The Path to 9/11

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I’m surprised that no one has said anything about this controversial ABC mini-series yet. Reportedly, in its original cut, The Path to 9/11 blames the Clinton administration for not capturing Osama bin Laden and thus averting the 9/11 attacks.

Clinton in row over 9/11 program

A controversial television dramatisation that alleges former president Bill Clinton did not try hard to capture Osama bin Laden has roiled emotions over who is to blame for the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The US television channel ABC was under intense pressure yesterday from Clinton and his backers to cancel the five-hour docudrama, to be shown for the fifth anniversary of the attacks, because, they allege, "fabricated scenes" do not accurately portray history.

ABC was quiet on the issue a day after top Clinton aides wrote a new letter to Robert Iger, president and chief executive of The Walt Disney Company, ABC's parent, pressing the company not to air the show.

On Friday the entertainment industry news website Variety, citing sources close to the network, said that ABC was considering killing the film.

The Path to 9/11 is a fictionalised — but, ABC has said, highly based on facts — account of government attempts to hunt down Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Critics say the film blames Clinton, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and other senior aides for not adequately pursuing bin Laden, leaving him free to plan the 2001 attacks in which nearly 3000 people died.

In the letter dated Friday and reprinted on the news blog TPM Cafe, Bruce Lindsey, the chief executive of Clinton's personal foundation, and Clinton's lawyer Douglas Band, charged that the The Path to 9/11 was "irreparably flawed" and would give viewers a false impression of events.

The film "cheapens the fifth anniversary of what was a very painful moment in history for all Americans".

"We expect that you will make the responsible decision not to air this film," they said.

The letter followed reports that ABC was re-editing some parts of the film in the wake of strong criticism from children's educational publishing group Scholastic; actor Harvey Keitel, who stars in the drama; and several members of Congress and the official commission which investigated the September 11 attacks.

On Thursday Scholastic, which worked with ABC to produce classroom study materials to use in conjunction with The Path to 9/11, announced it was removing the materials from its website, saying the materials "did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues".

ABC was also assailed Friday in a joint letter to Iger from nine respected US historians. "Broadcasting these falsehoods, connected to the most traumatic historical event of our times, would be a gross disservice to the public. A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it," they wrote in the letter, also reprinted by TPM Cafe.

The show reportedly portrays Clinton national security aide Sandy Berger refusing to authorise a CIA attempt on bin Laden's life, an episode Berger said never took place.

It also reportedly uses real news footage to imply that Clinton was too preoccupied with the scandal over his intimate relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky to effectively fight terrorism, which Lindsey also has denied was the case.

The film has angered Democrats who are challenging Republicans for control of Congress in November national elections in which the response to the 2001 attacks is a dominant theme.

Democrats fear the film will unfairly tar them with responsibility for the attacks, which occurred after the Democrats lost control of the government to Bush's Republican Party. Clinton was president from January 1993 - January 2001.

ABC's plans for the film ran into more trouble when Bush announced yesterday that he would be making a national television address marking the September 11 anniversary on Monday night time right in the middle of the showing of the second segment of The Path to 9/11.

- AFP

[Faithless]

Wellll, there's links all over the friggin' place on other boards. The link I sent you in a PM has been following it closely.

Think Progress (http://thinkprogress.org/) has been on top of the issue, calling on its readers to engage in email writing campaigns to ABC, Scholastic.

Media Matters (http://mediamatters.org/) have been following it, too, like other alternative news sources, making their own way.

Scholastic actually responded by taking down links they had based on the series, altering the teaching materials for something more even.

ABC still went ahead and ran the series. Bush is supposed to give a speech during the middle of the Monday night episode.

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A.B.C. 9/11 DOCUMENTARY'S RIGHT-WING ROOTS

by Max Blumenthal

Mon Sep 11, 6:28 PM ET


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 theproduction of The Path to 9/11, ABC Vice President of Media Relations Hope Hartman declined to comment on this story.

All week, ABC has withstood withering criticism for The Path to 9/11's imaginative screenwriting that depicts Clinton and members of his administration either ignoring threats from Al Qaeda or botching operations that could have eliminated terror-master Osama bin Laden. Iger conceded in a September 5 press release that key scenes in The Path to 9/11 were indeed fabricated, calling the film "a dramatization, not a documentary." Behind the scenes, Iger reportedly made personal assurances to some of the film's most prominent critics that those scenes would be edited out. But even though some deceptive footage was cut from the original, much of its falsified version of events leading up to 9/11 remains.

