[lbo-talk] Re: Dude, Why are you fronting?

Joseph Wanzala jwanzala at hotmail.com
Wed Jul 7 12:25:44 PDT 2004


http://www.oilempire.us/michaelmoore.html#bittersweet

Michael Moore is one of America's most famous dissidents. He first received notoriety for his film "Roger and Me," a biting commentary on the General Motors corporation, "downsizing" jobs, and elite indiffierence to the destruction of working class communities such as Moore's native Flint, Michigan. Roger and Me propelled him into fame, with TV shows (mostly aired in Britain), and several other films, including "Pets or Meat," "The Big One," and the Oscar award winning "Bowling for Columbine."

Moore's 2003 book "Dude, Where's my Country?" included severely deficient analysis of 9/11 that provides (hopefully) inadvertant support for the US's next war - the invasion of the Saudi oil fields, the largest on Earth.

The thesis that Moore puts forward is essentially this: the Saudis attacked the US on 9/11, Bush has business ties to the Saudis, therefore, Bush must be replaced in 2004. While elements of this are true, the claim that the Saudis perpetrated 9/11 is reminiscent of similar claims that the Mafia killed President Kennedy. In neither case did the Saudis nor the Mafia have the power to turn off the normal protection (of New York or of the President).

see http://www.oilempire.us/saudi.html for detailed reasons why the "blame the Saudis" campaign is really a sophisticated effort to lay the ground work for the forthcoming US invasion of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were merely a subcontractor in 9/11 (at most), since they do not control the Air Force and NORAD's fighter planes that are supposed to intercept off-course jet liners within minutes. While it is unknown whether Moore realizes that he is playing into the "Project for a New American Century" strategists (who seem eager to declare Saudi Arabia an enemy of the US and put it toward the top of the "Countries We Must Invade" list), his next film "Fahrenheit 9/11" will certainly be seen as the "dissident" view of 9/11. The film did not actually probe into the complicity of the Bush administration in the event, it is merely a "Limited Hang Out" that blames Bush for "intelligence failures" while pointing out (accurately) that the Bush and Bin Laden families have business ties that date to the 1970s.

see also http://www.oilempire.us/limited.html - Limited Hang Outs (fessing up to a small crime to avoid the deeper crime - understanding the mechanisms of coverups)

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Fahrenheit 9/11: the sequel A bittersweet movie review

Watching Fahrenheit 9/11 was a bittersweet experience.

It is nice that a small taste of the evidence compiled by the 9/11 skeptics movement has finally reached a mass audience. But Moore's blockbuster documentary is a weird mix of extremely good and extremely bad, falsely blames Saudi Arabia as the perpetrator of 9/11, and missed blatantly obvious opportunities to provide the audience with tools to understand why the Bush regime allowed 9/11 and invaded Iraq.

The "blame the Saudis" campaign is really a sophisticated effort to lay the ground work for the forthcoming US invasion of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were merely a subcontractor in 9/11 (at most), since they do not control the Air Force and NORAD's fighter planes that are supposed to intercept off-course jet liners within minutes. While it is unknown whether Moore realizes that he is playing into the "Project for a New American Century" strategists (who seem eager to declare Saudi Arabia an enemy of the US and put it toward the top of the "Countries We Must Invade" list), his film "Fahrenheit 9/11" will certainly be seen as the "dissident" view of 9/11. The film did not actually probe into the complicity of the Bush administration in the event, it is merely a "Limited Hang Out" that blames Bush for "intelligence failures" while pointing out (accurately) that the Bush and Bin Laden families have business ties that date to the 1970s.

