Michael Moore's version of the truth continues to get trashed with facts & reality......
<font size=4>Reliable Sources<font size=3>
Sunday
....KURTZ: But joining us now here in Washington, "Newsweek" investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff. Christopher Hitchens, columnist for "Vanity Fair" and a contributor to "Slate" and "The Atlantic." And Bill Press, political analyst for MSNBC and author of the new book, "Bush Must Go: The Top 10 Reasons Why George Bush Doesn't Deserve a Second Term." Welcome.
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Michael Isikoff, you say the film is just flat-out wrong on, for example, the question involving the bin Laden family after 9/11. Explain. <font size=3>
MICHAEL ISIKOFF, NEWSWEEK: The movie clearly gives the impression that a lot of Saudis were allowed to flee the country, to fly out of the country at a time when nobody else could, because of the political influence that the Saudis have with the White House and that they weren't adequately vetted by the FBI.
This is in some cases flat-out wrong. In some cases, he is raising a legitimate issue, but he's leaving out a whole lot. Mainly, that there has been an independence investigation of the Saudi flights after -- that took place after September 11. <font size=4>The 9/11 Commission looked at it. They determined that many of them were interviewed in detail, that they were screened by the FBI, and that none of them were wanted for or needed to be interviewed who had any information relevant to 9/11.
But most importantly, it says the White House approved these flights and gives the impression this was because of the Bush family nexus with the Saudis. Well, we know who at the White House approved the flights, and it was Richard Clarke, a holdover from the Clinton White House.
KURTZ: Christopher Hitchens, you write that the movie is "a piece of crap," "a sinister exercise" and "a big lie." I get the impression that you didn't like it.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, VANITY FAIR: Actually, I didn't say the first thing. It's not my style. But if pressed, I probably would have wanted to say that.
KURTZ: Why do you dislike the movie so much?
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HITCHENS: I made also some of the points that Michael has just made about the -- Moore must have known that Richard Clarke could say this. Maybe he did say it, and <font size=4>Moore didn't think it was useful, because it wouldn't work to say that Richard Clarke had authorized the flights.
So that's one small lie, but there's a bigger lie that it's helping to propagate. He says that the whole of American foreign policy is determined by the Saudi Arabian royal family. Now, the Bush administration has been to war with two of Saudi Arabia's friends. The Taliban, who they helped to impose in Afghanistan, and the government of Saddam Hussein, which they regarded as their buffer state against the Shia.
The actual history is exactly the opposite of what Moore's paranoid suggestions are. He openly says that he believes that the other side of this war, the Islamic jihad, torturers, saboteurs, beheaders and fanatics and murderers are the equivalent to the American Minutemen. So welcome to his contribution to the 4th of July celebration. The man is openly on the other side in this war, and the film shows it in every frame.
KURTZ: Speaking of the other side...
HITCHENS: What the Democrats are doing with such a person is beyond me. Beyond me.<font size=3>
KURTZ: Let me go to Bill Press. Let me go to Bill Press. You've practically written a blurb for this film. You called it a "must-see movie." Do you admire Michael Moore?
BILL PRESS, MSNBC: I'm here to defend the premise that the left can be as hard-hitting and sometimes as careless with the truth as the right.
KURTZ: But you don't approve of the careless with the truth part, do you?
PRESS: Michael Moore is a polemicist. He's making a point there. Look, is he -- does he get sometimes over the top? Absolutely. Does he put himself front and center?. Absolutely. Does he take the cheap shot occasionally? Absolutely. But they've talked about the lies...
HITCHENS: Does he believe the war in Afghanistan is about a pipeline that was never built?
PRESS: There are also -- there are also some basic truths that have come out of this movie -- if I can finish my opening statement -- one of which is that this administration and previous ones have been far too cozy looking the other way on the Saudis. And two, that this president led us into an unnecessary and unwise war. That is true.
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KURTZ: So you're saying it's OK to distort the facts, as long as it's in the service of the side that you believe in? <font size=3>
PRESS: All I'm saying is, let's not have a double standard. OK? If we are going to pick, pick, pick, at everything Michael Moore says, let's pick, pick, pick at everything Bill O'Reilly says, Rush Limbaugh says, Sean Hannity says, and everybody else on the right.
