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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Hard Questions

The serialisation of Moore's book "Dude, Where's My Country?" [US | UK | CA] continues in the Guardian and today's installment has a series of unanswered questions which, if the US media were to decide to take them on board, would tangle Bush in investigations that would make the Clinton affair look like a party game. Of course, they won't.

But questions about how well the Bush family knows the bin Laden family and whether the Saudi air force trained the Saudi citizens who conducted the WTC attack (which Moore characterises as an attack by disaffected Saudis sponsored by a US-trained multi-millionaire, not quite the way it's usually represented) need answers. We know the US media will do their damnedest to ignore it though:

Fox News led the charge of pinning Chirac to Saddam Hussein, showing old footage of the two men together. It didn't matter that the meeting had taken place in the 1970s. The media didn't bother to run (over and over again) the footage from when Saddam was presented with a key to the city of Detroit, or the film from the early 1980s of Donald Rumsfeld visiting Saddam in Baghdad to discuss the progress of the Iran-Iraq war. The footage of Rumsfeld embracing Saddam apparently wasn't worth running on a continuous loop. Or even once. OK, maybe once. On Oprah.

History will surely repeat itself in this regard. Moore will certainly need a good deal more patience.

posted at 4:38 AM (UK) | |