This is a viewer’s guide to Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. Its purpose is to help the viewer of the film sort through Moore’s many varied claims; to separate fact from fiction and true from false impression; to provide context when the film fails to do so; and to weigh Moore’s assertions, arguments, and narrative moves.
This assessment reveals that Moore’s film is profoundly dishonest and misleading on a scale that even the very skeptical viewer cannot begin to appreciate without a careful analysis of each of the individual pieces that make up the narrative. For the most part, the movie does not proceed by outright false assertions: Moore is careful—often through a lawyerly precision in word choice—to avoid the simplest lies and to steer barely clear of claims that are plainly libelous. Instead, he chops up the truth and rearranges the pieces to form a thoroughly false picture of reality that is composed of genuine video and audio clips that in reality often have little or nothing to do with the point being advanced in the film, and of facts out of context and figures misrepresented. This means that while Moore’s “facts” are not all false, essentially none of his “arguments” turns out to be true.
The film is a patchwork of vague allegations, insubstantial insinuations, unrelated events patched together, and outright non sequiturs. By throwing it all at us in a vivid and often entertaining way, Moore hopes we will not examine his suggestions and connections too closely, and that we will just submit to the general premise with which he seeks to flood our perception, which is that George W. Bush and those around him are profoundly wicked people, at once appallingly stupid and diabolically clever, simpleminded and cunning, arrogant and (above all else) singularly greedy and obsessed with amassing wealth by any means. The film suggests that American foreign policy under the Bush Administration has been driven by a desire to enrich certain well-connected corporations and to serve the needs of oil-fattened Saudis and their American partners, all of whom are united with Bush and his highest officials in a grand cabal of villainy and avarice for which they will sacrifice the nation at a whim. It is a cheap and thin paranoid conspiracy theory, with all the familiar traditional symbols and ornaments of such tales, and no two parts of the story quite hold together.
The film literally closes its eyes to the attacks of September 11th, and then tries to describe what followed in all but the obvious and reasonable ways. It does its best to avoid the possibility that there really are dangers (except for American power), and there really sometimes are reasons to act in the world with real force. It couches its pacifism in a contrived righteous anger, revved up by a series of purported outrages, all of which totally collapse upon inspection.
The only way to truly appreciate the mastery of this deception is to examine the film move-by-move, claim-by-claim, and to follow up on the facts and trace the patterns of reasoning. This guide attempts to do just that, essentially narrating the reader through the film and taking up each claim. Wherever they are available, we have offered hyperlinks to news stories and other original sources that counter Moore’s claims. When hyperlinks were unavailable, we have cited other transcripts and articles, generally obtained through the LexisNexis database.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of a number of other people who have undertaken attempts to fact-check portions of Moore’s film and to offer context Moore intentionally left out. Especially useful in preparing this document have been the impressive work of Dave Kopel (http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm) and the “Fahrenheit Facts” blog (http://fahrenheit_fact.blogspot.com). We also welcome questions, comments, and corrections, which should be submitted by e-mail to fahrenheit911@eppc.org.
—The Ethics and Public Policy Center
October 5, 2004
Continue to Section I: The Election and Bush in Office Before September 11
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright 2004, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Inc. We encourage you to freely share and circulate this document, either electronically or on paper.
TO CONTACT US
We welcome your questions, comments, and corrections. To contact us about this document, please e-mail fahrenheit911@eppc.org.
