1. Watchdog Calls on UN Chief to Clarify Remarks Comparing Israel’s Shalit to Hamas Terrorists

2. U.N. Sticker Shock: New Building Will Cost at Least Five Times Previous Estimates

3.

Today the UN General Assembly will give its podium to Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on Palestine. This is deeply offensive, however, because contrary to what he and his defenders say, Falk has continued—in his official capacity—to use his UN mandate to promote the 9/11 conspiracy theory, questioning Al Qaeda’s responsibility for the attack, and suggesting instead an “inside job” by the U.S. government.

more here

4. PM condemns UN adviser’s ‘antisemitic’ cartoon

5. 45 rights groups urge UN Rights Council to investigate its Gaddafi apologists Jean Ziegler & Al-Hajjaji

6. UN Shows Its Bias Again, on Shalit Prisoner Exchange

Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped and held in isolation for five years by Hamas terrorists, was finally released in exchange for over 1000 brutal terrorists, many of whom are guilty of the most barbaric slaughter of Israelis. The young captive arrived in Egypt, gaunt, pale and nervous, but before being released to his nation and family, the Egyptian intermediaries and terrorist captors subjected him to yet more stress, barraging him with questions in a television interview as masked Hamas terrorists stood by. Gilad was obviously uncomfortable, struggling for breath as he must have feared that one wrong answer could undermine the entire deal and land him back with his cruel captors.

Did this concern UN representatives? Unsurprisingly not. The only concern voiced was that some Palestinian terrorists who were released in the prisoner exchange may have been deprived of their rights by not having been given a choice on where to go. Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, made that clear.

“It was with a sense of great relief that we have received news of the agreement to exchange prisoners. We do however have concerns regarding reports that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank may be released to the Gaza Strip or abroad,” Pillay’s spokesman Rupert Colville told Reuters in response to a query. “If in some cases this has been without the free and informed consent of the concerned individuals, this may constitute forced transfer or deportation under international law,” he added. “We are not sure to what extent they consented to this.”

Considering the barbaric crimes for which these terrorists had been incarcerated, their complete lack of repetance, and the Palestinian reception of the prisoners, which include calls for kidnapping “a new Gilad Shalit” and shouts of “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud” (invoked as a reference the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Islamists), the concern of the UN human rights council is truly ludicrous and twisted, raising questions about the council’s true goals and motives. Clearly, there is no concern about the human rights or well-being of Israeli victims and captives. The concern is limited to the terrorists’ rights. The right to recidivism? Ensurance that the terrorists have full freedom to return to their previous comfortable and familiar bases of operation? Ensuring that the terrorists’ ability to attack Israelis remains unimpeded?

7. Lords in London Launch San Jose Articles

More than 30 senior politicians, diplomats, lawyers, scholars and public figures from around the world have signed the San Jose Articles, a document that defends the unborn child and refutes the subversive international campaign that falsely claims that abortion is a human right.

The importance of the Articles was recently underlined when the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN Secretary General all wrongly stated that a right to abortion exists. It is precisely this approach which has led to the gendercide that has taken the lives of over 100 million girls – aborted because of their sex.

The San Jose Articles, named for the city where they were drafted in Costa Rica in March 2011, were launched this month at the United Nations. Further launches have taken place in legislatures around the world – with Jim Dobbin MP and Fiona Bruce MP, the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the All Party Pro Life Group, joining me at Westminster.

The San Jose Articles begin by proclaiming the scientific fact that human life begins at conception and further explains that no UN treaty mentions abortion or defines reproductive health as including abortion. On the contrary, a number of human rights treaties recognize the humanity of unborn children and the rights and duties of governments to protect them as members of the human family.

Over two-thirds of UN member-states have laws recognizing that unborn children deserve protection. Only 56 countries permit abortion for any reason, and only 22 of these are without restriction.

Thanks to Weasel Zippers for the link!

Larry Pratt is Executive Director of Gun Owners of America. GOA is a national membership organization of 300,000 Americans dedicated to promoting the second amendment freedom to keep and bear arms as they work to provide legal assistance to those involved in lawsuits with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

This broadcast was an update of an earlier Crosstalk from April that looked at Project Gunrunners, a program that resulted in firearms deliberately ending up in the hands of Mexicans. It’s estimated that 150 people have been murdered by criminals using guns that were traceable back to the United States. This operation may have been an effort to change the attitudes regarding the gun control debate here in America.

Larry also discusses two other issues. The first deals with Andrew Traver. Traver runs the ATF Chicago Office and is President Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Secondly, Larry commented on the ATF’s celebration of its first gay pride event that took place Wednesday “to recognize the accomplishments and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans to ATF and the nation, and to promote awareness of the LGBT culture”.

Today, May 21, is the anniversary of the White Night Riot and tomorrow is Harvey Milk Day. I’m reminded of Nancy Pelosi‘s grand crying moment from 2009.

The following quoted text comes from Jack Cashill’s article “Ms. Pelosi Misremembers the 70s.” I’ve added relevant youtube clips throughout:

Leftist politicians glide through their careers as though there were no Internet, no YouTube, no newspaper archives, no history books, no one worth knowing who does not agree with them.

Protected as they are by the media, they feel free to ignore the past as it happened and reconstruct it as it suits the purpose of the moment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave remarkable witness to this willful amnesia with her hysterical—in both senses of the word—re-imagining of San Francisco in the seventies.

“I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw, I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco,” said a tearful Pelosi last Friday.

“This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we (sic), violence took place.”

Pelosi was implying that the 1978 murder of Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco supervisor, was spawned by the kind of right wing rhetoric one hears at Tea Parties and the like.

In reality, Milk’s murder had nothing to do with anything right wing. Indeed, left wing violence of all sorts, the worst of it abetted by the Democratic establishment, terrorized the Bay Area from one end of the decade to the other.

For starters, Milk’s killer was a Democrat, former supervisor Dan White. In November 1978, the emotionally troubled White abruptly resigned from the Board of Supervisors.

On Milk’s advice, Mayor George Moscone refused to reinstate White when he petitioned to get back on. White snapped. He shot and killed them both and promptly turned himself in. This was no historic moment. This was routine work place violence prompted by Milk’s double dealing.

After an absurdly lenient verdict—only in psycho San Francisco would the “Twinkie” defense have worked–

the anti-death penalty coalition organized a protest march. It quickly went south on them.

How far south? How about thousands of angry gay men marching down Market Street chanting “Kill Dan White” south—pretty rough rhetoric in anyone’s book.

When the marchers reached City Hall, they broke windows, burned police cars, and injured 61 cops. Our gay friends called their May 1979 escapade the “White Night Riot”—a cold-blooded pun on the recent Jonestown carnage

Speaking of Jonestown, the atheist “religious leader” Jim Jones was the toast of liberal San Francisco throughout the 1970s. All the leading Democrats–George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Willie Brown, Jerry Brown–came a courting.

“In my later years,” Jones reflected near the end, “there wasn’t a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at one time, that I was a communist.”

In the People’s Republic of San Francisco that fact bothered no Democrat of consequence. A guy who could inspire suicide could certainly deliver votes and volunteers.

After moving his flock to Guyana, he oversaw their mass poisoning in November 1978. On the down side for Pelosi, he removed 918 current or future Democrats from the voter rolls. On the upside, he waited until after the mid-term elections to remove them.

Those who tell Kool-Aid jokes take note: three year-olds don’t commit suicide. Authorities dumped the bodies of more than 250 of these children, all victims of left wing violence, into a mass grave in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery. There they lie to this day, unsung and un-mourned, as they serve no useful political purpose.

“Free at last, free at last,” Jones would proselytize, “thank socialism almighty we’re free at last.” Socialism is exactly what these children had to thank for their final liberation.

Speaking of Oakland and left wing violence, in November 1973 the Symbionese Liberation Army shot and killed black school superintendent Marcus Foster in cold blood.

The S.L.A. had condemned him for his “fascist” plan to introduce identification cards into Oakland’s chaotic public schools. In February 1974, the S.L.A. made the big time when its cadres kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst in neighboring Berkeley.

The S.L.A. fled to Southern California where they ended their days in a flaming shootout with the local constabularies. Another sad day for Pelosi–more future Democratic leaders lost.

Speaking of crime sprees, none in recent American history can match the grotesque and wanton murders perpetrated by the so-called “Zebra” killers in mid-70s San Francisco and hushed up by a complicit media.

The self-described “Death Angels,” a rogue auxiliary of Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, killed as many as 71 white Californians. Leadership gave extra points, literally, for the murder–often preceded by rape, torture and dismemberment–of white women and children. Look it up.

When San Francisco police finally arrested the culprits in 1974, local black leaders quickly denounced the arrests, claiming that they were racially motivated. Just like Skip Gates in Cambridge!

Speaking of the San Francisco police, the decade of left wing violence began when some future Democratic leaders planted an anti-personnel bomb on the ledge of a police station, killing Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell.

The culprits? As WND recently reported, the evidence is “mounting” that Mrs. William Ayers, Weatherwoman Bernadine Dohrn, was responsible.

Pelosi was advancing her career in San Francisco Democratic politics throughout the entire decade. She was elected party chairwoman for Northern California in January 1977, the same year Milk was elected and Jones moved to Guyana.

If she were anything like her fellow Dems, Pelosi would have befriended Jones, ignored his communism, buried his crimes, suppressed all talk of the Zebra killings, sucked up to Farrakhan, criticized the police for “profiling” the Zebras, hung out with the radical cop-killers, marched with the White Night rioters, and wept when the S.L.A. got smoked in LA.

Then, at the end of the day, she would blame all this madness on a non-existent right wing, a claim unchallenged by an unwittingly comical major media.

For anyone who knows San Francisco history, Pelosi’s verklempt reminisce suggests too much time on the bong, the early stages of Alzheimer’s, or the chronic dissembling we have come to expect from our Democratic friends.

Pelosi gives proof to the adage that those who remember the seventies in San Francisco weren’t there.

====================================

:: E X I T L I N K S ::

Who Killed Brian V. McDonnell?

YouTube: For The Record : Milk and Kool-Aid

YouTube: Glenn Beck: Milk, Twinkies, and Kool-Aid

Harvey Milk’s Letter Addressed to President Jimmy Carter, Dated February 19, 1978

YouTube: Larry Grathwohl on Ayers’ plan for American re-education camps and the need to kill millions

The Truth about the Twinkie Defense

YouTube: The first ten minutes of Jack Cashill’s Pro-Life documentary about the March For Life

Thanks to Adam Baldwin and Arnegrim’s World for the links!
================================

ps: there was no kool-aid involved with Jonestown.

they used “Flavor Aid”.

“A 44-minute cassette tape (the “death tape”), recorded at least part of a meeting Jones called under the pavilion in the early evening. Before the meeting, aides prepared a metal vat with Flavor Aid, poisoned with Valium, chloral hydrate, cyanide, and Phenergan.

[...]

On the death tape, Jones urged Temple members to commit “revolutionary suicide”. Such “revolutionary suicide” had been planned by the Temple before and, according to Jonestown defectors, its theory was “you can go down in history, saying you chose your own way to go, and it is your commitment to refuse capitalism and in support of socialism.”

[source: wiki]

Time: 0:20:00 – 0:26:13

Transcription:

Michael Moore: In the days following September 11th all commercial and private airline traffic was grounded.

Spokesman: The FAA has taken the action to close all of the airports in the United States.

Newscaster: Even grounding the president’s father, former President Bush on a flight forced to land in Milwaukee.

Newscaster: Thousands of travelers were stranded, among them Ricky Martin due to appear at tonight’s Latin Grammy Awards.

Michael Moore: Not even Ricky Martin could fly. But really, who wanted to fly? No one, except the bin Ladens.

[Song] We gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do.

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) Senate Subcommittee on Aviation: We had some airplanes authorized at the highest levels of our government to fly to pick up Osama bin Laden’s family members and others from Saudi Arabia and transport them out of this country.

Michael Moore: It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis. At least six private jets, and nearly two dozen commercial planes, carried the Saudis and the bin Ladens out of the U.S. after September 13th. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country.

Craig Unger, Author, House of Bush, House of Saud: Osama’s always been portrayed as the bad apple, the black sheep in the family, and that they cut off all relationship with him in 1994. In fact, things are much more complicated than that.

Michael Moore: You mean Osama has had contact with other family members?

Craig Unger, Author, House of Bush, House of Saud: That’s right. In the summer of 2001, just before 9/11, one of Osama’s sons got married in Afghanistan, and several family members showed up at the wedding.

Michael Moore: Bin Ladens?

Craig Unger, Author, House of Bush, House of Saud:  That’s right. So they’re not cut off completely. That’s really an exaggeration.

Larry King: We now welcome to Larry King Live — good to see him again — Prince Bandar, ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States.

Prince Bandar: We had about 24 members of bin Laden’s family, and…

Larry King: Here?

Prince Bandar: In America. Students and — His Majesty felt it’s not fair for those innocent people to be subjected to any harm. On the other hand, we understood the high emotions, so, with coordination with the FBI, we got them all out.

Michael Moore: This is retired FBI agent Jack Cloonan. Before 9/11, he was a senior agent on the joint FBI-CIA al Qaeda task force.

Jack Cloonan: I, as an investigator, would not want these people to have left. I think, in the case of the bin Laden family, I think it would have been prudent to hand the subpoenas out, have them come in, get on the record. You know, get on the record.

Michael Moore: That’s the proper procedure?

Jack Cloonan: Yeah. How many people were pulled off airlines after that coming into the country who were what? They were from the Middle East or they fit a very general picture.

Michael Moore: We held hundreds of people for weeks and months at a time.

Jack Cloonan: We held hundreds…

Michael Moore: Did the authorities do anything when the bin Ladens tried to leave the country?

Craig Unger, Author, House of Bush, House of Saud: No. They were identified at the airport. They looked at their passports and they were identified.

Michael Moore: Well, that’s what would happen to you or I if we left the country.

Craig Unger, Author, House of Bush, House of Saud: Exactly. Exactly.

Michael Moore: So, a little interview, check the passport. What else?

Craig Unger, Author, House of Bush, House of Saud:  Nothing.

[Dragnet music]

Michael Moore: I don’t know about you, but usually when the police can’t find a murderer, don’t they usually wanna talk to the family members to find out where they think he might be?

Dragnet Cop 1: You have no idea where your husband might be?

Dragnet Cop 2: Well, if you hear anything, let us know, will you?

Dragnet Cop 1: Are you willing to come downtown and give us a statement?

Man: How long?

Cop: You’ve got the time.

Man: Mine’s worth money. Yours isn’t.

Cop: Send in a bill.

Man: I asked you a question.

Cop: You’re going to answer them, not ask them.

Man: Now you listen to me, Cop. I pay your salary.

Cop: Alright, now sit down. I’m gonna earn it.

Michael Moore: Yeah! That’s how cops do it. What was going on here?

Senator Byron Dorgan: I think we need to know a lot more about that. That needs to be the subject of a significant investigation. What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? And who authorized it?

Jack Cloonan, Senior FBI agent (retired), Al Qaeda Task Force: Imagine what those poor bastards were feeling when they were jumping out of that building to their death. Those young guys and cops and firemen that ran into that building never asked a question. And they’re dead. And families’ lives are ruined. And they’ll never have peace. And if I had to inconvenience a member of the bin Laden family with a subpoena or a grand jury, do you think I’d lose sleep over it? Not for a minute, Mike. No one would question it. It’s right. Not even the biggest civil libertarian.

Michael Moore: No one would question it –

Jack Cloonan, Senior FBI agent (retired) Al Qaeda Task Force: You know, you got a lawyer? Fine. Counsel? Fine. Mr. bin Laden, this is why I’m asking you. It isn’t because I think you’re anything. I just want to ask you the questions that I would anybody. And that’s all.

Michael Moore: None of this made any sense. Can you imagine in the days after the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, President Clinton helped to arrange a trip out of the country for the McVeigh family? What do you think would have happened to Clinton if that had been revealed?

Witchburners: Burn him! Burn him!

Larry King: Prince Bandar, do you know the bin Laden family?

Prince Bandar: I do, very well.

Larry King: What are they like?

Prince Bandar: They’re really lovely human beings. He is the only one I never, I don’t know him well, but I met him only once.

Larry King: What was the circumstance under which you met him?

Prince Bandar: This is ironic. He came to thank me for my efforts to bring the Americans, our friends, to help us against the atheists, the Communists. Isn’t it ironic?

Larry King: He came to thank you for helping bring America to help him. And now he may be responsible for bombing America.

Prince Bandar: Absolutely.

Larry King: What did you make of him when you met him?

Prince Bandar: I was not impressed too much, to be honest with you.

Larry King: Not impressed?

Prince Bandar: No. I thought he was a simple and very quiet guy.

Michael Moore: Hmm. A simple and quiet guy, whose family just happened to have a business relationship with the family of George W. Bush. Is that what he was thinking about? Because if the public knew this, it wouldn’t look very good. Was he thinking, “You know, I need a big, black marker”?

Deceptions:

From the Ethics and Public Policy Center:

Moore then tells us that, “In the days following September 11th, all commercial and private air line traffic was grounded” but that a group of Saudis, including Bin Laden family members staying in America, was permitted to fly out of the country. He then implies that something was wrong with these flights, that the people who departed were not properly interviewed by the FBI, and that this happened because the Saudis used their influence with the White House. He even has a former FBI agent (whom he admits was no longer in the FBI by the time of the attacks and so would have no direct knowledge of what happened) say that these people should have been interviewed.

But Moore’s assertions are all wrong. First of all, the flights carrying Bin Laden family members did not take place while other civilian flights were grounded, as Moore suggests. The one flight that actually carried Bin Laden family members took place on September 20, a week after flight restrictions had been lifted. Flights carrying other Saudis also occurred on or after September 13, when flying was no longer restricted. Also, all the Saudis who left the country on the flights Moore mentions were in fact thoroughly interviewed by the FBI before leaving. And finally, the flights were approved personally (and exclusively) by White House counterterrorism head Richard Clarke, whom Moore later cites with approval as an authority.