Iger now bears ultimate responsibility for authorizing the product of a well-honed propaganda operation — a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far-right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, a secretive evangelical religious right group long associated with Horowitz, founded by The Path to 9/11's director, David Cunningham, that aims to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision, has taken the lead.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC signed David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). According to Sara Diamond's book Spiritual Warfare, during the 1980's YWAM "sought to gain influence within the Republican party" while assisting authoritarian governments in South Africa and Central America. Cunningham, Diamond noted, was a follower of Christian Reconstructionism, an extreme current of evangelical theology that advocates using stealth political methods to put the United States under the control of Biblical law and jettison the Constitution. Cunningham instilled his radical ideology in young missionaries by sending them to "Discipleship Training School." A former student of Cunningham's school claimed "similarities between cult mind controlling techniques and the [Discipleship Training School] program instituted by YWAM."

When the young Cunningham entered his father's ministry, he helped found an auxiliary group called The Film Institute (TFI). According to its mission statement, TFI is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry." Cunningham has placed over a dozen interns from Youth With A Mission's Discipleship Training School in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.

Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film,mysteriously titled "Untitled History Project." "TFI's first project is a doozy," a newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as: 'The Untitled History Project,' it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!"

The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the 'Untitled History Project,'" the Post noted.

Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to write the script of his secretive "Untitled" film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.

Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo — both friends of Nowrasteh — announced they were "partnering" with Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."

Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugar daddies like billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)

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."

This year, Horowitz's Hollywood hothouse finally spawned his most potent anti-Clinton propaganda device. With the LFF under Horowitz's control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh's "Untitled" project, which finally was revealed last August as The Path to 9/11.

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.

Murty followed her review with a blast e-mail to conservative websites such as Liberty Post and Free Republic on September 1, urging their readers to throw their weight behind ABC's mini-series. "Please do everything you can to spread the word about this excellent miniseries," Murty wrote, "so that The Path to 9/11 gets the highest ratings possible when it airs on September 10 & 11! If this show gets huge ratings, then ABC will be more likely to produce pro-American movies and TV shows in the future!"

Murty's efforts were supported by Appuzo, who handles LFF's heavily-trafficked blog, Libertas. Appuzo was instrumental in marketing The Path to 9/11 to conservatives, writing in a blog post on September 2, "Make no mistake about what this film does, among other things: it places the question of the Clinton Administration's culpability for the 9/11 attacks front and center.... Bravo to Cyrus Nowrasteh and David Cunningham for creating this gritty, stylish and gripping piece of entertainment."

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 repostedhis 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?" The question is quietly being raised in the corridors of ABC-TV's headquarters in Burbank, California. Besieged in his lush office, Iger privately agonizes that he was complacent about an attack on his network's reputation by a band of political terrorists. But when faced with his own version of the Taliban, he appeased them.

***
Max Blumenthal writes for "The Nation"

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THE SWIFT BOAT CONNECTION OF A.B.C.'S 9/11 DECEPTION

by Max Blumenthal

Wed Sep 13, 1:18 AM ET


Under pressure about his institutional ties to the conservative movement (see here), The Path to 9/11 screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh now claims, the film he wrote had no political agenda. "This project was generated at ABC at the highest network levels," and brought together people from "broadly different backgrounds," Nowrasteh told the right-wing evangelical publication WorldNetDaily. Two ABC flacks, meanwhile, told the New York Times that Nowrasteh's politlcal affiliations had nothing to do with The Path to 9/11's content.

But ABC and Nowrasteh have yet to answer for the admission by Lt Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson that significant portions of his anti-Clinton attack books were incorporated into Nowrasteh's script.

Who is Patterson? He is a former military aide to President Bill Clinton who exploited his brief, low-level experience in the White House to ingratiate himself with the far-right. In 2003, Patterson wrote Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Endangered America's Long-Term National Security, a polemic rife with distortions about Clinton's record in combating terrorism. A year later, he pumped out Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security, a book that claimed without basis that terrorists wanted the Democrats to win the 2004 presidential election. Both books were produced by the right-wing publishing house, Regnery.

During the 2004 election, Patterson's second book became a centerpiece of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's campaign to undermine Sen. John Kerry's military record in Vietnam. The book dubiously asserted that after Kerry charged a Vietcong position, he returned from the battle "armed with a Super 8 video camera he had purchased at the post exchange at Cam Ranh Bay, and reenacted the skirmish on film."

Today, Patterson is a board member of Move America Forward, a right-wing group that mounted a PR campaign claiming that Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD's, and falsely claimed a photograph that was later revealed to have been taken in Turkey was a snapshot of a Baghdad pacified by US military forces.

On September 1, while Nowrasteh endured scathing criticism of his falsehood-laden script, he called Patterson at home to tell him that he used his book, Dereliction of Duty as a source for the film that was about to air. Later that day, Nowrasteh hosted Patterson at his home for a private screening of The Path to 9/11. Patterson told WorldNetDaily a week after meeting with Nowrasteh that he received a personal phone call from ABC senior vice president Quinn Taylor.

When The Path to 9/11 finally aired with only 70 seconds of falsified footage missing, Nowrasteh declared triumph. "To lose only a minute is a success, is a victory," Nowrasteh told WorldNetDaily. "I think ABC stood tall."

