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Scavenger Hunt This first lesson in the Fahrenheit 9/11 teaching guide invites students to become many of the major players portrayed in the first half of the film. This is a pre-viewing activity that will make Fahrenheit 9/11 more meaningful. In the Scavenger Hunt, students circulate throughout the classroom, introduce themselves to one another, and complete questionnaires that help them begin to piece together connections they’ll learn more about in the film. Materials Needed: 1. Copies of Fahrenheit 9/11: The Players. Cut up the descriptions of the individuals and organizations so that there are enough to allow each student to portray one of the players. (If you have more students than roles, there can be two students playing the same role. This works out fine. Just advise students not to interact with another student who is playing the same role.) 2. Copies of Fahrenheit 9/11: Meet the Players — enough for each student to have his or her own copy. 3. Adhesive name labels — enough so that each student can have one. Suggested Procedure: 1. Begin by telling students that they are going to watch a film called Fahrenheit 9/11 about the Bush administration’s response to the attacks of 9/11 and the reasons for the war in Iraq. Tell them that before the class watches the film, every student will assume the identity of one of the major players in the first half of the film. 2. Distribute one player description to each student. Give sufficient time so that they can read the roles carefully. One way to help students internalize the information in these descriptions is to ask them to write briefly from their character’s point of view. For example: Write a paragraph describing how you have been affected by the attacks on September 11 or the war on terror or how you feel about the U.S. government, the war on terrorism, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. 3. Distribute the adhesive name labels. Have students write the name of their individual or group on the labels and affix them so that these will be visible as they circulate throughout the classroom. 4. Distribute the handout, Fahrenheit 9/11: Meet the Players, to each student.
5. Begin the activity. Monitor discussions to ensure that people are really listening to one another and not treating it as a contest to see who can finish first. We like to participate in the activity as students, and assign ourselves one of the players to portray. 6. In a whole-class discussion, review students’ answers to each of the nine questions on the handout and conclude by discussing the following questions:
The aim of discussion at this point is more to raise issues and questions, not to fully answer them. Students will have a richer discussion after they have seen the film. The teacher should collect or record the questions and comments the students raise for use in the silent discussion lesson after they’ve watched the entire film. Fahrenheit 9/11: The Players Dick Cheney: You are Vice President of the United States and took office in 2001. You were Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration. During your time as Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon began to use private contractors for many duties and jobs previously run by the military. One corporation, Halliburton, received many of these contracts. After your term as Secretary of Defense ended, you became CEO of Halliburton. While you were CEO, the company did business with Iran, Libya and Iraq, despite all three countries being considered state sponsors of terrorism. People accuse you of arranging a sweet deal for Halliburton, but you say the company no longer pays your salary. However, since becoming Vice President the company has paid you almost $400,000 in deferred compensation and you retain $18 million in stock options. Halliburton continues to have billions of dollars worth of government contracts and is making a sizable profit from the Iraq war. Though there has been no evidence Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, you still believe that the war in Iraq is a just war. You also still believe that Saddam Hussein had links to Al- Qaeda, although you offer no proof and although the 9/11 Commission disagrees. You worked on a document for the Project for a New American Century that calls for U.S. action to obtain or maintain control of the world’s energy resources. Donald Rumsfeld: You are President Bush’s Secretary of Defense. During the Reagan administration, when you were Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, you were a major proponent of the Reagan administration’s support of Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein. The U.S. removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982 and you were able to visit Baghdad in 1983, during the decade-long Iran-Iraq war. Although intelligence reports indicated the Iraqis were using illegal chemical weapons against Iran “almost daily,” during several trips to Iraq, you told government officials that the U.S. would consider an Iraqi loss to Iran a major defeat. In a personal meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983, you told Saddam that the U.S. wanted to restore full diplomatic relations with Iraq. U.S. companies, with the blessings of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, shipped poisonous chemicals and biological agents to Iraq. Before taking