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HITCHENS: Excuse me. Can I just say? I have made a number of documentaries myself, including one that was in theaters, calling for Henry Kissinger to be tried for war crimes. And I'm not a friend of Limbaugh or Hannity, thanks all the same.
No one has ever made a factual objection to anything that appears in my movie or my book, as a matter of fact. They don't. Because they couldn't. Because I don't play fast and loose. Michael Moore says that Americans are being killed by people who he supports, incidentally, by jihadist guerrillas in Afghanistan because the Bush family wanted to build a pipeline. That pipeline project was abandoned in 1998. And Moore knows this perfectly well. What he says is flat-out false and sinister.
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PRESS: I don't believe that.
HITCHENS: And his propaganda...
(CROSSTALK)
HITCHENS: ... deliberate, deliberate propaganda for the other side is...
KURTZ: Well, let's let viewers see for themselves, because I want to play a brief clip from the movie in which Michael Moore runs up to and accosts -- verbally at least -- Congressman Mark Kennedy. Let's take a look.
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MOORE: Congressman? Michael Moore.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you doing?
MOORE: Good. Good. Trying to get members of Congress to get their kids to enlist in the Army and go over to Iraq.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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KURTZ: Now, what was left out of the trailer to the movie was Congressman Kennedy's response when he was asked about we're trying to find out whether members of Congress have kids in the war, which is "I have two nephews in the military." That wasn't used.
Do you find a lot of omissions in this movie as well? In other words, things that are kind of true are put in and things that might change the view are left out?
ISIKOFF: Well, yeah. I mean, there are glaring omissions. Such as on the pipeline issue, the fact that it was abandoned in 1998.
KURTZ: And this is a pipeline that Moore says that the reason we went to war in Afghanistan was so that Bush's pals could build an oil pipeline in Afghanistan.
ISIKOFF: The actual truth of it is quite fascinating, which is that this was a project that was being pushed in the late 1990s by Unocal, the oil company, and according to Steve Call's (ph) book on -- in which he deals with this, you're a managing editor, Howie -- he talks about how Unocal was having repeated meetings with the Clinton White House trying to promote the project, and getting a quite receptive audience. The problem is that the Taliban, clearly as they hardened their positions and became more and more a protector of Osama bin Laden, the project became untenable. Unocal turned -- and Unocal pulled out of it.
And then what Moore does in this movie...
(CROSSTALK)
ISIKOFF: What Moore does in the movie is then cut to...
HITCHENS: He's a liar.
ISIKOFF: ... a Taliban envoy coming to Washington in March of 2001 and suggesting that the Bush White House was embracing this project. Well, it was a dead issue at the time. It wasn't on the table.
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PRESS: I don't buy the pipeline argument at all for the war in Afghanistan. I think the war in Afghanistan was justified. What I want to make is, why suddenly everybody piling on Michael Moore?
(CROSSTALK)
HITCHENS: ... Taliban side of the war is why.
PRESS: I want to say...
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KURTZ: You think he's been treated unfairly?
PRESS: We had an administration that put out lie after lie after lie about why we had to rush into war in Iraq, and the mainstream media just swallowed it hook, line and sinker and repeated it. And put it out on the network news, on the front pages of papers every day. Why...
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KURTZ: Let me jump in. Let me jump in.
PRESS: OK.
KURTZ: Are there any parallels between "Fahrenheit 911" and your book, "Bush Must Go," where you say -- it's all in black in white. He lied us into war, he never tells the truth, worst president ever. Black and white.
PRESS: I will say this, OK, in my defense. I don't think you will find any untruth in that book. (UNINTELLIGIBLE). Sure. I talk about the war in Iraq, I talk about the war on terror, I talk about the economy. But I'm very, very careful with my facts. But you know, I'm a journalist. I'm a journalist. Michael Moore is not. He's a filmmaker. He is a polemicist. He is the Rush Limbaugh of the left.
ISIKOFF: Can I...
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HITCHENS: Documentary means documentary, I'm sorry. It is not kosher to tell conscious lies, it is not kosher to tell them in order to boost the cause of the (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
KURTZ: I got to jump in here. First of all, I want to mention my pet peeve, which is the film opens with a suggestion that Bush stole the election, and Moore says that few people know that Bush's cousin at Fox News helped call the election for the president. "Washington Post," November 14, 2000, by Howard Kurtz, "Bush Cousin Made Florida Vote Call" for Fox News. So much for that. Now I also want to turn -- all right, I guess not that many people read it.
