Will Michael Moore's Facts Check Out?

Philip Shenon, 2912db05cb9917f">New York Times

Michael Moore is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit
9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President Bush
and the war in Iraq. He wants it to be remembered as the
first big-audience, election-year film that helped unseat a
president."And it's not just a hope," the Oscar-winning filmmaker
said in a phone interview last week, describing focus
groups in Michigan in April at which, after seeing the
movie, previously undecided voters expressed eagerness to
defeat Mr. Bush. "We found that if you entered the theater
on the fence, you fell off it somewhere during those two
hours," he said. "It ignites a fire in people who had given
up."

The movie's indictment of the president is nothing if not
sprawling. Mr. Moore suggests that Mr. Bush and his
administration jeopardized national security in an effort
to placate Bush family cronies in Saudi Arabia, that the
White House helped members of Mr. bin Laden's family to
flee the United States after Sept. 11 and that the
administration manipulated terrorism alert levels in order
to scare Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Moore's previous films generated a cottage industry of
conservative commentators eager to prove sloppiness and
exaggeration in his films; a handful of mainstream critics
have also found flaws. But if "Fahrenheit 9/11" attracts
the audience Mr. Moore and his distributors are predicting,
Mr. Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike
anything he — or any other documentary filmmaker — has ever
experienced. After all, White House officials and the Bush
family began impugning the film even before any of them had
seen it.

"Outrageously false," said Dan Bartlett, the White House
communications director, last month when told about the
film's assertion of a sinister connection between Mr. Bush
and the family of Osama bin Laden. The former president
George H. W. Bush was quoted in The New York Daily News
calling Mr. Moore a "slime ball" and describing the
documentary as "a vicious personal attack on our son."

So how will Mr. Moore's movie stand up under close
examination? Is the film's depiction of Mr. Bush as a lazy
and duplicitous leader, blinded by his family's financial
ties to Arab moneymen and the Saudi Arabian royal family,
true to fact?

Mr. Moore and his distributors have refused to circulate
copies of the film and its script before the film's release
this Friday; his production team said that as of last
Wednesday, there was no final script because the film was
still undergoing minor editing — for clarity, they said,
not accuracy.

After a year spent covering the federal commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, I was recently allowed
to attend a Hollywood screening. Based on that single
viewing, and after separating out what is clearly presented
as Mr. Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it
seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in
"Fahrenheit 9/11" are supported by the public record
(indeed, many of them will be familiar to those who have
closely followed Mr. Bush's political career).

Mr. Moore is on firm ground in arguing that the Bushes,
like many prominent Texas families with oil interests, have
profited handsomely from their relationships with prominent
Saudis, including members of the royal family and of the
large and fabulously wealthy bin Laden clan, which has
insisted it long ago disowned Osama. Mr. Moore spends
several minutes in the film documenting ties between the
president and James R. Bath, a financial advisor to a
prominent member of the bin Laden family who was an
original investor in Mr. Bush's Arbusto energy company and
who served with the future president in the Air National
Guard in the early 1970's. The Bath friendship, which
indirectly links Mr. Bush to the family of the world's most
notorious terrorist, has received less attention from
national news organization than it has from reporters in
Texas, but it has been well documented.

Mr. Moore charges that President Bush and his aides paid
too little attention to warnings in the summer of 2001 that
Al Qaeda was about to attack, including a detailed Aug. 6,
2001, C.I.A. briefing that warned of terrorism within the
country's borders. In its final report next month, the
Sept. 11 commission can be expected to offer support to
this assertion. Mr. Moore says that instead of focusing on
Al Qaeda, the president spent 42 percent of his first eight
months in office on vacation; the figure came not from a
conspiracy-hungry Web site but from a calculation by The
Washington Post.

The most valid criticisms of the film are likely to involve
the artful way that Mr. Moore connects the facts, and
whether he has left out others that might undermine his
scalding attack. A great many statistics fly by in the
movie — such as assertions that 6 percent to 7 percent of
the United States is owned by Saudi Arabians, and that
Saudi companies have paid more than $1.4 billion to Bush
family interests. But Mr. Moore doesn't explain how he
arrived at them, or what these vague interests comprise.
Mr. Moore and his team say they have news reports and other
evidence to back up the numbers and that it will be posted
on his Web site (www.michaelmoore.com) after the film's
release.

Mr. Moore may also be criticized for the way he portrays
the evacuation of the extended bin Laden family from the
United States after Sept. 11. As the Sept. 11 commission
has found, the Saudi government was able to pull strings at
senior levels of the Bush administration to help the bin
Ladens leave the United States. But while the film clearly
suggests that the flights occurred at a time when all air
traffic was grounded immediately after the attacks ("Even
Ricky Martin couldn't fly," Mr. Moore says over video of
the singer wandering in an airport lobby), the Sept. 11
commission said in a report this April that there was "no
credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi
Arabian nationals departed the United States before the
reopening of national airspace" and that the F.B.I. had
concluded that no one aboard the flights was involved in
Sept. 11.

