Not in my name

Michael Moore, suffering from having been out of the headlines for a month or so, has started touting his next book, Dude, Where’s My Country? with seven questions directed at George Bush. They show all of Moore’s general sense of finesse, fairness, and intelligence. Which is to say, very little.

I have seven questions for you, Mr Bush. I ask them on behalf of the 3,000 who died that September day, and I ask them on behalf of the American people.

How noble of him, to offer to speak on behalf of the folks who died on 9-11. Wonder how they feel about it? Hopefully not the same as I feel about being one of the American people that Moore also offers to ask questions on behalf of.

I can ask my own questions, Mike. Stick to asking them on behalf of your fans and your book sales.

1. Is it true that the Bin Ladens have had business relations with you and your family off and on for the past 25 years?

Moore goes on to note the various investments made by the Bin Laden family in various US companies and firms, including some that the Bush family invested in. The relative proportion of these investments is never mentioned; I mean, it’s one thing to invest $2 MM in a $3 MM company, quite another if it’s a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. The private-vs-public nature of these investments isn’t mentioned, either; CalPERS is a huge institutional investor, but that doesn’t mean its investment companies are part of some sinister plot by California government workers.

He mentions in passing, for example, that the Bin Ladens invested in Microsoft, Citigroup, GE, Merrill Lynch, etc., not to mention contributing to Harvard. (Of course, he also mentions that the Bin Laden family is made up of literally dozens of brothers, which implies it’s far from some sinister monolithic bogie-man under Osama’s control, but never mind that). In other words, it would be hard to work for any large company without encountering some of the Bin Laden money — indirectly, at least.

How this turns into a special business relationship with the Bushes is never quite made clear.

2. What is the ‘special relationship’ between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family?
A major chunk of the American economy is built on Saudi money. They have a trillion dollars invested in our stock market and another trillion dollars in our banks. If they chose suddenly to remove that money, our corporations and financial institutions would be sent into a tailspin, causing an economic crisis the likes of which has never been seen. Couple that with the fact that the 1.5m barrels of oil we need daily from the Saudis could also vanish on a mere royal whim, and we begin to see how not only you, but all of us, are dependent on the House of Saud. George, is this good for our national security, our homeland security? Who is it good for? You? Pops?

Perhaps that’s why Bush keeps harping on developing domestic energy sources, rather than reliance on foreign oil. One would suspect that, were he a lackey tool in the pocket of the Saudi princes, he’d be pooh-poohing such efforts. He’d also be bowing to other Saudi foreign policy initiatives — avoiding action against Iraq, for example, or cutting off aid to Israel.

After meeting with the Saudi crown prince in April 2002, you happily told us that the two of you had “established a strong personal bond” and that you “spent a lot of time alone”. Were you trying to reassure us? Or just flaunt your friendship with a group of rulers who rival the Taliban in their suppression of human rights? Why the double standard?

Is Mr. Moore suggesting that we should invade Saudi Arabia and overthrow their oppressive regime? If we did so, would he be on the sidelines cheering, or shouting about how it’s all about the ooooiiiiillllll?

3. Who attacked the US on September 11 – a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friend, Saudi Arabia?
You got us all repeating by rote that it was Osama bin Laden who was responsible for the attack on the United States on September 11. Even I was doing it. But then I started hearing strange stories about Osama’s kidneys. Suddenly, I don’t know who or what to trust. How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, hooked up to dialysis, have directed and overseen the actions of 19 terrorists for two years in the US then plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets? How did he organise, communicate, control and supervise this kind of massive attack? With two cans and a string?

It’s called a cell phone, dude. And personal couriers. And lieutenants and subordinates and go-betweens. And, oh, yeah, weren’t you going on in the previous question or two about how much money the Bin Laden family had, and all the connections they’d made?

Why, when Congress released its own investigation into September 11, did you, Mr Bush, censor out 28 pages that deal with the Saudis’ role in the attack?

