Text 545, 253 rader
Skriven 2004-08-03 10:53:38 av John Hull (1:379/1.99)
Ärende: 59 Deceits - Pt 8
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   ----- 59deceits-p8.txt begins -----

Bush Administration Relationship with the Taliban
Deceit 31

     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. 

Frank, Newsday.
 
[Moore response. Quotes some articles showing that the Taliban visited the U.S.
in 2001 to appeal for the lifting of sanctions on their government. Shows no
evidence that the Taliban were "welcomed" by the Bush administration. Does not
explain why Fahrenheit omits the fact that the Bush administration rebuffed all
the Taliban's requests.]
 
Moore Claimed that Osama bin Laden Might be Innocent and Opposed the
Afghanistan War
Deceit 32
 
Fahrenheit 9/11 attempts in every way possible to link Osama bin Laden to
George Bush. Moore even claims that Bush deliberately gave bin Laden "a two
month head start" by not putting sufficient forces into Afghanistan soon
enough. (On HBO, Moore explicitly claimed that the U.S. is protecting bin Laden
in order to please the Saudis.) However, Moore has not always been so fierce
demanding that the Afghanistan War be prosecuted with maximal power in order to
get bin Laden:

     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.

Hitchens, Slate. That Osama, if captured and tried in an American court, would
be entitled to a presumption of innocence (in the sense that the prosecution
would have to prove guilt) does not mean that the U.S. should be morally
foreclosed from destroying Osama's base in Afghanistan and attempting to
capture or kill Osama based on facts demonstrating his guilt. 
 
Three days after September 11, Moore demanded that no military action be taken
against Afghanistan:

     "Declare war?" War against whom? One guy in the desert whom we can never
seem to find? Are our leaders telling us that the most powerful country on
earth cannot dispose of one sick evil f---wad of a guy? Because if that is what
you are telling us, then we are truly screwed. If you are unable to take out
this lone ZZ Top wannabe, what on earth would you do for us if we were attacked
by a nation of millions? For chrissakes, call the Israelis and have them do
that thing they do when they want to get their man! We pay them enough billions
each year, I am SURE they would be happy to accommodate your request....

     But do not declare war and massacre more innocents. After bin Laden's
previous act of terror, our last elected president went and bombed what he said
was "bin Laden's camp" in Afghanistan -- but instead just killed civilians. 

Michael Moore, "War on Whom?" AlterNet, Sept. 14, 2001.
 
The next day he wrote:

     Trust me, they are talking politics night and day, and those discussions
involve sending our kids off to fight some invisible enemy and to
indiscriminately bomb Afghans or whoever they think will make us Americans feel
good.

     ...I fear we will soon be in a war that will do NOTHING to protect us from
the next terrorist attack.

"Mike's Message," Sept. 15, 2001. Although Moore vehemently opposed the
Afghanistan War, Fahrenheit criticizes Bush for not putting more troops into
Afghanistan sooner.
 
Are we any safer because the U.S. military eliminated the al Qaeda training
camps in Afghanistan, removed a government which did whatever al Qaeda wanted,
and killed or captured two-thirds of the al Qaeda leadership? Fahrenheit's
thesis that the Afghanistan War was solely for the pipeline and to distract
attention from Saudi Arabia is inconsistent with the well-known results of the
war. A sincere patriot could have opposed the Afghanistan War for a variety of
reasons, such as fear that the invasion might stir up even more anti-American
sentiment. But the only reason which Fahrenheit offers for opposing the war is
the claim that not enough force was used in the early stages (a criticism
contrary to Moore's 2001 opposition to the use of any force), and the factually
indefensible claim that the results of the war did not help American security
or harm terrorists. 
 
[Moore response: none.]
 
Afghanistan after Liberation
Deceit 33

     [When] 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….[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.

Hitchens, Slate.
 
[Moore response: none] 
 
Cooperation with 9/11 Commission
Deceit 34

     Moore: But when Congress did complete its own investigation, the Bush
White House censored twenty-eight pages of the report.
     Reporter: The President is being pressed by all sides to declassify the
report. US officials tell NBC news most of the secret sources involve Saudi
Arabia. 
     President Bush: We have given extraordinary cooperation with Chairmen Kean
and Hamilton.
     Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean: We haven't gotten the materials we
needed, and we certainly haven't gotten them in a timely fashion. The deadlines
we set have passed.

Bravo to Moore for raising the point about censorship of the 28 pages. It's
possible that all the censorship was necessary to protect confidential sources,
but it's also possible that at least some of the censorship was unnecessary,
and was the result of the White House being overprotective of the Saudis. As
I've said before, Moore is right to call attention to excessive Saudi influence
in the U.S.; he's just wrong with many of his claims about particular issues,
and is ridiculous in his claim that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were
undertaken for the benefit of the Saudis.

The second part of the quoted dialogue, however, is deceptive. The sequencing
makes it appear that Kean was rebutting Bush's claim of extraordinary
cooperation. In fact, Kean complained on July 9, 2003, that several "government
agencies" (Justice and Defense) were not being cooperative. 

