"Path to 9/11" Will Air Despite Leftist Condemnation

In yesterday's post, I noted the left's hypocrisy in its opposition to ABC's September 11 docudrama, "The Path to 9/11." If anything, though, the controversy was still kicking into high gear. This morning's Los Angeles Times reports that ABC will stand by its story, with only minor changes to the miniseries:

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC is forging ahead with plans to air a miniseries starting Sunday despite controversy over its efforts to dramatize — and some say unfairly politicize — the events leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Producers said late Friday that they had finished making minor edits to "The Path to 9/11" amid a firestorm of protests from leading Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who warned that telecasting "right-wing political propaganda" might violate the terms of ABC's government-mandated broadcast license.

Critics say that, among other things, the film fabricates scenes and unfairly blames the Clinton administration for failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The network, for its part, has urged critics to withhold judgment until the final version airs.

Whatever viewers ultimately see, it's clear that the five-hour $40-million docudrama, highlighting years of intelligence failures and political bickering before the attacks, has detonated an election-year bomb that's reverberating from Hollywood to Capitol Hill.

The movie is also threatening the bipartisan work of the Sept. 11 commission, whose Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, served as a paid consultant on the project and has played a key role in ABC's public-relations campaign.

At least two other commission members — former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general under President Clinton — have vehemently criticized the miniseries project. And two former Clinton officials, Madeleine Albright and Samuel "Sandy" Berger, expressed dismay with Kean's involvement. Clinton spokesman Jay Carson called ABC's actions "despicable" and said the film was "indisputably wrong."

Read the whole thing. The article cites Rush Limbaugh, who says the Democrats are "just a bunch of thin-skinned bullies now trying to pressure ABC."

Further mentioned is the controversy over the fim's writer-producer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a conservative Iranian-American Muslim who is critical of the Clinton administration's response to terror in the 1990s. The story quotes Nowrasteh's July interview in Front Page Magazine.

As would be expected, bloggers are having a field day with the "Path" dust-up. A post up yesterday at Power Line was especially good in highlighting the troubling underying issues in Democratic attacks on the miniseries, noting that conservatives should be careful in attempting to give the Clinton administration a pass on its weak pre-9/11 response to terror:

The Democrats are, today, trying to dismantle our efforts to fight the terrorists. They are trying to block the NSA from intercepting terrorists' communications; they are trying to force our armed forces to treat captured terrorists with the same deference they would accord to a member of our own services; and they are trying to block the confirmation of John Bolton as U.N Ambassador so that he can be replaced with someone who will offer meaningless platitudes instead of aggressive advocacy of American interests.

What the Democrats are trying to do is return to the hunker-down and hope for the best days of the Clinton administration. They are trying to sell the American people on the absurd proposition that the terrorist threat we face today is mostly George Bush's fault, and that if we only abandon his tough approach to national security, everything will be fine.

That is why I think it is critically important that the American people not be deceived about how we got to the pass we arrived at on September 11, 2001; and that is why, I think, the Democrats are so hysterical about The Path to 9/11.

See also this outstanding post over at Saber Point, which skewers the Democratic Party's double standards in the war on terror.