"The Path to 9/11" writer's rebuttal

[boater1217]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008958

[NewXD40fun]

The Path to Hysteria

My sin was to write a screenplay accurately depicting Bill Clinton's record on terrorism.

BY CYRUS NOWRASTEH



How long will it take for the Bush-haters to squeal, "Nowrasteh Lied"...weeeeeee,,weeeeeeeee....weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee




Tom

[Old School]

I felt that the mini series was well done and balanced. If you watched the entire thing, beginning to end, you too would have felt that the Bush Admin was also to blame. It was not until the last moment that Condi took Richard Clarke seriously. At that point, it was too late.

It is politics and bureaucracy that enabled the attacks to happen, IMHO. It was the lack of communication between agencies and the inability to decipher information that held us back.

It was a deficit of will by a US President in the mid-1990s to pull the trigger that allowed the attacks to move forward.

OS

[Old School]

I do have one thing to add. If you watched the series, you would have seen that Sandy Berger was the reason why the Clinton administration is taking the hits they deserve. The reason is now clear on why Berger stole items from the National Archive, since those memos where more examples of his unwillingness to listen to reason and fact about pending terrorist attacks.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/...ger.sentenced/

BTW, the man destroyed federal document and only paid $50k. American blood was spilled because of this man and he felt that he paid his debt to our Country.

"I deeply regret the actions that I took at the National Archives two years ago, and I accept the judgment of the court," Berger said outside the courthouse after his sentencing.

[beardman2]

I'd really like to hear the usual dem suspects explain this one away.

IT surely was disgusting. I'll even save OEFM the trouble and say CBS has no spine.

[jeff221]

Surprise, Surprise, the writer of the movie claims his writeings are "accurately depicting" the story... Well, since he says so, I guess we all should believe him... But wait, the other guys say it doesn't "accurately" depict the story... Who am I to believe? Now I'm confused, where's the guy who the big curved stick, I'll just follow him around.

[Wu Wei]

I didn't catch it, there were to many factual shows on the Discovery, Military, and History channels to bother with a docu-drama. The Liberals on Bill Maher's show sure were pissed off though! I got a kick outta that.

[Son of Norway]

http://public.cq.com/public/20060905_homeland.html

ABC Docudrama Sparks 9/11 Spat
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
The docudrama that ABC will air next week commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks seems likely to revive some long-running disputes over whether the Clinton or Bush administration has more to answer for in neglecting indications of a pending al Qaeda attack on the United States.

“The Path to 9/11,” a five-hour, two-part depiction of events prior to the attacks, is to air Sept. 10 and 11. And early reviews among veterans of the Clinton White House are decidedly negative: They argue that the show downplays the Bush White House’s culpability while inventing some scenes out of whole cloth to dramatize the supposed negligence of Clinton officials.

That complaint came to the fore at a National Press Club screening of the show late last month, when Richard Ben-Veniste — one of the 10 members of the independent Sept. 11 commission, whose final report producer Marc Platt credits with supplying much of the mini-series’ detail and narrative structure — rose to denounce the veracity of a key scene involving Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. Berger.

Berger, portrayed as a pasty-faced time-server by Kevin Dunn (Col. Hicks in “Godzilla”) freezes in dithering apprehension when a manly and virtuous CIA agent played by Donnie Wahlberg radios in from the wilds of Afghanistan to say that he and his noble band of local tribesmen have Osama bin Laden within sight and begs for the green light to terminate him with extreme prejudice. In the film, the line goes dead before Berger offers any reply.

The moment is clearly intended to encapsulate the notion of American inattentiveness to the terror threat in the 1990s — a point driven home when the camera pans back to show Berger surrounded by a supporting cast of fellow Clinton administration nervous Nellies, including Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen.

So when the post-screening question-and-answer session began, Ben-Veniste stood to say that the Berger-bashing scene didn’t square with the research he and the other commissioners conducted. “There was no incident like that in the film that we came across. I am disturbed by that aspect of it,” Ben-Veniste, a loyal Democrat, told the panel, which included both the producer and the commission’s GOP chairman, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey.

Berger, reached by phone after the screening, seconded Ben-Veniste’s criticism. “It’s a total fabrication,” he said tersely. “It did not happen.”

That is not likely to prevent the film from being embraced far and wide among Bush supporters. Even before its airdate, the show is being hailed as a breakthrough in the conservative blogosphere. One blogger marveled in an interview with scriptwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh that “one unbelievable sequence shows how . . . Sandy Berger . . . actually hung up the phone on the CIA agent on the ground.”

Neither Berger nor Ben-Veniste was consulted on the film. Kean, however, is an official adviser; he says the incident was a fictionalized composite. It was “representative of a series of events compacted into one,” he replied to Ben-Veniste at the time. In a phone interview a few days later, he added, “It’s reasonably accurate.” And he offered a prediction that the show will “get just as many howls from Republicans.”

Source: CQ Weekly
The definitive source for news about Congress.
© 2006 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.

I'm sure much of the stuff is accurate, and I am just as sure that much is not. This film was never meant to be anything except entertainment. No facts required.