On February 8, 2004, Bush told MSNBC that his administration had given
extraordinary cooperation. So rather than rebutting Bush's claim, Kean's
complaint helped spur the administration to, belatedly, fulfill the Committee's
requests. Kean stated that the Commission had been given "unprecedented" access
to records.
Frank, Newsday.

John Ashcroft
Deceit 35 

     Moore mocks Attorney General John Ashcroft by pointing out that Ashcroft
once lost a Senate race in Missouri to a man who had died three weeks earlier.
"Voters preferred the dead guy," Moore says, delivering one of the film’s
biggest laugh lines. It’s a cheap shot. When voters in Missouri cast their
ballots for the dead man, Mel Carnahan, they knew they were really voting for
Carnahan’s very much alive widow, Jean. The Democratic governor of Missouri had
vowed to appoint Jean to the job if Mel won.
     McNamee, Chicago Sun-Times. 

[Moore response: Provides a newspaper quote: "Sen. John Ashcroft on Wednesday
graciously conceded defeat in his re-election campaign against the late Gov.
Mel Carnahan and urged fellow Republicans to call off any legal challenges."
Does not address the fact that voters knew that if they voted the late Mel
Carnahan, his widow Mrs. Jean Carnahan would become their Senator.]
 
FBI and Department of Justice
Deceits 36-37
 
Much worse than Moore's petty slam of Senate candidate Ashcroft is Moore's
false charge that Attorney General Ashcroft ignored warnings about the
September 11 attacks:

     [A]fter suggesting that Ashcroft was unconcerned about terrorism before
September 11, Moore uses phrasing that exaggerates how widespread knowledge of
the Al Qaeda plot was before the attacks inside the FBI and Justice Department:

          [Ashcroft's] own FBI knew that summer that there were Al Qaeda
members in the US and that Bin Laden was sending his agents to flight schools
around the country. But Ashcroft's Justice Department turned a blind eye and a
deaf ear.

     This implies far more prior knowledge about flight school activity than
actually existed. As the 9/11 Commission found in a staff statement (72K Adobe
PDF), the so-called "Phoenix memo" from an FBI agent in Arizona suggesting a
possible effort by Bin Laden to send agents to flight schools was not widely
circulated within the FBI and did not reach Ashcroft's desk:

          His memo was forwarded to one field office. Managers of the Osama Bin
Laden unit and the Radical Fundamentalist unit at FBI headquarters were
addressees, but did not even see the memo until after September 11. No managers
at headquarters saw the memo before September 11. The New York field office
took no action. It was not shared outside the FBI.

     Before Sept. 11, the Minneapolis FBI also investigated Zacarias Moussaoui,
the so-called 20th hijacker, who was enrolled in a flight school there, but no
Al Qaeda connections were discovered until after the attacks. Again, saying the
FBI "knew" of a plot to send agents to flight schools is overstated.

Brendan Nyhan, "Fahrenheit 9/11: The temperature at which Michael Moore's pants
burn," Spinsanity.org, July 2, 2004.

Moore claims that Bush "cut terrorism funding from the FBI." Not so. In 2001,
the Department of Justice was operating under the budget established in the
last year of the Clinton administration, so any proposed change in future
budgets obviously could not have prevented September 11. For the 2002 budget,
the Bush administration did not propose cutting the FBI counter-terrorism
budget. The relevant documents are collected at the website for the Center for
American Progress, a self-declared "progressive" think tank which is scathing
in denouncing Ashcroft for not agreeing (before September 11) to various FBI
proposals for increasing FBI counter-terrorism funding. Rejecting an increase
is not the same as imposing a cut.

Fahrenheit shows a document highlighting the one significant cut which Ashcroft
proposed (in a Sept. 10 memo; see p. 25). Contrary to Fahrenheit's claim, that
cut was not for the FBI budget. The funding was for grants to states to buy
equipment; as the memo detailed, the equipment fund already had more than two
years worth of money which had not been spent, because states had not yet
complied with grant requirements that the states produce state-wide
preparedness plans in order to receive funding. 

There was also a cut in a special Attorney General fund which had been set up
to pay Department of Justice field offices for costs related to the Oklahoma
City Bombing. The Senate had voted to eliminate this fund.

[Moore response: Cites the Phoenix Memo warning about al Qaeda trainees in
flight schools. Does not attempt to rebut the evidence that the memo was "not
widely circulated within the FBI and did not reach Ashcroft's desk." Cites a
Chicago Tribune article summarizing September 11 Commission hearings in which
former acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard claims that Ashcroft told Pickard he
did not want to hear any more about terrorism. Omits Ashcroft's denial of
Pickard's claim--and the possibility that Pickard might have been attempting to
shift blame away from the FBI. Claims that the September 11 Commission supports
Pickard's claim; actually, the Commission said that it could not determine
whether Pickard or Ashcroft's versions were correct. Moore's response does not
attempt to defend the false claim about budget cuts.]
   ----- 59deceits-p8.txt ends -----

John 

America:  First, Last, and Always!
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