office in the current administration, you were involved with the Project for a New American Century which drafted a blueprint for U.S. foreign policy, which calls for preemptive (“get them before they are ready to get us”) war to achieve global economic and military domination. John Ashcroft: You are President Bush’s Attorney General. You were appointed after being defeated in an election to the U.S. Senate by a dead candidate’s widow. You consider yourself a conservative Christian upholding the values of God and your country. You are the chief administrator of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to check library records, enter homes and search without notification, detain immigrants and citizens suspected of terrorist activity without access to lawyers and without being officially charged. Many groups, both conservative and liberal, are concerned the Patriot Act violates people’s civil liberties, so you launched a speaking tour to support it. You have said, “Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.” Colin Powell: You are President Bush’s Secretary of State. You were Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War. When asked about the number of Iraqi people who were directly killed by the war in 1991 (more than 100,000), you replied, “It’s not really a number I’m terribly interested in.” You developed a philosophy that has been called the Powell Doctrine, which urged no U.S. military intervention unless the objective is clear and limited and an exit quickly foreseeable. In this current Bush administration you have been the least eager proponent of war. Still, it may have been your detailed speech before the United Nations assuring the world that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction that convinced many people in the United States that this war was justified. U.S. weapons inspectors agree that there is no evidence of weapons of mass destruction or restarted weapons programs in Iraq. Condoleezza Rice: You are currently President Bush’s Secretary of State, the first African American to hold that office. You have a Ph.D. in international studies and served in the previous Bush administration on the National Security Council. You also served on the board of several large corporations including Chevron Oil. They even named a tanker after you. You repeatedly claimed there was a connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and that Saddam posed a nuclear threat to the world. However, there was no evidence to support either of these claims. It was you who claimed that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, although you had been told before your public statements that this information was not true. You played an important role in drafting Bush’s foreign policy document, “The National Security Strategy of the United States,” which reads, “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting pre-emptively.” James A. Baker III: You were Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and Secretary of State in the first Bush administration. You fought on behalf of George W. Bush to stop the recount in Florida during the 2000 presidential election -- and succeeded. The Supreme Court then declared George W. Bush the winner of Florida, and therefore, the election. Now you are senior Counsel for the Carlyle Group, one of the largest defense contractors in the world. During the 9/11 attacks you were with a member of the bin Laden family at a Carlyle meeting in Washington D.C. Lately your law firm has been very busy defending the Saudi government in a trillion dollar law suit filed on behalf of many of the families of 9/11 victims. George W. Bush appointed you as a special envoy to erase the debt of post-war Iraq. The Carlyle Group: You are located halfway between the White House and the Capitol, which is convenient since you are an investment corporation which operates within the so-called iron triangle of industry, government, and the military. Your group manages over $17 billion dollars in assets. Until very recently your investors and leadership included the Bush family and the Bin Laden family. In fact, the morning of the 9/11 attacks, a member of the Bin Laden family was attending a Carlyle meeting in Washington D.C. You owned United Defense that makes, among other things, the Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle. You have made a good profit from this war. Some say Carlyle members have a conflict of interest, considering former President George H.W. Bush was a consultant and James Baker is one of your attorneys. You disagree and believe that national security and successful business can go together. Unocal: You are an American oil company. You have been accused of human rights abuses. For several years you negotiated to build a pipeline that would go from the Caspian Sea region through Afghanistan to Pakistan. You negotiated with the Taliban in 1997, even though they were already known for human rights abuses such as preventing women access to health care and beating women for appearing in public, and even though they were harboring Osama Bin Laden, a wanted terrorist. After the U.S. government bombed al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in 1998, the pipeline deal became unworkable. Plans for the pipeline are once again in place, but you formally pulled out of this deal years ago. However, it may come in handy that one of your former