Around midday on September 11, 2001, I was supposed to go to Bethesda, MD for a training class on meeting FDA requirements for clinical data security. I'd had a bad feeling about the trip for weeks. I didn't know why; I'd never been dreading a trip like this before, but I was dreading this one. That morning, my spouse, having been stuck in Raleigh the night before due to inclement weather, had called at around 8:00 AM from LaGuardia Airport; he'd just landed and was heading home over the George Washington Bridge.

It was one of the last flights to land in New York that day, and he got out of the city not an hour before it was essentially shut down.

That night, as we were watching the various coverages of the day's horrific events, we happened to stop at CNBC, and there was Larry Kudlow -- former neoconservative economic darling and disgraced cokehead, now redeemed with conservatives back in charge -- grinning from ear to ear and crowing about how this meant an end to any talk of a Social Security lockbox. Suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. "My God," I said. "They did it." The "they" I was talking about was the Bush Administration.

It all made horrible sense. Here was a president who came to office under extremely dubious circumstances, who instead of taking to heart the conventional wisdom that a president without a majority of the votes, let alone a convincing one, would have to govern from the center, was determined to govern as far to the right as possible. The day before, the September 17 issue of Newsweek had hit the stands with a scathing expose of the tactics used to install George W. Bush in the White House. His approval ratings stood at well under 50%. But now America had been attacked by terrorists, and suddenly it was bases loaded, bottom of the 9th, down 6-3, with a fastball hitter at the plate and a fireballer on the mound -- and no pitchers left in the bullpen. The unlikely come-from-behind victory of George W. Bush was now complete.

At first I thought I must be crazy. I may be a liberal, but while I knew that a Bush administration would be bad (after all, I had managed to survive the Reagan years), I couldn't believe that even this bunch could be so, well, evil as to concoct, or even allow to happen, such a vile and destructive act upon American soil. I'd read about Operation Northwoods, the plan drafted by military leaders in the 1960's to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But after being rejected by the civilian leadership, it was another 40 years before they were disclosed. What Operation Northwoods proved was that even our government is capable of terrible things without a vigilant populace.

As the aftermath of 9/11 unfolded and the invasion of Afghanistan began, I put my concerns aside, flush with the patriotism of a united nation. Besides, who on earth would WANT to believe it? In a weird way, even I, who had always loathed All Things Bush Family with such vehemence that as far back as 1988 I was saying "The Bush family regards this entire country as a private fiefdom for themselves and their friends", wanted the unity; the sense that We Were All In This Together. But things kept popping up that just didn't fit. The put options on American and United Airlines -- essentially bets that the stocks would fall. Who placed them? The meeting of the Carlyle Group that included George Herbert Walker Bush, a.k.a. Bush 41 and members of the Bin Laden family that took place on 9/11. The fact that John O'Neill, an FBI agent who had been removed from the terrorism beat by the Bush Administration had just become director of security for the World Trade Center two weeks earlier -- and died in the towers. The fact that discussions had taken place between the U.S. and the Taliban government of Afghanistan to have Unocal build a natural gas pipeline and the talks had fallen through. The hijacker passport that somehow miraculously survived the crash and was found within a week when thousands of bodies, computers, and building materials were pulverized. The fact that the names of the hijackers appeared nowhere on the passenger manifests. The efforts the Bush administration made to quell any move towards an investigation of what happened. And so on and so on and so on. $70 million for a presidential blowjob in the last administration, but we can't investigate the worst terrorist attack on our soil? What the heck was going on?

The questions were there for the asking -- and no one asked, at least not in the sources most Americans go to for news and insights. I abandoned the thought of outright complicity; that was too monstrous for even me to wrap my mind around. I decided that this administration had at least some foreknowledge that something was about to occur -- and allowed it to happen because it would give them the opening they needed to oust the Afghan Taliban and get the pipeline through Afghanistan, invade Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein and allow George II to resolve whatever psychosexual issues he has about his father, and perhaps most importantly, keep people afraid so they would be willing to abandon many of the freedoms we as a nation had always prized -- in order to "feel safer." Not necessarily BE safer, but "feel" safer. No one else seemed to see it, except a few crazies on the Web who ran conspiracy sites. Then a young woman from New Jersey named Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband died in the World Trade Center, refused to buy into the conventional wisdom. Along with three other widows and in conjunction with other loose federation of survivor families, they pushed for an investigation, and in the process, many of these strange linkages and coincidences began to see the light of day.