The 9/11 Commission Report makes short shrift of all of Moore’s accusations, stating that the commission “found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001. To the contrary, every flight we have identified occurred after national airspace reopened.” It states further that there was “no evidence of political intervention” to permit the flights, and finally observes that, “the FBI interviewed all persons of interest on these flights prior to their departures. They concluded that none of the passengers was connected to the 9/11 attacks and have since found no evidence to change that conclusion. Our own independent review of the Saudi nationals involved confirms that no one with known links to terrorism departed on these flights” (http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, pp. 329-30; also see pp. 556-558). In response to this, a spokeswoman for Moore told the Washington Post that “Moore did not intend to suggest that the Bin Ladens flew away while civilian flights were grounded”—which is preposterous given what is plainly said in the film, and also fails to address all of the film’s other false claims on this issue (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10070-2004Jul23.html).

From Dave Kopel’s Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 911:

Moore is guilty of a classic game of saying one thing and implying another when he describes how members of the Saudi elite were flown out of the United States shortly after 9/11.If you listen only to what Moore says during this segment of the movie—and take careful notes in the dark—you’ll find he’s got his facts right. He and others in the film state that 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country after Sept. 13.

The date—Sept. 13—is crucial because that is when a national ban on air traffic, for security purposes, was eased

But nonetheless, many viewers will leave the movie theater with the impression that the Saudis, thanks to special treatment from the White House, were permitted to fly away when all other planes were still grounded. This false impression is created by Moore’s failure, when mentioning Sept. 13, to emphasize that the ban on flights had been eased by then. The false impression is further pushed when Moore shows the singer Ricky Martin walking around an airport and says, “Not even Ricky Martin would fly. But really, who wanted to fly? No one. Except the bin Ladens.”

But the movie fails to mention that the FBI interviewed about 30 of the Saudis before they left. And the independent 9/11 commission has reported that “each of the flights we have studied was investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a professional manner prior to its departure.”

McNamee, Chicago Sun-Times. (Note: The Sun-Times article was correct in its characterization of the Ricky Martin segment, but not precisely accurate in the exact words used in the film. I have substituted the exact quote. On September 13, U.S. airspace was re-opened for a small number of flights; charter flights were allowed, and the airlines were allowed to move their planes to new airports to start carrying passengers on September 14.)

Tapper: [Y]our film showcases former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, using him as a critic of the Bush administration. Yet in another part of the film, one that appears in your previews, you criticize members of the Bush administration for permitting members of the bin Laden family to fly out of the country almost immediately after 9/11. What the film does not mention is that Richard Clarke says that he OK’d those flights. Is it fair to not mention that?

Moore: Actually I do, I put up The New York Times article and it’s blown up 40 foot on the screen, you can see Richard Clarke’s name right there saying that he approved the flights based on the information the FBI gave him. It’s right there, right up on the screen. I don’t agree with Clarke on this point. Just because I think he’s good on a lot of things doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything.

Jake Tapper interview with Michael Moore, ABC News, June 25, 2004. In an Associated Press interview, Clarke said that he agreed with much of what Moore had to say, but that the Saudi flight material was a mistake. Clarke testified to the September 11 Commission, on September 3, 2003, that letting the Saudis go “was a conscious decision with complete review at the highest levels of the State Department and the FBI and the White House.” It’s possible to read Clarke’s 2003 statement as consistent with his 2004 statements; if you believe that what Clarke is saying now contradicts what he said in 2003, then Clarke is a liar, and all other claims he makes in Fahrenheit are discredited. Although he really did not make those claims for Fahrenheit; according to National Public Radio:

“I think Moore’s making a mountain of a molehill,” he said. Moreover, said Mr. Clarke, “He never interviewed me.” Instead, Mr. Moore had simply lifted a clip from an ABC interview.

Fahrenehit includes a brief shot of a Sept. 4, 2003, New York Times article headlined “White House Approved Departures of Saudis after Sept. 11, Ex-Aide Says.” The camera pans over the article far too quickly for any ordinary viewer to spot and read the words in which Clarke states that he approved the flights.

Like Clarke, most of the political figures in Fahrenheit 9/11 were not filmed by Moore; he used footage which had been shot by news organizations. The Internet Movie Database lists 40 public figures in the “cast” of Fahrenheit; of these, 37 are listed as from “archival footage.”

Some Saudis left the U.S. by charter flight on September 14, a day when commercial flights had resumed, but when ordinary charter planes were still grounded. When did the bin Ladens actually leave? Not until the next week, as the the 9/11 Commission staff report explains:

Fearing reprisals against Saudi nationals, the Saudi government asked for help in getting some of its citizens out of the country….we have found that the request came to the attention of Richard Clarke and that each of the flights we have studied was investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a professional manner prior to its departure.

No commercial planes, including chartered flights, were permitted to fly into, out of, or within the United States until September 13, 2001. After the airspace reopened, six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin. We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace.

The Saudi flights were screened by law enforcement officials, primarily the FBI, to ensure that people on these flights did not pose a threat to national security, and that nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country. Thirty of the 142 people on these flights were interviewed by the FBI, including 22 of the 26 people (23 passengers and 3 private security guards) on the Bin Ladin flight. Many were asked detailed questions. None of the passengers stated that they had any recent contact with Usama Bin Ladin or knew anything about terrorist activity.

The FBI checked a variety of databases for information on the Bin Ladin flight passengers and searched the aircraft. It is unclear whether the TIPOFF terrorist watchlist was checked. At our request, the Terrorist Screening Center has rechecked the names of individuals on the flight manifests of these six Saudi flights against the current TIPOFF watchlist. There are no matches.

The FBI has concluded that nobody was allowed to depart on these six flights who the FBI wanted to interview in connection with the 9/11 attacks, or who the FBI later concluded had any involvement in those attacks. To date, we have uncovered no evidence to contradict this conclusion.

The final Commission Report confirms that Clarke was the highest-ranking official who made the decision to let the Saudis go, and that Clarke’s decision had no adverse effect on September 11 investigations. See pages 328-29 of the Report.

Finally, Moore’s line, “But really, who wanted to fly? No one. Except the bin Ladens,” happens to be a personal lie. Stranded in California on September 11, Michael Moore ended up driving home to New York City. On September 14, he wrote to his fans “Our daughter is fine, mostly frightened by my desire to fly home to her rather than drive.” Moore acceded to the wishes of his wife and daughter, and drove back to New York. It is pretty hypocritical for Moore to slam the Saudis (who had very legitimate fears of being attacked by angry people) just because they wanted to fly home, at the same time when Moore himself wanted to fly home.

From Bowling For Truth:

“In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film” liberal columnist Christopher Hitchens says Moore “makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11″. As Hitchens notes in a recent article, he too had a problem with this, but changed his position when the facts came out. So why didn’t Moore? From Hitchens:

I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore’s triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights.

Moore interviews former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who, as Newsmax noted, served as a principal source for Fahrenheit 9/11. However, Clarke has gone on record saying that the central premise of Moore’s film is “a mistake.” From Newsmax:

In an interview with the Associated Press, Clarke took issue with Moore’s criticism that President Bush allowed prominent Saudis, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, to fly out of the U.S. in the days after the 9/11 attacks.

Saying Moore’s version of the episode has provoked “a tempest in a tea pot,” Clarke called his decision to make the bin Laden family flyout a big part of the film’s indictment against Bush “a mistake.”

Note the word “HIS”. Not president Bush’s decision…Richard Clarke’s (a published Bush critic) decision. Once again, Moore’s own source proves him wrong.

“After 9/11, I think the Saudis were perfectly justified … in fearing the possibility of vigilantism against Saudis in this country. When they asked to evacuate their citizens … I thought it was a perfectly normal request,” he explained.

In May, Clarke confessed that he, and he alone made the decision to approve the flyouts.

A desperate Moore-fan has to really scramble over this one yet again to find some excuse for Moore to somehow not be lying here. But Clarke leave no room for honest mistake here.

“It didn’t get any higher than me,” he told The Hill newspaper. “On 9/11, 9/12 and 9/13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.”

STILL want to give Moore a free pass for missing Clarke’s confession in May and still brush this off as an honest mistake that Moore spends a large chunk of time on in his movie? Not a smart move if you want to keep from looking foolish.

Clarke told the 9/11 Commission the same thing in March, after first detailing the episode for Vanity Fair magazine last August – leaving plenty of time for Moore to adjust his film to the facts as recounted by his primary source.

And back to Hitchens:

This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that’s another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic “key to all mythologies.”

But this entire criticism has a huge gaping damming hole in its logic, as if we are to believe Moore’s argument that Bush is in an unseemly partnership with the Saudi’s, why then didn’t they join “the Coalition of the Willing”? Hitchens asks:

Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other’s pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad?

Logic and historical fact crush Moore’s argument to pieces, but Moore’s appeal is never with facts or logic, but rather emotion, and thus the audience is tempted to go along with his leaps of believability due to their presentation. The truth is much different:

The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq’s recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film’s “theory.” Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist.

Spinsanity slices at another angle:

In another scene, Moore suggests that members of Osama Bin Laden’s family and other Saudis were able to fly out of the country while air traffic was grounded after September 11. After an initial report in Newsweek inaccurately characterized the scene, saying it had made a direct claim to that effect, Moore’s staff replied with a legalistic parsing. The film does accurately date the Saudi flights out of the country to “after September 13″ as they claim (flights leaving the country resumed on the 14th), but Moore does not take the important step of explaining the meaning of this date in the film:

Moore: In the days following September 11, all commercial and private airline traffic was grounded… [video clips] Not even Ricky Martin could fly. But really, who wanted to fly? No one, except the Bin Ladens.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND): We had some airplanes authorized at the highest levels of our government to fly to pick up Osama Bin Laden’s family members and others from Saudi Arabia and transport them out of this country.

Moore: It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the Bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis. At least six private jets and nearly two dozen commercial planes carried the Saudis and the Bin Ladens out of the US after September 13th. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country.

Given that Moore states that “In the days following September 11, all commercial and private airline traffic was grounded,” how are viewers to know that this description did not include the Saudi flights out of the country? The “after September 13th” clause may show that Moore’s claim was technically accurate, but it leaves viewers with the distinct impression that the Bin Ladens left the country before others were allowed to.

From Michael Moore Exposed:

6. The flight of the bin Ladens. Moore makes this a major theme; supposedly the bin Ladens and Saudis pulled strings with the President, and were flown out of the country during the no-fly period right after 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission Report takes Moore to pieces on this. (pp. 329-330):

“First, we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopenning of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001. To the contrary, every flight we have identified occurred after national airspace reopened.

Second, we found no evidence of any political intervention. (Discussion of how decision was made by Richard Clarke in coordination with the FBI).

Third, we believe that the FBI conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States on charter flights. (discussion of the screening). The FBI interviewed all persons of interest on these flights prior to their departures. They concluded that none of the passengers was connected to the 9/11 attacks and have since found no evidence to change that conclusion.”

Clarke (portrayed by Moore as a hero) confirms this. He told The Hill: “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.” “It didn’t get any higher than me,” he said. “On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.”

As to style:

There is no question as to one thing. Moore is simply the most brilliant propagandist who has ever lived. Bar none. This may be due to the inept competition (the field is dominated by government-types, often totalitarian, and those are callings that do not encourage brilliance and art), but it is still a distinction.

I try here to use “propaganda,” not as a pejorative, but as a neutral description of a field of human endeavor. Unless we understand its techniques, we cannot understand how Moore stands out. Let’s take a look at some principles of state-of-the-art propaganda.

1. The spokesman must never quite say that which is provably false, but must create false impressions indirectly.

I cannot think of any communicator who approaches Moore’s skills at this aspect of the propagandist’s art. Moore knows how to juxtapose footage and statements in a way that leaves the viewer with the belief that X is true, without Moore ever quite saying X. If someone then demonstrates that X is false, Moore has the “out” that he never really said that.

Classic example: in F 9/11, Moore has a sequence on the flights of the Saudis out of the US. He states that everyone was grounded right after 9/11, but then who would want to fly — except the bin Ladens. Cut to an aircraft zooming away, and Moore discussing how chartered planes were used to round up Saudis, including some bin Laden family members. Cut to former FBI agent discussing how the FBI should have been allowed to interview them first.

Viewers naturally conclude that the Saudis were sent out of the US while everyone else was grounded, and the FBI was prevented from interviewing them. But Moore didn’t really say that. And thus when confronted with the 9/11 Commission Report, which concluded that the Saudis were NOT flown out during the ban on flying, and that the FBI had opportunity to interview all of them it wanted to, Moore had his out. The Washington Post reported, “Joanne Doroshow, an associate producer of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” said Moore did not intend to suggest that the bin Ladens flew away while civilian flights were grounded.” Yeah, sure.

From CNSNews.com: When Bush-Bashers Collide? Moore’s Film at Odds with Clarke Remarks:

One of the central charges made by left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore in his upcoming, Bush-bashing film is being undermined by another critic of the president — former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Moore’s upcoming film, Fahrenheit 911, points to President Bush’s rumored relationship with Saudi officials as the motivating factor in the president allegedly allowing relatives of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden to fly out of the country following the Sept.11, 2001 terror attacks.

But Clarke recently admitted that he alone approved the exit of the bin Laden kin — damaging the key premise of Moore’s film.

Chris Horner, a GOP strategist, finds irony in the fact that the credibility of Moore’s film is being undermined by one of Bush’s biggest critics even before the film is released in the United States.

“When self-promoting, Bush-hating conspiracy theorists collide,” Horner said of Moore and Clarke.

“One self-promoting, Bush-hating conspiracy theorist (Clarke) proves the undoing of another Bush-hating conspiracy theorist (Moore),” Horner told CNSNews.com.

Moore has alleged in interviews promoting the film that Bush and his father, former president George H.W. Bush, had close ties to the Saudis, which led to the decision to help bin Laden’s family leave the country following the terrorist attacks.

Clarke’s sworn testimony before the 9/11 Commission in March, describing how the FBI approved the flights for the bin Ladens and other Saudis to leave the U.S., may have strengthened that premise. But Clarke’s interview with The Hill newspaper, published on May 26, contradicted that previous testimony.

The decision to approve the flights, Clarke admitted last week, had been his own. The request “didn’t get any higher than me,” he told The Hill .

“On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI,” Clarke said of the plane flight carrying bin Laden’s relatives.

“I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again,” he added. The Saudis and bin Laden’s relatives were flown from the U.S. out of fear for their safety following the terror attacks.

Clarke turned against the Bush administration and became a darling of the left earlier this year when he criticized the government’s anti-terror policies. His book Against All Enemies : Inside America’s War on Terror , detailed his frustrations working in the administration, and news clips of Clarke appear in Moore’s documentary, according to film critics who have screened the movie.

But Moore’s film relies in part on Clarke’s original comments, the ones he has now contradicted.

According to a movie review by the BBC, one of the film’s “chief accusations is Bush allowed planes to pick up 24 members of the bin Laden family and fly them out of the U.S. in the days following the attacks – when all other aircraft were grounded.”

The BBC review states that the movie explores “the relationships between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties.”

Fahrenheit 911 received a 10-minute standing ovation and the top award at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May. It is expected that the film will be released in the U.S. in July.

While promoting the documentary, Moore has not been shy in linking Bush’s alleged “relationship” with the bin Laden family to the flight that took the bin Ladens and other Saudis from the U.S. following Sept. 11, 2001.

“So here is Bush trying to deal with everything on Sept. 11, 12 13th, you know. You remember, everybody remembers the total state of chaos and people, just everyone, all of us, discombobulated by the whole thing, and he had the time to be thinking — what can I do to help the bin Ladens right now,” Moore told Pacifica radio last October.

“And all of these elaborate plans were made, because [the Saudis] were spread out throughout the country, to be able to pick them up, get them to Boston and then get them to Paris,” Moore said.

“While we are being told that the hunt is on for Osama bin Laden, what is really going on is when you got 24 bin Ladens here, (a disputed number) you know, none of them are asked for any kind of help. None of them are interrogated, and they are given the royal red carpet treatment in the days after September 11th. My question is why? What is really going on here?” Moore asked.

But Horner believes Moore’s film will eventually be discredited.

“In his rush to ensure that no credit goes un-annexed, Clarke exposes Moore’s rant as based on paranoia and the presumptions common among fever-swamp liberals that never survive the slightest encounter with facts,” he said.

Horner sees Clarke’s admission and its impact on the credibility of Fahrenheit 9/11 as just the latest setback for what he calls the “conspiratorial left” in the past year.

“First [former Democratic presidential candidate] Howard Dean implodes in a fury. Then Clarke bombs, and then the [Al] Franken/[Al] Gore political MoveOn-ment (MoveOn.org) lashes itself to the hilariously hapless [global warming disaster film] The Day After Tomorrow . And then there is the collective failure of [the liberal] Air America radio,” Horner explained.

“Now Moore’s movie’s premises are revealed to be nothing more than huffing liberal anger. Every weapon in the pacifist arsenal has proven, fittingly, a dud,” Horner charged.

From Deconstructing Michael Moore:

With his 2004 release of Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore set himself the ambitious goal of terminating a presidency. No longer content to merely pad his bank account, Moore attempted to alter history. He brought to Fahrenheit all the editing skills he had honed in Bowling for Columbine. Like his previous efforts, Fahrenheit was a faux documentary, a party platter of false histories, invented memories and fabricated “facts.” Each time Moore is questioned about the misleading nature of his film-clip montages his puerile defense is that he is not responsible for the false conclusions of others, so it’s your fault if you were misled. Again and again he petulantly whines “I didn’t really say that” even though it’s obvious that his carefully crafted montages were designed to push the viewer toward a false conclusion. His childish hair-splitting defenses demonstrate his utter disrespect for his audiences. For example: In Fahrenheit 9/11 Moore asserts that military action against Saddam Hussein was unprovoked because Saddam had not “murdered” even a single American. When Moore was reminded that Saddam had sheltered Abu Nidal and other terrorists and that he had attempted to assassinate President H.W. Bush with a bomb, Moore childishly responded that he had said “murdered” not “killed,” as though this fine legalistic distinction somehow absolved him of all responsibility for the misleading nature of his narration. When Moore claims that his misleading montages are not really lies he is speaking in exactly the same spirit in which Bill Clinton claimed that the oral stimulation of his erect penis was not really sex. Every adult knows better and every adult knows a big phony when they hear one.

