Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > False History in "Path to 9/11"

There's controversy over ABC's miniseries, "The Path to 9/11," which starts tonight. Bill Clinton and his former staff members in particular are angry about some of the scenes. From the best accounts, they should be.

Other than the terrorists behind the attack, no American president is to blame for 9/11. One can fairly criticize Clinton in general for not taking fundamentalist Islamic terrorism seriously. That same general level of blame can also be directed at Carter, Reagan, and Bush, Sr. All of them glossed over terrorist problems, failed to take reprisals, and cut and ran following attacks. The sum effect of all of those decisions of all of those presidents led the 9/11 terrorists to believe that a massive attack on American soil would lead to a massive withdrawl of American influence around the globe.

The real issue in "Path to 9/11" is that based on accounts of people who have seen the movie, ABC has created fictional events using historical characters. I understand that dialog has to be re-created for historical dramas. I can even understand creating composite characters to make the story simpler to tell (while cringing at the potential for abuse). What ABC has apparently done is to have specific historical characters taking specific actions and making specific decisions that aren't true to history. That's unfair to those individuals and to anyone trying to understand 9/11.

One of the people whose opinion I'm relying on is John Podhoretz, a conservative columnist for the NY Post and National Review. He's seen the original, unedited movie and while he has no love lost for the Clintons and their staff, he found parts of the movie blatantly inaccurate.

Ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's anger is unquestionably justified. The version that I saw has her self-righteously owning up to actions that effectively tipped off Osama bin Laden to a strike against his Afghan training camp. "We had to inform the Pakistanis," the movie's Albright insists.

The real Albright says she neither did nor said such a thing and that the meeting we see in the movie never took place. The 9/11 Commission report, on which the film is partly based, says it was a senior military official who told the Pakistanis.

The portrait of Albright is an unacceptable revision of recent history and an unfair mark on a public servant who, no matter her shortcomings, doesn't deserve to be remembered by millions of Americans as the inadvertent (and truculent) savior of Osama bin Laden.

Samuel Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, also seems to have just cause for complaint. The version of the film I saw portrays him as having ruined the CIA's one clear shot at bin Laden himself. "Do we have clearance" to shoot, the CIA asks Berger, with Osama in their sights, and Berger responds, "I don't have that authority." That scene never took place in real life. The imputation that an actual living person named Sandy Berger refused to give a specific OK to an operation that would have put an end to Osama bin Laden three years before 9/11 is a libel.

If, as reported, ABC has revised that scene to conform more closely to reality, the network has done the right thing.

ABC isn't the first to do this sort of thing. Oliver Stone famously altered history and repeated long-discredited theories in JFK and received eight Oscar nominations for his efforts. See One Hundred Errors of Fact and Judgment in Oliver Stone's JFK. Michael Moore has a reputation for unfair editing and outright fabrications. See Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine: Documentary or Fiction?.

All authors are tempted to bias and unfairness. Film is a medium that is especially tempting. The author (typically in the form of the producer or director) controls the camera and the microphone, and when big budgets and big audiences are involved critics often don't have the resources or attention at their disposal to fully rebut the original film.