One of the people whose curiosity was piqued was documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, and in his scorchingly accusatory new film, FAHRENHEIT 9/11, he puts all the puzzle pieces together and comes up with a devastating indictment of the Bush Administration: that the Administration's cozy relationship with the Saudi royal family prevented them from connecting the dots in the face of overwhelming evidence that a major terrorist attack involving planes crashing into buildings was planned on American soil, and that the events of 9/11/2001 were used as cover for not just one but two wars that serve almost entirely to benefit Bush family cronies and the American energy industry.

While Moore stops short of an outright accusation of complicity on the part of the Administration in the events of 9/11, he asks the question that has bothered me for almost three years; Who stood to benefit most from the Administration's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? It is now clear that I was not far off from the truth in 1988 when I made the claim that America is regarded by Bush family as their own private fiefdom to be plundered as they see fit. My error was only one of scope, however: This bunch regards the whole WORLD as their private fiefdom to be plundered as they see fit.

Moore packs an extraordinary amount of information into two hours of completed film. Beginning with a Bush cousin at Fox News calling the election for Bush, Katherine Harris, the ChoicePoint voter purge, the paid Congressional intimidators disrupting the recount, and the many other the Florida election shenanigans of 2000, topped off by the heartbreaking sight of minority Congresspeople unable to find even one Senator to sign off on their objection to certifying the election, it's clear that this is going to be a pretty comprehensive compendium of not just Bush horrors, but also a scathing indictment of a gutless, weak, and pretty much useless opposition party, otherwise known as the Democrats.

Yet this is not simply a compilation of conspiracies spun from the Web. Moore has done his homework, gleaning much of his information from news sources other than the corporate whores that form the U.S. media, and after laying the groundwork that this is an illegitimate administration with an agenda that has nothing to do with serving the American people, he asks the basic question to any administration: Who Benefitted? Then he proceeds to lay out his case, brick by brick, piece by piece, of a web that ranges from the Bush family's cozy business relationship with the Bin Laden family, to the Carlyle Group to Halliburton to Vice President Dick Cheney to Enron and back again, with a stop at the story of James R. Bath, who served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush, whose name was redacted from the White House release of Bush's service records, and who not only was the Texas money manager for the Bin Laden family, but whose name also shows up as a director of the infamous and now-collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) a "bank" that was the biggest money-laundering operation in history; the only bank - so far as anyone knows - that also ran a brisk business in both conventional and nuclear weapons, gold, drugs, turnkey mercenary armies, intelligence and counterintelligence, shipping, and commodities. (This little nugget is brought to you courtesy of Your Humble Critic, as it didn't make it into Moore's film.)

Conservative critics of Moore's film have been spending the last few weeks doing the right-wing equivalent of parsing the definition of "is" -- first claiming that there is no difference between "contacts", "linkages" and "relationships" in an effort to justify Bush's oil-fueled invasion of Iraq. Now they are attempting to debunk the film by claiming that the fact that the FBI interviewed 26 of the 130+ Bin Laden family members who were flown out of the country and that they were flown out after flights began again, and besides, it was Richard Clarke who signed the order and he's a Clinton holdover so that makes him a liar, means Moore's claim is meaningless.

Except that Clarke was originally hired by Ronald Reagan and an FBI agent shown in the film says that this was highly irregular, but okay, whatever.

So let's talk about the film now, shall we? This is the most serious, passionate work Moore has ever done and while even I am not going to deny that Moore can be a pain in the ass, a hypocrite, and a master of the cheap shot (a technique he uses fairly liberally here), there's no question that FAHRENHEIT 9/11 is a well-researched, carefully crafted film that not only packs a punch in the stomach of an emotional wallop but at times achieves true artistry. Moore trusts in audience memory, James Gibbs' mournful, Philip Glass-influenced score, and footage of the shocked reactions of people on the street to the fires and collapse of the twin towers, to provide the emotion of remembrance of that day. This tasteful handling of the event is followed by a slow-motion sequence showing debris blowing in the wind; a scene of haunting beauty that paradoxically calls to mind Ricky Fitts in American Beauty, commenting on his own film of a plastic bag blowing in the wind: "...this bag was like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and ... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever."

