There are rightwingers all over the internets, including below in comments, who are mewling that the Democrats are calling for “censorship” in putting political pressure on ABC/Disney to prevent the airing of lies about 9/11. I, for one, suggest a compromise: If ABC would issue a disclaimer, or better yet a continuous banner, stating:
Note: The program you are watching contains lies and numerous unsubstantiated smears deliberately inserted by rightwing operatives to deflect blame from George W. Bush
then I would have no objection whasoever to the broadcast.
As an alternative, they could simply postpone the broadcast to correct the errors and eliminate the lies.
But as the promotional videos demonstrate, the Disney series is rightwing 9/11 porn. It has no business being broadcast. If it is, then any Congress, whether controlled either by Republicans or Democrats, should investigate whether ABC is, intentionally or not, fomenting the agenda of groups bent on subverting the government of the United States. Let’s not forget. Contrary to what the extreme right thinks, this government is supposed to be a democratic republic, not an oligarchy, and not a theocracy.
In addition, this country is certainly not supposed to be a fascist state in which far-right propaganda is permitted on our mass media but anything to the left of Colin Powell’s politics is deliberately squashed or quarantined, available only on less influential media and never heard by the majority of the American people.
Matt Stoller’s post on what Disney has at stake is a must reasd. Here’s a taste:
There is a window of time now for Mr. Iger to step up, an ‘apologize for Tylenol tampering’ moment. He needs to cancel this miniseries, and take personal responsibility for inadequate oversight. He should privately fire the people responsible for this total disaster of a project, and apologize. That’s the only way to restore Disney’s brand among a large group of very angry people. Be brave, be public, and be honorable. It’ll work.
And what will happen if he doesn’t? Well, it’s not just boycotts. Those are probably going to happen, but that’s not what Iger has to worry about, or his corporate brethren. You see, Disney has a number of political objectives, as is obvious from the donor patterns of their corporate executives and their lobbying behavior.
One of them is the egregiously awful broadcast flag. Disney is leading the effort to give Hollywood control over how your TV and TiVo are built and what you can do with programs you watch. This is in the Stevens bill before the Senate. Democrats didn’t really have any reason to deny Disney its political candy, since Disney was thought to be responsible with its content, or at least not overtly insane. Their credibility on this front is going quickly, and donations to Chuck Schumer aren’t the palliative they once were.
Another is copyright extensions, which Disney has used to keep its perpetual license on characters like Mickey Mouse, who should by now have fallen into the public domain. Democrats didn’t really have any reason to think that this was anything but a dispute over intellectual property, with corporations like Disney having motives that are only as pure as Snow White, versus pirates bent on stealing songs and movies by hardworking artists. Now that Disney’s credibility is going, lobbyists for Disney are going to find it tougher on Capitol Hill, and lobbyists for the Creative Commons movement are going to find a much easier reception. Iger knows there’s a movement bent on routing around his unreasonable and political control of free speech through copyright extremism. He’s got a choice on whether he gives that movement a whole lot of real political power.
And thing Disney wants is media consolidation. Disney wants to buy everything, since media is seen as a scale business. It’s pretty obvious to Democrats if this movie airs that Disney is not a responsible public steward of the airwaves it controls right now. Why should they be allowed to engulf even more assets? Like Creative Commons, the free media movement is growing rapidly, and it is a real movement that could receive a dollop of political power thanks to Disney’s exceptionally and impressively poor judgment.
Mr. Iger has a choice about what to do here. I don’t imagine he’ll make the right choice, but he might.
And the probability that he will is directly related to how loudly those of us who care about this issue make ourselves heard.
BTW, in the biz, the copyright extensions are often called something like “The Mickey Mouse Protection Bill.” And for good reason. Iger has a lot to lose by angering Democrats if they gain the legislative houses and he airs Republican propaganda. Billions and billions, as, in a different context, Carl Sagan is reputed to have said (but probably didn’t).
Details of the plot are being hushed up to protect the film from copycats, executive producer says
GUY DIXON
The rumour mill is buzzing about an ABC miniseries currently being shot in Toronto about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Hollywood is only now daring to dramatize the 2001 events, and this six-hour miniseries, scheduled to air next spring, is one of a handful of Sept. 11 projects in the works. Yet, this production, which so far is being anonymously called the Untitled History Project, seems so unusually secretive that it is causing some in the industry to wonder if there are serious security concerns on set.
