It pains me that on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I need to spend time commenting on the ABC docudrama “The Path to 9/11,” which has occasioned controversy for its unflattering portrayal of Clinton administration officials. I watched part one last night. The uproar is entirely justified.
At every critical juncture in the film, some high-ranking Clinton official emerges to rain on the testosterone parade, scuttling effective anti-terrorist action. Madeleine Albright attempts to delay the Ramzi Yousef takedown in Islamabad. She’s berated by George “slam dunk” Tenet for giving Pakistan advance warning of the 1998 missile attack on the Qaeda training camp. She’s made to look as though she’d never heard of Pakistani ISI, let alone its Taliban sympathies. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, is consistently demonized as soft on terror. Following the African embassy bombings in 1998, a female FBI official barges into an NSC meeting to berate Berger personally, in the most hackneyed TV movie fashion. Smacked down by a woman! How dare Berger wince over potential civilian casualties! Doesn’t he get that we’re at war? The character playing Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of the Afghan Northern Alliance, is made to say: “Are there any men left in Washington, or only cowards?”
Oh, and after one egregious supposed example of Clinton administration pussyfooting, we get a gratuitous jump-cut to Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” line. It doesn’t serve the story in any way at all. It’s just there.
If this sounds like Bush administration propaganda, it is. Max Blumenthal has revealed that the bias in the film is not in the least bit accidental. “The Path to 9/11” was spearheaded by a group with an avowedly right-wing agenda.
ABC’s disclaimer — that the film is not a documentary, that it contains fictionalized scenes, composite characters, time compression and so forth — makes matters worse. Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger are not composites; they are real. The events depicted in the film are real, but refracted through a political prism, one that speaks to America’s political life in the here and now. The ABC disclaimer is nothing more than a license for lies.
To grasp the political stakes for November, read the words of an anti-Bush conservative, Andrew Sullivan, who argues in the London Times:
The rationale is clear. In the week of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 the president wants to change the debate from Iraq, from Iran, from the past and position himself once again as the indispensable protector. It’s territory he knows and feels secure on: goading the opposition as appeasers and terror lovers.
[…]
So any congressional resistance to Bush’s war crimes and military tribunal bill will be depicted as delaying justice for the perpetrators of 9/11. The choice in the November elections will be described as being between breaching the Geneva conventions or backing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
This should be a day to mourn and reflect. But the Republicans, the forces behind “The Path to 9/11” and the honchos at ABC have chosen otherwise.
[Update: More details on the film controversy here. And here.]
[Note: This site carries detailed rebuttals of the film from Richard Clarke and others. Joe Conason’s remarks at Salon.com are also worth reading, esp. for insight on part two, which I haven’t seen and don’t intend to see.]
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