Except that now there was every reason to be afraid, and Moore explores the Bush Administration's efforts to play off that fear, to use it, exploit it, and mold it to justify both its war in Iraq and its attempts at eviscerating civil liberties here at home. Indeed, as I write this, the Supreme Court has ruled that American citizens CAN be held as enemy combatants at the whim of the President, though they've thrown a bone at the citizenry it supposedly works for in that that you must be allowed access to a court system that if Bush has his way will be stacked with right-wing ideologues, once Bush decides you're a terrorist because you bought a copy of Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud. Thank you, Supes, may I have another? But Moore forces us to look at the consequences of this war fought in Our Name -- all the blood, the gore, the Holocaust-like images of piles of Iraqi bodies loaded into the backs of trucks, the shattered limbs and equally shattered souls of the young men and women from towns like Moore's devastated original hometown of Flint Michigan -- the ones who "die so we don't have to."

Because Moore has such a reputation as a tub-thumper, it's tempting to focus on the cheap shots that are his main stock in trade -- the goofy Bonanza spoof that may provide a few chuckles to break the horror but is ultimately pointless; the obligatory Gonzo Stunts, in this case riding an ice cream truck through the streets of Washington, DC reading the USA Patriot Act and asking Congressmen to encourage their own children to enlist. Like Steven Spielberg, Moore almost never gives his audience credit for Getting It, and so he has to insert his obligatory sledgehammer moment that is inevitably the cheapest shot of all. In Bowling for Columbine, he cruelly and gratuitously ambushes Charlton Heston, playing fast and loose with the facts, when his point about the culture of fear is driven home most effectively by the animated sequence by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone -- after which he informs us that these two fierce sociopolitical satirists are alumni of Columbine High School, only they focused their alienation in a far more constructive direction thatn did killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Here, as if watching Flint mother Lila Lipscomb talk about her patriotism, her love of country, and her son, dead in Iraq barely a week after writing home begging his mother to vote Bush out of office because he was sent to Iraq for nothing, weren't enough, he deposits her outside the White House -- for what?

Moore's use of these gimmicks is even more frustrating because he has an important story to tell, and stuff like this only serves to alienate the remaining reasonable Bush supporters for whom I still have hope. I know they're out there, even though there may be only five of them. There's plenty of meat here; Moore doesn't need to overstate the case; the case is right out there for the world to see. In fact, the entire case could be made during the footage from the now-infamous Emma Booker School tape, which shows the Leader of the Free World, sitting in a room full of school children, doing Absolutely Nothing after being told that the nation is under attack. This may be the most powerful and important piece of video since Abraham Zapruder filmed John F. Kennedy's Dallas motorcade, and indeed it speaks for itself, though what it says is open to interpretation. Does it depict a man completely out of his element, waiting for his handlers to tell him what to do? Does it depict a man in shock? Does it depict, God forbid, a man complicit in a heinous plot who has just been told that everything has gone according to plan? Or simply a small, chickenshit little man, a venal politician in an empty suit, like the fictional candidate Gregg Stillson in The Dead Zone, using schoolchildren as human shields? These are vitally important questions, and they demand more discipline than the kind of affable, shaggy-dog, shambling, regular-guy style that is Moore's stock in trade can handle alone.

That said, the weaknesses in FAHRENHEIT 9/11 don't interfere with its value in providing red meat to the already-converted. They are only frustrating because they keep a Very Important Film from taking that one last step into greatness, and thereby providing an argument so compelling that not even the most ardent knee-jerk Bush supporter could fail to be moved. But after three years of watching the American media carrying water for this gang of thugs and wondering just how far they'll be able to go, I am grateful to Michael Moore for having the guts to use his bully pulpit to finally say, "Enough."

Now it's our turn to say "Enough" at the polls in November. But will we?

-- Jill Cozzi

(Note: On Thursday, June 24, a day after FAHRENHEIT 9/11 opened in New York, the Carlyle Group announced that it is one of three investors who have agreed to buy the Loews theatre chain from Onex Corporation. Loews is the third largest movie theater chain, with about 200 Cineplex operations worldwide. Among the Bush family cronies currently associated with the Carlyle Group are James A. Baker III, Frank C. Carlucci, and former British Prime Minister John Major. Former President George Herbert Walker Bush, father of the current occupant of the White House, was a consultant for the company for ten years, resigning in October 2003. YOU do the math.)

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