More Distortions From Michael Moore
Some of the main points in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ really aren’t very fair at
all
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 6:26 p.m. ET June 30, 2004
June 30 - In his new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” film-maker Michael Moore
makes the eye-popping claim that Saudi Arabian interests “have given” $1.4
billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George
W.
Bush. This, Moore suggests, helps explain one of the principal themes of
the
film: that the Bush White House has shown remarkable solicitude to the
Saudi
royals, even to the point of compromising the war on terror. When you and
your associates get money like that, Moore says at one point in the movie,
“who you gonna like? Who’s your Daddy?”
But a cursory examination of the claim reveals some flaws in Moore’s
arithmetic—not to mention his logic. Moore derives the $1.4 billion figure
from journalist Craig Unger’s book, “House of Bush, House of Saud.” Nearly
90 percent of that amount, $1.18 billion, comes from just one source:
contracts in the early to mid-1990’s that the Saudi Arabian government
awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country’s
military and National Guard. What’s the significance of BDM? The firm at
the
time was owned by the Carlyle Group, the powerhouse private-equity firm
whose Asian-affiliate advisory board has included the president’s father,
George H.W. Bush.
Leave aside the tenuous six-degrees-of-separation nature of this
“connection.” The main problem with this figure, according to Carlyle
spokesman Chris Ullman, is that former president Bush didn’t join the
Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998—five months after Carlyle had
already sold BDM to another defense firm. True enough, the former
president
was paid for one speech to Carlyle and then made an overseas trip on the
firm’s behalf the previous fall, right around the time BDM was sold. But
Ullman insists any link between the former president’s relations with
Carlyle and the Saudi contracts to BDM that were awarded years earlier is
entirely bogus. “The figure is inaccurate and misleading,” said Ullman.
“The
movie clearly implies that the Saudis gave $1.4 billion to the Bushes and
their friends. But most of it went to a Carlyle Group company before Bush
even joined the firm. Bush had nothing to do with BDM.”
In light of the extraordinary box office success of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and
its potential political impact, a rigorous analysis of the film’s
assertions
seems more than warranted. Indeed, Moore himself has invited the scrutiny.
He has set up a Web site and “war-room” to defend the claims in the
movie—and attack his critics. (The war-room’s overseers are two veteran
spin-doctors from the Clinton White House: Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani.)
Moore also this week contended that the media was pounding away at him
“pretty hard” because “they’re embarrassed. They’ve been outed as people
who
did not do their job.” Among the media critiques prominently criticized
was
an article in Newsweek.
In response to inquiries from NEWSWEEK about the Carlyle issue, Lehane
shot
back this week with a volley of points: There were multiple Bush
“connections” to the Carlyle Group throughout the period of the Saudi
contracts to BDM, Lehane noted in an e-mail, including the fact that the
firm’s principals included James Baker (Secretary of State during the
first
Bush administration) and Richard Darman (the first Bush’s OMB chief).
Moreover, George W. Bush himself had his own Carlyle Group link: between
1990 and 1994, he served on the board of another Carlyle-owned firm,
Caterair, a now defunct airline catering firm.
But unmentioned in “Fahrenheit/911,” or in the Lehane responses, is a
considerable body of evidence that cuts the other way. The idea that the
Carlyle Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of some loosely defined “Bush
Inc.” concern seems hard to defend. Like many similar entities, Carlyle
boasts a roster of bipartisan Wa****ngton power figures. Its founding and
still managing partner is David Rubenstein, a former top domestic policy
advisor to Jimmy Carter. Among the firm’s senior advisors is Thomas “Mack”
McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, and Arthur
Levitt, Clinton’s former chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission.
One of its other managing partners is William Kennard, Clinton’s chairman
of
the Federal Communications Commission. Spokesman Ullman was the
Clinton-era
spokesman for the SEC.
As for the president’s own Carlyle link, his service on the Caterair board
ended when he quit to run for Texas governor—a few months before the first
of the Saudi contracts to the unrelated BDM firm was awarded. Moreover,
says
Ullman, Bush “didn’t invest in the [Caterair] deal and he didn’t profit
from
it.” (The firm was a big money loser and was even cited by the campaign of
Ann Richards, Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial opponent, as evidence of what a
lousy businessman he was.)