consultants, Hamid Karzai, is now President of Afghanistan. The pipeline will cost $2.5 billion and many in the energy industry expect you to sign on to the project once again. Katherine Harris: You now serve as a Republican U.S. Representative from Florida. Before that you were Florida’s Secretary of State while you were also cochairing Bush’s election campaign in Florida. This meant you got to work for a candidate in the same election you were in charge of over-seeing. Based on your instructions and a 19th century law that denies ex-felons the right to vote in Florida, as many as 94,000 voters were purged from Florida’s rolls. Many of these purged voters had never committed a felony and were mistakenly identified, but still they did not get a chance to vote. In the end, you declared George W. Bush the winner in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn your decision. As a result, George W. Bush became the President of the United States. Jeb Bush: You are the brother of President George W. Bush and son of the former President George Bush. You are Governor of Florida. You delivered on your promise to your brother that he would win the 25 electoral votes of Florida in the 2000 presidential race, but only after a messy election that included a difficult to read ballot, broken machines, and eliminated voters. Because of the ballot difficulties, recounts were called, but stopped before fully completed. Your state said that Bush won by less than 600 votes. However, far more than 600 voters were improperly denied their right to vote in the election. You made sure of that by creating a list of ineligible voters using an 1868 law that refused the right to vote for ex-felons unless they applied before a special board. However, your government also took the right away from citizens who had never committed any crime. As a result of your Secretary of State’s actions, thousands of voters (mostly black and mostly Democratic) lost their right to vote. To settle a lawsuit with filed against your state by the NAACP, you promised to fix the situation, but most purged voters are still waiting to have their rights reinstated. Richard A. Clarke: You were a counter-terrorism expert under four presidents — three of them Republican, including the current George W. Bush. Before the 9/11 attacks you repeatedly tried to get the Bush administration’s attention regarding a possible Al-Qaeda attack. According to you, they refused to listen. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks Bush demanded you find a link between 9/11 and Iraq — a link you knew never existed. You repeatedly told him that. You felt that invading Iraq was NOT the way to win the war on terror. Finally you resigned and went public with what you knew. You testified publicly in front of the 9/11 Commission investigating the September 11 attacks. You have been the only government official from this current administration to apologize to the American public: “Your government failed you. Those you entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you.” The Taliban: The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan for ten years. When it withdrew from power, a bloody civil conflict ensued. You are an Islamic faction of fundamentalist students that took power in Afghanistan during this time. You imposed order and “peace” upon Afghanistan through strict interpretation of Islamic law. You reduced the opium trade. You systematically violated the human rights of the Afghan people, particularly women. When George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, you visited the state to negotiate an oil pipeline with Unocal. In 2001 you even visited the State Department. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration accused you of harboring and aiding Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. They insisted you turn him over to the U.S. government. They used your poor human rights record to drum up support for an invasion. The U.S. bombed your country and removed you from power. Now Hamid Karzai is running Afghanistan with the help of the U.S. military, and you and many Afghan warlords continue to fight them, leaving the people of Afghanistan in a permanent state of upheaval. Halliburton: You are an oil services company and a defense contractor. Since the 9/11 attacks, the current Bush administration has awarded you billions of dollars worth of government contracts, mostly to support military operations overseas and to rebuild Iraq. A lot of what the military used to do for itself is now provided by private companies like you. This is called “outsourcing,” a practice implemented by Vice President Dick Cheney, your former CEO, when he was Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration. You continue to pay the Vice President $150,000 a year on top of the $18 million in stock options he holds. Your workers in Iraq get paid a lot more than someone in the armed services who might do a similar job. You are involved in a couple of major scandals right now. The government is being criticized for giving you big contracts without taking bids from other companies. It is true that your first contract on rebuilding Iraq and maintaining the oil fields worth billions was given with no open bidding process. You are also being accused of overcharging the U.S. government, but the government hasn’t canceled your contracts. You have offices in over 70 countries and your revenue is about $12.6 billion a year. Osama Bin Laden: You are known as the leader of Al-Qaeda, a terrorist group, and are accused of organizing and implementing the 9/11 attacks, along with the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole. You have developed, organized, and trained your own network of Islamic jihadists, extremist Muslims who will fight for Allah to rid your lands of what you call the infidels. You recruit passionate, religious, disempowered young men into Al-Qaeda by highlighting U.S. government policy in Israel, the U.S. military and financial support of the Saudi monarchy, the U.S.