Then there is the fact that Harvey Keitel is starring as John O’Neill, the FBI official whose warnings about al-Qaeda fell on deaf ears in Washington. O’Neill eventually quit his job to become, fatefully, the director of security of the World Trade Center. He died in the New York attacks.
Will the miniseries turn O’Neill into a tragic American hero and the Sept. 11 attacks into a rah-rah patriotic tale, in the same way that many feel it was exploited during the last U.S. election? And how can the filmmakers re-enact in Toronto the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon?
Also provoking interest is the background of some of the filmmakers, such as director David Cunningham, who comes from a family that founded an international Christian evangelical missionary group. Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh, however, comes from an Iranian-American family.
As it turns out, the production office isn’t trying to be particularly secretive, said executive producer Marc Platt. But because there are other competing projects floating around at the various networks and studios, such as the now-cancelled miniseries for NBC, and with more films likely to be developed, there is an incentive not to give too much away.
[…]
“The intention really is to tell the story of the events that led up to 9/11, as recounted to the best of our knowledge in The 9/11 Commission Report, as accurately as possible,” Platt said.
[…]
As for the choice of director and writer, there was “no grand plan or intention to hire people of varying backgrounds” or to present the terrorist attacks with any moral or religious slant, Platt said.
The director, who is in his early thirties, is the son of Loren and Darlene Cunningham, founders of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an international organization of Christian missions, ministries and evangelical outreach programs. Short biographies of Loren and Darlene Cunningham on a YWAM website mention that their son and his wife “own a film company and feel called of God to influence society through this medium, keeping ‘one foot in the film industry and one foot on the mission field.’ “
“I don’t know David’s religious background any more than I know any other of the many filmmakers I’ve ever worked with,” said Platt. He pointed to Cunningham’s 2001 film To End All Wars, which stars Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Carlyle as Second World War prisoners of war in the Pacific in a story about forgiving one’s enemies, as his main reason for hiring the director for the miniseries.
“When this project came up, I thought creatively he was perfect for it,” Platt said.
This was written over a year ago. Platt knew his choice of Cunningham for this project raised some questions. Journalists were asking about it even then. And in light of what we know now, you certainly have to wonder whether that secrecy thing was about more than somebody stealing their concept.
Nowrasteh told Hugh Hewitt that he was approached to do the film:
HH: Now it is a huge project. So before we talk about the particulars, when did it get started? How long did it take to make? And why is it showing without commercials? What is ABC saying about that? And I salute them for.
CN: Well, I salute them as well. I mean, I was contacted in November, 2004, initially, asked if I’d read the report, would I take a look at it, and see if I…
HH: The report being the 9/11 Commission Report?
CN: Yes, the 9/11 Commission Report. Take a look at it, and see if you think there’s a movie there. They were considering at the time anywhere from six to ten hour mini-series, based on the report and other sources. So I started the process of looking into it.
I have no reason to believe that Marc Platt is political except to the extent that he is involved in mainstream Jewish causes. He doesn’t seem to contribute politically and isn’t associated with Horowitz’s Wednesday Morning Club or any other conservative (or liberal) groups that I can find.
They might have innocently called in Nowrasteh based upon his earlier TV Movie “The Day reagan Was Shot.” But regardless of that, I suspect it was Nowrasteh who who then recommended David Cunningham. It’s pure speculation, but it just isn’t credible that this conservative creative team came together by coincidence.
Platt and Disney/ABC were given plenty of hints of problems early in the production, by curious journalists like this one — and the FBI consultants who refused to work on the film because it wasn’t credible. There were red lights blinking all over the place. If Platt and Disney/ABC didn’t see them they were being willfully blind.
And then it’s also possible they knew exactly what they were doing. Nowrasteh says they called him in in November of 2004. Disney ABC and Platt may have felt in that moment of GOP triumph that there was no possible downside to blaming the Democrats for 9/11. It looked like the smart play. Two years later it looks like a debacle of epic proportions.
