who were going to be on the passenger manifest and that they approve it or not. I spoke with the — at the time — No. 2 person in the FBI, Dale Watson, and asked him to deal with this issue. The FBI then approved … the flight."

In the new version of the story, the FBI approved the flight. But in the same article, the FBI denies having approved the flight. So, when Hitchens says that "recent developments have not been kind to our Mike" (apparently without irony, since in the immediately preceding sentence he has admitted to having voiced the same concerns himself), he might as well say that recent developments have been unkind to the facts. We don't know who is telling the truth in this instance, although we may guess. What we do know is that Michael Moore can claim to have made this charge in good faith.

Ensuing criticisms range from the fatuous to the merely banal. Here are a few examples:

1) "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."

2) "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."

There you are. One can't accuse Bush of being a lazy bastard and at the same time call him a ceaseless planner of war. But then, Moore's charge is that Bush spent so much time on vacation before the 'war on terror', and his cited source is dated August 10th, 2001. And Bush needn't be exhaustively involved in the planning of wars to indicate his preferences, need he? On the other hand, if Bush sits reading My Pet Goat when the nation is under attack, is that perhaps better than going to war "on a hectic, crazed impulse"? Probably, but I assume there were other things the President could have done - find out what was going on, confer with intelligence, planners, advisers, take executive action to defend the nation, that sort of thing.

Hitchens suggests that Moore is dissembling when he claims that Iraq has never harmed, or even threatened, any American. Here is Moore's exact wording: "On March 19th, 2003, George W. Bush and the United States military invaded Iraq, which had never attacked or threatened to attack the United States. A nation that had never murdered a single American citizen." Here is what Hitchens retorts with: "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."

There is more, but suffice it to note that Hitchens is buttressing heavily the only point at which he has a point. The inclusion of the alleged assassination attempt on former President Bush as well as the charges of support for Palestinian terrorism (which may, coincidentally, kill an American civilian) are presumably necessary, otherwise Hitchens would merely say that many Americans were killed in the Gulf War (79, and some of those were friendly fire), and they too count as American citizens. Moore's sourcing for his point is rather shabby (he includes a reference to an article by Stephen Zunes which doesn't quite say what he says, and a quote from a former Australian government minister which says part of what he says, as well as - inexplicably - a quote from Maureen Dowd of the New York Times.

But then, Hitchens makes a few shoddy errors himself: "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.)" The story of Hussein's attempt to get a missile system appears to be accurate , but what isn't accurate is that it was the coalition presence that put an end to the negotiations. The deal was called off before the attack, and the North Koreans, having bagged the $10m, refused to hand it back.

More fatuities await: "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?)" The difference between ignoring serious warnings and issuing spurious ones ought to be obvious enough, no?

And so he goes on.


As for the leftist critics...

Yes, there is much preaching to the choir, and much ommitted. The Democrats are attacked only one; but this is a film seeking to oust Bush. There is no mention of Israel; a flaw, but I expect that Moore wants pro-Israeli Democrats also to vote against Bush. The final few frames in the film concern themselves with passages from Orwell's 1984, in which the war between Eurasia and Oceana must be sustained - not for the sake of victory abroad, but for the sake of preserving the system at home, keeping the populace in check. That's the war on terror alright - its real target is at home.