So ABC is doing a documentary on The Road To 9-11, is it…?
On September 10 and 11, ABC will air a “docudrama” called “The Path to 9/11.” It was written by Cyrus Nowrasteh, who describes himself as “more of a libertarian than a strict conservative,” and is giving interviews to hard-right sites like FrontPageMag to promote the film.
What will it say about President Clinton? Here’s Rush Limbaugh with a preview:
A friend of mine [Cyrus Nowrasteh] out in California has produced and filmed — I think it’s a two-part mini-series on 9/11 that ABC is going to run in prime-time over two nights, close to or on 9/11. It’s sort of surprising that ABC’s picked it up, to me. I’ve had a lot of people tell me about it, my friends told me about it…And from what I have been told, the film really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration in doing anything about militant Islamofascism or terrorism during its administration. It cites failures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Sandy Burglar.
How does it deal with President Bush? Salon has a review:
Condoleezza Rice gets that fated memo about planes flying into buildings, and makes it very clear to anyone who’ll listen just how concerned President Bush is about these terrorist threats — despite the fact that we’re given little concrete evidence of the president’s concern or interest in taking action. Maybe my memory fails me, but the only person I remember talking about Osama bin Laden back in 1998 was President Clinton, while the current anti-terrorist stalwarts worked the country into a frenzy over what? Blow jobs. In the end, “The Path to 9/11″ feels like an excruciatingly long, winding and deceptive path, indeed.
The director of the film, David Cunningham, is already backtracking about its accuracy, saying “this is not a documentary.” OK, fair enough. But the movie is being billed as “based on The 9/11 Commission Report.
KOS diarist stephdrey writes…
ABC’s drama will purportedly conflate separate incidents into a single fictional account that gives the impression that U.S. operatives were literally standing outside Bin Ladin’s compound ready to go and Clinton refused to give the order. Allegedly, the television program will even depict a make-believe phone call in which Sandy Berger tells field agents that if they go after Bin Ladin, they’ll have to do it without the support of the U.S. Government.
This warped account is pure wing-nut fantasy. It’s both fictional and irresponsibly untrue. But is it even truthy?
Richard Clarke, a terrorism expert who served under Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. Bush, refutes this claim utterly. Clarke does describe an incident in which Clinton hesitates on a question of international law until Al Gore persuades him to be more aggressive. But Clarke maintains that at no time was Clinton ever given an opportunity to capture Osama Bin Ladin that he failed to give the go order.
And if Richard Clarke’s testimony isn’t good enough for you, the 9/11 Commission itself discredits the claim that Clinton ever refused an offer of Osama bin Ladin on a silver platter.
So much for being based on the 9-11 commission report…
What we do know is that after Osama Bin Ladin bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Bill Clinton personally ordered simultaneous military strike camps in Afghanistan, and was roundly criticized by Republicans for "Wagging the Dog" to distract from his Monica Lewinsky scandal.
We also know that President Clinton sent strong Memoranda to the CIA reiterating that they were authorized to use tribal assets or other means to hunt down Osama Bin Ladin, and kill him if necessary. And we know that President Clinton personally negotiated with the leader of Pakistan and secured a joint plan to capture Bin Ladin – plans that evaporated when Mr. Sharif was violently overthrown by General Pervez Musharraf.
We also know that President Clinton demanded daily intelligence reports about Bin Ladin after 1998 and that his administration successfully thwarted a Millenium Attack – with connections to what we would eventually understand to be Al Qaeda – by arresting an Algerian Jihadist smuggling a load of explosives into the U.S.
And finally, we also know that when the Bush Administration transitioned into power, they did not agree with Clinton officials that terrorism should be the major priority of their administration until after September 11, 2001.
Bear in mind, ABC is the same network that tried its level best to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard back in November of 2004. it deliberately and despicably planted in the national discourse on gay bashing, calculated anti-gay propaganda that Shepard was a meth addict and his murder was the result of a drug deal gone bad. The religious right had been yapping since before the poor kid’s body was cold that he must have brought it on himself somehow, in some way, because after all he was a homosexual. Whenever anyone made the obvious link between religious right hate mongering and Shepard’s murder, they fell over themselves trying to smear that poor kid even more. He was a sexual predator they said. He was a prostitute they said. He was a drug addict who liked dangerous sex they said. Until ABC News gave their smears the respectability of a mainstream news network, nobody beyond the kook pews took them seriously.
But ABC News knew that calling Matthew Shepard a meth addict who may even have had a sexual relationship with one of his killers wasn’t merely a right wing obscenity. It was…controversial. And that meant ratings. So they did it. Less then four months later, in Santa Fe New Mexico, a young gay man, James Maestas was beaten so badly by his three attackers, his lungs were burned by his own stomach acid.
Now ABC News will, in a few days, give another bitter America hating right wing fantasy wings. And its of a piece with little they care anymore about the lives of common average everyday Americans. Instead of holding the Bush gang accountable for how badly they’ve damaged America’s ability to defend itself, they’re going to help it pass the buck, and never mind that isn’t going to make Americans one whit safer from terrorism. They didn’t smear a dead gay college student to draw attention to anti-gay violence. They did it for the money. And that’s where the fascist right, and the network executives shake hands.
[Edited a tad…]