Moore’s endlessly repeated claim that he did not intend to mislead anyone is belied by the painstaking artfulness of his ideological celluloid tapestries. For example, Michael Moore used his editing skills to persuade his viewers that George Bush personally helped members of the bin Laden family scram out of America right after the September 11th attacks when all commercial air traffic was grounded. Moore finds a former FBI agent who will say on camera that the Bureau should have been allowed to interview the bin Ladens before they flew away. Moore splices in footage of singer Ricky Martin grounded in a congested airport terminal and adds the overdub, “Not even Ricky Martin would fly. But really, who wanted to fly? No one. Except the bin Ladens.”

The 9/11 Commission Staff Report states flatly that there were no exceptions to the no-fly ban. The FBI questioned everyone of interest; the bin Ladens were grounded for almost two weeks, like everyone else. When reporters sought an explanation from Michael Moore, this coward used an associate as a human shield: according to the Washington Post “Joanne Doroshow, an associate producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, said Moore did not intend to suggest that the bin Ladens flew away while civilian flights were grounded.” [Emphasis added]

In his book Dude, Where’s My Country? Michael Moore sets up this same slimeball lie with a carefully excerpted passage from the New York Times: “In the first days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi Arabia supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden’s extended family from the United States…” He relied on the intellectual laziness of his readers whom he could count on not to dig up the entire article. In the next paragraph the Times tells how the two planes carrying Saudi nationals were “caught up in the FBI dragnet” and “Both planes, one Jumbo jet carrying 100 family members, and the other 40, were eventually allowed to leave when airports reopened and passports were checked.” The planes didn’t depart America until September 22nd; not a single bin Laden left America before that date. Some bin Ladens may have been on domestic flights as early as the 13th. The authority who granted permission for their departure was Michael Moore’s favorite Bush critic, Richard Clarke. Mr. Clarke is on record as declaring; “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again… It didn’t get any higher than me . . . On 9/11, 9/12 and 9/13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.” (The Hill)

On NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday (7/24/04) Clarke stated flat out: “I think Moore’s making a mountain of a molehill.” Moreover, said Mr. Clarke, “He never interviewed me.” Moore had once again lifted a clip from an ABC interview rather than risk getting answers that did not comport with his paranoid thesis. For purposes of smearing the president innuendo worked better than the truth.

The lie about the favoritism shown the bin Laden’s is a central pillar of Moore’s confused Fahrenheit thesis. Here’s what the 9/11 Commission Report had to say on this subject:

“First we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001. To the contrary, every flight we have identified occurred after national airspace reopened.

“Second, we found no evidence of any political intervention. [Here there is a discussion of Richard Clarke's consultations with the FBI before making his decision.]

“Third, we believe that the FBI conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States on charter flights. [Here there is a discussion of that screening process.] The FBI interviewed all persons of interest on these flights prior to their departures. They concluded that none of the passengers was connected to the 9/11 attacks and have since found no evidence to change that conclusion.”

So, Michael Moore is just smearing our president so he can sell more tickets; rather than doing any honest investigating and reporting he scrapes up some former FBI guy who was totally out of the loop to offer his uninformed personal opinion. Moore’s witless followers can only bob their empty heads in agreement.

Now compare the truth of the 9/11 Commission Report with the lying jabber of Michael Moore:

“[W]hile thousands were stranded and could not fly, if you could prove you were a close relative of the biggest mass-murderer in U.S. history, you get a free trip to gay Paree!” and “A frightened nation struggled to get through those days after September 11. Yet, in the sky above us, the bin Ladens and Saudi royals jetted home. I think we deserve an explanation.” (Dude, Where’s My Country?)

Later, Moore would embellish this fantasy: “Bush said: No you’re not to interrogate any of the bin Ladens. They get a free pass out of the country. 280 million Americans, and the only people who flew on those three days were people named bin Laden.” (Playboy 2/02) This is slander, plain and simple.

Reviewers Who Fell For the Deceptions:

From About.com:

Arab businessmen, including many Bin Laden family members, were flown out of the country shortly after the attacks–while every other flight was still grounded. What are the implications?

From Craig J. Koban at Craigerscinemacorner.com:

The catalogue of offences that Moore emphasizes in the film are almost too numerous to mention. Here are some of the more frustration-inducing tidbits: [...]

4. Right after September 11, when seemingly no flights in North America are granted lift-off (even ones including former President George H. Bush, Dubya’s dad) the White House helped expedite flights of Bin Laden family members back to their home country, no questions asked.

From Aaron West at aaronfilms.tripod.com:

The most eye-opening, and likely the most controversial piece has to do with the Bush family’s connection to the Saudi Arabian oil tycoons. The controversy begins with the accusation that in the days following 9/11, when all airline flights across the country were grounded, hundreds of Saudi nationals were flown back to their country, including several members of the Bin Laden family.

From Reeling Reviews:

A Republican with well seeded connections stole a presidency. The Bush family and their close circle have close ties to the Saudis and oil interests. George W. Bush was a lousy businessman before becoming president. The Bin Laden family was rushed out of the country after 9/11. [...] All of these things should be known by now to the American public, but filmmaker Michael Moore presents them with a magician’s flourish in his anti-Bush screed, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

From Attack the System:

Moore provides heavy documentation of the long-standing personal and commercial relationships between the Bush and bin Laden families. The evacuation of members of the bin Laden family and other Saudi elites from the US immediately after 9-11, when all commerical air flights had been grounded, is also discussed.

From Barbara DeGrande at Suite 101:

On August 6, 2001, it was reported that Osama Bin Laden planned to attack the United States, yet Bush did nothing to prevent the attacks. Indeed, after the attacks, when the country was shut down with no airplane flights, somehow eight planes filled with Saudis and Bin Ladens were allowed to leave the country, without investigation and without consequence.

Leftist radio ad which was probably influenced by Moore’s movie:

Media Fund Radio Ad:
“Flight Home”

Announcer: After nearly 3,000 Americans were killed, while our nation was mourning the dead and the wounded, the Saudi royal family was making a special request of the Bush White House. As a result, nearly two dozen of Osama bin Laden’s family members were rounded up…

Not to be arrested or detained, but to be taken to an airport, where a chartered jet was waiting…to return them to their country. They could have helped us find Osama bin Laden. Instead the Bush White House had Osama’s family flown home, on a private jet, in the dead of night, when most other air traffic was grounded.

We don’t know whether Osama’s family members would have told us where bin Laden was hiding. But thanks to the Bush White House…we’ll never find out.

Articles:

From The Hill:

Clarke claims responsibility

Ex-counterterrorism czar approved post-9-11 flights for bin Laden family

Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush’s chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.”

Most of the 26 passengers aboard one flight, which departed from the United States on Sept. 20, 2001, were relatives of Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence officials blamed for the attacks almost immediately after they happened.

Clarke’s claim of responsibility is likely to put an end to a brewing political controversy on Capitol Hill over who approved the controversial flights of members of the Saudi elite at a time when the administration was preparing to detain dozens of Muslim-Americans and people with Muslim backgrounds as material witnesses to the attacks.

Several Democrats say that at a closed-door meeting May 6, they pressed members of the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11 to find out who approved the flights.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who attended the meeting, said she asked former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a Republican, “Who authorized the flight[s] and why?”

“They said it’s been a part of their inquiry and they haven’t received satisfactory answers yet and they were pushing,” Boxer added.

Another Democrat who attended the meeting confirmed Boxer’s account and reported that Hamilton said: “We don’t know who authorized it. We’ve asked that question 50 times.”

Referring to questions about who authorized the flights, former Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), one of the 10 members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, said in an interview Monday: “In my mind, this isn’t resolved right now. We need more clarity and information from the relevant political sources and FBI sources.”

But Clarke yesterday appeared to put an end to the mystery.

“It didn’t get any higher than me,” he said. “On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.”

Clarke’s explanation fit with a new stance Hamilton has taken on the issue of the Saudi flights.

Hamilton said in an interview Friday that when he told Democratic senators that the commission did not know who authorized the Saudi flights, he was not fully informed.

“They asked the question ‘Who authorized the flight?’ and I said I did not know and I’d try to find out,” Hamilton said. “I learned subsequently from talking to the staff that we thought Clarke authorized the flight and it did not go higher.”

“I did not at any point say the White House was stalling,” Hamilton added. “They asked me who authorized it, and I said we didn’t know.”

Hamilton said, however, that “we asked the question of who authorized the flight many times to many people.”

“The FBI cleared the names [of the passengers on the flights] and Clarke’s CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] team cleared the departure,” Hamilton said.

He cautioned that this is “a story that could shift, and we still have this under review.”

This new account of the events seemed to contradict Clarke’s sworn testimony before the Sept. 11 commission at the end of March about who approved the flights.

“The request came to me, and I refused to approve it,” Clarke testified. “I suggested that it be routed to the FBI and that the FBI look at the names of the individuals who were going to be on the passenger manifest and that they approve it or not. I spoke with the — at the time — No. 2 person in the FBI, Dale Watson, and asked him to deal with this issue. The FBI then approved … the flight.”

“That’s a little different than saying, ‘I claim sole responsibility for it now,’” Roemer said yesterday.

However, the FBI has denied approving the flight.

FBI spokeswoman Donna Spiser said, “We haven’t had anything to do with arranging and clearing the flights.”

“We did know who was on the flights and interviewed anyone we thought we needed to,” she said. “We didn’t interview 100 percent of the [passengers on the] flight. We didn’t think anyone on the flight was of investigative interest.”

When Roemer asked Clarke during the commission’s March hearing, “Who gave the final approval, then, to say, ‘Yes, you’re clear to go, it’s all right with the United States government,’” Clarke seemed to suggest it came from the White House.

“I believe after the FBI came back and said it was all right with them, we ran it through the decision process for all these decisions that we were making in those hours, which was the interagency Crisis Management Group on the video conference,” Clarke testified. “I was making or coordinating a lot of the decisions on 9-11 in the days immediately after. And I would love to be able to tell you who did it, who brought this proposal to me, but I don’t know. The two — since you press me, the two possibilities that are most likely are either the Department of State or the White House chief of staff’s office.”

Instead of putting the issue to rest, Clarke’s testimony fueled speculation among Democrats that someone higher up in the administration, perhaps White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, approved the flights.

“It couldn’t have come from Clarke. It should have come from someone further up the chain,” said a Democratic Senate aide who watched Clarke’s testimony.

Clarke’s testimony did not settle the issue for Roemer, either.

“It doesn’t seem that Richard Clarke had enough information to clear it,” Roemer said Monday.

“I just don’t think that the questions are resolved, and we need to dig deeper,” Roemer added. “Clarke sure didn’t seem to say that he was the final decisionmaker. I believe we need to continue to look for some more answers.”

Roemer said there are important policy issues to address, such as the need to develop a flight-departure control system.

Several Democrats on and off the Hill say that bin Laden’s family should have been detained as material witnesses to the attacks. They note that after the attacks, the Bush administration lowered the threshold for detaining potential witnesses. The Department of Justice is estimated to have detained more than 50 material witnesses since Sept. 11.

Clarke said yesterday that the furor over the flights of Saudi citizens is much ado about nothing.

“This is a tempest in a teapot,” he said, adding that, since the attacks, the FBI has never said that any of the passengers aboard the flight shouldn’t have been allowed to leave or were wanted for further investigation.

He said that many members of the bin Laden family had been subjects of FBI surveillance for years before the attacks and were well-known to law-enforcement officials.

“It’s very funny that people on the Hill are now trying to second-guess the FBI investigation.”

The Sept. 11 commission released a statement last month declaring that six chartered flights that evacuated close to 140 Saudi citizens were handled properly by the Bush administration.

===============================

:: E X I T L I N K S ::

My Full Collection of F9/11 Deceptions Will Be Stored Here

The Best F9/11 Debunkings can be found at:

Dave Kopel’s “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11″

“War, Lies, and Videotape: A Viewer’s Guide to Fahrenheit 9/11″ from The Ethics and Public Policy Center

Moore Watch

Trailer for FahrenHYPE 9/11, a documentary that debunks F9/11

Michelle Obama, Bernardine Dohrn, and Sidley & Austin:

From National Review’s The Corner:

A quick follow-up to Andy McCarthy’s intriguing and provocative essay exploring when and how Barack Obama and Bill Ayers really first met:

Michelle Obama joined Sidley & Austin as an associate in the fall of 1988. She had previously been a summer associate at Sidley & Austin—evidently in the summer of 1987.

According to Wikipedia, Bernardine Dohrn worked for Sidley & Austin from 1984 to 1988, while she unsuccessfully sought admission to the New York and Illinois bars. (According to Sidley’s managing partner, Dohrn didn’t get admitted to the bar because “She wouldn’t say she’s sorry” for her acts of domestic terrorism.) It appears that Dohrn first worked in Sidley’s New York office, and then in its Chicago office.

Did Michelle Obama and Bernardine Dohrn work together? Did they know each other at Sidley? When and how did they come to know each other?

I don’t mean to suggest by these questions that there’s any reason to conclude that Barack Obama and Bill Ayers met through their wives. As Andy suggests, it’s quite possible that they met earlier in New York. Another alternative, as Steve Diamond speculates, is that Obama and Ayers may have worked together during a battle over reform of Chicago’s public schools in 1987 and 1988 (before Barack met Michelle).

Obama and Ayers helped fund Khalidi’s organization that rejects ‘racist’ Israel’s existence:

From WorldNetDaily:

The board of a nonprofit organization on which Sen. Barack Obama served as a paid director alongside a confessed domestic terrorist granted funding to a controversial Arab group that mourns the establishment of Israel as a “catastrophe” and supports intense immigration reform, including providing drivers licenses and education to illegal aliens.

The co-founder of the Arab group in question, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, also has held a fundraiser for Obama. Khalidi is a harsh critic of Israel, has made statements supportive of Palestinian terror and reportedly has worked on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group.

In 2001, the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that describes itself as a group helping the disadvantaged, provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, for which Khalidi’s wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the AAAN for $35,000 in 2002.

Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund’s website. According to tax filings, Obama received compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2000.

Obama served on the Wood’s Fund board alongside William C. Ayers, a member of the Weathermen terrorist group which sought to overthrow of the U.S. government and took responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971. [...]

The $40,000 grant from Obama’s Woods Fund to the AAAN constituted about a fifth of the Arab group’s reported grants for 2001, according to tax filings obtained by WND. The $35,000 Woods Fund grant in 2002 also constituted about one-fifth of AAAN’s reported grants for that year. [...]

AAAN co-founder Rashid Khalidi was reportedly a director of the official PLO press agency WAFA in Beirut from 1976 to 1982, while the PLO committed scores of anti-Western attacks and was labeled by the U.S. as a terror group. Khalidi’s wife, AAAN President Mona Khalidi, was reportedly WAFA’s English translator during that period.

Rashid Khalidi at times has denied working directly for the PLO but Palestinian diplomatic sources in Ramallah told WND he indeed worked on behalf of WAFA. Khalidi also advised the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991.

During documented speeches and public events, Khalidi has called Israel an “apartheid system in creation” and a destructive “racist” state.

He has multiple times expressed support for Palestinian terror, calling suicide bombings response to “Israeli aggression.” He dedicated his 1986 book, “Under Siege,” to “those who gave their lives … in defense of the cause of Palestine and independence of Lebanon.” Critics assailed the book as excusing Palestinian terrorism.

Obama endorsed Ayers’ 1997 book “A Kind and Just Parent”:

From National Review Online:

And then Axelrod gave us still more lies: “There’s no evidence that Obama in any way subscribed to any of Ayers’ views.”

Oh yeah? Well, Mr. Axelrod, how do you explain Obama’s breathless endorsement of Ayers’s 1997 Leftist polemic on the criminal-justice system, A Kind and Just Parent? As Stanley Kurtz has recounted, Ayers’s book is a radical indictment of American society: We, not the criminals, are responsible for the violent crime that plagues our cities; even the most vicious juvenile offenders should not be tried as adults; prisons should eventually be replaced by home detention; American justice is comparable to South Africa under Apartheid. Obama’s reaction? He described the book as “a searing and timely account” — a take even the Times concedes was a “rave review.”

Go here for the rest of Obama’s quick review

Ayers Book Mentions Obama by Name:

From FoxNews.com:

Barack Obama, who has consistently downplayed his relationship with William Ayers during his presidential campaign, once gave a glowing endorsement of a book by the former domestic terrorist and was mentioned by name in the book itself.

A blogger unearthed the Dec. 21, 1997, endorsement in the Chicago Tribune and posted photographs of the praise for Ayers’ book on Zombietime.com Saturday.

Featured next to a smiling photograph of himself, then-State Senator Obama called Ayers’ book, “A Kind and Just Parent: Children of the Juvenile Court,” a “searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”

The book, which details life at the Chicago Juvenile Court prison school, mentions Obama by name on page 82 when it describes Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood:

“Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of ‘safe neighborhood watch’: the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has an eye on things twenty-four-hours a day.“

Khalidi/Ayers Book Connections:

From National Review Online’s The Corner:

In the acknowledgments of Ayers’ 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent (the book Obama publically endorsed in the Chicago Tribune), he thanks Rashid Khalidi’s wife, Mona Khalidi, calling her a “co-parent:”

Thanks to friends and family who provided models and standards and shared struggles of parenting:…Mona Khalidi, sister, friend, and co-parent today….

Thanks to…Mona Khalidi…for careful critical comments.

And in the acknowledgments of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi begins like this:

There are many people without whose support and assistance I could not have written this book or written it the way that it was written. First, chronologically and in other ways, comes Bill Ayers. He persuaded me a little over a year ago that I should write this book, and he put me in touch with my editor, Helene Atwan, who has done all that I imagined a good editor could do and more. Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do some of the writing for the project….

Bernardine Dohrn continually encouraged me to keep working on the book when I was traveling and at home….

Obviously, the Khalidi and Ayers-Dohrn families were very close, intellectually, personally, and politically. Both Ayers-Dorhn and the Khalidis gave separate campaign events for Obama. Khalidi did exchange ideas with Obama, and it’s hard to believe that Khalidi’s political backing of Obama and exchanges with Obama on the Middle East weren’t thoroughly discussed with Ayers, whom Khalidi would surely have known had a history with Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and on the juvenile crime battle.

Ayers’ 1998 edited book, Teaching for Social Justice, features a contribution by Rashid Khalidi (pp.186-187). Here are some excerpts from Khalidi’s piece:

Much of what I do involves teaching for justice, because the very terms I teach about are subversive of so many categories of public knowledge. This is because teaching about the modern Middle East in the United States means confronting a great deal of resistance, notably where the subject of Palestine is concerned….