Patterson, for his part, will be a headline speaker at David Horowitz's Renaissance Weekend this year.

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LYING ABOUT 9/11? EASY AS A.B.C.

by Eric Alterman


You may have heard talk of the TV network that decided to devote hours and hours of its prime-time schedule to a deliberately false rendering of significant historical events in order to flatter the ignorance and ideology of its nation's rulers and mislead its citizens. Yes, it's true. Al Manar, the Hezbollah television network, did recently broadcast in Lebanon a prime-time series based on the notoriously dishonest Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Here at home another network, ABC, and its parent, Disney, broadcast a prime-time, commercial-free miniseries, The Path to 9/11, also devoted to a deliberately dishonest rendering of history designed to flatter our current rulers.

How did Disney's decision differ from Hezbollah's? It's hard to say. The various statements coming from Disney and ABC executives have been so contradictory — both internally and when compared with known facts — it's nearly impossible to figure out what they intended to accomplish. After all, it's not every day that a global media corporation spends tens of millions to make a film to give away without commercials and offer free on iTunes, and bases it all on lies. It is particularly odd when it turns out to be the very same corporation that decided to forgo hundreds of millions of dollars when it refused to distribute another movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, that took a differing view of this same historical event because, as one of its executives explained, "it's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle."

The network initially trumpeted the program in full-page ads as "based on the 9/11 Commission Report." But it explicitly contradicts the findings of almost every part of that report, in order to cast blame on the Clinton Administration — inventing scenes, characters and dialogue along the way. To take just one of many examples, as Editor & Publisher reported, the film "explores the terrorist threat starting with the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, and there is little question that President Clinton is dealt with severely, almost mockingly, with the Lewinsky scandal closely tied to his failure to cripple al-Qaeda." The commission concluded exactly the opposite. Clinton instructed his staff to ignore his domestic troubles and, as the report explains, "All his aides testified to us that they based their advice solely on national security considerations. We have found no reason to question their statements."

Former National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism Roger Cressey has added in a Washington Times op-ed that Clinton "approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al Qaeda." Recall that most Republicans and many in the media were themselves obsessed with the President's penis at the time and accused Clinton of playing "wag the dog" with every attempt to take action against Al Qaeda.

In what might otherwise be considered a comedy of errors, New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley — who has earned what must be the largest collection of corrections on staff despite having the job only of watching television — repeated this lie, about Clinton's supposed focus on Lewinsky at the expense of the hunt for bin Laden, in the Paper of Record. Stanley's faulty rendering of history, although corrected in the Times, demonstrates the danger presented by ABC's irresponsibility. If a Times reporter and her editors can't tell the facts from the fiction, how in the world can Mr. and Mrs. American — or Mr. and Mrs. Foreigner — be expected to?

ABC News, which might have taken a stand on behalf of what its own staffers know to be the truth, took a collective pass on the problem. Its amazingly comprehensive daily digest The Note all but ignored it. This Week host George Stephanopoulos made no effort to defend either historical truth or his former colleagues in the Clinton Administration. ABC News correspondent and blogger Jake Tapper went so far as to imply that those who cared enough to protest ABC's lies were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "I wonder," he wrote, sounding much like Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney, "what would bin Laden prefer us to focus on? A TV show, or improving this country's defenses?" (As Media Matters's Jamison Foser pointed out about Tapper's challenge: "This from a guy who, just two days earlier, had devoted a post to Dancing with the Stars appearances by country music singer Sara Evans and [Tucker] Carlson, whom Tapper described as 'my personal favorite contestant' and 'my pal.'")

Just why was the network willing to humiliate its news division, costing its stockholders tens of millions in order to slander public servants with a story it knows to be a tissue of lies? Why did it ignore the protestations of its own consultants, including FBI agent Thomas Nicoletti, who quit after less than a month, calling parts of the program "total fiction"? And why did it ignore protests from many members of the 9/11 Commission? President Clinton's lawyers and Cabinet members? A group of distinguished historians (in whose company I was honored to be included)? All Americans who hold the history of that horrible day as something to be honored, not trampled upon?

ABC execs offered up one Mickey Mouse excuse after another. One day they defended their depiction as true; the next they claimed it was a "dramatization, not a documentary." But as Max Blumenthal reports on the Huffington Post and TheNation.com, the program is part of a plan hatched by a group of right-wing extremists dedicated, in the words of the organization founded by the film's director, David Cunningham, "to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry." The scriptwriter, a young friend of Rush Limbaugh's named Cyrus Nowrasteh, was a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival, an annual event founded to promote right-wing films, which calls itself "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center." ABC also passed along hundreds of advance screeners to right-wing taste-makers like Limbaugh but refused to allow even the ex-President to have an early look.

What Liberal Media?