Truth or tale, experts analyse 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2004/s1162379
.htm
Reporter:
TONY JONES: Since its release many critics have lined up to
shoot down Michael Moore and his film.

Renowned journalist, author and commentator Christopher
Hitchens describes Fahrenheit 9/11 as "a sinister exercise in
moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness".

His debating partner, George Monbiot is one of the leaders of the
anti-war push in Britain, an author and columnist in the Guardian
newspaper.

They agreed to meet at the opposite ends of their days -
Christopher Hitchens around midnight in California and George
Monbiot in early morning Oxford.

Christopher Hitchens why did you feel it necessary to
comprehensively so debunk Moore's film?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR & JOURNALIST: It's
nice of you to say I debunked it.

It is, in my opinion, I lie in itself.

It purports to say we are at war with Islamic Jihadism, not because
of Islamic Jihadism but because of private dealings by the Bush
family.

In other words, there is nothing to worry about, there is no clash,
there is no crisis, there is no terrorism - except American
terrorism.

Within that there are about - one very good reviewer's counted 56
or so individual falsifications, I could mention some of them
myself if you like.

And then the third reason is this - I'll make it as plain as I can -
Michael Moore has said openly and repeatedly that he is on the
other side in this war, that he regards what he calls the Iraqi
resistance as the 'just' side in the battle.

He thinks that they are the equivalent of the American
revolutionary fighters of 1776 and that they will win which, I will
conclude by saying, makes it a bit much for him to gather up for
his own purposes the tears and the grief of American widows and
mothers whose sons have been killed by people who he openly
proclaims his kinship with.

TONY JONES: George Monbiot, let me bring you in.

You found fault with the film's crudity and incoherence, but in the
end you say you were so shaken you actually applauded it.

GEORGE MONBIOT, AUTHOR AND COLUMNIST: Well, with
the rest of the audience.

We're finding that in cinema after cinema across the country
audiences are applauding this film. And they're doing so, not
because they think it's a brilliant piece of journalism - I don't think
it's a brilliant piece of journalism, most reviewers don't think it's a
brilliant piece of journalism - but because there's footage on that
film, material in that film, which isn't available elsewhere.

I'm not talking about the accusations about the Bush and bin
Laden family, for example, but about things which should have
been on the news all over the world.

For example, Bush addressing a white tie dinner of some of the
richest people in the United States and saying to them: "It's great
to be here with the haves and the have mores. Some people call
you the elite. I call you my base."

Now that sort of thing we should all have seen, because that tells
us more about the Bush presidency than anything else that Bush
has ever said and yet as far as I can find out, it's never been on
television before.

Similarly, I've been aware of the footage of Donald Rumsfeld
meeting Saddam Hussein on the Internet for over a year.

It's been there - when Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam Hussein in
1983, shaking hands, big smiles, all the rest of it, again, why
hasn't this been universally broadcast?

It's a critical piece of footage.

Why did we have to wait for Michael Moore to broadcast it for
us?

TONY JONES: Christopher Hitchens?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: We didn't have to wait for either.

George Monbiot may or may not know this, but perhaps should,
George Bush is speaking at the Al Smith dinner, which is a public
political dinner that's been held in New York since 1906.

It's only recently started being transmitted or recorded.

It's famous occasion where the two candidates for the office of
presidency meet to tell jokes at each other's expense.

What you saw there was George Bush telling a joke at his
expense.

Al Gore then comes up - if Michael Moore had shown the rest of
it - and says: "It's great to be at a dinner which I invented, just like
I invented the Internet."

It's a joke, if you get my mean meaning and it's well known in the
United States to be a joke, George Bush is being funny at his own
expense, perhaps not that funny, but that's the whole point of it.

That's how Michael Moore can get hold of it so easily because
anyone can see it.

As for the film of Rumsfeld meeting Saddam Hussein, it's been
shown a huge number of times in the US.

It's very well known that in the days of the Reagan administration
there was a strong preference for Saddam Hussein over the
Ayatollah Khomeini in the Gulf War.

Many of us thought that was a deplorable policy at the time.

Those of us who thought that that policy was wrong, for this
reason applaud the policy that changes it, that says no we
shouldn't be fawning on Saddam Hussein, we should be removing
him from office and should have done it earlier than we did.

TONY JONES: You can't have been particularly comfortable
yourself watching the President sitting there glassy-eyed for seven
or eight minutes while he had been communicated the information
that the second plane had gone into the World Trade Centre.

He's sitting there with a children's book on his lap in front of a
group of children.

He doesn't do what one would expect a President in those
circumstances to do which is get up, interrupt the book reading
with the children and try and make some decisions about what
should happen in this incredible crisis.

Those are scenes which haven't been shown on the other media?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS; Even on that very gripping piece of
film, we'd seen Bush looking that way and sitting on the stool for
several seconds.