Beyond generalized prejudices and often not-so-veiled racism against Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners, the main problem comes when I have to confront firmly held and profoundly wrong ideas, particularly one which are widespread in our culture….

Things get harder when such misunderstandings, which at times are honest and innocent, are combined with the “idiot wind” which blows whenever government policy is discussed, and the lemmings in the media and the inside-the-beltway chorus echo whatever those in power are saying. It is nevertheless vitally important to try to talk sense about such things, whether about the Gulf war back in 1991, or about the “peace process” today, which has so far given us a lot of process and very little peace.”

[...]

It’s also of interest that in the back of Teaching for Social Justice Ayers includes a list of books he believes can serve as “resources for teaching for change.” Among those books is Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

Khalidi, the PLO, and Salah Khalaf:

From Power Line:

Among the Hyde Park friends of Barack Obama was former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi was on the faculty of the University of Chicago, at whose law school Obama was a lecturer. Their children attended the same school. The Khalidis and the Obamas became friends and dinner companions.

As Paul notes below, when Khalidi moved from the University of Chicago to Columbia, Obama attended the dinner honoring Khalidi. Obama saluted Khalidi for “offer[ing] constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” What a guy.

Last night FOX News reported that Khalidi wrote an obituary for Salah Khalaf (also known as Abu Iyad) when he died in 1991. According to the FOX News report, Khalidi praised Khalaf and said he would be “sorely missed by the Palestinian people to whom he devoted his life.”

Khalaf held many PLO posts. In Inside the PLO Neil Livingstone and David Halevy report that Khalaf was the PLO’s spymaster, the leader of its security and covert apparatus and the principal link to so-called rejection front elements like Abu Nidal. He directly oversaw the PLO’s internal security including Force 17, the Special Operations Group and the Intelligence and Security Apparatus.

Khalaf was also the commander in chief of the terrorist Black September organization. Black September was a PLO front group that answered directly to Yasser Arafat. It is of course best known for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

Among its other operations was the 1973 seizure of the Saudi embassy in Khartoum. During the operation the American ambassador to Sudan (Cleo Noel) and his deputy chief of misson (George Curtis Moore) were both brutally murdered on Arafat’s orders along with the Belgian diplomat Guy Eid. Khalaf was involved in the planning of the operation and directed the seizure of the embassy. (I tell the story of the operation in “How Arafat got away with murder.”)

Before they murdered Noel, Moore and Eid, the Black September terrorists demanded the release of Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan. Obama’s friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were also big fans of Sirhan Sirhan. FOX News reported this week that Ayers and Dohrn dedicated their 1974 book Prairie Fire to “political prisoners” including Sirhan Sirhan…

Obama, Ayers, and the Woods Fund:

From American Thinker:

Barack Obama served on the board of directors of Woods Fund of Chicago from 1993 to 2001. During that time, the tax exempt foundation made some interesting grants, including one to Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ, headed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the time. Grants were also made to ACORN, a left wing voter registration group and to a partnership for constructing low income housing. The fund also used Northern Trust for financial services, which is the same company that provided Obama his 2005 mortgage.

In 2001 the board of directors included Obama, William Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical terrorist, and serving as chairman was Howard J. Stanback who headed New Kenwood LLC, a limited liability company founded by now-convicted felon Tony Rezko and Allison Davis, Obama’s former boss at the law firm of Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland.

Obama, Ayers, and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge:

From Hugh Hewitt:

SK: Well, Hugh, I think they had a genuine political partnership. As far as we know for certain, it began in about early 1995 when Barack Obama became the chairman of the board of a small education foundation, not too small, because it had ultimately more than $100 million dollars to dispense. But Barack Obama became chairman of the board of something called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation that was essentially founded by Bill Ayers. Now this foundation had two operating bodies, the board, which Obama chaired, and something called the collaborative, which Bill Ayers chaired. And so the two were effectively working together at this foundation, and what’s more, the foundation was giving a lot of money to Bill Ayers’ personal education projects, and the projects of his allies. And as, since the board was in charge of giving out that money, Obama effectively was funding Bill Ayers’ very radical education projects for years on end.

Obama and Ayers at Panel Discussion:

From WorldNetDaily:

Michelle Obama in 1997 organized a university event in which she invited her husband, Sen. Barack Obama, and former Weathermen radical Bill Ayers to serve on a panel discussion about whether child murderers should be tried as adults.

Both Barack Obama and Ayers served on the side that opposed treating offending minors as adults.

Obamas and Khalidis: Frequent Dinner Guests and Babysitters:

From Family Security Matters via Campus Watch:

Rashid and Mona Khalidi became close friends of Barack and Michelle Obama during the time when both Barack and Rashid taught at the University of Chicago (1992-2003). At a lavish farewell party for Khalidi in Chicago in 2003, when Khalidi left his prestigious position at the University of Chicago for an even more prestigious one at Columbia University in New York, Obama gave Khalidi a glowing eulogy. He said that he and his wife Michelle had been frequent dinner guests of the Khalidis, and that the Khalidis had frequently babysat for the Obama children. According to a Los Angeles Times account based on a video of Obama’s speech, he added that “his many talks with the Khalidis, . . .had been ‘consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation-a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,’ but around ‘this entire world.’” [...]

Rashid and Mona Khalidi anticipated Obama’s generosity to AAAN by holding a fundraiser in their house for Obama’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 2000. It would seem that it later proved to be a profitable event for the Khalidis.

Ayers held a Meet-and-Greet for Obama in 1995 at his home:

From National Review Online:

You might think the Times would be more curious. After all, the Democrats’ presidential nominee has already lied to the Gray Lady about the origins of his relationship with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Back in May, in a cheery profile of Obama’s early Chicago days, the Times claimed (emphasis is mine):

Mr. Obama also fit in at Hyde Park’s fringes, among university faculty members like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant members of the radical Weather Underground that bombed the United States Capitol and the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Mr. Obama was introduced to the couple in 1995 at a meet-and-greet they held for him at their home, aides said.

Now look, anyone who gave five seconds of thought to that passage smelled a rat. Ayers and Dohrn are passionate radical activists who lived as fugitives for a decade. There’s no way they held a political coming-out party for someone who was unknown to them. Obviously, they already knew him well enough by then to feel very comfortable. They might have been sympathetic to a relative stranger, but sponsoring such a gathering in one’s living room is a strong endorsement.

And now, even the Times now knows it’s been had. In this past weekend’s transparent whitewashing of the Obama/Ayers tie, the paper claimed that the pair first met earlier in 1995, “at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper[.]” That storyline is preposterous too, but it is also a marked revision of the paper’s prior account (which, naturally, reporter Scott Shane fails to mention).

Obama, Ayers, Khalidi, and the LA Times Won’t Release the Khalidi Tape:

From National Review Online:

Obama, Ayers, and PLO supporters toast Edward Said’s successor, but the press doesn’t think it’s quite as newsworthy as Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor … who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.

Now let’s say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.

Question: Is there any chance — any chance – the Times would not release the tape and publish front-page story after story about the gory details, with the usual accompanying chorus of sanctimony from the oped commentariat? Is there any chance, if the Times was the least bit reluctant about publishing (remember, we’re pretending here), that the rest of the mainstream media (y’know, the guys who drove Trent Lott out of his leadership position over a birthday-party toast) would not be screaming for the release of the tape?

Do we really have to ask?

So now, let’s leave thought experiments and return to reality: Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?

At the time Khalidi, a PLO adviser turned University of Chicago professor, was headed east to Columbia. There he would take over the University’s Middle East-studies program (which he has since maintained as a bubbling cauldron of anti-Semitism) and assume the professorship endowed in honor of Edward Sayyid, another notorious terror apologist.

The party featured encomiums by many of Khalidi’s allies, colleagues, and friends, including Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, and Bill Ayers, the terrorist turned education professor. It was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which had been founded by Khalidi and his wife, Mona, formerly a top English translator for Arafat’s press agency.

Is there just a teeny-weenie chance that this was an evening of Israel-bashing Obama would find very difficult to explain? Could it be that the Times, a pillar of the Obamedia, is covering for its guy?

Gateway Pundit reports that the Times has the videotape but is suppressing it.

Michelle Obama attended a party celebrating the marriage of Khalidi’s Daughter:

From the L.A. Times:

It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.” [...]

And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama’s speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi’s 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”

One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.” [...]

Still, many of Khalidi’s opinions are troubling to pro-Israel activists, such as his defense of Palestinians’ right to resist Israeli occupation and his critique of U.S. policy as biased toward Israel.

While teaching at the University of Chicago, Khalidi and his wife lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the Obamas. The families became friends and dinner companions.

In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama’s unsuccessful congressional bid. The next year, a social service group whose board was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from a local charity, the Woods Fund of Chicago, when Obama served on the fund’s board of directors.

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years, Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the marriage of the Khalidis’ daughter.

Son of Ayers and Son of Khalidi are Co-authors:

From WorldNetDaily:

…Patel has a much deeper relationship with Ayers than he admitted in the NPR interview.

In 2005, he co-authored a book with Ayers’ adopted son, Chesa Boudin.

The book, “Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out,” was co-written by several young radicals, including Ismail Khalidi, the son of Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi.

WND was first to report on Obama’s close relationship with Khalidi, who has been tied to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and who has described Israel as a “racist” state with an “apartheid” system.

The preface of Patel’s 2005 book, meanwhile, was written by Ayers’ wife, Weather Underground co-founder Bernardine Dohrn.

Dohrn describes the book as “a clarion call of hope, defiance, critical analysis, humor, irony, and self-conscious insistence that the queer, the Palestinian, the immigrant, the privileged, the children of prisoners and hip-hopsters have arrived.”

The back cover of the book boasts an endorsement from Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop-killer and former member of the Black Panther Party.

On the acknowledgments page, Patel and co-authors thank Ayers himself for “guidance” and “encouragement.”

Ayers influencing Obama?

From The Real Barack Obama:

We begin with the discovery by Danette Clark, an RBO contributor, that Eboo Patel (on right), a former White House religious advisor to Barack Obama, stayed as a guest in residence during the 2004-2005 school year in the same hall as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Clark continues:

If that’s not enough to convince you that this faith-based appointee and Bill Ayers knew each other personally, consider this — Eboo Patel also co-authored a book in 2005 with Bill Ayers’ adopted son, Chesa Boudin.

The book, Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, was authored by several young radicals including Ismail Khalidi, the son of Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University professor with ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization who has described Israel as a “racist” state with an “apartheid” system. [...]

Clark writes: Patel isn’t the first White House appointee revealed to have close ties to Bill Ayers and I’m positive he won’t be the last. As Donald Trump and others continue to speculate as to whether Ayers actually wrote Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, dare I speculate as to who has really been helping to make White House appointments?

Ayers and Obama: Same Polling Location:

From the New Yorker:

Early this morning, the Obama family voted at the Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School, in Hyde Park. Long after they had gone, the lawn in front of the school was filled with reporters, mostly Europeans, filming voters. While I was talking to an eight-year-old kid dressed as George Washington, my colleague Peter Slevin, of the Washington Post was across the street, knocking on the door of someone else who had voted at the Shoesmith School this morning: William Ayers. [...]

As the polling day drew into the late afternoon, the level of security in Hyde Park matched the level of anticipation. Obama’s house, four blocks away, was surrounded.

Ayers said he felt “a lot of sympathy” for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “who was treated grotesquely and unfairly” by the media. He said that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in his time, far more radical than Wright: “Wright’s a wimp compared to Martin Luther King—he had a fiercer tone.” Ayers was referring to the speeches King gave late in his life in opposition to the Vietnam War and on the subject of economic equality. “Martin Luther King was not a saint,” Ayers said. “He was an angry pilgrim.” Ayers said that he had commiserated recently with yet another former Hyde Park neighbor (and fellow Little League coach), the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University, who has also been a punching bag of the right wing in recent weeks.

Across the street, neighborhood kids chanted “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” and “Yes we can!” for the cameras. Ayers smiled, looking a little like a more boomer Fred MacMurray in an episode of “My Three Sons.”

Transcription:

Michael Moore: As the attack took place, Mr. Bush was on his way to an elementary school in Florida. When informed of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, where terrorists had struck just eight years prior, Mr. Bush decided to go ahead with his photo opportunity.

Teacher: Good morning, boys and girls.

Students: Good morning.

Teacher: Read this word the fast way. Get ready.

Students: “Mad”!

Teacher: Yes, “mad.” Get ready.

Students: “Calf”!

George Bush: Yeah!

Teacher: Okay, get ready to read the words on this page without making a mistake.

Michael Moore: When the second plane hit the tower, his chief of staff entered the classroom and told Mr. Bush, “The nation is under attack.” Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read My Pet Goat with the children.

9:05 AM

9:07 AM

Michael Moore: Nearly seven minutes passed with nobody doing anything.

9:11 AM

9:12 AM

Michael Moore: As Bush sat in that Florida classroom, was he wondering if maybe he should have shown up to work more often? Should he have held at least one meeting since taking office to discuss the threat of terrorism with his head of counterterrorism? Or maybe Mr. Bush wondered why he had cut terrorism funding from the FBI. Or perhaps he just should have read the security briefing that was given to him on August 6th, 2001, which said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes. But maybe he wasn’t worried about the terrorist threat, because the title of the report was too vague.

Condoleeza Rice, National Security Advisor: I believe the title was, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”

Michael Moore: A report like that might make some men jump but, as in days past, George W. just went fishing.

As the minutes went by, George Bush continued to sit in the classroom. Was he thinking, “I’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Which one of them screwed me? Was it the guy my daddy’s friends delivered a lot of weapons to?

1983: Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein

Michael Moore: Was it that group of religious fundamentalists who visited my state when I was governor? Or was it the Saudis? Damn, it was them. I think I better blame it on this guy.

Deceptions:

From the Ethics and Public Policy Center:

“Moore then tells us that Bush was told of the attacks as he was starting an event with schoolchildren in Florida, and that he stayed in the classroom after being told of the second plane striking the World Trade Center. He does not explicitly criticize Bush for doing this, but he certainly wants to leave us with the impression that a more serious person would have gotten up and run out of the room. Moore says, “Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read My Pet Goat with the children.” He does not tell us what Bush should have done, and he does not tell us, for instance, that “Gwendolyn Tose’-Rigell, the principal of Emma E. Booker Elementary School [where Bush was], praised Bush’s action: ‘I don’t think anyone could have handled it better.… What would it have served if he had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?’… She said the video doesn’t convey all that was going on in the classroom, but Bush’s presence had a calming effect and ‘helped us get through a very difficult day’” (http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/florida/article/0,2071,NPDN_14910_2985640,00.html). The Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission—Lee Hamilton, a Democrat—also praised Bush for what he did that morning, saying, “Bush made the right decision in remaining calm, in not rushing out of the classroom” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,124079,00.html).

Moore then speculates on what Bush must have been thinking at the school, suggesting maybe Bush wished he had “shown up to work more often” (a rehashing of the misrepresentation of Bush’s “vacations”) and implying that the administration had paid no attention to terrorism in the preceding months—a charge shown to be thoroughly false by the 9/11 Commission Report (see http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, pp. 203-209, a section which ends by suggesting that Bush was prepared to invade Afghanistan to get Bin Laden even had there not been an attack on September 11th).

“Or maybe Bush was wondering why he had cut terrorism funding from the FBI,” Moore says. But as the 9/11 Commission Report also shows, the Bush Administration actually increased funding for counterterrorism in the FBI in its first year in office (before September 11th). Indeed they asked Congress for, and received, “the largest proposed percentage increase in the FBI’s counterterrorism program since fiscal year 1997” (http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, p. 209). These amounts, of course, only increased further after the September 11th attacks.

But Moore is undaunted by these facts, and continues reading the President’s mind. “Or perhaps,” Moore says, “he should’ve just read the security briefing that was given to him on August 6, 2001, which said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes.” Moore offers no evidence to suggest that Bush did not read this briefing, and in fact it is clear from the 9/11 Commission Report (http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, page 260) that the president did read it. The briefing was not nearly as clear or unequivocal as Moore suggests, however. It was a historical survey of Bin Laden’s activities and of various past threats which had not materialized, and it said:

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists. Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. (http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, pp. 261-2)

The briefing also assured the president that “approximately 70 full field investigations” from the FBI were looking into these matters. The commission found that the briefing was too generous in describing these investigations (http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, p. 535), but not that the president’s reaction to the briefing was insufficient.

Moore then says “A report like that might make some men jump. But, as in days past, George W just went fishing.” Actually, as the 9/11 Commission Report makes clear, the Bush Administration had already been at work on plans to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda, including a plan first circulated on June 7, 2001, whose goal, says the report,

was to “eliminate the al Qida network of terrorist groups as a threat to the United States and to friendly governments.” It called for a multiyear effort involving diplomacy, covert action, economic measures, law enforcement, public diplomacy, and if necessary military efforts. The State Department was to work with other governments to end all al Qaeda sanctuaries, and also to work with the Treasury Department to disrupt terrorist financing. The CIA was to develop an expanded covert action program including significant additional funding and aid to anti-Taliban groups. The draft also tasked OMB with ensuring that sufficient funds to support this program were found in U.S. budgets from fiscal years 2002 to 2006. (http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf , pp. 204-5)

Still reading Bush’s mind at the Florida school, Moore says, “As the minutes went by, George Bush continued to sit in the classroom, was he thinking, ‘I’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Which one of them screwed me? Was it the guy my Daddy’s friends delivered a lot of weapons to? [Footage of Donald Rumsfeld meeting Saddam Hussein in 1984, as part of the Reagan Administration’s effort to weaken the Iranian mullahs.] Was it that group of religious fundamentalists who visited my state when I was governor? [Footage of a Taliban delegation visiting Texas in 1998.] Or was it the Saudis? [Footage of Saudis.] Damn! It was them! I think I better blame it on this guy’ [Footage of Saddam Hussein].” This approach epitomizes Moore’s technique throughout. He shows random unconnected images and suggests that some dark but undescribed conspiracy connects them. He also suggests here that Bush “blamed” Iraq for September 11th, which is not true.”

From Dave Kopel’s Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 911:

Fahrenheit mocks President Bush for continuing to read the book My Pet Goat to a classroom of elementary school children after he was told about the September 11 attacks. Actually, as reported in The New Yorker, the book was Reading Mastery 2, which contains an exercise called “The Pet Goat.” The title of the book is not very important in itself, but the invented title of My Pet Goat makes it easier to ridicule Bush.

