New ABC Docudrama Ruffles Feathers

Occasionally a program garners quite a bit of controversy before it even airs. Recently, the Survivor series announced it would break up its competing “tribes” along racial lines. It’s done wonders for the potential ratings even as critics have howled at the bad example this sets. Exactly what bad example is being set the jury is still out on. Not that long ago, CBS was prepared to air a hit piece on Ron and Nancy Reagan entitled, creatively, “The Reagans” based almost exclusively on a gossipy tell-all book that itself was very partisan and free with the facts. Conservative outrage eventually got CBS to transfer the miniseries to Showtime, but it still aired.

That brings us to the latest in political dynamite to generate controversy without even reaching a TV screen. The new ABC miniseries, “The Path to 9/11” purports to base most of its storyline on information culled from an already white-washed 9/11 Commission Report. The attacks from the Left and from former Clinton officials from Albright to Berger to Clark have howled that none of it is true and that it’s an attempt to make them look bad while ignoring the culpability of the current administration.

Of course, it is also billed as a docudrama, with amalgamated characters and plot inventions that take a little license with historical accuracy. The story is not an accurate retelling even by the account of its producer. It’s a story that is supposed to give a general idea of the mindset of those who were in a position to do something about 9/11 before it happened.

As Larry Elder said, on September 11, 2001, our government failed in its most basic duty. It failed to protect its citizens against a foreign threat. The 9/11 Commission was a giant CYA party with the Bush and Clinton administrations scurrying to protect their own. It appears that there was little concern in the early Bush administration to do anything about Al-Qaeda. At the very least we have no tangible evidence that anything was being done or was in the planning stages.

We know the Clinton administration took even less of an interest in getting bin Laden or his organization. He has opined often on a variety of flimsy excuses as to why he didn’t take bin Laden when he was offered up, say by the government of Sudan. None of them have held any water. The man was a known terrorist even then and it is shameful to say the least that for the 15 to 20 years before 9/11, no administration made serious attempts to shut down or destroy groups that did us harm, from Hezbollah’s bombing of the Marine barracks and US Embassy in Beirut through the USS Cole disaster.

The focus of “The Path to 9//11”, though, tells us what we’ve already seen with our own eyes. The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993 and we did nothing. Khobar Towers, the African Embassy bombings, the USS Cole, all happened on Clinton’s watch…and he did NOTHING. Firing missiles at an empty training camp in my opinion constitutes a big nil in the doer column. These are indisputable historical facts. The opportunity was there, but not the will and Clinton’s administration failed us even before Bush got up to bat. That is what, presumably, this miniseries will dramatize for us, but we can’t know til it’s actually out.

That there is so much political hay being made by the Left, though, speaks volumes that they know this will do considerable damage to their five-year long attempt to pin everything on Bush and his administration, that somehow there was no terrorism or threat to the United States before he got here, or at least not one Clinton hadn’t bravely combated while being assailed by an evil Republican Congress. See, it all comes back to politics and legacies, folks and Clinton’s got nothing good in his. Any good idea that launched during his eight years was co-opted from more conservative elements, not something he wants advertised. The same goes for the bad, like his failure to address any significant international threat to the United States.

Again, though, it’s just a movie. We don’t even know what’s in it yet. In the end, there may be a CGI of Clinton’s head on Mel Gibson’s body from the final battle scene of “The Patriot”. I can’t say. What I can say is that it may be something rarely seen in the media and therefore worth the watch, an attempt to tell history from the other side of the political spectrum than what we’ve had to endure from the last five years of antique media rewrites.

Interestingly, this is supposed to be based off Richard Clarke’s book, which was not very favorable to the Bush administration. Perhaps there is something to the screenwriter’s alleged conservative leanings after all. I’d encourage people to review the July 5th Washington Times op-ed written by Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran and the man who headed the CIA unit that was tasked with getting bin Laden. Not much of a Bush fan either, as witnessed by his new book Imperial Hubris, Scheuer also skewered the Clinton administration in that piece for their ridiculously poor performance in fighting any kind of war on terror. It’s worth the read.

Update 1: It seems ABC may have bowed to political censorship after all. They are possibly changing the docudrama to make it a little less accurate so that Clinton's "legacy" is protected just a bit longer. I've already heard this compared to CBS's "The Reagans", but that wasn't censored and was roundly criticized by all but the Far Left as wholly untruthful. It was also shown in its entirety elsewhere. If true, this is plain censorship and ABC and Disney are pathetic.