-led ten year bombing campaign and embargo of Iraq, and the occupation of and destruction of holy sites by U.S. military. Years ago you were a leader of the mujahadeen to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—and the mujahadeen received significant help from the CIA. You brought your “holy war” to United States soil on 9/11, and the U.S. military has driven you from your training camps with its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but they have not yet caught you. Some say that the diversion of troops to Iraq has hindered any chances of capturing you. The Bush administration has repeatedly claimed a relationship between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but has not been able to prove this connection. Now the 9/11 Commission says there was no operational relationship. In fact, you considered Saddam an infidel—not up to the par of your version of Islam. But you see the current invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq as more proof that the U.S. is the enemy of Islam. You use this current occupation to encourage more young men to join the fight against the U.S. Hamid Karzai: You are now the President of Afghanistan. After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government bombed Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from power. You were appointed by an interim council organized by the U.S. Later you were officially appointed by an assembly of prominent Afghans, called the Loya Jirga. You are of the Pashtun tribe like the former King. During the Soviet invasion, you served as an advisor to the mujahadeen who eventually drove the Soviets from Afghanistan. You were Deputy Foreign Minister from 1992-1994. You have also been a former advisor to Unocal, an oil company that had been negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline in Afghanistan. You initially supported the Taliban but eventually moved to Pakistan to organize resistance against them. Some say you are nothing more than the mayor of Kabul, since chaos reigns outside the city with fighting factions and continued attacks by the Taliban. You believe that if the U.S. government would just provide enough funding and military support you could create a stable Afghanistan, but everyone’s attention is on Iraq. Saddam Hussein: You became a leader of the Baath party and the leader of Iraq with the support of the United States. The U.S. supported you in your ten year war with Iran, offering you money and even chemical weapons — although it also gave support to Iran. The U.S. government now uses your actions it supported during the Iran/Iraq war as justification for invading your country. You saw yourself as a strong and powerful leader. The rest of the world and most Iraqi people saw you as a dictator. You have been accused of torture and genocide. The current Bush administration accused you of maintaining stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and of restarting your nuclear weapons programs, but you insisted you had nothing. Weapons inspectors were never able to fully confirm your claims because you were uncooperative and the U.S. government was not willing to wait, preferring instead to go to war. The current Bush administration also claims you have ties to Al-Qaeda, but the 9/11 commission disagrees. Still, the Bush administration used your brutal history and their claims about weapons of mass destruction and Al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive (“get them before they get you”) war. You are still a prisoner. James R. Bath: You are a Texas businessman and a longtime friend of President George W. Bush. You joined the Texas Air National Guard in 1965 and became a fighter pilot. Bush and you were in what was called the “Champagne Unit” because it was where the rich of Houston society sent their sons to avoid serving in Vietnam. In the 1970s, you became good friends with the bin Laden family, one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia, and handled lots of their investments in the United States. You invested $50,000 in Arbusto, the first oil company run by George W. Bush. Prince Bandar: You are the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States. You are one of the best protected foreign diplomats in the world. You are very close friends with the Bush family — both the former President and the current President. In fact, your wife, Haifa, says that former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara “are like family” and the Bush family has nicknamed you "Bandar Bush." You donated $1 million of your own money to the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Texas and a million dollars more to a literacy program run by former First Lady Barbara Bush. You are also an investor in the Carlyle Group. Robert Jordan: You are an