What Moore did not tell you:

Gwendolyn Tose’-Rigell, the principal of Emma E. Booker Elementary School, praised Bush’s action: “I don’t think anyone could have handled it better.” “What would it have served if he had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?”…

She said the video doesn’t convey all that was going on in the classroom, but Bush’s presence had a calming effect and “helped us get through a very difficult day.”

“Sarasota principal defends Bush from ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ portrayal,” Associated Press, June 24, 2004. Also, since the President knew he was on camera, it was reasonable to expect that if he had suddenly sped out of the room, his hasty movement would have been replayed incessantly on television; leaving the room quickly might have exacerbated the national mood of panic, even if Bush had excused himself calmly.

Moore does not offer any suggestion about what the President should have done during those seven minutes, rather than staying calm for the sake of the classroom and of the public. Nor does Moore point to any way that the September 11 events might have turned out better in even the slightest way if the President had acted differently. I agree with Lee Hamilton, the Vice-Chair of the September11 Commission and a former Democratic Representative from Indiana: “Bush made the right decision in remaining calm, in not rushing out of the classroom.”

Moreover, as detailed by the Washington Times, Ari Fleischer was in the back of the classroom, holding up a legal pad with the words, “DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET.” The Secret Service may well have been cautious about moving Bush, not only because of hijackings, but also because on the morning of September 11, a Middle Eastern man had tried to gain personal access to the President by falsely claiming that he was a journalist with a scheduled interview, and by asking for a Secret Service agent by name [...]

Deceits 8-10

Castigating the allegedly lazy President, Moore says, “Or perhaps he just should have read the security briefing that was given to him on August 6, 2001 that said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes.”

Moore supplies no evidence for his assertion that President Bush did not read the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief. Moore’s assertion appears to be a complete fabrication.

Moore smirks that perhaps President Bush did not read the Briefing because its title was so vague. Moore then cuts to Condoleezza Rice announcing the title of the Briefing: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Here, Moore seems to be playing off Condoleezza Rice’s testimony of the September 11 Commission that the contents of the memo were vague.

However, no-one (except Moore) has ever claimed that Bush did not read the Briefing, or that he did not read it because the title was vague. Rather, Condoleezza Rice had told the press conference that the information in the Briefing was “very vague.” National Security Advisor Holds Press Briefing, The White House, May 16, 2002.

The content of the Briefing supports Rice’s characterization, and refutes Moore’s assertion that the Briefing “said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes.” The actual Briefing was highly equivocal:

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar’ Abd aI-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

(Some readers have wondered how this short segment qualifies as three deceits: 1. that Bush did not read the memo, 2. that the memo’s title was offered as an excuse for not reading the memo, 3. omitting that the memo was equivocal, and that the hijacking warning was something that the FBI said it was “unable to corroborate.”)

From Moorewatch.com:

Moore’s assertion here is much more than just the seven minutes (actually, is was closer to five) Here is a site with a frame by frame of the video showing a 5 minute timeline: But 7 sound more ominous.

Moore provides a voice over in the film during the roughly 3 ½ minutes of the video shown in the film. In the film , Moore omits several parts of the story and replaces them with this: [...]

Rather than argue over whether it was five minutes or seven minutes, I’d rather look at what Moore actually says in the film:

“When the second plane hit the tower, his Chief of Staff entered the classroom and told Mr. Bush the nation is under attack.”

So far, so good.

“Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read ‘My Pet Goat’ with the children”

Now, Moore is guessing at best here. In Bush’s own words about “not knowing what to do”:

Bush told Larry King:

“Well, I had just been told by (White House Chief of Staff) Andrew Card that America was under attack. And I was collecting my thoughts, I think what’s important is how I reacted when I realized America was under attack. It didn’t take me long to figure out we were at war.”

This contradicts Moore’s assertion that Bush “didn’t know what to do”, but there’s a larger point to be made here. Despite the President taking a few minutes to “collect his thoughts” there were many other things happening at the same time which were not captured by the school room video.

For example:

quote Moore:

“no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety,”

What Moore doesn’t tell you, is that the Secret Service had already dealt with some “strange circumstances” that morning concerning the security of the President.;

From the Longboat observer:

At about 6 a.m. Sept. 11, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan was at the front desk of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort as Bush prepared for his morning jog. From that vantage point, Mooneyhan overheard a strange exchange between a Colony receptionist and security guard.
A van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony stating they had a “poolside” interview with the president, Mooneyhan said. The self-proclaimed reporters then asked for a Secret Service agent by name. Guards from security relayed the request to the receptionist, who had not heard of either the agent or plans for an interview, Mooneyhan said.
The receptionist gave the phone over to a nearby Secret Service agent, who said the same thing — no one knew of an agent by that name or of any poolside interview.
The agent told the occupants of the van to contact the president’s public relations office in Washington, D. C., and turned them away from the premises, Mooneyhan said.
In light of the attacks, Mooneyhan wonders if what he witnessed is related to the events of Sept. 11.
So does the FBI.
“That’s very strange,” said an unnamed agent with the Sarasota field office of the FBI, who directed agents to look into the matter.
Earlier, the FBI questioned a Longboat Key man who also had a strange run-in with a van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent.
At 8:50 a.m. the man stood on the Sarasota bayfront waiting to watch the presidential motorcade pass. A dilapidated van passed him with two men of Middle Eastern descent “screaming out the windows, ‘Down with Bush’ and raising their fists in the air.”
The Longboat Key resident later reported the incident to police, who turned the matter over to FBI agents who questioned him.

The Secret Service was already at a state of unusally heightened alert because of this earlier incident. Given the circumstances,the Secret Service wouldn’t have rushed IN to secure Bush’s safety, rather, given the experiences of the morning, they would have rushed OUTSIDE to secure the area.

Without this part of the story, Moore is able to paint a picture of confusion on Bush’s part, rather than an instance of policy within the Secret Service which the President ( any president, that is) will NEVER discuss. He would simply rather say “I was collecting my thoughts” than explain how his security detail works.

This explaination goes a long way to explain the short time (five minutes) in which Bush remained in his chair.

Let me take a second to interject a few admittedly “nitpicky” items here. I have seen the video, and at no point does Bush appear to “read “ the book. As for the title, Moore got that wrong too. It’s actually Siegfried Engelmann’s story from the book called Reading Mastery page 153 , lesson 60 actually titled The Pet Goat. (It’s not a story book at all, rather, a reading textbook)

Okay, back to the real story. How could Bush possibly know what the Secret Service was doing at the time since he was clearly seated in a chair with his back to the door? Well……..According to the Washington times report, Ari Fleischer was in the room holding a handmade sign with big block letters:

UPDATED** The Washington post link. Hat tip to LD.

The president noticed someone moving at the back of the room. It was White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, maneuvering to catch his attention without alerting the press. Mr. Fleischer was holding up a legal pad. Big block letters were scrawled on the cardboard backing: DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET.

Given these two simple explainations, the secret service’s action and Fleischer’s sign telling Bush to wait, one can easily see how Bush would take the available time to try to collect his thought for a few moments. How long is a few moments? Well, if you’re an average reader, and didn’t click on any of the links, you just spent about 7 minutes and 15 seconds reading this article so far. ( I timed it 3 times and averaged, okay?)

Moore also contends:

“Nearly seven minutes passed with nobody doing anything.”

Apparently “nobody doing nothing” excludes the Secret Service and Ari Fleischer

and..

“As Bush sat in that Florida classroom, was he wondering if maybe he should have shown up to work more often?”

This is what is known in comedy as a “callback”, as in you refer to an earlier joke from your set. Moore is referring to the 42% vacation joke from the beginning of the movie. This exaggeration has been thoroughly debunked to the point that no one defends this number anymore. The whitehouse site provides the President’s schedule during this time and nobody can make the numbers add up to 42% , no matter how hard they try.

also:

“Should he have held at least one meeting since taking office to discuss the threat of terrorism with his head of counter terrorism?”

This is a bit misleading in that Bush’s cabinet did meet with Richard Clarke, who BTW, was the President’s guy for “cyber-terrorism”, he was the terrorism guy under Clinton. In fact, they had a meeting just a few days before 9-11 so, the issue was fresh on the table, not forgotten like Moore contends.

And then this:

“Or maybe Mr. Bush was wondering why he had cut terrorism funding from the FBI.”

actually, the “cuts” I believe Moore is referring to weren’t before 9-11, and they weren’t cuts.

The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million

You see, he actually increased the FBI budget by 531 million, but they requested 1.5 Billion. In some folks book, that’s a cut. ( for an every day average guy, Moore sure is up on all of the Washingtonian-esque slang)

Read the article here, Washington Post
Click that link to get the whole story and note the title.

And finally,

“Or perhaps he just should have read the security briefing that was given to him on August 6, 2001 that said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes. Or maybe he wasn’t worried about the terrorist threat because the title of the report was too vague.””

Let’s look at that breifing:

The title isn’t vauge, it’s simply obvious. Everyone knew BinLaden wanted to strike the U.S. . What information is contained in the breifing is the motivation for the possible highjacking of an airliner by BinLaden, and it sure as hell doesn’t say “TO CRASH IT INTO A BUILDING”!!!! Moore tries to lead the audience into two conclusions,
1) The PDB told Bush that this would happen and 2) Bush is a dummy for not predicting this because he didn’t “understand” the title. He is wrong on both counts. By not providing a look at the document, the viewer is asked to take Moore’s word for what it says. The wise viewer doesn’t take anything that Moore says at face value.

Yes, the US Intel community got caught with its pants down, and Bush did sit in that classroom for five minutes, but Moore paints this picture in a very skewed way. Armed with the facts, I doubt any thinking person would portray the events quite the same way. It’s just a shame that so few people will actully read this. The “seven minutes” issue would otherwise be dead in the water.

From fahrenheit fact:

From the film:

“Or perhaps he just should have read the security briefing that was given to him on August 6, 2001 that said that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America by hijacking airplanes. (shot of Bush at a meeting, date-stamped August 6, 2001) Or maybe he wasn’t worried about the terrorist threat because the title of the report was too vague.”

It turns out that the Bush administration claims that the contents of the memo- not the title- were vague:

“Now, on August 6th, the President received a presidential daily briefing which was not a warning briefing, but an analytic report. This analytic report, which did not have warning information in it of the kind that said, they are talking about an attack against so forth or so on, it was an analytic report that talked about UBL’s methods of operation, talked about what he had done historically, in 1997, in 1998. It mentioned hijacking, but hijacking in the traditional sense, and in a sense, said that the most important and most likely thing was that they would take over an airliner, holding passengers and demand the release of one of their operatives. And the blind sheikh was mentioned by name as — even though he’s not an operative of al Qaeda, but as somebody who might be bargained in this way. I want to reiterate, it was not a warning. There was no specific time, place or method mentioned. What you have seen in the run-up that I’ve talked about is that the FAA was reacting to the same kind of generalized information about a potential hijacking as a method that al Qaeda might employ, but no specific information saying that they were planning such an attack at a particular time.

Moore is correct when he notes that the Aug. 6th memo talks about an impending attack on the United States. At the time, however most evidence suggested an overseas attack, not one in America:

There is one other FAA IC in this period, issued on August 16th, where the FAA issued an IC on disguised weapons. They were concerned about some reports that the terrorists had made breakthroughs in cell phones, key chains and pens as weapons. There are a number of other ICs that were also issued; we don’t think they were germane to this, but I’m sure you can get the full record of all of the ICs that were released from Transportation. I want to reiterate that during this time, the overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas. The State Department, the Defense Department were on very high states of alert. The embassies were — have very clear protocols on how to button up; so does the military. That was done. But at home, while there was much less reporting or chatter at home, people were thinking about the U.S. and the FBI was involved in a number of investigations of potential al Qaeda personnel operating in the United States.”

Remember: that back in August of 2001, hijacking meant holding hostages on a plane and demanding ransom. It didn’t mean crashing a plane into buildings.

From Victor Davis Hanson’s website, by Joey Tartakovsky:

Fahrenheit 9/11 on Terrorism

Watching Michael Moore tackle the issue of the White House’s response to terrorism, you can’t help but feel an upwelling of déjà vu. Fahrenheit 9/11 explains that the Bush administration prior to 9/11 was unconcerned with the threat of terrorism, pointing to President Bush’s lack of meetings with appropriate counter-terrorism officials, and memos about bin Laden being determined to strike in the U.S. Where have we heard this before? That’s right, those were the controversies that arose – and were put to rest – by the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission informed us that before the attacks the Bush terrorism plan was the Clinton terrorism plan. Bush, for instance, retained Clinton’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Richard A. Clarke, a featured personality in Fahrenheit 9/11. In his book, Against All Enemies, Clarke details his policy proposals to combat the threat of al Qaeda. Among them, more funding to the CIA for intelligence-gathering and covert ops, a freer hand for the FBI, better cooperation among intelligence agencies, and the bombing of al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

We must ask how Michael Moore might have reacted to these recommendations. What if Bush suddenly declared in the spring of 2001 that he was approving a substantial increase in funding to the FBI, which would simultaneously enjoy intrusive new latitude in matters of domestic surveillance? What if this were matched by equivalent increases to the CIA for dispatching spies abroad? What if a newly-elected President Bush had declared, out of the blue, that he believed there was lurking in the shadows of the Middle East a radical Islamic mass movement that considered it its divine duty to kill Americans. Not only that, he believed they were at that very moment planning an assault on the American homeland on a scale unprecedented in our history. And as a result, he was ordering a massive bombing campaign on their training camps in war-torn Afghanistan to pre-empt them?

Michael Moore would have howled in outrage. No matter, that era is over now. But suddenly, there comes a new broadside from Moore: through his preoccupation with terrorism, President Bush has foisted a culture of fear on the United States to consolidate his power and silence critics! The idea that an unhinged Bush has – with the aid of John Ashcroft – ushered in a new age of American repression has bobbed among the farther reaches of the left for some time. This movie cinematizes it with an entire section devoted to exposing the “war on terror” as a White House plot to manipulate the minds of millions of Americans. When Moore speaks of censorship stalking the land, he must be referring to the sort that prevents truth-telling movies like Fahrenheit 9/11 from making $103 million in four weeks. It’s no secret that some people have it in for Bush to such a degree that they will stand on both sides of an issue – even one like terrorism – in order to stick it to him.

The only part of Moore’s narration that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the sentence: “Was it that group of religious fundamentalists who visited my state when I was governor?”

From Moorewatch:

In 1997 George W. Bush was indeed Governor of Texas, and Bill Clinton (a Democrat) was President of the United States. Note that Moore does not state that Bush had anything to do with the Taliban meeting, because Bush indeed had nothing to do with it. He only states that Bush was governor at the time (a fact), thereby implying that he had something to do with the meeting (a lie). The Taliban’s entry into the United States was requested by the Unocal corporation and cleared by Clinton’s State Department.

From Phoebus Apollo’s Oracle: A Libertarian View of Fahrenheit 9/11:

Of course, that’s before Sept. 11th, where the film’s fun begins. Bush enters a school as Moore’s narration tells us he got the information about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. What occurs now is not really a criticism of Bush, instead, it’s an indirect criticism of how he reacted to the news. After the second plane hit the second World Trade Center tower, Bush looked on, and we really question what he’s thinking, so Moore uses the moment to offer rhetorical suppositions.

One supposition is that Bush didn’t take the time to read an August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) on the threat of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda in hijacking a plane as a threat of planned terrorism. Moore is one of the first to speculate that the President hadn’t read this briefing. The briefing, which is online and can be read by anyone[2], contains a few points that make it very equivocal:

1. There is nothing about the nature the terrorist attack, other than that Bin Laden may be planning one.

2. Likewise, there is nothing about the location or date of the planned attack.

3. At the bottom it mentions that there may be plans for a plane hijacking. This briefing, however, implies that the plane will be hijacked off-shores and held for the ransom of U.S.-held extremists – reflected by what Condoleeza Rice told the 9/11 commission her impression was – and does not anywhere imply anything about using the planes to attack buildings. This plane hijacking report was something the FBI was “unable to corroborate”, and probably not very useful to the President, or well, anyone, at the time.

4. In notes at the bottom of the PDB it says that there was surveillance of several New York Federal buildings, possibly “other types of attacks”, at one point the briefing suggests explosives. Post-9/11 hindsight lets us know they were on the right track. Thinking pre-9/11 this note is essentially useless, since any rational person would’ve read this PDB and concluded that the 70 FBI investigations were plenty for the time being, and that this should mean a simple “step up” of surveillance.

Moore makes much of the report, as if Bush’s inaction could’ve prevented 9/11, but you can read it for yourself and come to your own conclusion as to what a president, only one month prior to the attacks, would’ve been able to do to supplement what was already being done by the FBI in 70 on-going Bin Laden related investigations. [...]

Either way, as the viewer, I’m left with the stark impression that Bush could’ve given any reaction – he could’ve stormed out, he could’ve sat there longer, he could’ve walked out calmly – all of these scenes would’ve likely made it into Fahrenheit 9/11, with negative connotations tied to it. The reason I’m left with that impression is because Moore doesn’t tell us what the President should be doing, he just uses the moment to bring about a point of criticism.

From Weird Republic:

Michael Moore will falsify even the smallest detail in order to heighten his mockery of George Bush. On the fatal morning of September 11th, 2001 George Bush was at a scheduled photo-op at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School promoting his school-reform program. The cameras were rolling as the President of the United States sat silently as students read aloud passages from a book titled Reading Mastery 2. Among this book’s offerings is a story titled The Pet Goat. Michael Moore knew all of this, and yet he made a point of telling his Fahrenheit audience that George Bush was reading a book titled My Pet Goat because he thought this false detail would make the president look more ridiculous.

Moore does his best to make Mr. Bush appear confused and indecisive by presenting a time-lapse montage of the president continuing to sit with the students after being told by Andy Card that a second jet had struck a building in New York City. Moore knows that his audience cannot erase from memory all that they later learned about the 9/11 attacks; they cannot return to that first moment when this news was new. So the audience, with its vast fund of memories, sits in the dark watching a man who has only just received the first bare-bones report of a jet crash in a far-away city and asks “Why is he just sitting there?” Moore encourages his audience to believe that Mr. Bush is not leaping to his feet because he is an idiot. Moore would never suggest that our president did our nation a favor by not jumping up like a startled rabbit and inclining the nation toward panic. This moment was, after all, a photo opportunity and the visual media were capturing every detail. It had become an opportunity to communicate to the world that the President of the United States would not be taken captive by the mood of panic that the terrorists were striving to create. Power politics before the cameras is pure theater and sometimes there is genius in calm reserve.