Bush at Booker Elementary: proof the usurper is not really the President

The footage of Bush reading "My Pet Goat" to second graders while people burned in the towers is new to most people because of self-censorship by the media that has avoided the issue for nearly three years. This scene is particularly damning because his aide did not ask the "President" for a response when he told him that the second tower had been hit. A commander-in-chief would have replied with inquires about the scrambling of fighter planes to intercept the remaining off-course jets, but Bush continued with the bland photo-op rather than make decisions that could have saved lives. The Secret Service also let Bush stay in the school for crucial minutes, which was either unprecedented incompetence or proof that they knew that Bush was not in danger from any of the hijacked planes. Moore's commentary suggested that Bush, while looking dumb and detached in the schoolroom, might have been wondering if his friends the Saudis had done this. It is much more likely that Bush was thinking that he had been told this event was coming, and now it was here.

The bittersweet aspect of Moore's inclusion of this key issue is the likelihood that if the mainstream media - or even the so-called alternative press - had discussed the strange behavior of George W. Bush when told of the attacks, it could have empowered many more citizens to break free of the post-9/11 trance, potentially strengthening efforts to prevent the invasion of Iraq when it would have saved many more lives. How many Iraqi deaths are partially responsible to the fear in the US media to expose the lies behind the official story of 9/11?

Evidence Ignored in F/911

The most basic dichotomy for understanding 9/11 is whether it was a surprise attack or allowed to happen. Fahrenheit 9/11 carefully steers clear of documenting the overwhelming evidence that at the very least, 9/11 was deliberately allowed to happen to enable long-planned efforts to seize the Middle East oil fields and impose the Homeland Security police state.

Moore says that "This movie is perhaps the most thoroughly researched and vetted documentary of our time. No fewer than a dozen people, including three teams of lawyers and the venerable one-time fact-checkers from The New Yorker went through this movie with a fine-tooth comb." Despite this claim, he makes some severe mistakes that are hard to explain with an incompetence theory, given the high quality of the film's good parts.

F/911 does not discuss the urgent warnings that came from at least 15 countries that the attacks were imminent, some of them were extremely specific. It also avoids the thorny issue of whistleblowers, especially those at the FBI, who complain that their surveillance of the flight schools was suppressed by top level managers in the Bureau, especially Mr. Dave Frasca, who ran the Radical Fundamentalist division in the FBI and was promoted after 9/11 despite his suppression of investigations by honest FBI agents.

The film does not show how selected political, military and corporate officials were warned not to fly or to get out of the way, even though this information is mostly sourced to mainstream media sources. One example was the Sept. 12, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle article that said that SF Mayor Willie Brown was warned not to fly to New York the night before 9/11. Newsweek mentioned that top Pentagon brass canceled their 9/11 flights the day before. Bush's cousin Jim Pierce relocated his business meeting on 9/11 from the top of the towers to a nearby building (source: Barbara Bush!). These and many other pieces of evidence would have strengthened Moore's argument that Bush must be removed from the White House, but they would also have pointed toward official complicity.

Moore ignored the insider trading on Wall Street and international stock markets that bet the values of United, American and companies with a large presence in the towers would drop immediately before 9/11. The insider trading scandal was a huge story in the international financial press in the weeks after 9/11, with numerous speculations that Osama had made the sickest stock trade in history. However, these trades are monitored in real time by the CIA, and would have been a huge clue that a bad thing was about to happen to those airlines and the World Trade Center for anyone paying attention inside the government.

This story disappeared down the "memory hole" after From the Wilderness published an article in October 2001 that linked the trades to a Wall Street company whose previous director is now the number three official at the CIA. In a more just world, FTW would have won the Pulitzer Prize for this scoop. Instead, FTW was attacked by foundation funded "liberal" groups such as The Nation, Norman Solomon, and Chip Berlet's Political Research Associates, but none of the attacks dared mention the stock trades story. It is curious, too, that two years ago, at the Toronto International Film Festival, Moore mentioned that he was starting work on F/911 and was asked if he was aware of the research of Michael Ruppert (who publishes FTW). Moore stammered, claimed he didn't know who that was (even though his company had been in touch with FTW), and quickly changed the subject.



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