The Path to 9/11, a docudrama set to air for millions on the fifth anniversary of the attacks that changed this country forever, contains a scene that suggests President Bill Clinton let Osama bin Laden escape. According to Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar for Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and now counterterrorism adviser to ABC, the scenario, in which Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger refuses to give the order to kill Bin Laden when he is cornered by CIA agents in Afghanistan, never occurred. It was completely made up by writer Cyrus Nowrasteh.

Both Richard Ben-Veniste — one of the 10 members of the independent Sept. 11 commission, and Sandy Berger have denounced the scene. Said Berger:" It’s a total fabrication. It did not happen."

There are other troubling inaccuracies as well.

Is it any surprise then, that advance copies of Path to 9/11 have only been sent out to Republican bloggers and not Democratic ones? Said Americablog: "...the fact that ABC is only targeting Republicans with this anti-Clinton TV show is prima facie evidence that this is nothing more than one big fat campaign contribution from ABC/Disney to the Republican party. A contribution grotesquely wrapped in the ashes of nearly 3,000 Americans."

An interview with the show's writer reveals an obvious right-wing bias. Have Disney and ABC become tools of the right wing?

So on September 10th and 11th, millions of Americans are to be spoon-fed this bit of rewritten history. And we have still not captured Osama bin Laden.
In a related kicker to this news, it was reported yesterday that Pakistan, the Bush administration's so-called "ally" in the war on terror, would not take Bin Laden into custody "as long as [he] is being like a peaceful citizen."

Yesterday, Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY-28), Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, released a statement condemning the program's "documentary" billing: "ABC has a responsibility to make clear that this film is not a documentary, and does not represent an official account of the facts surrounding the September 11th attacks," Rep. Slaughter said. "Disclaimers noting that The Path to 9/11 is a docudrama should be shown throughout its airing. We have yet to establish the impartiality and accuracy of the people behind this film and the claims it advances, and the American people need to know that...But what is far more important is the timing of this movie," Rep. Slaughter continued. "The anniversary of the attacks is an emotional time, and it is wrong for anyone to play on those emotions and use them to advance a political agenda."

Tell ABC to tell the truth about 9/11.

SEND A MESSAGE TO ABC HERE: http://thinkprogress.org/tellabc

Done. Makes about five I've sent off. :mad: , for wha little its worth.

For reasons I guess you can understand, Don, I don't dare even post a word in this thread. :rolleyes:

On second thought, dang it all. This is my home, and I won't be bullied out of my right to speak.

I've been so caught up in other stuff today (ahem) that I haven't even had time to follow what's been going on, but from what I can tell, there's been an awful lot of outcry for ABC to right the untruths in the 9/11 piece. I've gotten e-mail from every liberal organization I can think of today and yesterday, urging people to demand that ABC air the truth. It's also been all over the news--cable, anyway. I haven't watched network in the last few days (except that I caught the very important speculation as to whether Katie Couric had gotten botox injections :rolleyes: ).

Anyway, I really wonder what ABC is going to do. It seems enough of a hub-bub has been made that it would be hard for them to air it as it was. Should be interesting to see what happens.

200,000 people signed the DNC's petition to demand ABC dropping this phony documentary and ABC is editing out the scenes but that's not good enough,the whole thing should be dropped.

Btw i did hear only one republican who's on the panel for this whole documentary Tom Kean yes that's the same Tom Kean who was in charge of the 9-11 commission.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/08/gore-on-pt911/

Gore On Path to 9/11: 'It Would Be Fundamentally Irresponsible To Air Such Distortions'

Former Vice President Al Gore today released a statement criticizing The Path to 9/11 for presenting numerous historical inaccuracies. The statement is below:

By all accounts, "The Path to 9/11" is riddled with inaccuracies and contains material that directly contradicts the factual findings of the 9/11 Commission. I am deeply concerned that ABC is considering going forward with their plans to broadcast this so-called docudrama. The lessons from the events leading up to that tragedy are too important to trivialize, and it would be fundamentally irresponsible to air such distortions.

This is my take on it. It is wholly propaganda. They are scared, really scared. They may lose power so what must be done? They must scare the public. Rally the base. Rally the security moms. They do not want to the dems to win in November and this is their strategy plain and simple. They will not alter the show,they want to spew more lies. Afterall the masses fell for it before why not now?

Agreed.

It is a go-for-broke move.

They hope somehow to plant the thought that Bill Clinton, Democrat, was fooling around with an intern instead of doing his job, and that is why OBL was able to attack successfully on 9/11.