In any case, the Secret Service was in no hurry to move the president from his secure position. Word came in that a Middle Eastern man had tried to gain physical access to the president that morning by falsely claiming to be a journalist with a scheduled interview. Off camera, things were happening at a furious pace. The intelligence network was trying to form a comprehensive picture of the attack; all aircraft were being called down out of the sky. In the back of the classroom Ari Fleischer, out of sight of the media, held up a legal pad on which he had written the words “DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET.”

George Bush can be clearly seen in Moore’s lingering close up of the president as he looks up and nods in acknowledgement. Events were unfolding; information was pouring in but there was still no clear picture of the source or extent of the threat; air traffic was going into lockdown and the local first responders were rising to the challenge locally. The president was not about to start making statements that might make matters more confusing. As Lee Hamilton, former Democratic Representative and vice-chairman of the September 11 Commission later observed: “Bush made the right decision in remaining calm, in not rushing out of the classroom.” The principal of the school, who was an eyewitness, told the Associated Press, “I don’t think anyone could have handled it better.”

Michael Moore knew all this before he sat down to patch together his constricted vision of George Bush’s morning at the school, but he chose to conceal this information because he has no respect for his ticket buyers. Moore himself was incapable of offering any suggestions about what the president might have done in those few minutes that would have changed events for the better. Moore is a cunning film editor but a shallow thinker; he cuts and pastes together film montages in the hope that his cinematic trickery will somehow transcend the limits of his intelligence. So far, the mental low-watts on the Left have kept his hope alive.

The New York Times did its best to promote Moore’s efforts to mislead the American public. The Sunday, June 20, 2004 New York Times showcased an article about Fahrenheit 9/11 which included this:

“Besides, it may turn out that the most talked-about moments in the film are the least impeachable. Mr. Moore makes extensive use of obscure footage from the White House and network-news archives, including long scenes that capture President Bush at his least articulate. For the White House, the most devastating segment of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of ‘My Pet Goat’ to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers. Mr. 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.”

This is from the left-leaning newspaper that calls itself “the newspaper of record,” by which they mean the one that historians will refer back to. But this article was written long after the event described and long after the Times should have gathered the facts that I have explained above. And yet, here is the Times presenting to the public exactly the constricted and context-depleted vision of those few minutes that Michael Moore wants to promote. The Times even refers to “a copy of ‘My Pet Goat’” a book that doesn’t exist; it’s a Michael Moore invention; so are the “seven minutes” which were actually five minutes. By relying on Moore for its “facts” the Times has, in effect, made Michael Moore a New York Times reporter of record. Paging Jason Blair!

The Times even included an unflattering picture of the president; my newspaper clipping archive reveals that it’s the same unflattering photo that they used to decorate another article showcasing Fahrenheit 9/11 that ran in the Sunday, May 23rd, 2004 New York Times.

In that article Frank Rich recycled Michael Moore’s context-depleted vision: “Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended close-ups of the president continuing to read ‘My Pet Goat’ to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack.”

Once again, there were no “seven long minutes;” watching a static shot of some guy sitting in a chair can seem longer, much longer, to folks who are sitting in a darkened theater waiting to be entertained. If Frank Rich had paid attention he would have known that at no time did the president read aloud to the children; they read aloud to him. Michael Moore did everything he could to increase the tedium of those minutes so that they would seem like years. People who think that they are getting insightful analyses from the New York Times are deluding themselves.

Reviewers who Fell for the Deceptions:

From Roger Ebert:

Although Moore’s narration ranges from outrage to sarcasm, the most devastating passage in the film speaks for itself. That’s when Bush, who was reading My Pet Goat to a classroom of Florida children, is notified of the second attack on the World Trade Center, and yet lingers with the kids for almost seven minutes before finally leaving the room. His inexplicable paralysis wasn’t underlined in news reports at the time, and only Moore thought to contact the teacher in that schoolroom — who, as it turned out, had made her own video of the visit. The expression on Bush’s face as he sits there is odd indeed.

From James Berardinelli:

Three segments redeem Fahrenheit 9/11, allowing it to claim to be more than just a list of anti-Bush charges. The first is the videotaped footage of Bush in Florida’s Booker Elementary School, reading “My Pet Goat” for seven minutes after the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. His face is a mask of bewilderment and indecision. It’s clear that he has no idea what to do next, and he is waiting for one of his advisors to make a suggestion. It’s not the portrait of a man any sane American would want in command.

From Jonathan F. Richards:

What follows may be the most extraordinary footage in a movie full of arresting images. By the time the presidential caravan rolls into the school, the first plane has struck. Mr. Bush goes ahead in. As he is sitting in the classroom, an aide comes in and whispers in his ear the news of the second plane. The aide leaves. The President sits there, as if waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Nobody does. He picks up a children’s book called My Pet Goat. The minutes tick away. And in voiceover, the director begins to take us on a tour of the ties that bind the fortunes of the Bush family to the House of Saud.

From documentaryfilms.net:

The most celebrated find of this movie is a video of the President shot by an elementary school teacher at a Florida class he was visiting when the twin towers were hit. We see an aide inform Bush of the second plane’s impact. For a full seven minutes (mercifully edited down), the President continues to sit there with odd, distant, puzzled looks on his face while the children read the book My Pet Goat. He seems to be waiting for somebody to tell him what to do. The effect is quietly frightening.

From About.com:

From here, he takes us to the Florida elementary school, where George W. Bush was reading “My Pet Goat” to children and sat for long minutes after being told that the country was under attack, doing nothing.

From ComingSoon.net:

Meanwhile, Bush is in an elementary school classroom reading “My Pet Goat”, something that he continues to do for minutes after he becomes aware of the attacks. This is only part of the silliness that we see from Bush over the course of the movie.

From CNN:

Perhaps the most damaging footage shows Bush on September 11, sitting in a Florida classroom for a full seven minutes after he had been told that the second tower had been struck, and that it was clear the horrific events in New York were a terrorist attack, not a tragic accident. Moore lets this moment go on and on: The president of the United States, stone-faced in front of dozens of schoolchildren, doing absolutely nothing, as our nation comes under attack.

From The Boston Globe:

For my money, the key scene in “Fahrenheit 9/11″ — the moment on which Michael Moore’s blistering yet frustratingly blunt object of a movie hinges – is when President Bush first hears that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center and that the United States is under attack. He was at a photo op in Florida, remember, reading “My Pet Goat” to a schoolroom full of children, and his expression of pole-axed confusion is by now a matter of public iconography.

But Moore got his hands on all the footage, and he time-lapses us through the entire seven minutes that the president sat in that classroom and, knowing terrorists were using passenger planes as missiles on innocent Americans, stared like a stuffed deer into space. We’ve recently learned that this was around the time Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering fighter planes to shoot down the hijacked jets and our government’s emergency-response mechanisms were convulsing with chaos. You look at Bush, whose circuitry seems quite simply to have overloaded, and think, “This is the leader of the free world?”

From Entertainment Weekly:

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s potent and infuriating fight-the-power documentary, the most memorable indictment comes early on. It’s the moment you’ve heard about, but probably never seen, of President George W. Bush sitting in a Florida grade school and reading the book ”My Pet Goat” for a full seven minutes after he’s been told that the second plane has hit the World Trade Center. The power of the footage transcends virtually any issue of left, right, or center. Bush wears a look of pale suppressed horror, yet an executive decision seems beyond him. He’s portrayed as a man who can and will not act, a President — a President! — who greets this most calamitous of events by waiting for others to tell him what to do. On the soundtrack, Moore guilt-trips Bush by speculating, mischievously, as to his thoughts. Moore’s voice is pitiless in its didactic sarcasm, yet he gets at something essential about the inner Dubya. Watching the footage, you don’t doubt that Bush’s anguish was genuine, yet you also can’t help but wonder if it reflected his ultimate slacker nightmare: that the job was now going to be exponentially harder than he’d bargained for.

From AGGRESSVE-VOICE.com:

But these examples of bias and an anti-war agenda are often met with the indefensible, such as the video showing Bush reading My Pet Goat to a classroom of elementary schoolchildren in Florida as nearly 3,000 Americans lay dying in the rubble from the worst terrorist attack our nation has ever suffered. And yet Bush continued to read even after being informed of the second plane strike for nearly seven minuets. The camera lingers on his puzzled face and Moore explains, “with no one there to tell him what to do, he just sat there.” It’s blunt, but no conservative Bush-cheerleader can defend that.

From Spirituality & Practice:

Some of the footage is obviously meant as a corrective to public perceptions. For example, many people hold onto an image of the President leaping into action on the morning of 9/11, launching the war on terrorism that he is now making the centerpiece of his re-election campaign. But Moore includes video of the President sitting in a Florida elementary school classroom where the children are reading “My Pet Goat” for a good seven minutes after being informed by his chief of staff of the attack on the second tower. “What was he thinking,” Moore wonders in a voiceover as the camera closes in on Bush’s glazed eyes. Why isn’t he acting like the commander-in-chief is the question that crosses our minds.

From the LA Times:

Perhaps the most disturbing of all is footage showing the president on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing with a photo op involving a Florida elementary school class reading “My Pet Goat” for nearly seven minutes after having been told that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center.

It’s an unflattering picture of irresolution and even paralysis, one that informs Moore’s thesis — of a president in over his head — and pervades the entire film.

From Jack Newfield at Public Employee Press, NYC’s largest Public Employee Union:

There are many unforgettable scenes in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The most effective, mind-changing sequence in the film is the seven minutes right after Bush is told that terrorists have hit the Twin Towers.

He has just read to Florida second graders from the book “My Pet Goat.” A local TV news crew recorded these first seven minutes of the age of terrorism. Bush does not call the FBI, the CIA or the FAA. He does not find a secure phone or race to the airport. He doesn’t even call Dick Cheney. He does nothing. He is a mummy, a statue, as the world changes and a new era dawns. The president just sits there, like a baffled, catatonic zombie.

Hemmingway defined courage as “grace under pressure.” Bush is displaying its opposite — panic under pressure. Seeing Bush as a befuddled frat boy, unable to act or think for seven crucial minutes, will make voters think twice. These were the minutes when jets should have scrambled, when the FAA and the CIA needed to be linked up. But Bush was a zero instead of a hero.

From MikeGerber.com:

Attacking Iraq in response to 9/11? Cutting taxes in a time of war? Pretending that the world was behind us? Ignoring the PDB? I could go on–we all could. The Bush Administration is either crooked or incompetent, and both mean the same thing: kick the bums out.

From DVDTown.com:

A filmmaker shouldn’t have to be the one to point out that for seven minutes after the second plane hit the World Trade Center and it was clear that this nation was under attack, President Bush, who has since sold himself to the American people as a strong and decisive leader, sat in a classroom looking befuddled and thumbing through “My Pet Goat”—for seven silent minutes. Moore speculates what might have been going on inside Bush’s head: “Was he wondering if maybe he should have shown up for work more often? [Moore reminds us of the documented fact that Bush was on vacation 42 percent of the time during his first eight months in office]. Should he have held at least one meeting since taking office to discuss the threat of terrorism? [It's a matter of record that Bush held no such meetings]. Or maybe Mr. Bush was wondering why he cut terrorism funding from the FBI [a highlighted memo flashes across the screen, showing the cuts]. Or perhaps he should have just read the security briefing on August 6, 2001, which said that Osama Bin Laden was planning to attack inside the United States.”

From Film Freak Central:

Moore begins with a little riff on how W. and Jeb stole the Florida election in 2000, continues with a riff on how the day before the attacks, the Bush administration cut anti-terrorist funding, then proceeds with how the Bush family was in bed with the Saudis [...]

Is Moore wrong about any of this? I don’t think so. But he’s not the originator of it, either, and the way that he presents it actually makes it seem less credible. He’s not a thinker, he’s a muckraker; he’s not so much a filmmaker as someone who compiles video collages with the help of a dedicated–and gifted–crew of people who find damning clips.

From Phil Hinton at AVForums.com:

He follows this up with the footage of Bush sitting reading for school kids when he is told that a second plane has hit the Trade centre in New York, so what does this strong and decisive leader do? Moore asks the questions as bush sits there mesmerised. “Was he wondering if maybe he should have shown up for work more often? Moore refers to the documented fact Bush was on vacation 46% of the time during his first 8 months in office. Or maybe Mr. Bush was wondering why he cut terrorism funding from the FBI, or that he should have read the security briefing from August 6th that Bin Laden was planning to attack?

From Motorbar:

At the time, George Bush was visiting an elementary school in Florida and the film shows his reaction when he was told of the attack on America. Perhaps unfairly, there is a suggestion that Mr Bush chose to take a ‘photo-opportunity’. Maybe he was in shock — the fact that he’d cut terrorism funding from the FBI showed that he could never have contemplated such a tragedy, although a security briefing given to him on August 6, 2001, had warned of a plan by Osama bin Laden to attack America by hijacking airplanes.

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:: E X I T L I N K S ::

My Full Collection of F9/11 Deceptions Will Be Stored Here

The Best F9/11 Debunkings can be found at:

Dave Kopel’s “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11″

“War, Lies, and Videotape: A Viewer’s Guide to Fahrenheit 9/11″ from The Ethics and Public Policy Center

Moore Watch

Trailer for FahrenHYPE 9/11, a documentary that debunks F9/11

Just For Fun, from the Washington Post:

Getting Bush’s Goat
A primer on priorities
By Gene Weingarten

President Bush has been taking some heat for having failed to respond instantly to the 2001 terrorist attacks. The movie “Fahrenheit 9/11″ points out how Bush just sat in that second-grade classroom in Florida for seven minutes after he learned America was under attack. He was helping the children read “The Pet Goat.”

I, for one, think this criticism of the president is terribly unfair. It’s as unfair as criticizing “Fahrenheit 9/11″ just because the director looks like one of those 750-pound rural dimwits in bib overalls who are occasionally photographed being removed from their houses by a crane as neighbors stand by and tsk.

My point is, we ought to be fair. Maybe, just maybe, our president had a compelling reason to remain in that classroom for those seven minutes on September 11, a reason heretofore overlooked by the so-called “responsible” press.

Shockingly, this journalist is the first to obtain a copy of, and to review, “The Pet Goat.”

The Pet Goat

A McGraw-Hill publication

Reviewed by: Gene Weingarten

In this uplifting allegory of prejudice redeemed, a girl gets a pet goat. The girl is never given a name — she remains always “a girl,” imparting a universality to her plight, and a timelessness to the tale. She is anygirl, and her goat is anygoat, and what befalls them could befall any of us who happen to live in an area where pet livestock is allowed, such as certain portions of Fauquier County.

The goat is an undisciplined pet, with a most extraordinary digestive system. To quote: “The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate canes. He ate pans and he ate panes. He even ate capes and caps.”

The author of this tale, which is contained on pages 155 and 156 of a reading workbook, is never identified. This is tragic because one cannot help but admire the author’s skillful minimalism; as in the short stories of Ernest Hemingway or Eudora Welty, the reader is provided tantalizingly sparse detail and is invited to draw revealing conclusions. What are we to make of a household with “canes” and “capes”? Is this the home of a magician?

The magic, we soon see, is in the hands of the storyteller.

It turns out this household also contains a “dad” who is “mad.” The dad orders the girl to get rid of the remarkable pane-eating goat, but she pleads with him to let her try to cure the animal of its dietary excesses. And she does. With this restoration of order, one might expect the story to end, but here is where the author’s narrative mastery comes in. Here may well be where the president elected to set a spell, spellbound.

A robber arrives to steal the dad’s red car! But the goat butts the robber and saves the day. The delighted dad is no longer mad. Now he is glad. He declares that the goat may henceforth eat whatever he wishes. And so: “The girl smiled. Her goat smiled. Her dad smiled. But the car robber did not smile. He said, ‘I am sore.’ The End.”

(The eclectic reader will find unmistakable parallels between “The Pet Goat” and the national bestseller Walter the Farting Dog, published shortly thereafter. Walter is an unpopular pet whose flatulence foils a home robbery and restores the love of his family. Cynics might charge plagiarism; I am content to call it homage.)

In the end, “The Pet Goat” is the story of an authority figure — the dad — who learns to exercise his powers with restraint. When the security of his home is threatened by the goat’s appetite for mass destruction, the dad’s initial impulse is small-minded and simplistic. He focuses on one evildoer — the goat itself — to the exclusion of anything else. He thinks he knows goats, and they’re trouble. Other voices — specifically, the girl’s — raise less drastic possibilities: Possibly the goat can be reasoned with, or coerced, into altering its behavior. Possibly the goat is not the threat the dad thinks it is. Possibly the family is even complicit, for having trained the goat poorly. Possibly the goat is really . . . a scapegoat.

The dad proves a wise enough leader to heed this advice. In so doing, he avoids a costly overreaction, since, in the end, taking any action against the goat would have let the car robber get away scot-free. The car robber is the real enemy, and because the dad was so smart, the car robber was captured.

It should come as no surprise that the president chose to stick around for the end to this riveting story. Only the petty or small-minded could fault him for it. After all, there is much to learn from literature.

The Official Dwight Schultz Fansite

You won’t be sorry Following Adam Baldwin on Twitter

Dwight Schultz with… One to Grow On!
A valuable life lesson from 1980s NBC Saturday mornings.

Dwight Schultz is: a lifelong Conservative.

