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A First Look at "Fahrenheit 9/11"
Mon May 17, 2004 22:45
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A First Look at "Fahrenheit 9/11"
Controversy aside, the new Michael Moore film is a fine documentary
By MARY CORLISS/CANNES
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,638819,00.html

Monday, May. 17, 2004
A few years ago, Michael Moore spoke with then-Governor George W. Bush, who told the muckraker: “Behave yourself, will ya? Go find real work.” Moore has made trouble for so many powerful people he has become a media power of his own. He can even make celebrities of mere movie reviewers: When his latest cinematic incendiary device, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” had its first press screening Monday morning, American critics emerging from the theater were besieged by a convoy of TV and radio crews from networks around the world who wanted to know what they thought of Moore’s blast at the Bush Administration.

Disney, for one, was not impressed. Earlier this month, the company ordered its subsidiary, Miramax Films, not to release the film. Moore says that his lawyer was told by Disney CEO Michael Eisner that distributing it would harm the company’s negotiations for favorable treatment for its Florida theme parks from that state’s governor, one Jeb Bush. Harvey Weinstein, co-chair of Miramax, is now trying to buy the film back from Disney and to fashion his own coalition of the willing — other distributors happy to profit from Disney’s timidity. The result of this internal agita will be to raise the profile and, most likely, the profitability of Moore’s film, which he still hopes will open on the July 4th weekend.

So much for the controversy. How is it as a movie? “Fahrenheit 9/11” — the title is a play on the Ray Bradbury novel (and Francois Truffaut film) “Fahrenheit 451,” about a future totalitarian state where reading, and thus independent thinking, has been outlawed — has news value beyond its financing and distribution tangles. The movie, a brisk and entertaining indictment of the Bush Administration’s middle East policies before and after September 11, 2001, features new footage of abuse by U.S. soldiers: a Christmas Eve 2003 sortie in which Iraqi captives are publicly humiliated.

Though made over the past two years, the film has scenes that seem ripped from recent headlines. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Iraq and, to the cheers of his military audience, defiantly called himself “a survivor” (a word traditionally reserved for those who have lived through the Holocaust or cancer, not for someone enduring political difficulties). In the film, a soldier tells Moore’s field team: “If Donald Rumsfeld was here, I’d ask for his resignation.”

Moore’s perennial grudge is against what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex: the collusion of big corporations and bad government to exploit the working class, here and abroad, for their own gain and in the process deprive citizens of their liberties. The Bush Administration’s Iraq policy is handmade for Moore’s grievances. Bush and his father have enjoyed a long and profitable relationship with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens. The best-seller “House of Bush, House of Saud” by Craig Unger, whom Moore interviews, estimates that the Saudis have enriched the Bushes and their closest cronies by $1.4 billion.

Politicians reward their biggest contributors, and the Bushes are no exceptions. Fifteen of the 19 September 11th hijackers were Saudis; but when Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador who is close to the First Family, dined with the President in the White House two days after the attacks, the mood was collegial, not angry. In the Iraqi ramp-up and occupation, the Administration has rewarded its Saudi and Texas supporters with billions in rebuilding contracts. As Blaine Ober, president of an armored vehicle company, tells Moore: the Iraqi adventure is “good for business, bad for the people.”

Bad for the people of Iraq, Ober means. But, Moore argues, bad for Americans as well. As he sees it, 9/11 was a tragedy for America, a career move for Bush. The attacks allowed the President to push through Congress restrictive laws that would have been defeated in any climate but the “war on terror” chill. “Fahrenheit 9/11” shows some tragicomic effects of the Patriot Act: a man quizzed by the FBI for casually mentioning at his health club that he thought Bush was an “asshole”; a benign peace group in Fresno, Cal., infiltrated by an undercover police agent.

Two Bush quotes in the film indicate the Administration’s quandary in selling repression to the American people. One: “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, no doubt about it.” The other: “They’re not happy they’re occupied. I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.” Moore’s argument is that the U.S. is currently being occupied by a hostile, un-American force: the quintet of Bush, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz.

Moore is usually the front-and-center star of his own films. Here, his presence is mostly that of narrator and guiding force, though he does make a few piquant appearances. While chatting with Unger across the street from the Saudi embassy in Washington, he is approached and quizzed by Secret Service agents. Hearing from Rep. John Conyers that no member of Congress had read the complete Patriot Act before voting for it, he hires a Mister Softee truck and patrols downtown D.C. reading the act to members of Congress over a loudspeaker. Toward the end, he tries to get Congressmen to enlist their sons in the military. Surprise: no volunteers.

The film has its longueurs. The interviews with young blacks and a grieving mother in Moore’s home town of Flint, Michigan, are relevant and poignant, but they lack the propulsive force and homespun indignance of the rest of the film. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is at its best when it provides talking points for the emerging majority of those opposed to the Iraq incursion. In sum, it’s an appalling, enthralling primer of what Moore sees as the Bush Administration’s crimes and misdemeanors.

“Fahrenheit 9/11” may be seen as another example of the liberal media preaching to its own choir. But Moore is such a clever assembler of huge accusations and minor peccadillos (as with a shot of Wolfowitz sticking his pocket comb in his mouth and sucking on it to slick down his hair before a TV interview) that the film should engage audiences of all political persuasions.