Most im****tantly, the movie fails to show any evidence that Bush White
House
actually has intervened in any way to promote the interests of the Carlyle
Group. In fact, the one major Bush administration decision that most
directly affected the company’s interest was the cancellation of a $11
billion program for the Crusader rocket artillery system that had been
developed for the U.S. Army (during the Clinton administration)—a move
that
had been foreshadowed by Bush’s own statements during the 2000 campaign
saying he wanted a lighter and more mobile military. The Crusader was
manufactured by United Defense, which had been wholly owned by Carlyle
until
it spun the company off in a public offering in October, 2001 (and
profited
to the tune of $237 million). Carlyle still owned 47 percent of the shares
in the defense company at the time that Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld—in the face of stiff congressional resistance—canceled the
Crusader
program the following year. These developments, like much else relevant to
Carlyle, goes unmentioned in Moore’s movie.
None of this is to suggest that there aren’t legitimate questions that
deserve to be asked about the influence that secretive firms like Carlyle
have in Wa****ngton—not to mention the Saudis themselves (an issue that has
been taken up repeatedly in our weekly Terror Watch columns.) Nor are we
trying to say that “Fahrenheit 9/11” isn’t a powerful and effective movie
that raises a host of legitimate issues about President Bush’s response to
the September 11 attacks, the climate of fear engendered by the war on
terror and, most im****tantly, about the wisdom and horrific human toll of
the war in Iraq.
But for all the reasonable points he makes, on more than a few occasions
in
the movie Moore twists and bends the available facts and makes glaring
omissions in ways that end up clouding the serious political debate he
wants
to provoke.
Consider Moore’s handling of another conspiratorial claim: the idea that
oil-company interest in building a pipeline through Afghanistan influenced
early Bush administration policy regarding the Taliban. Moore raises the
issue by stringing together two unrelated events. The first is that a
delegation of Taliban leaders flew to Houston, Texas, in 1997 (”while
George
W. Bush was governor of Texas,” the movie helpfully points out) to meet
with
executives of Unocal, an oil company that was indeed interested in
building
a pipeline to carry natural gas from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan.
The second is that another Taliban emissary visited Wa****ngton in March,
2001 and got an audience at the State Department, leaving Moore to
speculate
that the Bush administration had gone soft on the protectors of Osama bin
Laden because it was interested in promoting a pipeline deal. "Why on
earth
would the Bush administration allow a Taliban leader to visit the United
States knowing that the Taliban were harboring the man who bombed the USS
Cole and our African embassies?" Moore asks at one point.
This, as conspiracy theories go, is more than a stretch. Unocal’s interest
in building the Afghan pipeline is well documented. Indeed, according to
“Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden,
from
the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10., 2001,” the critically acclaimed book by
Wa****ngton Post managing editor Steve Coll, Unocal executives met
repeatedly
with Clinton administration officials throughout the late 1990s in an
effort
to promote the project—in part by getting the U.S. government to take a
more
conciliatory approach to the Taliban. “It was an easy time for an American
oil executive to find an audience in the Clinton White House,” Coll writes
on page 307 of his book. “At the White House, [Unocal lobbyist Marty
Miller]
met regularly with Sheila Heslin, the director of energy issues at the
National Security Council, whose suite next to the West Wing coursed with
visitors from American oil firms. Miller found Heslin…very sup****tive of
Unocal’s agenda in Afghanistan.”
Coll never suggests that the Clintonites’ interest in the Unocal project
was
because of the corrupting influence of big oil. Clinton National Security
Council advisor “Berger, Heslin and their White House colleagues saw
themselves engaged in a hardheaded synthesis of American commercial
interests and national security goals,” he writes. “They wanted to use the
profit-making motives of American oil companies to thwart one of the
country
’s most determined enemies, Iran, and to contain the longer-term ambitions
of a restless Russia.”
Whatever the motive, the Unocal pipeline project was entirely a
Clinton-era
proposal: By 1998, as the Taliban hardened its positions, the U.S. oil
company pulled out of the deal. By the time George W. Bush took office, it
was a dead issue—and no longer the subject of any lobbying in Wa****ngton.
(Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force re****t in May, 2001, makes
no reference to it.) There is no evidence that the Taliban envoy who
visited
Wa****ngton in March, 2001—and met with State Department and National
Security Council officials—ever brought up the pipeline. Nor is there any
evidence anybody in the Bush administration raised it with him. The envoy
brought a letter to Bush offering negotiations to resolve the issue of
what
should be done with bin Laden. (A few weeks earlier, Taliban leader Mullah
Omar had floated the idea of convening a tribunal of Islamic religious
scholars to review the evidence against the Al Qaeda leader.) The Taliban
offer was promptly shot down. “We have not seen from the Taliban a
proposal
that would meet the requirements of the U.N. resolution to hand over Osama
bin Laden to a country where he can be brought to justice,” State
Department
spokesman Richard Boucher said at the time.
The use of innuendo is rife through other critical passages of “Fahrenheit
9/11.” The movie makes much of the president’s relation****p with James R.
Bath, a former member of his Texas Air National Guard who, like Bush, was
suspended from flying at one point for failure to take a physical. The
movie
suggests that the White House blacked out a reference to Bath’s missed
physical from his National Guard records not because of legal concerns
over
the Privacy Act but because it was trying to conceal the Bath connection—a
presumed embarrassment because the Houston businessman had once been the
U.S. money manager for the bin Laden family. After being hired by the bin
Ladens to manager their money in Texas, Bath “in turn,” the movie says,
“invested in George W. Bush.”
The investment in question is real: In the late 1970’s, Bath put up
$50,000
into Bush’s Arbusto Energy, (one of a string of failed oil ventures by the
president), giving Bath a 5 percent interest in the company. The
implication
seems to be that, years later, because of this link, Bush was somehow not
as
zealous about his determination to get bin Laden.
Leaving aside the fact that the bin Laden family, which runs one of Saudi
Arabia’s biggest construction firms, has never been linked to terrorism,
the
movie—which relied heavily on Unger’s book—fails to note the author’s
conclusion about what to make of the supposed Bin Laden-Bath-Bush nexus:
that it may not mean anything. The “Bush-Bin Laden ‘relation****ps’ were
indirect—two degrees of separation, perhaps—and at times have been
overstated,” Unger writes in his book. While critics have charged that bin
Laden money found its way into Arbusto through Bath, Unger notes that “no
hard evidence has ever been found to back up that charge” and Bath himself
has adamantly denied it. “One hundred percent of those funds (in Arbusto)
were mine,” says Bath in a footnote on page 101 of Unger’s book. “It was a
purely personal investment.”
The innuendo is greatest, of course, in Moore’s dealings with the matter
of
the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the
September 11 terror attacks. Much has already been written about these
flights, especially the film’s implication that figures with possible
knowledge of the terrorist attacks were allowed to leave the country
without
adequate FBI screening—a notion that has been essentially rejected by the
9/11 commission. The 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi
passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of
them and asked many of them “detailed questions." “Nobody of interest to
the
FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the
country,”
the commission stated. New information about a flight from Tampa, Florida
late on Sept. 13 seems mostly a red herring: The flight didn’t take any
Saudis out of the United States. It was a domestic flight to Lexington,
Kentucky that took place after the Tampa air****t had already reopened It
is true that there are still some in the FBI who had questions about the
flights-and wish more care had been taken to examine the passengers. But
the
film’s basic point—that the flights represented perhaps the supreme
example
of the Saudi government’s influence in the Bush White House-is almost
impossible to defend. Why? Because while the film claims—correctly—that
the
“White House” approved the flights, it fails to note who exactly in the
White House did so. It wasn’t the president, or the vice president or
anybody else supposedly corrupted by Saudi oil money. It was Richard
Clarke,
the counter-terrorism czar who was a holdover from the Clinton
administration and who has since turned into a fierce Bush critic. Clarke
has publicly testified that he gave the greenlight—conditioned on FBI
clearance.
“I thought the flights were correct,” Clarke told ABC News last week. “The
Saudis had reasonable fear that they might be the subject of vigilante
attacks in the United States after 9/11. And there is no evidence even to
this date that any of the people who left on those flights were people of
interest to the FBI.” Like much else relevant to the issues Moore raises,
Clarke’s reasons for approving the flights—and his thoughts on them
today—won’t be found in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” nor in any of the ample
material
now being churned out by the film-maker’s “war room” to defend his
provocative, if flawed, movie.
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Let the name calling begin!!! (its all you libs have)
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