Salon's review of Path to 9/11

[LostInAnomie]

Sept. 8, 2006 | It would be uplifting to believe, as the producers of ABC's "The Path to 9/11" have claimed, that the network spent $40 million on its anniversary docudrama to educate the American people and improve the nation's defenses. And it would be reassuring to believe, as the producers have insisted in recent days, that "our ambitions and our goals and our standards were all about accuracy." But it is impossible to believe, after viewing their somewhat cheesy, sometimes incomprehensible and severely distorted version of the events leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that they acted in good faith on either of those motivations.

(snip)

That incident simply never occurred. As Clarke himself would have told Nowrasteh, no CIA officer ever tracked bin Laden to his hideout. Neither did Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who is shown guiding the aborted operation. The handsome, charismatic Massoud, later assassinated by al-Qaida agents, asks Kirk angrily, "Are there any men left in Washington, or are they all cowards?" That sort of rhetoric is frequently uttered by actors portraying characters such as Massoud and O'Neill, who are no longer around to dispute the script.

(snip)

If the producers of "The Path to 9/11" unfairly indict the Clinton administration with fabricated scenes and notions, they go out of their way to exonerate the Bush White House by ignoring certain damning facts -- and creating substitutes that make the president look better. The movie shows a smarmy, condescending Condoleezza Rice demoting Clarke in January 2001 when she takes over as national security advisor. Clarke tries to warn her that "something spectacular" is going to happen on American soil, and she assures him that "we're on it," which they assuredly were not.

(snip)

Indeed, the script downplays the neglect of terrorism as a primary threat by the incoming Bush team -- and never mentions the counterterrorism task force, chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, that never met for nine months before 9/11. The famous Aug. 6 presidential daily briefing, which warned the vacationing Bush that al-Qaida intended to strike here, is given due attention. But the movie then shows Rice telling her associates that "as a result of the Aug. 6 PDB, the president wants to take real action" against al-Qaida. But the 9/11 Commission report's section on the PDB clearly states that the August warning was not followed up on by Rice

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/09/08/path_to_9_11/

[Selatius]

1. It's propaganda.

There's no way to call it anything but propaganda.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. I disagree. It's a pack of lies. Propaganda may or may not be

truthful, or in some measure truthful. This stuff is just lies.

[DeSwiss]

7. Yes and Joseph Goebbels...

Nazi father of the BIG LIE would be proud of ABC.....

[babylonsister]

2. This show should not be shown on network TV, period.

:grr: People are stupid and fallible, this won't help.

[Change has come]

3. Is there any way this mockumentary doesn't completely backfire?

I mean, this almost seems to good to be true.

[regnaD kciN]

5. Sorry to tell you...

...but most people aren't regular readers of DU. Most likely, the majority of people who tune in will come away believing that things happened the way pretty much the way the mockudrama shows it. After all, to quote John Fogerty, "I know it's true, oh so true, 'cause I saw it on TV."

Few of them will know about the controversy. And, of those who have heard, many of them will brush it off, saying "Liberals don't like this movie, conservatives don't like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, so who's to say which is right? All I know is that this was based on the 911 Report, so it has to be more factual than Moore or Stone's films."

[LaPera]

4. Other critic's have panned this propaganda shit as well.

It's garbage.