The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Co deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President George W. Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.
But this film, Fahrenheit 9/11, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on US television. And the muckraking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on Bush's tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer.
A reporter for The New York Times was invited to a screening of the film last week. Fahrenheit 9/11 focuses on long-standing ties among the Bush family, its associates and prominent Saudis and on whether those ties clouded the president's judgment in recognizing warning signs before the Sept. 11 attacks and hampered his response afterward.
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Moore extends his critique of the president to his conduct of the war in Iraq, arguing that the war is victimizing not only Iraqis but also the lower-income enlisted Americans who are fighting in it. In addition he attempts to make a case that the government's terrorism alerts at home are being used to repeal some civil liberties.
Hot potatos
These are the subjects that have made Fahrenheit 9/11 such a political hot potato. Icon Productions, Mel Gibson's company and the original primary investor in the film, backed out last spring, and Miramax Films, a Disney division run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, stepped in.
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Although Disney executives said they made clear last May that Disney would not allow Miramax to distribute the film, it was only recently that the Weinsteins became convinced they would not be able to budge their corporate masters. Two weeks ago Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary Bowling for Columbine, went public to protest Disney's actions. "Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show," he said at the time. (Last week Disney sold the movie to the Weinsteins, who can arrange for its distribution in North America, though not under the Miramax name.)
Republicans predict that many viewers will discount the film as an anti-Bush screed, and that it will ultimately have no effect on the election. Democrats say they hope it will feed what they describe as growing discontent in the US with Bush's Iraq policy and help the campaign of Senator John Kerry, his presumptive Democratic challenger.
Moore is confident it will sway votes against Bush, though he notes that the film, into which he also has tried to inject a good dose of humor, is likewise critical of Democrats for not posing any significant opposition to Bush after Sept. 11. Moore said he was considering making at least one sequence from the film available to the news media yesterday after he presents it at the Cannes film festival: that of American soldiers laughing and taking pictures as they place hoods over Iraqi detainees, with one of them touching a prisoner's genitals through a blanket.
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Moore and his production team said they also believed the film would get attention for showing that a name excised from one of Bush's National Guard records was that of an investment counselor for one of bin Laden's brothers, Salem.
In a copy of the record, released by the National Guard in 2000, the man in question, James Bath, was listed as being suspended from flying for the National Guard in 1972 for failing to take a medical exam next to a similar listing for Bush. It has been widely reported that the two were friends and that Bath invested in Bush's first major business venture, Arbusto Energy, in the late 1970s after Bath began working for Salem bin Laden.
Bath and the White House have said that the money he invested in Bush's company was his, not that of bin Laden. The White House said Friday that Bath's name was expunged from the record it released in February only to protect his privacy and should have been in 2000, as well.
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In the film Moore highlights several connections among Bush, his family and associates and Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis, as is Osama bin Laden. As White House officials noted last week, however, many of these connections have been made elsewhere, most recently in House of Bush, House of Saud, by Craig Unger.
Like father, like son
But writ large on the big screen with Moore's narration and set to music, the connections could still prove revelatory to those who have not paid close attention to reports about Saudi Arabia's connections to Bush and his associates. At the screening last week audience members -- including people featured in the film like the mother of a serviceman killed in Iraq and a soldier unwilling to return -- exclaimed loudly when Moore's narration spelled them out.
In one connection the film notes that Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, worked as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a private investment company with various ties to Saudi Arabia and even, for some years, to bin Laden's family.
"My point is first of all that the Bushes were so close to the Saudis that they essentially had turned a blind eye to what was really going on before 9/11," Moore said in an interview. "And after 9/11 they were in denial."
More specifically the movie implies that the Saudi connections explain why the US facilitated the departure of dozens of Saudi nationals from the country -- including relatives of bin Laden -- shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, and charges they were not properly questioned. But like other points in the film, critics will certainly argue with that assertion, and may not have to go far to seek ammunition. The independent panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks recently reported its conclusion that the evacuation was handled properly. And bin Laden's family disowned him in the 1990s and says it has no relationship with him anymore.
All the same
Adel al-Jubeir, foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, said that any ties between Bush and his associates and prominent Saudi Arabians should not be considered odd. "Look at any Texas family that's involved in the oil or oil services, and you will find they have a lot of connections to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf," he said, referring to assertions that the connections add up to anything more than that as nonsense.
After hearing a description of some of the connections made in the film, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said, "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment."
Bartlett also said he had no comment on the sections of the film that address the war in Iraq, which include gruesome images of violence, like a man angrily holding up an infant's charred corpse after an American attack and the exposed bone of a soldier's shrapnel-infused leg.
Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he believed there was no need to prepare a public challenge to the film. "People are smart enough to know that this is someone who is very angry, who has for some time had a clearly partisan agenda," he said.
Just the same, Democratic operatives said they believed viewers' opinions of Moore would not matter if his film raised new or even old questions about Bush.
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