You may know Adam from:

currently: NBC show Chuck
Jayne Cobb from the show Firefly
Knowle Rohrer from The X-Files

as Animal Mother in the movie Full Metal Jacket
as Ricky Linderman in the movie My Bodyguard
as Capt. Wilkins in the movie The Patriot
and many more…

You may know Dwight from:

Howling Mad Murdock from the tv show The A-Team
Lt. Barclay from the tv show Star Trek: the Next Generation
and movies…

They both have done many voice-overs for animated shows and video games
Adam’s IMDb filmography
Dwight’s IMDb filmography

They have both written articles at Big Hollywood.
Adam’s articles
Dwight’s articles

Adam Baldwin’s article about his participation with Ride 2 Recovery
Dwight article: TV’s Murdock Visits Real A-Team At Fort Bragg

some fun youtube videos featuring Dwight teaming up with fellow A-Team actor Dirk Benedict:

Dirk Benedict & Dwight Schultz – 23 September 2005 part 1
part 2

Q&A Dwight Schultz and Dirk Benedict May13th 2007 part 1
part 2

Dwight Schultz and Dirk Benedict May12th 2007 part 1
Dwight Schultz and Dirk Benedict May12th 2007 part 2
Dwight Schultz and Dirk Benedict May12th 2007 part 3
Dwight Schultz and Dirk Benedict May12th 2007 part 4

Note: I take no responsibility for the content of the youtube clips on this post. I have not watched all of them all the way through.

some Dwight Comic Con Appearances on youtube:

Chowder Panel at Comic-Con 2008
Chowder Panel at Comic-Con 2008 part 2

Just a little sampling of some Adam Baldwin Comic Con Appearance youtube clips:

ChuckTV.net Interviews Adam Baldwin at Comic Con 2009
2009 Comic-Con Diary Jeffster! Chuck!
Zachary Levi, Joshua Gomez, & Adam Baldwin Play Lego Rock Band at WB’s 2009 Comic-Con Booth
Zachary Levi, Joshua Gomez, & Adam Baldwin Play Lego Rock Band at WB’s 2009 Comic-Con Booth
Yvonne Strahovski Adam Baldwin Comic Con 2008 E!
Comic Con 2010: CHUCK panel
Chuck Comic-Con 2009 Panel Q&A session
Comic-Con 2009 – Chuck Interviews

Dwight has filled in as talk radio host for Michael Savage, Rusty Humphries, Jerry Doyle and Laura Ingraham…

Here’s a good sampling of Dwight in Talk-Radio Land:

From Dwight’s old podcast, Howling Mad Radio:

Clip 1: the Preamble to the Constitution of the Communist Party of the United States of America

Clip 2: Dan Rather impression

Clip 3: Chirac impression

Clip 4: Obama’s Ears

some clips of Dwight sitting in for Michael Savage:

Clip 5: Obama, Socialism, and Invasion of the Body snatchers

Clip 6: Dwight’s quick impression of Darth Soros

Clip 7: quick Al Gore impression, Climate Change

Adam has been a guest on the Talk Radio podcast The Stage Right show:

4/22/2011:

More Advertisers Pull from @Wonkette

Tonight on the Stage Right Show:
Tommy Christopher
Elmo
Kurt Schlichter
Adam Baldwin

6/24/2010:

Tonight: Adam Baldwin, star in NBC’s hit show Chuck, will discuss his views of the recent “fatherhood.gov” and his own experiences as a father.

5/8/2010:

Former Sec. of State from Ohio, KEN BLACKWELL and American Civil Rights Union’s KEN KLUKOWSKI join host LARRY O’CONNOR to discuss their latest book:

The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency

In Hour #2 ADAM BALDWIN, Star of NBC’s “Chuck” will join us for a discussion of the weeks biggest news stories including the controversy over the American flag on Cinco de Mayo.

4/10/2010:

Tonight NBC’s Chuck star Adam Baldwin joins Larry O’Connor-Stage Right for the full two hours as co-host! We will cover the latest in Adam Baldwin’s Hollywood and talk about the latest White House policies. All that plus your calls in that fan-crazy ‘Hollywood Chat Pack.’

3/2/2010:

TV and Film star ADAM BALDWIN and his friend and colleague MIKE RAUSEO sit in for vacationing LARRY O’CONNOR. They will have a multitude of special guests join them to discuss issues in the news, culture, entertainment, education and environmental politics. Scheduled guests include: Bill Whittle (PJTV.com, Eject!Eject!Eject!) Jeremy Boering (Big Hollywood) Hunter Baker (Houston Baptist University, “The End of Secularism”) Sid Burgess (sidburgess.com)

2/10/2010:

This is a segment from the “Live From a Hollywood Bar” episode of The Stage Right Show which aired live on the evening of February 9, 2010. Actor Adam Baldwin and Internet Impresario Andrew Breitbart joined me for a spontaneous, free-wheeling conversation about movies, the culture, politics, “coming of age” and a secret relationship between Janis Joplin and a leading conservative figure!

2/6/2010:

Star of NBC’s “Chuck” joins Larry O’Connor on The Stage Right Show to discuss the latest round of news at Big Hollywood featuring Howard Zinn’s “Zinn Education Project” and their attempts to subvert the lawful curricula n public schools. We will also discuss Adam’s great and varied career and ask him about his cutting edge use of Twitter in connecting with his fans. Also, a round-up of the week’s news from the Big Blog perspective, your calls and the Gun-toting “Hollywood Chat Pack” tonight, on “The Stage Right Show”

===================================

:: E X I T L I N K S ::

More Conservative Heroes:

Meet Katie Pavlich
Meet the Giles Family: Hannah, Doug and Regis
Meet Eduardo Verastegui
Meet Richard Landes
Meet actors Adam Baldwin and Dwight Schultz

From wikipedia:

Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boston University. Landes was the director of the now quiescent Center for Millennial Studies.

Academic work

He was trained as a medievalist and wrote his first book on a series of forgeries that had fooled historians for centuries, even after a scholar in the 1920s had shown decisively that the texts were fiction. In addition to working on the medieval “Peace of God” movement (980s-1030s) and the relations between elites and commoners in 11th century France, he focuses on millennial and apocalyptic movements. In addition to courses on medieval history, he offers courses in “Communications Revolutions from Language to Cyberspace”, “Europe and the Millennium,” and “Honor-Shame Cultures, Middle Ages, Modern World.”

He has published several books on Millenialism. The latest, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, will be published by Oxford University Press in December 2010.

He is best known to conservatives for his work on the Muhammad Al-Durah case and Pallywood:

more from wiki:

Landes is a strong supporter of the state of Israel, and a vigorous critic of what he considers anti-Israel propaganda in professedly objective news reports, and from supposedly impartial neutral bodies.

In particular, he denounces the “mainstream” press for uncritically repeating stories from Palestinian sources about civilian casualties from Israeli actions, even when these stories may be exaggerated, distorted, or false. Though he has never denied that Palestinian civilians have been killed and injured in Israeli operations, he has cited evidence that these casualties have been overstated for propaganda purposes.

He has coined the term “Pallywood” for the practice of filming staged funerals, casualties, and other evidence against Israel for the benefit of European and American news organizations.

He maintains two personal Web sites: “The Augean Stables” and “The Second Draft“. “The Augean Stables” is a blog on anti-Israel media problems and related issues. (The title refers to the Fifth Labor of Hercules: clearing the immense manure piles in the stables of King Augeas.)

“The Second Draft” is exclusively devoted to anti-Israel propaganda in the news, with essays, articles, and archived video. Landes has been particularly concerned with the alleged shooting of Muhammad al-Durrah by Israeli troops, and the inflammatory reporting of the incident by French television.

Landes has also helped establish Understanding the Goldstone report, a multi-authored Website devoted to exposing and refuting alleged inaccuracies in the Goldstone report on Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip.

PALLYWOOD: HISTORY

The term “Pallywood” refers to the staging of scenes by Palestinian journalists in order to present the Palestinians as hapless victims of Israeli aggression. They are able to succeed in this endeavor in large part due to the credulity and eagerness of the Western press to present these images, which reinforce the image of the Palestinian David struggling valiantly against the overpowering Israeli Goliath. Pallywood has led to astonishing lapses in Western journalistic standards in which badly staged scenes regularly appear on the news as “real events.” This page attempts to outline how such lapses could have come about, producing the current situation.

(please read the rest of that blog post at the above link for a good history of Pallywood)

Al Durah Affair: The Dossier

Professor Landes has produced some great documentaries on Pallywood and the Mohammad Al-Durah Affair. They can be downloaded at his site here.

You can also watch them on Youtube:

Pallywood I – According to Palestinian Sources

Pallywood II – Al Durah – Birth of an Icon

Pallywood III – Icon of Hatred

Gaza Beach Tragedy: Exploiting Grief

Pallywood Strikes Again!

Pallywood Strikes Again 2: France2 vs. Evidence

From American Thinker, By Joel J. Sprayregen:
The New York Times and the al-Dura Hoax:

Why won’t the New York Times accept responsibility for repeatedly publishing a falsehood which caused many deaths?

Mohammed al-Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, became an icon in 2000 when French State television (“France 2″) ran agonizing views of the boy, cradled in his father’s arms, supposedly under fatal fire from Israeli soldiers during a Gaza battle. The incident, deplorable if true, was presented by international media (see below) virtually as a reprise of the Crucifixion. A French appeals court ruled on May 21-dismissing France 2′s libel suit against the media watchdog who exposed the hoax-that the footage could not be accepted as true, citing testimony from the former Le Monde chief editor that “the theory that the scene [of the child's death] was faked was more probable then the version presented by France 2.”

Have you read about exposure of the hoax in the Times or other mainline media (excepting the Wall Street Journal and New York Sun)?

That the al-Dura lies incited murders of many innocent people is indisputable. The Jihadis who beheaded reporter Daniel Pearl inserted repeated footage of al-Dura in their gruesome video. Osama bin Laden cited al-Dura as a justification for his carnages in a post-9/11 recruitment video which showed the boy’s “death” 12 times. Streets and plazas–including the street on which Israel’s embassy in Cairo is located — were named after the boy.

Times reporter Deborah Sontag published a near-contemporaneous account — under a headline stating “In Battling Gazans, Israelis Sow Seeds of Hate” — on December 10 2000, which can fairly be read as justifying rather than explaining Palestinian suicide bombing. Sontag referred with certainty to “the boy shot dead as he crouched behind his father” and quoted a “cosmopolitan” Palestinian who wants a gun because he is “haunted by the image of Muhammad al-Dura.”

Sontag, a serial second-generation fictionalist, recently published a Sunday front-page article portraying returning U.S. combat personnel as deranged murderers; the Times’ Public Editor hastily acknowledged that her statistics were faulty.

The Hoax Unravels — The Journalistic Saturnalia Continues

By April, 2002, the al-Dura hoax was beginning to unravel. A German film-maker showed that the Israelis could not possibly have shot the boy. France 2 refused to air her documentary. Notwithstanding the evidence, the Times chose to elevate the falsehood by punditry. On April 17, 2002, the Times published a column by Max Rodenbeck, Middle East correspondent for the London Economist (much British reporting from the region sounds as if it was commissioned by Dr. Goebbels), opining that Arab television was winning the day because it accurately reports just resistance to “brutal” Israelis: [...]

By February, 2005, the Times, acknowledging that authenticity of the France 2 footage was disputed, quoted Professor Richard Landes of Boston University who concluded the video had probably been faked:

“Palestinian cameramen, especially when there are no Westerners around, engage in systematic staging of action scenes.”

Nevertheless, the Times continued to publish opinion columns accepting the faked footage as truth, e.g., on August 21, 2005, the Times published a column by Palestinian publicist David Kuttab “Live from Gaza” referring to “an interview with the parents of Mohammad al-Dura, the boy who was photographed dying in his father’s arms.” The Times never published an opinion piece challenging the falsification.

The Times was not alone in this saturnalia of bigoted journalistic incompetence. Time Magazine Europe honored al-Dura as “Newsmaker of 2000.” The editor of the Independent, concluding there was “no room for doubt,” excoriated the press for insufficient hostility to Israel. The London Telegraph agreed that al-Dura provided “provocation for revenge.” The London Review of Books published a Requiem for al-Dura, eulogizing him as “an infant Jesus.” National Public Radio ran puff interviews acclaiming the France 2 team as journalistic giants. The Palestinian cameraman who faked the footage says: “Journalism is my religion.” Journalism awards were showered on France 2.

The Contemptible Afterlife of Media Falsehoods: Will Anyone Accept Responsibility?

The afterlife of these falsehoods is even more contemptible than the initial reporting. Though the French Court decision was circulated by Reuters and the Associated Press (to which most newspapers subscribe) it was reported only in France and Israel. The New York Times has not published a word about the exposure so far as I ahve been able to find.

Were it not for a few truth-telling bloggers — Tom Gross of NRO, Andrea Levin of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting) in the Jerusalem Post, Ed Lasky in the American Thinker — the hoax would still be accepted…

Professor Landes’ websites:

The Second Draft

We are only a website with some unusually revealing and important video footage we think many people need to see.

Because those of us working on the opening dossier at this site are primarily American, French and Israeli Jews, that constitutes the initial core inspired to put up this website and to manage the material that comes in about Pallywood.

But because we feel that the Israelis are not alone in suffering from this particular debacle, we hope that Palestinians and other Arabs, as well as fair-minded and sincerely concerned outsiders will join us in trying to sort out the widespread damage these continuing media errors cause to all involved. And because we feel the loneliness of trying to draw the larger public’s attention to media malfeasance, we hope to draw other groups with similar problems to consider our website a place to air their concerns as well…

His blog: Augean Stables

some noteworthy pieces of writing by Professor Landes:

1. Paradigms and the Middle East Conflict:

includes: Politically Correct Paradigm (PCP1)

Post-Colonial Paradigm (PCP2)

Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm (HJP)

2. COGNITIVE EGOCENTRISM

includes: LIBERAL COGNITIVE EGOCENTRISM (LCE)

DOMINEERING COGNITIVE EGOCENTRISM (DCE)

MOEBIUS STRIP OF COGNITIVE EGOCENTRISM

3. Demopaths & Dupes

===================================

:: E X I T L I N K S ::

Understanding the Goldstone report

Center for Millennial Studies

More Conservative Heroes:

Meet Katie Pavlich
Meet the Giles Family: Hannah, Doug and Regis
Meet Eduardo Verastegui
Meet Richard Landes
Meet actors Adam Baldwin and Dwight Schultz

Time: 0:10:15 – 0:16:50

Transcription:

LIONS GATE FILMS AND IFC FILMS AND THE FELLOWSHIP ADVENTURE GROUP PRESENT

Donald Rumsfeld: Do you suppose he’s pretty confident on those numbers on Iraqi security forces?

A DOG EAT DOG FILMS PRODUCTION

FAHRENHEIT 9/11

MUSIC: JEFF GIBBS

ARCHIVAL PRODUCER: CARL DEAL

CAMERA: MIKE DESJARLAIS; SOUND: FRANCISCO LATORRE

EDITORS: KURT ENGFEHR, CHRISTOPHER SEWARD, T. WOODY RICHMAN

CO-PRODUCERS: JEFF GIBBS, KURT ENGFEHR

John Ashcroft: Make me look young. Yeah, I’ve got a little, sort of air noise. Yeah, just don’t turn it up too much. I don’t want it to blow my head off.

SUPERVISING PRODUCER: TIA LESSIN

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: HARVEY WEINSTEIN, BOB WEINSTEIN, AGNES MENTRE

PRODUCERS: JIM CZARNECKI, KATHLEEN GLYNN

WRITTEN, PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY MICHAEL MOORE

Newscaster: We have something that has happened here at the World Trade Center. We noticed a flame and an awful lot of smoke.

Michael Moore: On September 11th, 2001, nearly 3000 people, including a colleague of mine, Bill Weems, were killed in the largest foreign attack ever on American soil. The targets were the financial and military headquarters of the United States.

Girl: If anyone has any idea, or they’ve seen him or knows where he is, to call us. He’s got two little babies, two little babies.

Deceptions: No actual deceptions. Just some cheap shots.

From the Ethics and Public Policy Center:

As the opening credits roll, we are treated to a series of images of Bush Administration officials preparing for interviews or speeches, having microphones attached, having their hair combed, and talking to people off camera. It is part of Moore’s effort to make Bush and those around him seem somehow vaguely ridiculous—as if serious people would never behave this way before going on camera.

Following the credits is certainly the most inadvertently telling directorial move in the film. The only way that Moore’s absurd conspiracy theories could make sense is if we simply ignore the realities of the world that American leaders have to confront. We would have to close our eyes, for instance, to the attacks of September 11, 2001. And that is exactly what Moore does. Although he shows much explicit and painful footage of human suffering from Iraq later in the film, he chooses to portray the terrorist attacks of September 11th with a black screen, and only sound. He literally closes his eyes, and ours, to those events, and expects us to understand what follows without having seen them. The horror and suffering of the attacks are not shown, lest they lead us to understand, even a little, why a response was required.

From Dave Kopel’s Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit presents a powerful segment on the September 11 attacks. There is no narration, and the music is dramatic yet tasteful. The visuals are reaction shots from pedestrians, as they gasp with horrified astonishment.

Moore has been criticized for using the reaction shots as a clever way to avoid showing the planes hitting the buildings, and some of the victims falling to their deaths. Even if this is true, the segment still effectively evokes the horror and outrage that every decent human being still feels about September 11.

But as New York’s former Mayor Edward Koch reported, Moore says, “I don’t know why we are making so much of an act of terror. It is three times more likely that you will be struck by lightning than die from an act of terror.” If there is some additional context which would explain Moore’s remarks, he has not supplied such context on his website. It seems unlikely that Moore’s “war room” is unaware of the highly critical review written by former NYC Mayor Koch.

Moore’s first public comment about the September 11 attacks was to complain that too many Democrats rather than Republicans had been killed: “If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes’ destination of California–these were places that voted against Bush!” (The quote was originally posted as a “Mike’s Message” on Moore’s website on September 12, but was removed not long after. Among the many places where Moore’s quote has been repeated is The New Statesman, a leftist British political magazine.)

A person might feel great personal sympathy for the victim of a lightning strike, but the same person might feel that, overall, the “lightning problem” is not worth making a big fuss over. Fahrenheit presents September 11 as a terrible tragedy (in which Moore lost one a professional colleague, and many other people lost loved ones), and as something worth making a big fuss. On this latter point, Fahrenheit’s purported view does not appear to be the same as Moore’s actual view.

Moore was not the first director to black out the 9/11 attack:

From Reeling Reviews:

Then, lifting the technique of “21 Grams” director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s segment of the “September 11″ omnibus, the horrors of the day are heard over a black screen. (Moore has been praised repeatedly for this approach with very few references to Inarritu’s initial authorship).