They want to create a large number of people essentially brainwashed to believe no matter how bad Republicans may be, that Democrats are worse - are pure evil.

They don't care how blatant it looks to discerning people; they want to lock up those minds and throw away the key. They'll worry about any bad pr with the rest of the country later. After all, they lived down the Swift Boat sham.

As a completely off -topic digression - whats up with the makeup on Katie? She looks AWFUL!

Looks like they put it on with a spatula. :blink:


CBS and ABC have both now bowed out of the news business, IMO.

Even though the ABC thing is done by the entertainment division, it reflects so on the corporation that I have to now put them BELOW Faux News as far as being trustworthy. Peter Jennings would be apalled.

And you know that Cronkite and Rather are both appalled at the CBS move - can't even imagine what ER Murrow would think! Nothing against Katie, mind you, but shes not a newsperson, they have her calling the CBS news a "friendly chat over coffee" or some such. doctoring photos, and painting her like a clown - can't take them seriously either.

CNN has drifted away from its roots as an all-news channel - now it is a series of talkshows. Headline news no longer does its rotating stories to keep you up to date - now it has talk shows.

And MSNBC keeps running all these prison things. Whats up with that, anyway? I guess it gets them ratings, but WHY? Who wants to watch a bunch of criminals and see what their life is like? How about doing some actual NEWS? Go interview troops in Iraq about what THEIR lives are like!

To top it off, lately it looks like Vanity Fair is a legitimate, serious news magazine. Didn't it start out as a fashion mag or something?

And MTV does serious interviews...

Instead of Tom Cruise getting venture capital to make movies, we need an independent news agency!

I'm afraid that idea was planted long ago among conservatives. They despise Clinton so much (and Gore), that they do believe that Clinton was asleep at the wheel (or otherwise involved :rolleyes: ) and therefore didn't do his job as president. And you will never convince them otherwise.

I agree that the distortions (as Gore calls them) in this dramatization are damaging and may even border on being illegal (if they meet the legal criteria for slander), and as such, ABC has an obligation to correct the distortions. From a strictly p.r. standpoint, I think there's been so much opposition to and publicity about the whole thing that ABC would be nuts to air it in its original form.

Well, whether it's bad makeup or botox, she really does look bad. She almost looks like a deer caught in the headlights, though, sort of the way Nancy Pelosi gets doing the Dem. rebuttal to the SOTU address. Maybe she's just really stressed and uncomfortable with all her new responsibility? I mean, following in the footsteps of Walter Cronkite? I'd look scared, too. :dripple:

Did anyone watch any of that claptrap? I didn't, and I won't watch tonight either. It stumps me how they can even call this "entertainment." Entertaining to who, besides the Clinton-bashers? It appears that ABC is accepting the mantle of official state media organ.

It's a sweet deal they cooked up, eh? They hogtie Clinton with the Lewinsky saga, then they criticize Clinton for being hogtied with the Lewinsky saga.

Bush has really restored honor and dignity to the White House, huh? Farts and all.

We watched the 1954 sci-fi classic THEM!, and when it was over, I checked to see if ABC was running the 9/11 thing. Indeed they were. I watched a minute or two, noted that the quality of it was admirable, but didn't stay long enough to judge the content. The part I saw was pretty neutral--the very end of Maddie Albright speaking sternly to someone, and then a jump to a scene where they were toasting someone's birthday. I refuse to watch it. Won't patronize something like that.

I guess it's on again tonight. I watched some of MSNBC's real-time coverage of the events 5 years ago. It brings it all back. I remember a friend of mine came over, and we watched together in awe. We were concerned about our kids--wanted to get them home from school, but the schools weren't closing. Then we decided, since we had no idea what might be coming, that it would be a good idea to go to the market and get in a supply of bottled water and other provisions. It really felt like we were under attack, and it seemed perfectly reasonable that the water supply might get disrupted or contaminated, that food and gas would become scarce, etc.

We were very aware of there being no planes flying overhead. We live in one of the flight paths to Newark Airport, so there's almost always a plane somewhere overhead. Nothing. We heard rumors that there were two planes unaccounted for flying somewhere over NJ. Turned out to be untrue, but it was really scary.

I was so happy later in the day when my two kids came home from school and my husband returned from work, and we were all together and alive. So grateful.

Here's an interesting tidbit:

Leaving aside what ABC is or isn't saying in this 9/11 piece, apparently many more Americans blame Bush for 9/11 now than they did four years ago. Unfortunately, almost as many also blame Clinton. See story below.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/11/911.poll/index.html

Poll: More Americans blame Bush for 9/11

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The percentage of Americans who blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has risen from almost a third to almost half over the past four years, a CNN poll released Monday found.

