I've been thinking about Saudi Arabia and Fahrenheit 911.

[Minstrel Boy]

I enjoy Michael Moore's work, and he's a courageous left populist. But for whatever reason - maybe a conditioned reflex against "conspiracy theories" - he appears to balk at the conclusion of official complicity for 9/11. It's as though he walks up to LIHOP's door, rings the bell and runs away. Moore, rather, seems to regard the White House as an ignorant patsy of the Saudis: Bush and his team were blinded by greed and oil, and unwittingly allowed the Saudis to fund, plan and facilitate the September 11th attacks.

Not only is this a naive and uninformed position, I fear it could be turned into anti-Saudi agitprop, to justify military action against Saudi Arabia, leading to the seizure of its oil fields. (I read that Fox gave the film a glowing review. Why was that?)

I expect, eventually, the following limited hangout: We were snookered by Saudis! We thought they were our friends, but all the time they were plotting against us. It may need to come from a post-Bush White House, but I think it will come.

It would be tragic if the limitations of Moore's work were exploited to support the case for war, but it's a tragedy I can easily see happening.

The movie should open a lot of eyes, but it provides an opportunity to educate, not a complete education in itself.

[frankly_fedup2]

1. I haven't seen the movie yet, just some of the trailers;

however, the Saudis have not been supporters of this Country for a long time, especially since 9/11.

It's still American companies that are drilling all the oil out from every Arab country (24). They have never been able to have the technology to do it themselves. They pay the companies, then we pay them for the oil OUR companies have drilled, then the Government puts their taxes and all those other whatever charges per barrel, PLUS now all the bigger tax cuts (Thank you very much Dubya) then we, the consumers, pay the big price so that the companies and the Government are paid yet again. Sounds like a win-win situation for everyone . . . except the People.

It's all so twisted . . .

[pretzel4gore]

2. doubt the saudis, or anyone

has the power to cause global shifts etc, outside of the old murdering pigs who giggle atop the US/Brit ruling classes.....
michael moore al franken and all our heroes defend bush by blaming the dastardly saudis..... and their evil exploitation of bushinc.
like the man said...fukkit

[Minstrel Boy]

8. precisely

Not to excuse any of the Saudis' crimes, whoever lays 9/11 at their feet is playing the neocons' long game.

[bossfish]

3. I have no love for the Saudis...

I know a British gentleman, former MI6, who for a period was the general manager of the Riyadh airport. He is a very worldly man who has seen a lot more than I'll ever. In spite of making a boatload of money in Riyadh, he regretted the experience.

He later worked for the company I work for now. We were at a trade show and he was retiring. So a few of us gathered in a hotel room to drink a bottle of Scotch and shoot the bull one more time.

I remember near the end of the night, he put his hands on my shoulders, and with tears in his eyes said to me, "..promise me you will NEVER work for the Saudis."

I told him I never planned to.

[seemslikeadream]

9. 20 billion military equipment contract

4 April 2002. Thanks to Anonymous. The original was apparently sent to a party at jpmorgan.com with blind copy to Cryptome (however, a Cryptome e-mail to the jpmorgan.com address bounced). The April 4, 2002, e-mail to jpmorgan.com:

As many, you wondered why John Weston resigned from BAe Systems. There is one simple answer: Al Yamamah. Any BAe employee, like myself, who spent some years in Saudi Arabia knows too well that the £ 20 billion military equipment contract engendered massive bribery. Among colleagues, we spoke of even 40% commission paid to Thatcher, Aitken, the Tories, middlemen as Wafic Saïd and to Saudi princes.
September 11th terrorist attacks revealed that part of these commissions were used to finance Usamah Ben Laden’s terrorist networks. Several BAe Systems employees have decided to bring to light the truth and have gathered evidence. We are pleased that the USA required BAe Systems, 6th contractor of the Pentagon, to clean up and to start getting rid of the managers who indirectly allowed the funding of terrorism.

After John Weston, Sir Richard Evans, Mike Turner and many others will follow on.

These documents are our contribution to the fight against terrorism.

