“Based On The 9/11 Commission Report”
by digby
“I think they ought to tell the truth, particularly if they are going to claim it is based on the 9/11 Commission report. They shouldn’t have scenes that are directly contradicted by the findings of the 9/11 report.” Bill Clinton
Exactly.
Cyrus Nowrasteh, the avowed rightwing writer responsible for “The Path to 9/11,” appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s show this week and said a lot of interesting things:
HH: Cyrus Nowrasteh, there’s controversy surrounding this film which will be showing in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as the British Broadcast System, and all around the world. The controversy concerns whether or not edits were made. I have a preview copy, as do 900 other people. It’s not like I’m special. Is what I have what others will see on Sunday night?
CN: You know, I’m not sure yet. But as I understand it, there will be some minor changes.
HH: Are those changes of concern to you?
CN: You know, changes are always of concern, but I think I can live with these.
HH: There is a UPI and an AP story today saying that Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright and others are all upset with this. They’re not singled out for any particular abuse. Condi Rice comes in for some as well. Why the hue and cry?
CN: Boy, that’s a good question. You know, I don’t even know if these people have seen the movie. This all started at the National Press Club screening in Washington, D.C., the evening of August 23rd. There was a Q & A afterwards. Governor Thomas Keane, who was chairman of the 9/11 Commission, and a senior consultant and credited as co-executive producer on the movie, myself and executive producer Mark Platt conducted a Q & A. We only showed night one. You can’t invite people to a 7:30PM screening, and show them a five hour movie. However, in their gift bags, as they left, was a DVD of night 2. In the Q & A, Richard Ben-Veniste, and some of his staffers, felt that the movie misrepresented some of these people. And they questioned well, why didn’t you show this, or why didn’t you show that? And Governor Keane, myself and Mark Platt responded. And what was wonderful, really, was a number of other people in the audience got up and just talked about how powerful they thought the film was, how much they liked it, how impressed they were, and most important to me, Mary Fetchett, the mother of a victim who died in the first plane that went into the towers, got up and thanked us for doing the movie.
That’s very moving, but hardly the point.
This brings up the single most damning aspect of this entire episode: the network’s decision to send out advance screening copies only to conservative outlets, and providing one screening in DC featuring only the Clinton distortions while not providing DVD’s of that portion so that any Democrats in the audience couldn’t pass them around. Slick move.
Hewitt says he’s not special, but clearly he is and there is a reason they did this: someone was very conscious that this was going to get a friendly reception from Republicans and an unfriendly reception from Democrats. The marketing and publicity staff or their suncontractors, at least, knew exactly what they had. And knowing that, while continuing to portray this film as an “important event” based upon the 9/11 Commission Report and with no commercial interruptions is why suspicions are running so high about the filmmaker’s and Disney/ABC’s motivations.
Indeed, the fact that Nowrasteh chose to do exclusive interviews with Hewitt and Horowitz in the midst of all this controversy says everything you need to know about his objectivity. Michael Moore never made any claim to being objective when he made “Fahrenheit 9/11” and he never said he was basing his film on an official bi-partisan investigation. If you bought a ticket to F9/11 you knew exactly where Moore was coming from. Nowrasteh, on the other hand, is trying to have it both ways. He wants the conservative community’s approbation and has cooperated in a marketing plan to appeal to them while at the same time claiming that he has no agenda for a television program that is being presented for free as if it’s a public service.
HH: Can you tell us where the edits have been made? In what scenes?
CN: You know, I haven’t seen the edits, yet. I think there’s been a lot of concentration on this big sequence involving an attempted capture of bin Laden, and there’s just been a lot of discussion about Lewinsky stuff in the movie. I don’t know. You know, I think that the heartbeat of this movie is there. I think people…I just wish they would just relax and watch it.
HH: There is quite a lot of attention to the fact that we did not take serious action against Osama bin Laden throughout the 90’s, nor in the first 8 months of the Bush administration, where they focused on bin Laden. It was clear from the record that that was the case. As to the specific attempt when the composite character, Kirk, is in the field about to snatch bin Laden, does that have history behind it?
