Moore facts on 9/11
Local Republicans Bob Hodous and Randolph Byrd may justifiably reject the opinions expressed in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 [“Right or wrong,” July 6]. However, they can’t dispute the facts—with good reason. To vet the film, Moore hired Dev Chatillon, The New Yorker’s veteran fact-checker.
Central assertions of the film are supported by the public record. Bush did spend 42 percent of his first months in office on vacation (38 days at Camp David and 54 days at his Texas ranch—his month-long holiday in August of 2001 was the longest presidential vacation since Nixon). Bush did read kids a story about a goat for seven minutes after being told by Chief of Staff Andrew Card: “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center. America is under attack.” Bush’s firm Arbusto Energy was funded by James Bath, who managed money for Osama bin Laden’s brother Salim. The bin Laden family was a major shareholder in the Carlyle Group, which paid the salaries of the Bush family in the 1990s…etc.
Yes, the facts should “piss off” Byrd, as they have most of the film’s viewers. (What does he make of the fact that White House communications director Dan Bartlett said the movie “was so outrageously false it’s not even worth comment,” although he had not yet seen the film?)
How long can Republicans conscionably ignore the truth? These same data were documented long ago by legitimate journalists like seven-time British International Journalist of the Year Robert Fisk of the London Independent, and The New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh, who way-back-when was the first to tell us facts we didn’t want to hear about Vietnam’s Mei Lai Massacre.
Then, there’s Brooklyn artist Mark Lombardi, whose detailed, diagrammatic drawings critique the webs of influence surrounding the Reagans, Bushes and Clintons. Of special interest is one titled: “George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stevens,” completed in 1999 while George W. was still Governor of Texas. It demarcates the financial pipeline between Salim bin Laden, James Bath and George W. Bush as well as ominous spin-offs to Ferdinand Marcos and Saddam Hussein.
A review in the Utne Reader said: “Lombardi’s work is a total debunking of the naive idea that governments and corporations are looking out for your best interests.” He and Moore would’ve had a lot to talk about. Unfortunately, Lombardi hung himself in 2000. If you connected the facts, as Lombardi and Moore have done, you’d get a tad depressed, too.
Brian Wimer
Charlottesville
Base instinct
I wonder if anyone else has noticed the irony of Bush’s comment to his “banquet of wealthy types” as reported by reviewer Kent Williams [“Heat index,” July 6] and as I noted when I saw Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. Bush says, “I call you my base.” This is the meaning of al-Qaeda: “the base.” Kind of chilling actually.
Doris Safie
Charlottesville
CORRECTION
The photo of Bob Sigman and Denny King in last week’s 7 Days [“WCVL joins the fray”] was incorrectly credited. It was taken by Chris Smith.