Asked whether they blame the Bush administration for the attacks, 45 percent said either a "great deal" or a "moderate amount," up from 32 percent in a June 2002 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

But the Clinton administration did not get off lightly either. The latest poll, conducted by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, found that 41 percent of respondents blamed his administration a "great deal" or a "moderate amount" for the attacks.

That's only slightly less than the 45 percent who blamed his administration in a poll carried out less than a week after the attacks.

Still, most Americans appear to be fatalistic, with more than half -- 57 percent -- saying they think that terrorists will "always find a way to launch attacks no matter what the U.S. government does."

The poll was carried out August 30 through September 2 by Opinion Research Corp. with 1,004 American adults questioned by telephone. The sampling error for the questions was 3 percentage points.

The REAL Path to 9/11

A 9-11 blast from the past: Richard Clarke

Clarke's Take On Terror
What Bush's Ex-Adviser Says About Efforts to Stop War On Terror
March 21, 2004

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one.

Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda. "Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan. Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking.

Clarke helped shape U.S. policy on terrorism under President Reagan and the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be his terrorism czar, then held over again by the current President Bush. In the 60 Minutes interview and the book, Clarke tells what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after Sept. 11. When the terrorists struck, it was thought the White House would be the next target, so it was evacuated. Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it. "Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking. "I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. "I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' "He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously. "We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.

On January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on. "I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' "And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States." Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever." When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over."

By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter. The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August." Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House. Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations-- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day. That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives.

Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject." Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11." In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden. The president's new campaign ads highlight his handling of Sept. 11 -- which has become the centerpiece of his bid for re-election.

Does a person who works for the White House owe the president his loyalty? "Yes ... Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside," says Clarke. "I think the way he has responded to al Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe. Absolutely."

Hadley maintained, "Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists."

Does Clarke think that Iraq, the Middle East and the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power? "I think the world would be better off if a number of leaders around the world were out of power. The question is what price should the United States pay," says Clarke. "The price we paid was very, very high, and we're still paying that price for doing it." "Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda," adds Clarke. "So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of that is that al Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened."

When Clarke worked for Mr. Clinton, he was known as the terrorism czar. When Mr. Bush came into office, though remaining at the White House, Clarke was stripped of his Cabinet-level rank. "Frankly, if I had been so upset that the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a Cabinet level position to a staff level position, if that had bothered me enough, I would have quit. I didn't quit."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/...ain607356.shtml

Yeah, Richard Clarke is the man!

I DID decide to watch both parts...if only to compare to Clarke's version of events from his book "Against All Enemies." The miniseries was definitely conservative propaganda. The sad thing is it was pretty well made, with a lot of effort put into it. It's a shame they decided to go above and beyond in order to express their political bias.

A lot of conservatives were trying to suggest that the second part shows Bush in just as negative a light. But honestly, they were much more straight-forward with the facts in Part 2...in fact, they could have been much worse. They certainly didn't fabricate any scenes like they did with Clinton. Very unfortunate. It was certainly ambitious.

To think, they had struck a deal with Scholastic to use the miniseries as a teaching tool for students. It was like some elaborate plan to change history and teach children that Clinton was responsible for 9/11. Thank goodness that plan was cancelled.

They ought to use "Against All Enemies" as a teaching tool...or wait for the film to come out (being filmed by Paul Haggis)! Or show UNITED 93...Damn, what a powerful film!

By the way, here's Clarke's response to the miniseries from ABC's website:

I sincerely believe Richard Clarke is a true patriot. If there's one thing the miniseries did right, it that they portrayed him rather honorably.

I'm afraid I've been super busy and haven't been able to follow much of this.

Did Scholastic drop the teaching idea on its own? I certainly hope so. Textbook publishers are known for not wanting to take chances (because their books have to sell), but they're also known for not being particularly liberal.

Anyone with info on this, I'd appreciate knowing. And yeah, I could look it up, but it'd be so much easier if someone could just tell me! :rolleyes:

Scholastic is saying they made the decision because they decided the program ultimately didn't meet with their "high" standards:

http://www.scholastic.com/aboutscholastic/...09072006_CP.htm

Well, I give them credit for that. Of course, it could just be that they didn't want the negative publicity.

I've written for Scholastic over the years, and I did find them to have high standards that were basically politically sound. I just wonder why their staff didn't see the problems in the series before the shit hit the fan.