In conversation, Mr. Moore defended the scene, saying his
goal was to show how the White House was eager to bend and
break the rules for Saudi friends — in this case, the
extended family of the terrorist who had just brought down
the twin towers and attacked the Pentagon. And as reporters
have found, the White House still refuses to document fully
how the flights were arranged.

"I don't want to get lost in the forest because of a single
tree," Mr. Moore said. "The main point I want people to go
away with is that these people got special treatment
because they were bin Ladens or Saudi royals, and you and I
would never have been given that treatment."

Mr. Moore may also have to defend his portrayal of Mr.
Bush's presidency as sinking prior to Sept. 11, citing an
inability to win support for his legislation. But he fails
to mention that in May, Congress agreed to Mr. Bush's $1.35
trillion tax cut, the centerpiece of his legislative
agenda. Mr. Moore said that his review of news coverage
before Sept. 11 shows that, with or without the tax cut,
the Bush presidency was floundering before the terrorist
attacks. Mr. Moore said, "I've read what other people wrote
and said at the time, and he was definitely on the ropes."

Mr. Moore usually revels in his role as the target of
conservative attacks, and his delight in playing the
mischievous, little-guy bomb-thrower has brought him fame,
wealth and the devotion of fans more interested in
rhetorical force than precision. But with "Fahrenheit" he
has taken on his biggest and best-defended target yet, and
his production staff says that on his orders they have
taken no chances in checking and double-checking the film,
knowing Bush supporters would pounce on factual mistakes.

Mr. Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack,
saying he has created a political-style "war room" to offer
an instant response to any assault on the film's
credibility. He has retained Chris Lehane, a Democratic
Party strategist known as a master of the black art of
"oppo," or opposition research, used to discredit
detractors. He also hired outside fact-checkers, led by a
former general counsel of The New Yorker and a veteran
member of that magazine's legendary fact-checking team, to
vet the film. And he is threatening to go one step further,
saying he has consulted with lawyers who can bring
defamation suits against anyone who maligns the film or
damages his reputation.

"We want the word out," says Mr. Moore, who says he should
have responded more quickly to allegations of inaccuracy in
his Oscar-winning 2002 anti-gun documentary, "Bowling for
Columbine." "Any attempts to libel me will be met by
force," he said, not an ounce of humor in his familiar
voice. "The most important thing we have is truth on our
side. If they persist in telling lies, knowingly telling a
lie with malice, then I'll take them to court."

As proof of its scrupulousness, the Moore team cites
adjustments it made to the film's portrayal of Attorney
General John Ashcroft. The film is brutal to Mr. Ashcroft,
depicting him as a glassy-eyed architect of efforts to
shred the Constitution, who became Attorney General only
after he proved himself so unpopular in his home state of
Missouri that he lost a Senate race to a former Democratic
governor who died in a plane crash a month before election
day. "Voters preferred the dead guy," Mr. Moore deadpans in
the film, a line that drew belly laughs at recent preview
screenings. (In reality, voters knew they were in effect
casting ballots for the governor's widow).

An earlier version of the film, however, included a
reference to a widely circulated charge, broadcast by CBS
News in July 2001, that Mr. Ashcroft had received warning
of threats and stopped flying on commercial airlines. Tia
Lessin, supervising producer of "Fahrenheit 9/11," said the
reference to the CBS report was cut after Mr. Moore's
fact-checking team found evidence that Mr. Ashcroft had
flown commercially at least twice that summer.

"We have gone through every single word of this film —
literally every word — and verified its accuracy," said
Joanne Doroshow, a public interest lawyer and filmmaker who
shared in a 1993 Oscar for documentaries and who joined the
fact-checking effort last month. Ms. Doroshow is
responsible for preparing what she calls a "fact-checking
bible," with material ranging from newspaper and magazine
articles to copies of the Federal Register, that will allow
the film's lawyers and publicists to provide backup for its
allegations.

That said, Mr. Moore's fact-checkers do not view the film
as straight reportage. "This is an Op-Ed piece, it's not a
news report," said Dev Chatillon, the former general
counsel for The New Yorker. "This is not The New York
Times,[autonomedia editor:sic] it's not a network news report. The facts have to be
right, yes, but this is an individual's view of current
events. And I'm a very firm believer that it is within
everybody's right to examine the actions of their
government."

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 White House and
network-news video 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.