Hey, now there’s a great questions, Mike! Of course, it’s been asked by plenty of conservative, right-wing sorts before now, but they’re glad to see you’re coming aboard.

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.

And you know this … how, Mike?

I mean, in fligh school, you learn how to fly straight and land a plane on a narrow little concrete strip at hundreds of miles per hour. The distinction doesn’t seem all that great to me.

What if these weren’t wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? The House of Saud, according to Robert Baer’s book Sleeping With the Devil, is full of them. So, did certain factions within the Saudi royal family execute the attack on September 11? Were these pilots trained by the Saudis? Why are you so busy protecting the Saudis when you should be protecting us?

Why are you going from hypothetical questions to conclusions thereof? Do you know something we don’t? Are you hiding evidence that we should know about? Why are you so busy using that knowledge to the advantage of your book sales rather than disclosing it to the national media?

4. Why did you allow a private Saudi jet to fly around the US in the days after September 11 and pick up members of the Bin Laden family and fly them out of the country without a proper investigation by the FBI?

Why do you continue going on about this when it’s been largely debunked over and over again?

5. Why are you protecting the Second Amendment rights of potential terrorists?
Mr Bush, in the days after September 11, the FBI began running a check to see if any of the 186 “suspects” the feds had rounded up in the first five days after the attack had purchased any guns in the months leading up to September 11 (two of them had). When your attorney general, John Ashcroft, heard about this, he immediately shut down the search. He told the FBI that the background check files could not be used for such a search and these files were only to be used at the time of a purchase of a gun.
Mr Bush, you can’t be serious! Is your administration really so gun nutty and so deep in the pocket of the National Rifle Association? I truly love how you have rounded up hundreds of people, grabbing them off the streets without notice, throwing them in prison cells, unable to contact lawyers or family, and then, for the most part, shipped them out of the country on mere immigration charges.

Yeah, those pesky “mere” immigration charges. Why, who would ever think of such a dastardly and cruel punishment for violating immigration law than (gasp) deportation. Why, those rat bastard Bushies …

You can waive their Fourth Amendment protection from unlawful search and seizure, their Sixth Amendment rights to an open trial by a jury of their peers and the right to counsel, and their First Amendment rights to speak, assemble, dissent and practise their religion. You believe you have the right to just trash all these rights, but when it comes to the Second Amendment right to own an AK-47 – oh no! That right they can have – and you will defend their right to have it.

So, uh, would it be okay to violate their Second Amendment rights and value their First, Fourth and Sixth? Evidently.

Actually, there is a technical distinction here. The law regarding instant background checks explicitly restricts for what and when you can use those records. Ashcroft was, apparently, right — it was illegal to use those records later for the 9-11 investigation.

Still, I’d think Moore would be happy that any rights were being protected, or that legal procedures were being followed, or that a “all your documents are belong to us” police state of the sort the left so often worries about did not occur in this case. But I guess that he, too, thinks some rights are more worth protecting than others.

6. Were you aware that, while you were governor of Texas, the Taliban travelled to Texas to meet with your oil and gas company friends?
According to the BBC, the Taliban came to Texas while you were governor to meet with Unocal, the huge oil and energy giant, to discuss Unocal’s desire to build a natural-gas pipeline running from Turkmenistan through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and into Pakistan. Mr Bush, what was this all about?

Um, maybe about this.

“Houston, we have a problem,” apparently never crossed your mind, even though the Taliban were perhaps the most repressive fundamentalist regime on the planet.

Well, you mentioned earlier that the Saudis “rival” them.

What role exactly did you play in the Unocal meetings with the Taliban?

Well, as governor of Texas, what role, exactly, would have been appropriate?

I mean, I’m sure that any number of dubious sorts met with various businesses in Texas (and Indiana and Mississippi and New York and Oregon …) in 1998. But if the Clinton Administration were willing to let the Taliban representatives into the country, I suppose it was okay for Unocal to be talking with them, among others.

