Day two of the ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11" aired last night, and suffice it to say, it was not an improvement over day one.
The filmmakers' promised equal treatment of the failures of the Bush administration pre-9/11 never materialized. Team Bush is shown holding principals meetings on counter-terror that we know from the historical record never happened in the nine months of their tenure before the 9/11 attacks. President Bush is not shown or referred to as having been on vacation during the entire month of August, 2001. Instead, we're treated to the film's cartoon Condoleezza assuring the National Security Council members that the president was "laser focused" on the bin Laden threat, as is his movie team. Yeah. Meanwhile, in part one, the Clinton team were depicted as dilettentes unable to make a decision to take out Osama.
The fact that the Bush administration launched its secret phone and email surveillance program in February, 2001 -- rather than after the attacks -- and to no avail, apparently, since the attacks went forward ... is not treated.
The infamous PDB entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" is only passingly referred to.
Richard Clarke's alarm is treated, in a brief scene, but the fact that it was Condoleezza Rice who fired FBI agent John O'Neill is not referred to.
And worst of all, it was freaking boring as hell. Poor filmmaking. Atrocious screenwriting. Melodramatic pablum. And pure propaganda.
Now, for the important part.
My question this morning, is whether ABC/Disney may have violated election laws by airing six hours of political propaganda less than 60 days before an election. The film (and I use the term loosely) ... has numerous seedy ties, as journalist Max Blumenthal has thoroughly documented. But ABC's hands aren't exactly clean either. As Media Matters pointed out last week, screenwriter Cyrus Nowratesh appears to have based the film very loosely on aspects of the 9/11 commission report (when he chose to use it and not make things up) but also on a book from a former ABC producer who is now a Bush administration P.R. flak.
Marc Platt, the executive producer of ABC's upcoming two-part miniseries set to air on September 10 and 11, titled The Path to 9/11, has said that "every scene" of the film "is based on information from either the 9/11 [Commission] Report ... or the books The Cell (co-written by the former ABC News correspondent John Miller) and Relentless Pursuit, written by Samuel Katz." However, in addition to co-writing The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, Miller is also a member of the Bush administration, serving as the assistant director of public affairs for the FBI, as blogger Digby has noted. The film has been a ratings clunker... it has been savaged not only by former members of the Clinton adminstration, but also by former Bush terrorism czar Richard Clarke, by nearly every available member of the 9/11 commission (except Thomas Kean, since he's taking money from the project), by historians including Arthur Schlessinger, and even by some conservatives, including John Podhoretz. Hell, even American Airlines is blasting the film.
And while the film may also be a slander against former members of the Clinton adminstration, I'm wondering if it also constitutes unlawful electioneering. And more than a few people would like to know, who put up the $40 million bill?
The Pensito Review takes a stab at figuring it out, and one possible answer has a familiar ring to it for those who followed the "hunting" of President Clinton: Scaife.
Update: Max Blumenthal updates his original story/post on the Cunningham/Horowitz/Scaife connection in the latest issue of the Nation, with these key bites:
On Friday, September 8, just forty-eight hours before ABC planned to air its so-called "docudrama," The Path to 9/11, Robert Iger, CEO of ABC's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, was presented with incontrovertible evidence outlining the involvement of that film's screenwriter and director in a concerted right-wing effort to blame former President Bill Clinton for allowing the 9/11 attacks to take place. Iger told a source close to ABC that he was "deeply troubled" by the information and claimed he had no previous knowledge of the institutional right-wing ties of The Path to 9/11's creators. He reportedly said that he has commenced an internal investigation to verify the role of the film's creators in deliberately advancing disinformation through ABC.
After stating that she was "looking into" my questions about the production of The Path to 9/11, ABC Vice President of Media Relations Hope Hartman declined to comment on this story. And Blumenthal goes in-depth on Mr. Horowitz and his agenda:
In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, Horowitz led the right's campaign to pin the blame for attacks on Clinton. On February 19, 2002, Horowitz's organization mailed 1,500 lengthy pamphlets to major media outlets which claimed to expose how "the left" in general and Clinton in particular had "undermined America's security," thus causing 9/11. Two years later, Horowitz penned a lengthy manifesto for his FrontPageMag blaming Clinton once again for having "accepted defeat" in the fight against Al Qaeda. Horowitz singled out Clinton's National Security Council Director, Samuel "Sandy" Berger, as especially culpable for allowing the terror threat to fester, casting him as "a veteran of the Sixties 'anti-war' movement" who "abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia." ... um ... David Horowitz is a veteran of the Sixties anti-war movement...
More from Blumenthal:
Like Iger, Horowitz has pleaded ignorance about the sectarian agenda of the film's creators. Responding to an article I wrote for the Huffington Post exposing Horowitz's involvement in The Path to 9/11 (on which this article is adapted), he claimed in a blog post, "In fact, I never heard of David Cunningham or his group before reading about them in Max's hilarious column."
However, Horowitz's public relations blitz on behalf of the film began at least a month ago with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine In the interview, Nowrasteh described how The Path to 9/11 was filmed "under the very able direction of David L. Cunningham." (Doesn't Horowitz read his own magazine?)
Nowrasteh also foreshadowed the film's assault on Clinton's record on fighting terror. "The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response--or lack of response--to Al Qaida and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests," Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag's Jamie Glazov. "There simply was no response. Nothing."
A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton Administration officials and reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review published by FrontPageMag that emphasized the film's partisan nature. "The Path to 9/11 is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible," Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty's article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times by more than a week. ...
...When a group of leading Senate Democrats sent a letter to Iger urging him to cancel The Path to 9/11 because of its glaring factual errors and distortions, Apuzzo launched a retaliatory campaign to paint the Democrats as foes of free speech. "Here at LIBERTAS we urge the public to make noise over this, and to demand that Democrats back down," he wrote on September 7. "What is at stake is nothing short of the 1st Amendment."
At FrontPageMag, Horowitz singled out Nowrasteh as the victim of an unconstitutional crime. "The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh's ABC mini-series The Path to 9/11 "are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11," Horowitz declared. The next day, Horowitz reposted his 2004 manifesto holding Clinton responsible for 9/11, explaining that, "With tonight's premiere of the ABC-TV movie The Path to 9/11, the truth [sic] impact of the Left's policies in bringing about the nation's worst terrorist attack is finally coming to light."
Although Iger and ABC trimmed as much as thirty minutes of deceptive footage from Sunday's episode of The Path to 9/11, it appeared nonetheless as a mostly faithful adaptation of Horowitz's anti-Clinton essay. Indeed, The Path to 9/11 still contained its most egregiously false scene, in which Sandy Berger refuses to authorize a CIA officer's request to capture bin Laden, who is completely surrounded by rival Northern Alliance soldiers. After the halted (and totally fictional) operation, "Kirk," the (completely imaginary) CIA op played by Donny Wahlberg of New Kids on the Block fame, stands on a hilltop beside the Northern Alliance's quixotic warlord, Ahmed Shah Massoud.
"Are there any men left in Washington?" the script has a frustrated Massoud asking "Kirk." "Or just cowards?" Cowards is an awful word. But today, I'd say the men in Washington are something worse: cowards without conscience.
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Tags: ABC, TV, Programming, 9/11, September 11, News and politics,path to 911 |