Since his expression and posture doesn't change - for the networks
to not show the whole seven minutes of it hardly counts as
suppression.

We got the point that he was stunned looking.

I'll make three points.

One, Mr Moore says that Mr Bush was reading.

President Bush was reading a story called My Pet Goat.

No, he wasn't.

He was listening to children reading a chapter from a reading
primer which includes that story.

We have the word of the principal of that school that she was very
grateful that the President decided to complete his assigned
moment of minutes with the class, because she didn't want panic
and she was delighted that he retained his composure.

The third thing is this.

If he'd got up and run out of the room, it would have meant one of
two things to those watching.

Either that he was panicking, which upset the children as well as
everybody else or two - and Michael Moore would not have been
averse to saying this - that he couldn't wait to go to war or as some
of his Michael Moore's supporters believe that the President knew
it was all coming and was acting upon his cue to go to war.

So there was no way that you'd come out of a cinematic moment
like that looking anything other than what he does, which is like a
man who's just received some appallingly bad news and doing the
best he can.

This again requires of Moore no courage and it involves no
disclosure of any kind.

We are no wiser for seeing it.

No better off.

TONY JONES: George Monbiot, no courage, no disclosure,
Christopher Hitchens says.

How do you read that and indeed what is the most powerful aspect
of the film from your point of view?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, if we take a look at that footage over
George Bush having received the news, I would have liked to have
seen that footage in film.

I'm very glad that we were able to see at least part of the footage.

It was a very important moment.

Yet it's a moment of which we've only seen clips of a few seconds
and the first few seconds of Bush having heard this.

I want to know what the full response of the President was or in
this case non-response and it certainly looked odd to me, it
certainly looked disturbing to me that here was a man who we're
constantly being told is decisive, he's dynamic, he does what he
needs to do when he needs to do it and he was saying there at the
important moment of recent history looking absolutely stunned
and bewildered and really apparently unable to take decisive
action.

I think that did come across from that clip.

I was talking about the other clips, Christopher says he's seen
them many times on American TV.

I haven't seen at all on British TV and I have been looking for
them.

In fact, I did a search for the Rumsfeld clip and it just hasn't come
up from the search that I did.

So, I think that there is a gap being filled here and I think the key
point that I'm trying to make is this - that Michael Moore's film,
with all its crude journalism, it's incoherence and the rest of it,
would have been entirely unnecessary if we weren't bombarded
with propaganda from the other side all the time.

Propaganda from the right leaning television networks, which
seem to be very happy to do the business of the US and the British
governments, to do the business of their intelligence agencies, to
do the business of big corporations on both sides of the Atlantic.

They have unfortunately debased journalism.

They have created a journalism which is scarcely better than
propaganda.

That being so, it seems unfortunate that we do need some
propaganda on the other side.

TONY JONES: I do want you if you can to address some of the
other internal contradictions in the film that Christopher Hitchens
refers to in his criticism of the film.

There are many.

Let's take one for example.

The argument that the President allowed plane loads of bin
Ladens and other Saudis to escape the country after 9/11 because
of the close business relationship between bin Laden and the Bush
family.

Here's the thing that Christopher Hitchens points out.

Richard Clarke who himself is a tremendous critic of George W
Bush, as we know, has now taken complete responsibility for that
decision.

Now that is unchanged in Michael Moore's film in spite of that.

What do you think about that contradiction to start with?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, if it's true that Michael Moore knew
that Clarke was responsible for that decision, then plainly he
should have said that Clarke was responsible for that decision.

It has to be said that whoever in the Bush administration was
responsible for it, it seems to be a very odd one.

TONY JONES: Christopher Hitchens?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, Mr Moore knows very well,
as Mr Monbiot should know, that Richard Clarke had made that
statement before the release of the film.

But actually I think that's barely the point.

We're not at war with the bin Laden family.

We're at war with the bin Laden we know - Mr Osama bin Laden.

There have been many bin Ladens in the United States, members
of the family with the same name, for a long time.

Why shouldn't they be?

Bin Laden himself, though, and his Al Qaeda multinational
corporation cum crime family cum terrorist group have been an
official enemy of the United States since at least 1998 when
President Clinton bombed its camps in Afghanistan.

If there were any bin Ladens hanging around the United States
who were wanted, after that point, it would have been a case of
extreme delinquency on the part of at least two administrations.

Michael Moore doesn't have the courage or information to make
any such an assertion and the whole thing is nonsense on its face
whether Mr George Monbiot knows it or not.

TONY JONES: George Monbiot, does it worry you that this bin
Laden red herring is thrown into the film as a critical part of the
opening of the film?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, perhaps I could throw a question
back at Christopher.

Does he not think this is a story?

If it turns out to be true that the bin Ladens were allowed out of
the United States while the other flights were grounded, that they
were given special passage at a time when it would have been
made some sense to at least be questioning them, even if they
were not believed to have any direct connection with Osama bin
Laden at the time, but to be asking them questions about what
they might have known about his movements.