According to various reports, representatives of your administration met with the Taliban or conveyed messages to them during the summer of 2001. What were those messages, Mr Bush? Were you discussing their offer to hand over Bin Laden? Were you threatening them with use of force? Were you talking to them about a pipeline?

Well, evidently, none of it came to anything, did it?

And, of course, representatives of the administration met with, or conveyed messages to, all sorts of governments in the summer of 2001. What were they talking about with, say, France? Were you discussing cheese? Wine? Were you threatening them over the Iraq embargo? Were you talking to them about their nuclear tests? Why the big cover-up?

7. What exactly was that look on your face in the Florida classroom on the morning of September 11 when your chief of staff told you, ‘America is under attack’?
On the morning of September 11, you took a jog on a golf course and then headed to Booker elementary school in Florida to read to little children. You arrived at the school after the first plane had hit the north tower in New York City. You entered the classroom around 9am and the second plane hit the south tower at 9.03am. Just a few minutes later, as you were sitting in front of the class of kids, your chief of staff, Andrew Card, entered the room and whispered in your ear. Card was apparently telling you about the second plane and about us being “under attack”.
And it was at that very moment that your face went into a distant glaze, not quite a blank look, but one that seemed partially paralysed. No emotion was shown. And then … you just sat there. You sat there for another seven minutes or so doing nothing.
George, what were you thinking? What did that look on your face mean?

No, wait, let me simply make some things up. I’ll assume that it meant something awful, since you’re a meanie and a goofball and I don’t like you and you smell funny.

Were you thinking you should have taken reports the CIA had given you the month before more seriously? You had been told al-Qaida was planning attacks in the United States and that planes would possibly be used.

Were you trying to think of all the thousands of threats that you’d been told about over the past year and a half? Were you recalling any one in particular, and wishing to hell you’d had more evidence presented so it could be prioritized higher? Were you wondering how or whether you could have some something more concrete with warnings that “al-Quaida was planning attacks in the United States” (well, duh) and that “planes would possibly be used” (which planes? how? on what? where? when?)?

Or were you just scared shitless?

You big stinky poopyhead!

Because, after all, Al Gore or Ralph Nader would have felt nothing over having the ramming of passenger jets into the World Trade Center. Nothing at all. Gore would have simply sat there, woodenly, and Nader would have been figuring out how to blast the jet aircraft industry for making unsafe planes …

No. It would be grossly unfair to speculate what was going through the head of a President Gore or a President Nader if they had been been faced with such a horror. Grossly unfair.

But let’s get back to speculating on what was going through the head of President Bush.

Or maybe you were just thinking, “I did not want this job in the first place! This was supposed to be Jeb’s job; he was the chosen one! Why me? Why me, daddy?”

You big poopy stinkyhead!

Or … maybe, just maybe, you were sitting there in that classroom chair thinking about your Saudi friends – both the royals and the Bin Ladens. People you knew all too well that might have been up to no good. Would questions be asked? Would suspicions arise? Would the Democrats have the guts to dig into your family’s past with these people (no, don’t worry, never a chance of that!)? Would the truth ever come out?

Or maybe … just maybe … you were profoundly moved with grief over the thousands of deaths you knew had to have occured. By the enormity of the crime that had been committed. Maybe you were daunted for a few moments by the challenge you suddenly knew was before you, wishing it hadn’t happened on your watch, but knowing you’d have to act. Maybe you were considering what the next actions would be? Would you have to order the shooting down of other airliners? What would the impact on the economy, on the nation be? Who was behind it? Would war be necessary?

Or maybe you were praying. Or worried for your family — were they targeted next? Where was everyone today?

Nah. You were probably worried about your portfolio and the coverup. After all, you’re a stinky poopyhead. A fool. A dupe. A knave. We all know it. That’s why it’s okay to make up explanations for your behavior. Why it’s okay to ask leading and misleading questions, and then either imply or state what the answers must be. Because that’s what an Oscar-winning documentarian and best-selling author like me gets to do. So there, you big stinky poopyhead.

Yeesh.

(via InstaPundit)