Dare Not Speak The Truth

It looks as if Cyrus Nowastech, the screenplay writer whose "Path to 9/11" ABC screenplay thrust him into the national spotlight, has decided to answer the myriad of volleys from the Left tossed his way. The writer who has been labeled everything but a white man (literally) has responded to calls that he is partisan or had an "agenda" to discredit the Clintons with his docudrama. Consider:

In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, "No." I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings--wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.

This is a man whose screen credits certainly don't speak to his political leanings, including the likes of Oliver Stone's "The Day Reagan Was Shot", but that doesn't matter much anymore. All one must do is attack an icon of the new religion, or in this case icons and shed a little light on the real history that we've been encouraged to "Move On" from and you're officially a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Congratualtions, Cyrus. Now you're in the big time.

At least they didn't smear Cyrus alone. Apparently, the director David Cunningham committed the sin of relation to a father who started a youth ministry. What was it they used to say about America? Here we judge you by who you are, not by who your father was. That is, unless the Left can use that to some sort of political advantage. Fairness here, the Right does that too. It's pretty sad when they do. Although sometimes the sins of the father are inherited by the son, this isn't 19th Century Ireland. Let's take people as we find them.

All that aside, consider, though, what he feels he was really trying to say when he wrote that screenplay.

"The Path to 9/11" was intended to remind us of the common enemy we face. Like the 9/11 Report itself, it is meant to enable us to better defend ourselves from a future attack. Past is prologue, and 9/11 is merely another step in an escalating Islamic fundamentalist reign of terror. By dramatizing the step-by-step increase in attacks on America--all of which, in fact, occurred--we are better able to see the pattern and anticipate the future. That was the point of the series, its only intention. Call it the canary in the coal mine. Call it John O'Neill in the FBI.

Spoken like a real historian, one who actually wants to use history to interpret the past and possibly better understand the future. Understanding always worked so much better for me than structured attempts to rewrite history and construct a new future based on that. I thought Progressives were all about understanding. Where were you on that one, boys?

Cyrus Nowatech is yet another in an increasingly long line of people with no political agenda who find themselves in the inconvenient spot of being assigned on by powers who are adversely affected by their desire to "speak truth to power". He won't be the last. As this election cycle rolls into the '08 Presidential elections, and assuming Hillary is in fact running, I'd hazard a guess we'll see a lot more of these rather nasty character assassinations. Count on it.