Film Furor

I'm sure most people have caught wind of the burgeoning furor over the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11", and the fact that it slams then-President Clinton's handling of several chances he had to take out Osama Bin Laden. Apparently, the film greatly exaggerates the circumstances of how the Clinton administration failed to do enough, even showing a completely fictionalized scene where Sandy Berger, Clinton's former national securtiy advisor, hangs up on a CIA operative in the field, refusing to authorize a missile strike against Bin Laden. Mr. Berger has denied the scene ever occuring, and ABC has admitted to dramatizing it. In addition, Madeline Albright also denies the veracity of several events that the film presents, such as informing the Pakistani givernment of an impending missile strike, and not authorizing a strike against Bin Laden.

Now, on the one hand, as bad as these fabrications are, it's hard for me to be fully supportive of efforts to quash the movie. It is an admitted fictionalization of the events of 9/11, and the attempts to have the movie pulled still strike me as censorship. Trust me, I am as disgusted by the attempts to pin the blame for 9/11 on Clinton as the next guy, but I am against banning films in general. I didn't want to see "Farenheit 9/11" pulled either, and I didn't like everything presented in that movie. But still, this is different. This is presented by a major television network, and there is certainly some risk of the details in the docudrama being accepted as gospel by some watchers. For just an example, check this out (from Think Progress):

From the New York Times review of Path to 9/11:

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that the sex scandal distracted the Clinton administration from the terrorist threat.

What the 9/11 Commission actually says (pg. 118):

Everyone involved in the decision had, of course, been aware of President Clinton’s problems. He told them to ignore them. Berger recalled the President saying to him “that they are going to get crap either way, so they should do the right thing.” All his aides testified to us that they based their advice solely on national security considerations. We have found no reason to question their statements.

This is what happens when people learn about the 9/11 Commission by watching Path to 9/11.

The next paragraph of the 9/11 commission report, however, reads the following:

The failure of the strikes, the "wag the dog" slur, the intense partisanship of the period, and the nature of the al Shifa evidence likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against Bin Ladin. Berger told us that he did not feel any sense of constraint.

Obviously, the reality is more complex than presented either by Think Progress or by the version in the docudrama as repeated by the NY Times.

And I think examples like this show that if a network is going to present a skewed version of history, they better work damned hard on presenting it as the fictionalized retelling that it is. This time, ABC didn't work hard enough to do so. So though I still oppose calls for the outright banning of the film, I look forward to ABC's efforts to address the misinformation that the film contains.