attorney and a partner in Baker Botts, a powerful Texas law firm. You defended future President George W. Bush when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated Bush for “insider trading.” Bush was suspected of using inside knowledge leading him to sell around 200,000 shares in Harken Oil Co. just two months before the stock dropped from about $4 a share to $1.25 a share — and after Bush had been warned in a written memo by his own company’s lawyer that he should not sell his stock because such a sale would likely result in an insider trading investigation. One of the main partners in your law firm is James A. Baker, who had been the Secretary of State for the first President Bush. Your law firm represented huge companies in the oil industry: ExxonMobil, ARCO, BP Amoco, and Halliburton — all of which did business with Saudi Arabia. President George W. Bush appointed you ambassador to Saudi Arabia. President George W. Bush: Your father was President of the United States from January 1989 to January 1993. You served in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, but no one remembers much about you, and according to press reports, it appears you took entire months off from your Guard duties. You began an oil company, Arbusto, that was a failure. It was bought up by Harken Oil Company, where you became a director. You were investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for “insider trading” when you sold 200,000 shares of Harken for over $800,000 just two months before the stock went from $4 a share to $1.25 a share. Until 1994, you were a director for CaterAir, a company owned by the Carlyle Group, where your father was later a highly paid consultant. You became Governor of Texas. You ran for President of the United States in 2000. Your opponent Al Gore received more popular votes than you did, and according to many studies, he received more votes in the state of Florida, too. The Supreme Court prohibited a statewide recount and named you President. After the September 11th attacks, you overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and later invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein’s government. Former President George H.W. Bush: Your father was U.S. Senator Prescott Bush. You moved to Texas in 1948. You started Zapata Oil Co. with money from rich friends and relatives. Your company was successful. In 1966, you sold your share in Zapata for about a million dollars and were elected to Congress. You later lost your race for the U.S. Senate, but President Nixon appointed you to a number of jobs including Ambassador to the United Nations. Later you became head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). From 1980-88 you were Vice President under Ronald Reagan. Then you were elected President in 1988. During your administration, you started the Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Over the years you have had very close ties to Saudi Arabia, visiting there on business many times. One of your closest family friends is Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar. After losing re-election in 1992, you served the Carlyle Group, an enormously wealthy corporation with extensive investments in arms manufacturing. Fahrenheit 9/11: Meet the Players 1. Find someone involved in the 2000 election. Who is it and what did this person do? 2. Find someone who works for the current Bush administration. Who is it and what does this person do? 3. Find someone who worked in the first Bush administration AND the current Bush administration. Who is it? What did this person do for Bush I? What did this person do for Bush II ? 4. Find someone who works or worked for a large corporation, the oil business or defense industry. Who is it? What did/does this person do? 5. Find someone who works or worked for a large corporation AND for the U.S. government. Who is it and what did this person do for the corporation? What did this person do in the government?
You can also download the Bowling For Columbine TEACHER'S GUIDE
Welcome to the Bowling For Columbine TEACHER'S GUIDE. The lessons and activities in this GUIDE are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills, historical analysis, and open their minds on many universal issues. The individual units may easily be adapted to many levels and taught across the curriculum - Social Science, [History, Civics, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science] Language Arts, [English, Writing, Poetry], Humanities, Drama/Theatre, Film, ESL, Media/Journalism, Speech/Communications... You can review the guide page by page on the website, download a PDF of each section or the whole guide. So, go do that magic we call education! And, be sure to share, share, share! We would love to hear from you. Send your feedback or ideas to share with other educators to: teacher@michaelmoore.com. Click here for the full, chapter by chapter Bowling For Columbine TEACHER'S GUIDE
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Table of Contents 2. General questions for class discussion or written essays 4. More in-depth questions for discussion or essays by topic 5. The United States and Iraq: Choices & Predictions 7. Silent Discussion of Fahrenheit 9/11 10. Thinking in Pictures, Feeling in Words 11. What is Terrorism? Who are the Terrorists? 12. Scavenger Hunt 13. Acknowledgements and Contributors
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