Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [3]
Okay, I’m rationalizing. Six media companies own everything. Break up these monopolies for the good of the country! The free flow of news and information in a democracy must not be in the hands of just a few rich men.
Yet, I have to say, they seem to be behind me here 100 percent. 1000 percent!! Not once have they said I was “trouble.”
But then, it’s not me they really need to worry about.
It’s the librarians.
And you.
Michael Moore
Somewhere over Greenland
August 15, 2003
CHAPTER
1
7 Questions for
George of Arabia
AT FIRST,it seemed like a small plane had accidentally flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. It was 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, and as the news leaked out across America, no one stopped what they were doing. It was a freaky occurrence to be sure, but most of the country carried on with getting itself to work or school or back to sleep.1
Seventeen minutes later, reports came in that, now, a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. Suddenly the collective thinking of a nation shifted, in one fell swoop, to one single thought: “This is no accident!”
TV sets everywhere were flipped on. It was unlike anything you had ever seen. Your brain, now confronted with an event for which it had no prior reference, was scanning itself trying to figure out what it all meant, and in particular, what it all meant for your own personal survival, whether you were watching from your rooftop in Tribeca or on CNN in Topeka.
You were in a daze, paralyzed in front of screen or a radio, then you called everyone you knew, 290 million Americans all asking each other the same question: What the hell is going on????
This was the first of many questions that arose about the tragedy of September 11. Now, I’m not into conspiracy theories, except the ones that are true or involve dentists. I believe that all dentists must have gotten together at some point and decided that the real money was in root canals and full sets of X-rays every time you go in. No other mammal in the animal kingdom has to go through this.
The questions I have about September 11 are not about how the terrorists got past our defense system, or how they were able to live in this country and never be detected, or how all Bulgarians who worked at the WTC got a secret communiqué to not show up to work that day, or how the towers came down so easily when they were supposedly built to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis, and truck bombs in their parking garage.
These were all questions that a special commission investigating September 11 was supposed to answer. But the very formation of that commission was opposed by the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress.2 Reluctantly, they finally agreed—but then they sought to block the investigative body from doing its job by stonewalling them on the evidence that they sought.3
Why wouldn’t the Bush people want to find out the truth? What were they afraid of? That the American people would learn that they screwed up, that they were asleep at the wheel when it came to terrorist threats, that they belligerently ignored the warnings of the outgoing Clinton officials about Osama bin Laden4 simply because they hated Clinton (SEX! BAD!)?
The American people are a forgiving lot. They didn’t hold it against Franklin Roosevelt when Pearl Harbor was bombed. They didn’t shun John F. Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. And they still don’t care that Bill Clinton had those