Even if you accept the ol' Atlantic Monthly Perfect Blowback yarn that Osama is a black sheep from the biggest building family in Saudi Arabia that the Bushes HAD to know, that the CIA created a monster fighting the Soviets and now that is coming home to roost (which everyone from Europe lectures me with given the occasion) the fact that the flights out of the Bin Laden family was not reported on the boob tube amid 24-7 demonization of Osama gives palpable chills to the popcorn eaters in the cinema-house. WHY didn't Tom Brokaw tell me this, they think.. ..even though it only provides very circumstantial evidence of Bush's complicity.
Moore's thesis, to be sure... is not complicity... it is, of course, Bush as boob that dropped the ball and couldn't see the danger presented by his family's ties to the oil trade.
Glass is half full department:
What's in the film... Jim Bath is... although nothing really damning gets presented save for the fact that the Bin Ladens were in the Carlysle Group. Harken ties are rolled out, and, most significantly, Karzai's ties to Unocal, a staple circumstantial of Ruppert's early reports.
9/11 Visibility Project gets occasion to pass out flyers. You might find this an entertaining thing to do... downloading the flyers they have or making your own.
Box office (which looks to be off the charts) paves way for funding of other documentary projects that delve closer into the dirty deed.
Brian Quig once all-capsed about the film of Bush reading to the kindergarten class being the smoking gun or whatever he called it, and here it is, albeit voice-overed with a blowback thesis, but as the Iraqi Prison shots show, a picture cuts through all the BS.
Glass is half empty dept:
I must admit my own blinders about this thing making its way to the multiplex... I, who inferred earlier this year that Jackson Stephens had named Moore's price paving the way for the Wes Clark endorsement, exuding unreserved excitement that this was what Ruppert would refer to as a Dam Breaks moment. It is comforting that establishment lefties like Zinn, Asner, Begley, etc. that are not concerned about the whims of foundation-sponsored editors (Z and Nation for instance) are getting into this 9/11 thing after all. What did Moore have to do to get this thing out?
There would appear to be a Faustian bargain about the whole Saudi thing, of course. This amid these unexplained "Al-Qaeda" attacks to destablize and isolate the kingdom (with all previous manifestations of Al-Qaeda obviously CIA ops). Moore, in press interviews, goes out of his way to suggest that the attacks had something to do with who's in power in Saudi Arabia. This amid Kerry's stump statements that Bush is too closely aligned with the Saudi kingdom.
I do think that getting distribution probably had something to do with the hopes of some that a Kerry administration would invade or overthrow the Saudi government or seize the oil fields, where the Perle factions' earlier attempts to legitimize this idea had been ridiculed. Unless Iraq becomes a cakewalk, which won't happen, Kerry won't turn his eyes to Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. But keeping Saudi Arabia on edge and away from the euro is worth a lot of money to someone.
Still, this is balanced out with a strong anti-war message.
Number one on the annoying list is Richard Ben-Veniste's invite to the opening during which he could watch himself be a sympathetic character grilling the FBI guy about Ashcroft's indifference to terror warnings. This makes for powerful partisanship, which is one of the functions of those hearings – watching the cockfights between the Dick Clarks and the other angry Viacom dudes du jour while you quietly hope that they will make Cheney go away, even though it completely misses the point, as anyone who listens to the victims' wives association would hear.
A GOOD documentary about 9-11 would mention that Ben-Veniste represented Truman Arnold during the Whitewater investigations, and that Arnold, whose net worth among Arkansas residents is second only to Wes Clark's boss (Stephens, whose law firm is across the street from where Atta trained) rented a 2 million dollar plane for one dollar a year from the same company that gave Atta his flight lessons.