Original document: http://cryptome.org/soil/soiled-dove2.zip (1.4MB)
http://cryptome.org/soil/soiled-dove2.htm

[buycitgo]

4. that review was linked from thismodernworld

which is tom tomorrow, right?.....how much farther to go than he does......time to see the movie before judgment is made?......I was going to ask you about the Clarke/Watson/FBI bin Laden family exeunt deal. what do you know about that? have you seen where Sibel Edmonds names Watson and Meuller as the two FBI creeps who intimidated her during the gagging process? Clarke is close with Watson--praises him in his book as one of the few (two?) FBI figures he most trusted in going after terrorists......here's the thread..... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=1803168&mesg_id=1803168

[mountainvue]

5. So

You've seen it already?

[Minstrel Boy]

10. I've read and heard enough from Moore to know this is

his working premise.

He makes it pretty clear in this excerpt from Dude, Where's My Country?, where he questions Bush:

"Who attacked the US on September 11 - a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friend, Saudi Arabia?"

...

"I would like to throw out a possibility here: what if September 11 was not a 'terrorist' attack but, rather, a military attack against the United States? George, apparently you were a pilot once - how hard is it to hit a five-storey building at more than 500 miles an hour? The Pentagon is only five stories high. At 500 miles an hour, had the pilots been off by just a hair, they'd have been in the river. You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone's air force.

"The Saudi air force?"
http://www.rense.com/general42/dese.htm

This infuriates me as much now as the first time I read it. Because he's on to something, but rather than follow the evidence to the heart of the National Security State, he veers off into unsupported speculation. Yes, it was a military attack. But a Saudi attack? Gimme a fucking break.

Damn you Moore, educate yourself! The hijackers received training at US military installations, not Saudi. Mohammed Atta, for instance, attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/wot/sept11/undersurveillance.html; http://www.madcowprod.com/issue05.html; http://www.newsday.com/ny-usprob212376908sep21.story). Learn about the "bizarre coincidence" of the crash simulations and live-fly hijacking scenarios the CIA and the Pentagon just happened to be running the morning of 9/11, which caused a crippling confusion to any air response (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1298401; http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1694495). The Saudis could not have engineered this. Ask yourself why the head of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalism Unit, Dave Frasca, spiked multiple investigations into al Qaeda and flight schools the summer of 2001, threatened field agents and altered their reports, and after the attacks received a promotion. Learn the name of Sibel Edmonds, and listen to her.

The Saudis did it is a bullshit lie that will one day be hung around the necks of the Left if we perpetuate it now.

[TexasBushwhacker]

6. Have you seen it yet?

I'm not going to make any assumptions. I had great expectations for "Bowling for Columbine" and it still blew me away. Moore's audience is made up of pretty smart people. He doesn't have to put CONSPIRACY in neon for them to "get it". And if they don't get it, then they're the ones that don't think that such a conspiracy could ever take place. Never underestimate the power of denial. I was mentioning MIHOP as soon as Iraq became our enemy instead of Afghanistan and my mother was like "Oh please! There is no way they would do that!". If you bang the conspiracy drum too much, people start handing you the tin foil.

I've read in reviews that Moore lets the images and the people he interviews do the talking this time much more than in his previous films. I think it's a good call, and let's not forget it won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He's showing us the "dots" but he's letting us connect them. If someone doesn't connect them, it's probably because they don't want to, not because he didn't make it clear.

[frankly_fedup2]

7. Like Gore Vidal stated . . .

(sic) "If someone uses the term "conspiracy" people think of flying saucers and little green men. I prefer to call them coincidences. When you use the term "coincidence" people tend to listen as to why what happened was such a coinsidence." (sic)

(not exact quote but pretty close to what he said {I think}

[buycitgo]

11. or, as in JFK, how about "coincidence theorists," instead of

"conspiracy theorists?"

sometimes Occam's razor requires a bit of unlawful cooperation as the simplest explanation

[Beam Me Up]

12. kick -- Minstrel Boy and I share a world view -- I see a CONSPIRACY

not a COINCIDENCE. Did the Saudi's know this was going down? Of course they did -- but so did many others. This was THE catalyzing event, this was a media driven, quickly mythologized event. We see how it has been and is being used to support domestic and foreign policies that would have been inconceivable without such an 'event.'

I ASSUME that one of the reasons Michael Moore hasn't met with some unfortunate accident is because this film can be used to lay the groundwork for another limited hangout. However, if MM were to dig deeper and point our social attention deeper than just 'bush is a fuck up' -- I don't doubt his work would be brought to a very quick end.