All through his presidency, I wondered why the NY Times was so obsessed with Clinton’s manly member but I assumed they would get over it once he left office. I was wrong. A couple of months ago they spent untold man hours a large p[iece of ront page real estate figuring out how many nights the Clintons spent together and today they devoted an entire article about Ned Lamont to rehashing the Lewinsky matter.
Ned Lamont met with New York Times writers for dinner this week. I knew this because Anne Kornblut was on Chris Matthews’ show and they dished about it together:
MATTHEWS: … What‘s going on? You had dinner last night with Mr. Ned?
ANNE KORNBLUT, THE “NEW YORK TIMES”: He came in and had dinner with a few of us and yesterday, of course, was back to school day.
[…]
MATTHEWS: Well why was Lamont carrying favor with you guys last night?
KORNBLUT: Well, we are a local New York metropolitan paper, for one thing, but I think at the same time he wants to come to Washington and thank a lot of the Democrats, the national Democrats who are supporting him and essentially turning against Lieberman, their long-time friend.
[…]
MATTHEWS: Is he too waspy?… Didn‘t he just drop out of the Greenwich Country Club so he could run?
KORNBLUT: Well that‘s why he can afford to run, right?
You can’t win with these people. Clinton was a self made man and they sniffed that he was “trashing the place.” Lamont comes from old money and progressive politics for generations and he’s not a real Democrat (which I guess rules out JFK and FDR as acceptable Democrats too.) Bush, meanwhile, gets treated like a salt-of-the-earth everyman because he talks like a moron even though he’s far more blue blooded than any of them.
Anyway, I saw that Matthews show and expected that we’d be reading quite the article about Ned Lamont in the NY Times. They had dinner, they spoke for hours — they must must have talked about a wide range of topics. But with all that is going on in the world and in that race, apparently Kornblut and her friends couldn’t think of anything to ask about except Bill Clinton’s pants and whether Lamont was as exercized about them as Lieberman was back in 1998:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Ned Lamont, Connecticut’s Democratic Senate candidate, has sharply criticized Senator Joseph I. Lieberman’s public rebuke of former President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, suggesting this week that Mr. Lieberman turned his back on a decades-old friendship and helped make a tragic episode a “media spectacle.”
Mr. Lamont said on Wednesday night that he shared Mr. Lieberman’s “moral outrage” over Mr. Clinton’s sexual misbehavior, but Mr. Lamont was harsh in attacking a speech that was praised as principled by many leaders in both parties and helped propel the Connecticut senator to national prominence.
“You don’t go to the floor of the Senate and turn this into a media spectacle,” Mr. Lamont said of Mr. Lieberman’s remarks eight years ago this month.
“You go up there, you sit down with one of your oldest friends and say, ‘You’re embarrassing yourself, you’re embarrassing your presidency, you’re embarrassing your family, and it’s got to stop.’ ” he said.
Mr. Lamont made his comments during a dinner with seven reporters and editors for The New York Times, in a free-wheeling conversation in which he repeatedly spoke of Mr. Lieberman — a longtime Democrat running as an independent on his own line after losing to Mr. Lamont in the primary — as the de facto Republican candidate.
The dinner, held at the Equinox restaurant, was an on-the-record meeting arranged by aides to Mr. Lamont. It came at the end of his first full day in Washington since the Aug. 8 primary, capping a 14-hour marathon of meetings with national reporters, a handful of union leaders, and top Democratic officials.
Mr. Lamont skipped the wine (“I better not,” he said with a chuckle) and ordered a caramelized banana tart for dessert but left before it arrived. He and his aides moved to end the interview after the discussion of the Lewinsky scandal, normally an off-limits topic for Democrats.
In answering repeated questions about the scandal, Mr. Lamont noted that he had young children at the time — his eldest, 19-year-old Emily, sat next to him during the first course but then left.
“Everybody condemns what he did,” Mr. Lamont said, referring to Mr. Clinton. “But it’s how our country responded and handled it, turned it into an impeachable offense and dragged it across the front page of the paper for a long time.”
