Is Michael Moore telling the truth?; June 26, 2004; New York Times

…So how will Moore's movie stand up under close examination? Is the film's depiction of Bush as a lazy and duplicitous leader, blinded by his family's financial ties to Arab moneymen and the Saudi Arabian royal family, true to fact? After a year spent covering the federal commission investigating the September 11 attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood screening before the film opened nationally in the US yesterday.

Based on that single viewing and after separating out what is clearly presented as Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in Fahrenheit 9/11 are supported by the public record (indeed, many of them will be familiar to those who have closely followed Bush's political career). Moore is on firm ground in arguing that the Bushes, like many prominent Texas families with oil interests, have profited handsomely from their relationships with prominent Saudis, including members of the royal family and of the large and fabulously wealthy bin Laden clan, which has insisted it long ago disowned Osama. Moore spends several minutes in the film documenting ties between the President and James Bath, a financial adviser to a prominent member of the bin Laden family who was an original investor in Bush's Arbusto energy company and who served with the future president in the Air National Guard in the early 1970s.

The Bath friendship, which indirectly links Bush to the family of the world's most notorious terrorist, has received less attention from national news organisations than it has from reporters in Texas, but it has been well documented. Moore charges that Bush and his aides paid too little attention to warnings in the summer of 2001 that al-Qaeda was about to attack, including a detailed August 6, 2001, CIA briefing that warned of terrorism within the country's borders. In its final report next month, the September 11 commission can be expected to offer support to this assertion. Moore says that instead of focusing on al-Qaeda, the President spent 42 per cent of his first eight months in office on vacation; the figure came not from a conspiracy-hungry website but from a calculation by The Washington Post.

…But with Fahrenheit 9/11 he has taken on his biggest and best-defended target yet and his production staff say that on his orders they have taken no chances in checking and double-checking the film, knowing Bush supporters would pounce on factual mistakes. Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack, saying he has created a political-style "war room" to offer an instant response to any assault on the film's credibility. ….And Moore is threatening to go one step further, saying he has consulted lawyers who can bring defamation suits against anyone who maligns the film or damages his reputation. "We want the word out," says Moore, who says he should have responded more quickly to allegations of inaccuracy in his Oscar-winning 2002 anti-gun documentary, Bowling for Columbine.

….For the White House, the most devastating segment of Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the video of a befuddled-looking Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of September 11, continuing to read a copy of My Pet Goat to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him a second plane has struck the twin towers. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.
www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/25/1088144982454.html