NARRATOR: “And who else stood to benefit from the pipeline? Bush’s number one campaign contributor, Kenneth Lay, and the good people of Enron. (shot of BBC News website, 3 December 1997) Only the British press covered this trip. Then in 2001, just 5 1/2 months before 9/11, the Bush Administration welcomed a special Taliban envoy to tour the United States to help improve the image of the Taliban government.”

5 1/2 months before 9/11 would put this meeting around the end of March 2001, right around the time of this article I posted last time.  Here we find that the visit was about a lot more than merely improving the Taliban’s image.

MR. BOUCHER: “Yes, I’ll fill you in on that one. Mr. Rahmatullah met today with working level officials at the State Department. He met with the Director of the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Bangladesh desk, and the actual Afghanistan desk officer for the Office of Counter-Terrorism. He presented a letter addressed to President Bush calling for improved relations and continued dialogue, but it did not contain any specific proposals for addressing the international concerns about terrorism and other issues with Afghanistan—with Taliban.

“We meet with Taliban officials to discuss issues involving Afghanistan that are of great concern to the United States, including terrorism, narcotics, the peace process, humanitarian assistance and human rights. During these meetings, we inform the Taliban precisely where we stand and what they have to do to meet our concerns.

“We have stressed in particular to Mr. Rahmatullah the importance of Taliban’s compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1333 and to the international community’s concerns, including handing over indicted terrorist Usama bin Laden to a country where he can be brought to justice, and closing the terrorist camps.”

As Boucher says, the Taliban’s letter to the US concerned mostly improving relations and dialogue, but it was the US who pushed for greater action against terrorism, among other important issues, not just “improving the image of the Taliban government”, as Moore asserts.  Looks like a major lie right from Moore here.  The Taliban might have wanted to visit simply to improve their own image (the sole reason which Moore ascribes to Bush), but the Bush administration welcomed them to lay the groundwork for anti-terrorism operations and humanitarian aid.  Of course Moore might counter by saying, “Well, that was just a side show; the real reason was to boost the Taliban,” or by parsing his sentence and saying, “I was only saying that the image improvement was simply a result of the meeting, not the goal.” The problem with even these counters is that Moore presents the Taliban-boosting as either the only reason for or the only effect of the visit, both which we KNOW are false, and conceding a major omission.  Thus we’ve got a bad omission at least, and a lie at worst.

Back to Moore:

NARRATOR: “Here is the Taliban official visiting our State Department to meet with US officials. Why on Earth did the Bush administration allow a Taliban leader to visit the United States knowing that the Taliban were harboring the man who bombed the USS Cole and our African embassies? Well, I guess 9/11 put a stop to that.”

The implication is that Bush was making oil deals with these guys until 9/11 made it no longer politically expedient to do so.  What Moore doesn’t tell you is that the US allowed the Taliban to visit precisely because we wanted to catch the man they were harbording and to stop such attacks as those on the USS Cole and the African embassies.  We tried to negotiate a handover of Bin Laden, unfortunately without success because the Taliban was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda. My earlier quotes from the Village Voice underscore this point: the Taliban offered only to kill Bin Laden, not hand him over alive under the terms of UNSC 1333, which the US was actively looking to enforce.

Moore wonders why on Earth Bush would allow such a visit, and although he could have answered this question as easily as I have, he instead chose to ignore the answer and allow earlier mentions of purported oil deals to falsely fill in the blanks.

Of course, we dare not accuse Moore of “lying” per se.  Instead, we rightly accuse of him of once again omitting important evidence and willfully misleading the viewer.

Chris Z