CN: Well, I’ll tell you what it is. Yes, it is a…but it is a conflation, it is a fusing together of a number of different attempts. I have heard, and you’ve got to understand, we’re dealing with classified missions here.
HH: Right.
CN: I have heard that there were as many as nine to thirteen capture and or kill attempts on Osama bin Laden in the late 90’s. And rather than show a dozen straight sequences of trying to do the same thing, and each time failing or lacking the will to execute the action, we sort of did a melding together for one major sequence.
I like that “I have heard” business. So much for “based on fact.”
And Hewitt just lets it go at that. The fact that Nowrasteh just made up out of whole cloth a scene that not only shows a specific failure to capture or kill bin Laden but that shows a fictional account of Sandy Berger actually refusing to give the order to kill him is glossed over as if it’s a meaningless “conflation” of events when it is actually character assassination. (Hewitt clearly knows this and knows very well that if the shoe were on the other foot he would be having an aneurysm.)
HH: Okay. And there’s also a sequence in which there is a question about whether or not the cruise missile attempt on Osama bin Laden following the bombing of the embassies had been tipped to Pakistani intelligence. Is that based on any particular series of sources?
CN: It was based on a number of sources, yes.
HH: And so you’re confident that we did give Pakistan advance warning that we would be trying to hit him?
CN: Yes.
HH: And as a result, that might have compromised that mission?
CN: Yes.
Nobody questions that the US gave advance warning to the Pakistanis once the missiles were in the air. It’s that the movie depicts Madeline Albright as giving advance warning when it was actually the Vice Chairman of the Joint chiefs who did it. And from what I read, Albright is portrayed as being a shrewish apologist for “her” action, which also isn’t true. Surely, it is not unreasonable for people to object to this “conflation” and question the motives of those who saw fit to portray the Secretary of State in such a defamatory way when it was completely false.
HH: You see, that’s what people are really upset about. That’s what it comes down to, is that there’s an argument in this film that not only were we not purposeful, but that we were self-defeating. And that’s much worse than being feckless, is to be self-sabotaging. Do you think that’s the source of most of the complaints?
CN: Sure. I mean, these are half measures.
HH: In your opinion, ought Bush to have been acting more vigorously in the first 8 months? Should he have known?
CN: Of course.
HH: I just wanted to put that on the record, because you’re not really a conservative apologist in any way, shape or form. Although if you read the blogs, Cyrus, you’ve been working as an arm of Rove, Inc., for a couple of years now. It seems that…
That’s just nonsense. “Cyrus” is a well-known conservative writer, whom Rush describes as his friend and who is giving interviews only with right wing bloggers and activists. The reason Bush administration figures aren’t complaining is because “PT9/11” didn’t falsify events about them and they have no basis for complaint.
Democrats are upset that Disney/ABC is presenting a calumnous, partisan work of fiction as being based upon the official 9/11 Commission Report — and even further that they planned to teach this biased work of fiction to schoolchildren as a “history” of the events leading to 9/11! The facts are what they are and nobody ever disputed that the Clinton administration failed to stop al Qaeda and that in hindsight there are many things that could have been done differently. If this film had not been so obviously biased I doubt that anyone would have made a stink; after all we were all aware of what was in the 9/11 Commission Report and understood that nobody came away unscathed. But making up facts about the Clinton administration’s actions makes the agenda of this film clear for anyone to see. When a film has that kind of overt agenda, you can be sure that the sub-text going all the way through reflects that agenda, as well. The early euphoric reviews by wingnuts certainly suggest that’s so — or as Hewitt’s Hollywood mole put it:
…the blame on the Clinton team is in the DNA of the project and could not be eradicated without pulling the entire show.
I would just remind everyone of something that I think says something important about the 9/11 Commission Report and why it’s so galling that this work of propaganda is being sold as based on it:
JIM LEHRER: Congressman Hamilton, I’ve just been told that you all talked this afternoon with former President Clinton. Is that true?