In one sense, Michael Moore took George W. Bush’s advice. He found “real work” deconstructing the President’s Iraq mistakes. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is Moore’s own War on Error.

Mary Corliss has covered the Cannes Film Festival for Film Comment and other publications since 1974. This year she is reporting for TIME.com.
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C o v e r S t o r y / I r a q
The Sad Tale Of Nick Berg
He went to Baghdad looking for business. How did he end up in the hands of Iraq's top terrorist?
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040524/wberg.html

Posted Sunday, May 16, 2004
In a country where foreign businessmen are reluctant to travel even in armor-clad SUVs with security guards, Nick Berg crisscrossed Iraq by hailing cabs and hopping onto buses. Usually clad in a baseball cap and jeans, he made no effort to blend in with the locals as he lugged around sophisticated electronic equipment in search of work. His Arabic was awful, and he had a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In January, during his first prospecting trip to Iraq, Berg was picked up during a police sweep in the southern town of Diwaniya, where "there are supposedly a good deal of Iranian spies who wander over and sneak about," he told friends in an e-mail, adding, "Isn't this starting to read like a mystery novel ...?"

There are many haunting questions about Berg and his odyssey in Iraq, which came to a tragic close last week when his body was found and a video of his horrific execution was circulated on the Internet. Why was this communications-tower repairman imprisoned for 13 days this spring in the city of Mosul—and who had custody of him there? After his release, why did he refuse offers of help to get home? And perhaps the biggest mystery of all: How did a former Boy Scout, who had spent time doing humanitarian work in Africa, stumble into the path of one alleged al-Qaeda terrorist in Oklahoma only to end up kidnapped and beheaded by another in Iraq?

Berg, who was 26 when he died, was one of a small number of free-lancers in Baghdad hoping to make a buck and, his family recalled, do some good. A "tower guy," he figured he could earn as much as $20,000 a month repairing antennas in Iraq, a job that sometimes involved climbing hundreds of feet of latticework in 120° heat, according to business consultant and fellow free-lancer Andy Duke, who says he drank some beers with Berg the night before he disappeared.

Berg embarked on his first trip to Baghdad in December. Friends say he assumed he could find work the same way he had launched his tower-repair shop in a Philadelphia suburb: by cold-calling potential clients and sweet-talking his way into assignments. He came home in February to West Chester, Pa., with some promising leads as well as rich tales of his adventures in the war-scarred land. "He had a comfort level in Iraq that is beyond our comprehension," says colleague Dave Skalish, a technical supervisor at a Philadelphia radio station.

Berg's innocence got him into trouble. He apparently didn't know to avoid getting an Israeli stamp in his passport when he traveled to Israel en route to Baghdad. By the time he was picked up by Iraqi police at a Mosul checkpoint in March, rumors circulated among his associates that Berg, who was Jewish, was working for a telecom firm with ties to Israel, according to a security contractor in Iraq.

During his detention in an Iraqi prison, Berg was interviewed three times by the FBI, which sent agents to question his family in Pennsylvania. It wasn't his first encounter with the bureau, which had investigated a possible link between him and Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaeda follower awaiting trial for suspected ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers. In 1999, during the semester Berg spent at the University of Oklahoma, he let an acquaintance access his e-mail account. Berg's user name and password subsequently got passed around and was used by an associate of Moussaoui's, who in 2001 enrolled in the nearby Norman flight school. But when the FBI interviewed Berg in 2002, agents determined that he had no connection to Moussaoui's associate. "It turned out to be a total coincidence," says a Justice Department official. When notified that Berg had been picked up in Mosul, the FBI might have wondered if its original assessment was wrong. After conducting a "thorough review of records," the agents decided once again that he was harmless—and possibly in danger.

Berg wasn't released until April 6, a day after his parents filed a federal lawsuit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claiming that their son had been transferred to U.S. military custody and was being detained without probable cause. Berg's father Michael, a staunch antiwar activist, now blames the Administration for his son's death while the U.S. military continues to deny it ever had custody of Berg. After he was released, the U.S. consulate offered to arrange for him to fly out of Baghdad, but he refused. Instead, he told friends and family that he planned to drive to Kuwait or Turkey. On April 10, he checked out of Baghdad's Al-Fanar Tower Hotel, suitcase in hand, and disappeared. U.S. soldiers found his decapitated body a month later.

Last week a video was posted on an Islamic militant website, and the world learned what had happened to him. After reading a statement about avenging the suffering of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Berg's masked captors took a long knife from his shirt, grabbed a screaming Berg by the hair and cut off his head. CIA officials say there is a "high probability" that the knife was wielded by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden's believed to be the kingpin behind the recent attacks in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was nearly captured there last year, says a U.S. official. But the terrorist may have picked a particularly inappropriate victim, a young man who, according to his father, was a do-gooder trying to help the Iraqi people. Says the elder Berg: "They killed their best friend."

—With reporting by Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/Washington, Adam Pitluk/ West Chester and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad

 

911 Plot Uncovered

— RESEARCHER, Sun May 16 17:45

• 9-11 - easy to understand slideshow — goldi, Mon May 17 04:16
• "Fahrenheit 9/11" still does not have a distrib — Michael Moore, Sun May 16 21:26
  • Nick Berg's Father Michael — Kunundrum, Tue May 18 14:57