It goes on and on and on like that for twelve more paragraphs, rehashing the speech and Lieberman’s reason for giving it and how it led to his being chosen for the vice presidency blah, blah, blah. They even quote that putz Dan Gerstein, who wrote the heinous thing, saying Lieberman had to do it in order for the party not to be “widely perceived as ‘the anything goes party.'” Thanks Dan. Very helpful.
That’s all they had to talk to Ned Lamont about over this dinner — which evidently led to him ending it and I don’t blame him. That’s the entire article except four useless final paragraphs about some advertisements. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they wanted to give Joe Lieberman an opportunity to sanctimoniously drone on and on about his superior morality again, which he promptly did, right here.
The kewl kidz at the NY Times just love Lieberman. After all, he gives them the excuse they need to obsess about Clinton’s pants — which makes them feel superior and tingly “down there” all at the same time.
Update:
Jesus, it’s worse than I thought. It appears that the NY Times wasn’t only having fun rolling around in Clinton’s pants. Lieberman has now miraculously “turned up” a letter that Lamont wrote him back in 1998 which he and the Times are blatantly misrepresenting as some sort of agreement with Joe’s speech when it is nothing of the sort. Did a little birdie whisper in Ann Kornblut’s and Jennifer Medina’s ears that they should grill Lamont about Lewinsky? Sure looks that way.
Let’s relive the glory days of the Starr Report, shall we? There’s nothing more important going on, after all. As far as the NY Times is concerned, there has never been anything in the world more important.
Disney/ABC either got punked by David Horowitz or they knowingly affiliated themselves with one of the craziest wackos on the right. Either way, they need to pull this loser.
Anybody here in the LA area who can get off work this afternoon should try to get over to The Disney Studios in Burbank at 4pm. The Courage Campaign has organized a protest. Info here.
Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice looks at the “PT9/11” controversy from the perspective of Disney’s corporate failure:
How often do you see a corporation truly step in it — I mean, step in it so strongly that you virtually can hear the “squish”?
How often in your lifetime do you see a big corporation do something, either by sloppy advance work or the intent of some higher-ups, that angers and bitterly offends a large number of its customers in such a way that its image could be dramatically transformed for years within a shockingly short period of time? How often do you see a corporation dig in its heels — and make matters worse? Or change course — and possibly (in another way) make matter worse? As any PR person knows, it is far easier to destroy an image (and credibility) than to rebuild it.
The Great “The Path To 911” Docudrama Controversy of 2006 is a body blow to ABC that is likely to have implications for the network and its parent company — for years.
Matt Stoller talks a bit more about the corporate straightjacket that Disney/ABC has put themselves in over this. They have a number of very important issues before the government that vitally depend upon their being perceived as wise stewards who don’t require special supervision or regulation. That is going to be a much harder case to make if they air this biased propaganda. They have a lot to lose.
But it’s even bigger than their current corporate agenda. In 2004, Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew and third largest shareholder of the company gave a stirring speech to the shareholders in which he made this point:
The Walt Disney Company is more than just a business. It is an authentic American icon — which is to say that over the years it has come to stand for something real and meaningful and worthwhile to millions of people of all ages and backgrounds around the world.
This is not something you can describe easily on a balance sheet, but it is tangible enough. Indeed, it is the foundation on which everything we have accomplished as a company — both artistically and financially — is based.
Disney isn’t just any corporation. It is one of the most valuable brands on the planet. They make a product that they can sell over and over again as each generation is born and they sell it with with a stamp of approval from parents who enjoyed the same product when they were children. Roy is right. It is an authentic American icon.
If they allow themselves to become a purveyor of biased political product, which they lately seem intent upon doing, they will have devalued the single most important asset they have. It would be unfortunate for all of us if millions of Americans were to reluctantly be forced to accept that this authentic American icon is nothing more than a cheap imitation of Fox News.
Even Rupert Murdoch keeps his political and entertainment divisions separate.
We write as professional historians, who are deeply concerned by the continuing reports about ABC’s scheduled broadcast of “The Path to 9/11.” These reports document that this drama contains numerous flagrant falsehoods about critical events in recent American history. The key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence into order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000.
The claim by the show’s producers, broadcaster, and defenders, that these falsehoods are permissible because the show is merely a dramatization, is disingenuous and dangerous given their assertions that the show is also based on authoritative historical evidence. Whatever ABC’s motivations might be, 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. We strongly urge you to halt the show’s broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.