Does he not think it's a story that that was taking place?

It seems extremely odd to me.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Not only do I think it is a story, I
thought at the time it was a story and as a matter of fact I believe
the two or three columns I wrote at the time in the Nation
magazine are part of the reason why Michael Moore asked the
question.

But he asked the question to somebody - Mr Clarke - who could
have told him the answer, as the 9/11 collision has since
confirmed, and all this was known before the film came out.

That doesn't prevent Michael Moore from making the suggestion
that Mr Bush is somehow in cahoots with the bin Laden family
which is a lie and even if it was true would be very bizarre,
because why has Mr Bush, in that case, gone to war with the
Taliban - Saudi Arabia's client, with the Baath party regime in
Iraq, Saudi Arabia's buffer stage in the regime, Saudi Arabia are
very opposed to the regime change.

As you may or may not have noticed, recently there's been a lot of
scepticism about the idea of any Iraqi/Al Qaeda connection, some
of the scepticism is my opinion is justified though I think there
was a connection.

Michael Moore is getting what Mr Monbiot calls 'applause' for
proposing a Saudi-Bush connection that is completely made up, to
which there is no truth at all, in which one can place no
confidence whatever.

Now, of what value is this kind of applause, if we're being
honestly sceptical about serious connections, on what is a major
matter?

And I repeat and I'll ask Mr Monbiot again - what does he think
about Michael Moore's endorsement of Islamic Jihad fighters and
his comparison of them to American revolutionary resistance
fighters in Iraq?

What of that?

TONY JONES: Since Christopher Hitchens is taking over the role
of interviewer here and you did so yourself a moment ago, I'll ask
you if you can confine yourself to statements from now on.

But George Monbiot, can you give a quick response to that one?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, I think that as far as resistance to the
US troops in Iraq is concerned, then I can understand why people
want to resist.

I think if my country was under occupation I would want to resist.

Now, I've got no sympathy for the fundamentalist Islamists who
would like to create a Sharia State in Iraq, and there are many
there.

I've no sympathy for the Al Qaeda elements and the other foreign
terrorists who are moving into Iraq, but Iraq has been invaded.

Iraq is under occupation by the troops of another nation and I
think if my own country was in a similar situation I would feel
such resentment that I'm likely to take up arms myself against that
situation.

I think that most red-blooded men probably would.

TONY JONES: Christopher Hitchens, I know that you're probably
tempted to take up that argument and run with it.

I'm going to interrupt that argument so that I can make a point to
you about one of the criticisms you made.

You've taken Michael Moore apart for his segments in Flint,
Michigan, with young black kids and the marine recruiters and so
on.

Aren't there however universal truths in what he is doing here -
showing that America's wars, in particular, are often fought by the
poorest and the most deprived people in the community for the
wealthiest people in the community?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: You mean, I'm not allowed to
respond to the charge that I have no red blood in my veins?

Very well.

The United States armed forces are made up of volunteers ever
since a decision by Richard Nixon to abolish the draft on the basis
of the claim that the draft constituted involuntary servitude under
the constitution.

The number of people who want to volunteer for that army is
limited, but quite large.

It's not drawn from the plutocracy, if that's what you mean, no.

I don't think I needed Michael Moore to tell me this though, as a
matter of fact.

TONY JONES: George Monbiot?

GEORGE MONBIOT: The scenes I did enjoy were the recruiting
scenes where you had these recruiting sergeants in their very well-
pressed uniforms, wandering about, really appearing to single out
black teenagers who looked as if they weren't going any place in
particular and being pretty pushy in trying to persuade them to
join the armed forces, to take the king's shilling.

And there was something rather disturbing about those images and
I feel, unlike Christopher, that the point that most of those who
joined the army are from the lower social strata in the United
States is a point which does need to be made continuously.

It might have been made before, but that doesn't avert the need to
continue making that point.

Because, of course, the very obvious point, the point we all know,
but we all tend to forget is that it's the powerful people who make
the wars and it's the weak people who fight them.

TONY JONES: Christopher Hitchens, we're on the verge of
winding up...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Oh, please - at a time when we
really need to be thinking seriously, Michael Moore is throwing in
distractions, fabrications, snipped quotes, badly chucked and
chunked pieces of celluloid and appeals to bogus emotion.

Even Mr Monbiot, I'm proud to see, has the kindness, if I might
put it like that, to admit that all that's true but still it might get
some anti-Bush applause in some cinema which he attends.

I don't think that makes up for the right to lie.

Michael Moore in this context, if he had the grace, should be
totally ashamed.

TONY JONES: All right, we are out of time.

We're going to have to leave it there.

But thank you both for joining us.

Christopher Hitchens in California and George Monbiot in
Oxford, thank you.

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