Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed by a Navy SEAL team -- he was straight up executed, Michael Moore told TheWrap on Wednesday.
The “Fahrenheit 9/11” director has been setting Twitter aflame Wednesday afternoon urging the Obama administration to come clean about the circumstances surrounding the terrorist leader’s death -- particularly in light of the White House’s shifting account of last weekend’s firefight in Abbottabad.
The Oscar-winning director has been tweeting about his belief that Bin Laden should have received a trial, and his theory that Pakistan was keeping the Al Qaeda head under house arrest. TheWrap grilled Moore about his controversial views.
Is Obama lying about how Bin Laden died?
Common sense tells you he was executed. That was the plan all along. Just tell us that and quit treating us like children.
I have a lot of faith in Obama, but we’ve received three different stories in three days. We heard, "There was a firefight." "He used a woman as a shield." Now it turns out none of these things were true. He wasn’t armed.
Does it matter if he was executed? Do you think he deserved a trial?
I am a Catholic, and the position of the Catholic Church and the Pope is that we are 100 percent against the death penalty unless it is in self-defense. Look at the Nuremberg Trials. We didn’t just pop a bullet in the heads of the worst scum in history. We thought it was important to put them on trial and expose their evil. In a democracy we believe in a system of justice and we believe in a judicial system that gives people a day in court...and then we hung them.
It doesn’t mean we can’t hang them afterward.
Do you think people will be angry if it turns out the operation was less heroic than it originally seemed?
It was heroic. There was no need to embellish things. People in positions of power tread so gingerly around the electorate. Some people may not like it, but don’t bullsh*t us anymore about stuff like this.
The government, especially the Pentagon, has a poor track record of telling the truth, starting with Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman, that was all made up, and this firefight is going to turn out to be hooey.
Will it hurt Obama if the story turns out to have been partly false?
It won’t hurt him, because the basic facts will remain the same. Osama is still dead and everybody is happy about it.
In your tweets you say that Pakistan was safeguarding Bin Laden.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This was a garrison city. He was living in a compound attached to their version of West Point.
Where were the bodyguards? There were no bodyguards because the Pakistanis were in charge of him. They had him there under house arrest to contain him.
Was Bin Laden still a threat to the United States, then?
He was put out of business some years ago. Now, we’re dealing with rogue underwear bombers. Bin Laden was probably going, "This is so fucking embarrassing. Just hook me up to the Internet and let me get on with my business."
Were you surprised that we didn’t find Osama in a cave?
Not at all. I alluded to the fact in “Fahrenheit 9/11” that this man was a multi-millionaire, and if you know these kind of people, they don’t live in caves. I said on “Larry King,” he’s in some place comfortable with lots of money, not in a cave in the tribal region.
Why didn’t Bin Laden’s wealth get mentioned more?
From day one, they would use his name and pair it with Muslim, as some kind of fear thing about Muslims. Well, he was as much a multi-millionaire as he was a Muslim, but we didn’t start profiling multi-millionaires. Everybody who flew those planes into the Twin Towers rode in first class.
Do you think Osama was really buried at sea because of his religious beliefs?
That’s bullshit -- "He was buried at sea according to Muslim tradition." I’ve got many Muslim friends where I live in Michigan. When I go to a Muslim funeral in Detroit, we don’t hop in a chopper after the ceremony and drop the body into Lake Erie.
We’re so worried about upsetting the Muslim world. We just shot him in the fucking head, do you think they care how we conduct the funeral?