HITCHENS: No, I remember it very well. It was a very good piece. <font size=3>
KURTZ: I want to turn to what Moore has had to say about your profession, our profession, the media. Let's take a look at an interview he gave to George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week."
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MOORE: I mean, listen, George, if the media had done their job, if they'd asked the hard questions of the Bush administration, about these weapons of mass destruction, demanded proof -- the media and everybody watching this knows this, got on board. They took the soup. They took the Kool-Aid. They just became cheerleaders for this war. And it was -- and that was a disservice to the American people.
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KURTZ: Michael Isikoff, doesn't Moore have a point that the press was less than aggressive in challenging the shaky evidence presented by Bush and Cheney in the run-up to the war in Iraq?
ISIKOFF: Yes, he does. I mean, I think that's a legitimate point. It's been made in a lot of media, you know, inquests since then.
KURTZ: "New York Times" editors know it, for example.
ISIKOFF: "New York Times," and I think we all could have been more aggressive. And there's been a lot written about this and a lot exposed about how intelligence was manipulated and overstated, and I think the media's been quite aggressive. My...
KURTZ: Christopher is shaking his head.
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HITCHENS: Well, look, as someone who was in favor of the intervention, I remember thinking in the run-up before -- to it, that you couldn't -- you could hardly open "The New York Times" without being told the administration's claims were not up to much. And now I would say the media gives everyone the impression that Saddam Hussein was no problem with regards to either weaponry or contacts with terrorism. I think, by the way, that's a very dangerous misapprehension.
But Michael Moore's film shows pre-war Iraq and says, no problem. This was a happy place, a sovereign country. Which it wasn't. It was under international sanctions, for very excellent reasons, by the way, where children are flying kites. And everything is cool in Iraq. And so suddenly the nightmare weapons of American...
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(CROSSTALK)
KURTZ: Moore uses the word cheerleaders. Journalists were cheerleaders for the war. Do you agree with that?
PRESS: I don't think they were cheerleaders for war, but I do think, as I said earlier, they swallowed the administration's line and reprinted it without doing the homework that they should have done. But the related issue on this, I think one of the strengths of the movie is that Moore shows some video that I have never seen before. I think most Americans haven't. That seven minutes of President Bush sitting there while the teacher continues to read "My Pet Goat." I mean, did he want to -- what was he waiting for? Did he want to see how it ended?
I mean, America was under attack. And if I may just finish, quickly, that this footage of Lila Lipscomb, the woman who lost her son, which is certainly the most powerful part of the movie.
HITCHENS: Nauseating.
PRESS: I have seen tons of interviews of families of troops in Iraq on network television. I've never seen one stand up and say, this war is wrong.
ISIKOFF: I actually agree with you on both. I thought those were the two most powerful parts of the movie, and I think the movie does raise a lot of legitimate questions and is provoking a lot of real debate.
My problem is that for many people, millions of people who are going to see this movie who don't perhaps read the media or watch CNN regularly, this is going to be all they know about what has taken place in the last few years, and it is...
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KURTZ: The Oliver Stone argument.
ISIKOFF: Right. And it is a selective, highly selective use of the facts, and I think the media does play a role here in perhaps fleshing things out and sort of pointing out that which has been...
HITCHENS: And it comes from someone who is arguing for the other side. He is an advocate for the other side in the war.
KURTZ: We have got about 30 seconds. Does Moore try to have it both ways? He wants to be taken seriously as a documentarian, but when you press him on some of these points, he says, you know, I'm a satirist, this is just entertainment.
HITCHENS: Well, then he shouldn't say to people like Stephanopoulos, no, this is the truth at last. I mean, he can't have it both ways. But there is a truth about it, he should be taken seriously. It is a sinister thing that we make a culture hero out of someone who is in favor of the Taliban and al Qaeda and the Iraqi military.
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PRESS: I say don't demand any more of Michael Moore than we've always demand -- ever demanded of Rush Limbaugh. He's got a right to be on the left the way Rush is on the right.
KURTZ: From the left, you're Bill Press. Michael Isikoff, Christopher Hitchens, thanks very much for joining us. |