Sincerely, Arthur Schlesinger Sean Wilentz, Princeton University Michael Kazin, Georgetown University Lizbeth Cohen, Harvard University, Nicholas Salvatore, Cornell University; Ted Widmer, Washington College; Rick Perlstein, Independent Scholar; David Blight, Yale University; Eric Alterman, City University of New York.
“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
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.
(It’s safe to assume that any future mini-series about American foreign policy will not delve flatteringly into Mr. Bush’s march to war in Iraq.)
Can you believe it?
She’s saying don’t worry, be happy, every little thing will balance out in the end, that if the 9/11 series is harsh and unfair towards Clinton, Bush will get his just as harshly and unfairly. That’s because the Disney propaganda will be counterbalanced by a future, hypothetical mini-series on the Bush administration’s marketing of the New Product in 2002 – the Iraq war – which will be equally inaccurate.
Once again, my mind boggles. It’s a simple fact: The Disney propaganda series is laced with lies, bald-faced lies about the actions of the Clinton administration. That in no way is “balanced” by telling the harsh, despicable, and miserable truth about the Bush administration’s wholesale effort to mislead the public into a pointless and ghastly war in Iraq. Real balance requires telling the truth both about what happened before 9/11* AND about the American public’s bamboozlement regarding Iraq. Real balance leads to the inescapable, if frightening, conclusion that the Bush administration is incompetent, deceptive, violently delusional, and corrupt at a level that greatly exceeds any presidential administration within memory, including Nixon. (If not ever.) Real balance requires that story to be told as it is.
Let’s get this straight. I have no doubt that every official dealing with al Qaeda in the Clinton administration wishes they had done at least some, if not many, things very differently. I’m sure each official has his or her personal and profound life-long regrets over their mistakes, “What if I had just done X instead?” In fact, Richard Clarke, to his credit, said as much in his eloquent public apology to the families of the 9/11 victims. It’s not partisanship to recognize that the Clinton administration was far from perfect in its hunt for bin Laden. ** That’s simple fact that no one disputes.
But those mistakes, as awful and as dangerous as they turned out to be are in no way is comparable to the willful denial of reality, the inexcusable refusal to listen to warnings, the insane obsession with non-existent threats that characterized the Bush administration in the first nine months of his presidency. Whatever the Clinton era mistakes were, these were not among them and they were (and are) far worse. That, too, is not partisanship. That’s simple fact.
I truly am sorry that the man who is currently occupying the White House, arguably the most powerful person in the history of the world, is an incompetent, delusional liar, and that his administration has set new lows for corruption and criminal behavior.*** But that’s the way it is. “Balance” isn’t achieved by lying about Clinton in a vain attempt to make his administration appear as dreadful as Bush’s. It wasn’t. Not even close. Yes, Clinton was far from perfect, sometimes he made terrible choices. But 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, the deficit, the wholesale destruction of science and health standards, the high oil prices, the war profiteering, the debacle in Afghanistan, the shredding of the Bill of Rights and so on, so on, so on – those are Bush’s full responsibility. He created many of them out of empty air. They are his fault.
And that is unfortunate. Very unfortunate. Because Bush has no idea what he is doing and he still has two more years plus to wreak even more damage, even if, mirabile dictu, Republicans lose either or both of their legislative majorities.
* Which happened, let’s not forget, well over 200 days into the Bush presidency. Not to mention the months of transition prior to 2001 when the Bush candidacy and government-in-waiting were surely also warned repeatedly in no uncertain terms about bin Laden if, in no other way, than by simply reading the newspaper.
** And let’s not forget that bin Laden predates Clinton. His grandiose delusions were directly stoked by the failure of Bush I”s Defense Secretary to honor his word to Saudi Arabia – the SecDef was a man named Dick Cheney by the way – and withdraw American troops immediately after Gulf War I ).
***It’s sheer hell explaining Bush to my 10 year old. much harder than it is explaining Lewinsky, for example.
[Updates to original post: The footnote about Cheney during Bush I was added. The header of the post was slightly changed.]