From Jonathan Foreman:

Alert critics will doubtless point out its artistic flaws. For example, its most moving sequence which features audio from the World Trade Center attacks played over a black screen is a direct ripoff of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 11-minute segment in the 2003 film “9/11/01″

Reviewers:

From San Francisco Bay Guardian Arts and Entertainment:

OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT is getting ready for his close-up. He isn’t on air yet, so instead of playing to the camera, he’s demonstrating what might be his day-to-day vision: a vacant stare into the empty distance. The lack of expression is eerily familiar – it recalls the uncanny impression of a mannequin offered by his father in Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway’s documentary Feed.

Yes, the opening credits of Fahrenheit 9/11 stare into the “steely blue eyes with no warmth in them” (to quote Morrissey) of George W. Bush; Feed-ing more than once on Bush’s unscripted moments, Michael Moore later catches sight of his subject’s “humorless smile” March 19, 2003. Seconds before addressing the nation about the bombing of Iraq, Bush sizes up his global audience with a self-satisfied, contemptuous smirk. The man who will soon hide behind the grave-faced political mask looks like a jerk.

=========================================

:: E X I T L I N K S ::

My Full Collection of F9/11 Deceptions Will Be Stored Here

The Best F9/11 Debunkings can be found at:

Dave Kopel’s “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11″

“War, Lies, and Videotape: A Viewer’s Guide to Fahrenheit 9/11″ from The Ethics and Public Policy Center

Moore Watch

Trailer for FahrenHYPE 9/11, a documentary that debunks F9/11

Actor, Singer, Producer… Pro-Life Warrior…

His website
Follow Him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/verastegui777
His production company, Metanoia Films

From the American Family Association Journal:

Verástegui plays the role of José in Bella, an independently produced life-changing love story centered on an unwanted pregnancy. Verástegui’s life is a parallel to José’s life in that both men lost everything but wound up gaining it all. This role is one way Verástegui is telling the world that he is no longer a sex symbol but rather a sinner saved by grace.

“He [the director] wrote this film to [fit] me because he wanted to … destroy the stereotype I had before,” Verástegui told AFA Journal during a recent trip to AFA headquarters in Tupelo, Mississippi.

While he can’t change his past or erase the remnants of a career rooted in pop culture, Verástegui can begin anew, and he is doing just that by seeking to live a life that brings glory to Christ – right in the middle of Hollywood.

“It is clear to me [now] that I wasn’t born to be a movie star,” Verástegui said. “I wasn’t born to be famous. I wasn’t born to be a CEO of a company. I was … born to know and to love and to serve Jesus Christ.”

The old and the new
Verástegui grew up in a small town in Mexico, and when he was 18 he moved to Mexico City to pursue his dream of being an actor and a singer. He spent three-and-a-half years traveling all over Latin America as a member of the successful boy band Kairo. He made his debut as an actor in Mexican soap operas, which were seen in over 50 countries, according to Wikipedia.org.

“In Mexico, if you are an actor and you want to make a living as an actor, … you either do soap operas or soap operas,” Verástegui said with a laugh.

So that is what he did prior to coming to the U.S. where he launched his career as a solo music artist and was later cast in a 20th Century Fox film. He then moved to Los Angeles and began immersing himself in the American culture and English language.

In a quest for success and notoriety, he did it all.

“I started compromising all of the values that my parents taught me to the point that I lost perspective of what is good and what is bad,” Verástegui admitted. “Even though … I believed in God, I had no transformation.”

After 12 years in the entertainment industry, Verástegui realized he was empty – thanks to his English teacher whom the Lord used to change his heart.

His teacher was a devout Christian and as she taught him English, she also questioned him about the purpose of his life.

“Why do you want to be an actor? Why are you doing what you’re doing?” she would ask Verástegui.

After six months of conversation, God did a work in Verástegui, and he was broken over the sin in his life. He came to the stark realization that he had used his talents in projects that were poisonous to society, while hurting his family, himself and others in the process.

“But the one thing that broke my heart was when I realized that I offended God with talent that He gave me,” he added. “And it is the most painful moment in my life because I was 28 years old and handsome and I saw myself in a place where everything was so clear.

“It was a moment of grace where He revealed all the things that I was doing with my life. And thank God that He is a God of forgiveness.”

Christ changed Verástegui’s heart and became the center of his life, which could have meant the end of his career as an entertainer. But that didn’t matter to Verástegui.

“The price of changing my path was that I was never going to be able to work again,” he admitted. “I was at peace with that.”

In fact, Verástegui made a commitment to never be part of a project that would compromise his faith or values. As a result, he didn’t work as an actor for four years prior to Bella because “as an actor it’s very hard to control the message [of a film] from A to Z. The only way you can do it is if you become a producer.”

So Verástegui wanted to leave Hollywood completely. He wanted to run away to the jungles of Brazil to do missionary work among the poor and to discern God’s will for his life. But he soon found he could be a missionary without skipping the country. God used a friend to convince Verástegui that Hollywood was a bigger jungle where believers are needed to share the light of Christ.

“He convinced me to stay there even though it didn’t make any sense, …” Verástegui said. “[And] … that is when I was inspired to open up a production company to make films that will not only entertain but will make a difference … and light a candle in the hearts of people.”

The movie and the crew
In 2004, the Three Amigos, as they call themselves – Verástegui, Alejandro Monteverde and Leo Severino, created Metanoia Films, which is now owned by these three men plus Sean Wolfington and Eustace Wolfington.

“I didn’t know anything about the industry, I had never financed a film, I hadn’t even seen a script – but I knew within five minutes of our first meeting that we were going to give Bella a green light,” Wolfington said. “So my business partner and I put up the funding, and we all got along so well we decided to become permanent partners in Metanoia Films and to finance future projects.”

Metanoia is a Greek word that literally means conversion – “a change of heart or mind; a turning from darkness to light,” Severino said.

“When we were thinking of names it was the perfect choice because each of us had experienced great transformations in our lives, both personally and professionally,” Serverino explained. “It also describes our mission of making quality films that not only entertain, but inspire people to live better lives, to love more and to be light in an often dark world.”

According to Verástegui, Metanoia Films wants to use media to speak the truth. It is carrying out its mission with Bella – the first of a several films planned by the company. Bella was inspired by several true stories and was filmed in 24 days in New York on a three million dollar budget. Yet it won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival – one of the largest film festivals in the world.

“In Toronto you have a wonderful and diverse mix of people from different backgrounds and beliefs,” Monteverde said, “and the fact that they chose Bella for the biggest award says a lot about our film’s broad appeal.”

Other films that have received this honor have gone on to win Oscars.

But an Oscar is not the motivation behind this film. Rather, its purpose is to change the lives of hurting souls, which has already begun happening among viewers who have screened the film.

“But Bella is a film that appeals to everyone,” Monteverde explained. “The themes of love and sacrifice and family, the hope for a second chance in life after we’ve made mistakes – those desires are universal” and presented in a powerful way.

Saving Babies: (from American Family Association Journal)

Bella was our first film. So three weeks before I moved to New York to start shooting this film, Alejandor [Monteverde – the director] is calling me asking, “Are you rehearsing?” I said, “Brother, yes, but I need the actress to rehearse.” And we couldn’t find the actress [to play Nina] at that time. Two weeks before, no actress. And I’m in L.A. [thinking] how in the world am I going to rehearse, or how in the world am I going to do my character well if we find the actress two days before.

So I went to an abortion clinic. I thought it was going to be very easy and very simple. I was going to arrive, stop the first lady and [say], “Excuse me. My name is Eduardo. I’m making a film. Can I ask you a few questions? How do you feel? Hold on. Let me write it down.”

That’s what actors do. You go and you do your research, your homework and your tasks.

Now, when I arrived at that clinic, I was in shock. When I saw these 15- and 16-year-old girls going in, I didn’t know what to do. Of course, I didn’t even want to talk to them [anymore] because I didn’t even want to use their pain for my own movie. So it was very hard for me. It was the first time I was really facing the reality of something I wasn’t really aware.

I saw a little group of people trying to convince them (people going into the clinic) not to do it. So I approached that group and introduced myself to them, and they thought I was one of them. The next thing you know, one of the girls is telling me, “Talk to this couple. They don’t speak English. They’re from Mexico.”

I go, “Sure.”

The couple recognizes me from the soap operas [I did in the past]. Even though I did them like 10 years ago, they repeat them on television forever.

“Eduardo, what are you doing here?” [they asked]. I was thinking they’re going to think my girlfriend is inside. I cannot tell them about the movie either. What am I going to say?

We ended up talking for 45 minutes about faith, life, Mexico, dreams, food – about everything. I was trying to be delicate. I wasn’t trying to really talk. I was just praying, “Lord, please, help me. Help me to use my fame now to do something good and beautiful and to save this baby. I used to use my fame to do selfish things, and please, this is an amazing opportunity for me to do something to repair whatever I did in the past.”

I was just praying and closing my eyes. I gave her a little teddy bear just like in the film. I gave her my cell phone number and everything, and then she started crying and she left the place. She didn’t go in, so I thought maybe she was going to come back the next day because she was a little shy with me. I called her like three or four times, [and that was the end of it, or so I thought].

We found the actress, moved to New York, finished the film and came back to Los Angeles. A few months later I received a call from the man who was with her. He said, “Eduardo, I have great news. My baby was born yesterday, and I want to ask your permission because I want to call him Eduardo.”

I couldn’t even talk. I put my phone down. I was emotional more than I ever was in my life. I went to the hospital and I saw the baby. A few days later I was carrying the baby in my arms, and the way he was looking at me changed my life.

He changed my life because I didn’t plan to do this. I went there only to do my work as an actor. I never thought that by the grace of God I was going to be used as an instrument to save this beautiful baby. And it [the opportunity] is the most beautiful thing.

Saving a life
In Miami, [there was] another girl who was going to have an abortion. We talked to her. We showed her the film, and she cancelled he appointment. A few weeks ago the baby was born, and they call her Bella. Now it’s two babies we know.

Valuing morality
I said to myself, “I will never, for example, kiss anybody until I’m married.” And everybody in Hollywood told me, “Well, that’s the end of your career. How are you going to work then? You will have to open your own production company and do your own films.”

And so that’s what I’m doing. It’s the only way. You can’t put yourself in another position where you’re going to be vulnerable because the next thing you know the director going to say, “You know what? Let’s change this. Ok take your shirt off. …”

Next thing you know, you find yourself doing things that you already said no to. That’s why it’s called legal adultery because it’s the only career where you are allowed to be with somebody else, and it’s ok.

one of the latest bits of news from his website:

…his dream to raise the necessary funds to open a pro-life medical center in the middle of all the abortion clinics in Los Angeles (LA). This dream is about to be realized. He announced the fact that plans are underway for his international aid organization, “Mantle of Guadalupe”, to build the largest crisis pregnancy centre in the United States on 15 January at a gala dinner in Beverly Hills. 300 guests at the dinner raised funds for the pro-life Mantle of Guadalupe medical center which recently opened in LA and provides free of charge pre-natal care, ultrasounds and natural family planning to women in need.

From LifeSiteNews.com:

MEXICO CITY, October 24, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Mexican-American movie star Eduardo Verastegui has begun campaigning against California’s homosexual “marriage” law, and is incurring the wrath of Mexican homosexuals as a result.

Following Verastegui’s reported decision to lead the campaign for the Hispanic organization “Viva la Familia” (Long Live the Family) enraged members of “Tri Gay”, Mexico’s self-proclaimed “gay soccer selection” expressed their displeasure against the pro-life, pro-family actor and entertainer.

At a press conference on October 22 in the offices of Mexico’s Secretary of Health, the team denounced Verastegui. The vice-president of Tri Gay, Eduardo Velasquez, tore up a picture of the star.

Calling the action a “message of condemnation of his actions,” Velasquez said that the destruction of the picture was meant “as an act of rejection of all those who promote homophobia” according to Mexico’s El Universal newspaper.

Verastegui’s support of California’s Proposition 8, which would amend California’s constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman and overturn the judicial activist decision approving homosexual “marriage” in the state, is likely to have a serious impact on the voting in November. “Verastegui is very well known among Latinos for his role in ‘Bella’, and other telenovelas,” noted Maria Ramirez of Viva la Familia.

Verastegui is also participating in advertisements in favor of California’s Proposition 4, which would require parental consent for abortions for minors. Pro-lifers believe that they may narrowly win because of strong Hispanic support for the measure.

Tri Gay, which bills itself as “Mexico’s Gay Soccer Selection,” is composed of homosexual activists who seek to legitimize the homosexual lifestyle in Mexico. They participate in “gay” soccer tournaments including the “Gay-Lesbian World Cup,” and the “World Outgames” (scheduled for 2009 in Denmark).

Although it receives no government funding, Tri Gay was recently named “Embassadors Against Homophobia” by Mexico’s National Center for the Prevention and Control of HIV/AIDS (CENSIDA).

Here’s the Trailer for Bella, the first movie from his production company called Metanoia Films

Review for the movie Bella by Rebecca Cusey:

There are moments in life that change everything. They are hinges, turning us toward perhaps toward joy, perhaps toward sorrow, but ensuring that nothing will ever be the same again. A rich new drama from producer Alejandro Monteverde, Bella, covers two such moments in the life of Jose (Eduardo Verastegui).

At the start of the film, Jose serves as a chef in his brother’s Mexican restaurant in New York. He hides behind a thick beard and mourns the sudden event that halted his life of promise as an international soccer star. There is hope in the ashes, however. Nina (Tammy Blanchard), a troubled waitress, provides Jose an opportunity for a new hinge, a new moment to set his life on a different track. The film follows Jose and Nina over a single weekend as they connect to each other and search for the best path for each of their lives. Neither can go back. The question is: How they will move forward?

Bella, a shoestring production that was quite literally filmed out of the trunk of Monteverde’s car, won the People’s Choice Award at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival, as well as a host of other awards. It’s not surprising. There’s a lot to love about the movie.

The story of Jose and Nina happens against a backdrop of Jose’s warm, middle-class, Latin immigrant family. Nina, a pregnant Caucasian woman alone in the world, crosses a metaphorical border into a world of salsa dancing, spicy food, and Spanish speakers. There is a warmth, intimacy, and humor in the family that transcends the culture barrier. They have the same magical qualities as a happy, connected family in Hoboken or Prague or New Delhi. Blanchard portrays Nina with a compelling mix of toughness, clarity, and vulnerability. To her, the love is as foreign as the language.

The best part of the movie, however, is Jose. Eduardo Verastegui, a Latin-American heartthrob often called the Brad Pitt of Mexico, deliberately chose the role because he was tired of playing banditos and Latin lovers. He wanted to play a hero; not a fantasy superhero, but a real man who cares for and sacrifices for those around him. Like the character he portrays, Verastegui displays his own heroism in opting for a movie with such noble ideals, even going so far as to ugly up his chiseled face, no easy task, to portray a man consumed by sorrow.

In spite his own tragedy, or perhaps because of it, Jose truly sees Nina when no one else does. He cares enough to notice the signs of her distress, and then chooses to involve himself in the troubles of a coworker he barely knows. It’s a big task, embodying a hero, and in the hands of a different actor and producer, it might have swung toward cheesy melodrama. The film, for the most part, resists the urge to oversell. Jose’s haunted heart, and his underlying decency, are entirely believable.

The pregnancy is an important factor in Nina’s crossroads. The film handles both Nina and the life inside her with honor, refusing to minimize the gravity of Nina’s fear or the value of the child. We watch Nina be torn by incompatible desires and fears, wavering between decisions she doesn’t want to make. She is alternately rational, irrational, resigned, and undecided. Jose stands beside her through the entire journey, affirming the life of both mother and child.

In the end, the choices that Nina and Jose make affect each other. Their moments of destiny merge, giving them both a chance to be redeemed. Bella is one of the best movies to come along in years. It offers hope that those pivotal moments, met with courage and compassion, can lead to the kind of joy that changes everything.

Here’s a teaser trailer for the short film that he acted in called The Butterfly Circus.

The Butterfly Circus is a short film created by Joshua and Rebekah Weigel in 2009. The production was completed in 12 days by a cast and crew of over 150 people, on locations in the Southern California regions of the San Gabriel Mountains, Riverside, Palmdale and Santa Clarita. The short garnered its first award as the Grand Prize winner of The Doopost Film Project, and then went on to win subsequent awards at festivals around the world. By July 2010, the film had already accumulated over 7 million collective online views primarily through posts on YouTube. It also featured Latino celebrity Eduardo Verástegui (Bella), Doug Jones who played the Fawn in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, the Silver Surfer in ‘Fantastic Four-Rise of the Silver Surfer’ and Abe Sapien in ‘Hellboy I & II’. Nick Vujicic, an international motivational and evangelistic speaker from Australia who was born without arms or legs, debuted in film and received the Best Actor award for his starring performance as Will at the 2010 Method Fest Independent Film Festival. Along with his many life experiences, Nick recounts working on the film in his book titled Life Without Limits: Inspiration for a Ridiculously Good Life (Random House, 2010). Director Joshua Weigel has stated that he will be working on writing a feature-length version of the script.

You can watch all of the short film version of The Butterfly Circus at this link.

Eduardo acted in the upcoming movie Cristiada which also stars Andy Garcia, Peter O’Toole, Bruce Greenwood, Nestor Carbonell, Bruce McGill, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Eva Longoria.

You can watch the trailer at the official website.

CRISTIADA is a chronicle of the Cristeros War (1926-1929), which was touched off by a rebellion against the Mexican government’s attempt to secularize the country. The film follows the stories of ordinary people from across the country who chose to stand

Here are some youtube videos in which Eduardo speaks about saving a baby from abortion during his preparation for filming Bella:

Eduardo’s Story of Life

Kurt Ramspott, founder of Guys For Life, interviews Eduardo

Other youtube videos:

Eduardo on the Today Show

Eduardo Verastegui’s Dura Realidad (Hard Truth):

The following is a portion of the video “Dura Realidad” (Hard Truth), presented by Mexican actor Eduardo Verastegui in order to inform Hispanic voters about the issue of abortion and the position of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Eduardo interviewed by Paul Crouch Jr.

interview on the 700 Club

Eduardo’s visit to Sacramento, CA to support John McCain

on Neil Cavuto’s show

Sorry girls! I have not included any videos made for the sole purpose of ogling Eduardo’s physical appearance. You’ll find plenty of them on Youtube. Also: there are loads of Spanish-language videos that I have not included.

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:: E X I T L I N K S ::

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