LEE H. HAMILTON: Yes, it is. We ran, literally ran, to the next meeting. We concluded the hearing with Dr. Rice. We had to go to the location, which I think I probably should not disclose to meet with President Clinton. We met with him from about 1:15 or 1:20 until 5:15 or 5:20. We had about four hours with him.
JIM LEHRER: How did it go?
LEE H. HAMILTON: Well, it was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. And I think every commissioner would agree with that. He was exceedingly generous with his time, very candid in his discussions of even the most delicate kinds of relationships, for example, the relationship with several foreign countries and specifically several foreign leaders.
He had a lot of very constructive suggestions to us as to how to put the report together and what kinds of recommendations to make. So I think the commissioners were all favorably impressed, both Republican and Democrat, and very appreciative of the amount of time that he gave to us.
JIM LEHRER: Governor, did President Clinton express any regrets about actions he did or did not take in the area of al-Qaida and terrorism while he was president?
THOMAS H. KEAN: Well, he said he’s going back in his mind over and over again about whether there’s anything else he could have done and how he might have done it. But a lot of what we talked to him about was actually the inner workings of the presidency as well as many of the classified briefings we’ve been able to read. We asked him some pretty detailed questions on those. And he was just totally frank — totally frank, totally honest, and forthcoming. And I don’t think there was a question the commissioner had that he was not willing to answer, and he said, “I’ll stay just as long as you all want me to.”
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with Congressman Hamilton that there was a bipartisan good feeling about what he had said and done?
THOMAS H. KEAN: I don’t think there’s any question that there was a good feeling in the room about the kind of time he gave us, his honesty and forthrightness, and the fact that he really… we really did have a glimpse inside his presidency in a very frank and honest way which is going to be very helpful in the shaping of this report.
The white house, you’ll recall, after stalling for months, finally agreed to let the president speak with the commission, but, bizarrely, only if he appeared jointly with Dick Cheney. They had no choice but to agree:
President George W. Bush says he and Vice President Dick Cheney answered every question from the panel investigating the September 11 attacks and denied the joint appearance was aimed at keeping their story straight.
In comments afterward in the White House Rose Garden, Bush declared the extraordinary, more than three-hour session a success that he hoped would lead to recommendations about how to guard against future attacks, which he left open as a possibility.
He dismissed criticism from Democrats that he wanted to appear together with Cheney so they would not contradict each other and did not mention he had only met with the commission under pressure from victims’ families.
“Look, if we had something to hide we wouldn’t have met with them in the first place. We answered all their questions. As I say, I came away feeling good about the session because I wanted them to know how I set strategy, how we run the White House, how we deal with threats,” Bush said.
[…]
The meeting, with potential election-year ramifications, took place in the very heart of presidential power, the Oval Office, rather than in a room that would have provided a traditional table-and-chair setting.
Bush and Cheney took up opposite seats in front of the fireplace, and commission members were clustered in the room on couches and chairs.
Bush was joined by White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales and two other, unidentified White House lawyers who were there to take notes. The commission was allowed to bring one staffer for note-taking
And that was after the Bush administration did everything possible to prevent a 9/11 Commission from being formed in the first place — and then spent months stonewalling and and denying the commission access to vital documents.
Today, Daily Variety reported that there are rumblings that ABC might pull the series. They had better be giving it very serious thought. Disney ABC and their advertisers are going to feel the repurcussions of this thing for some time if they don’t. The days when Democrats and liberals would roll over as the right created lizard brain myths of cowardly leftists being unwilling to defend the country while the rightwing warriors lead the charge are OVER.
Go to Open Letter To ABC to get all the action items and instructions for the day. There are petitions to be signed, calls to be made, emails to be sent and money to be spent (or not spent.) Do what you can. This film distorts events in such a way that it will lead many in the public to believe that Democrats caused 9/11 and it just isn’t true. If we let them get away with it we’ll be fighting this back for generations. Draw the line now.
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