ABC Entertainment's 9/11 Film Under Fire
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10, 2006 — -- Democrats have been waging a full-bore political campaign, led by former President Bill Clinton, to convince ABC Entertainment and its parent, the Walt Disney Company, to pull its docudrama "The Path to 9/11" from the air.
"I don't want any lies in there parading as truth, that's all," Clinton said Friday. "And I don't think there should be any scenes in the movie that pretends to be based on the 9/11 Commission report that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report."
ABC Entertainment says its miniseries, which begins airing tonight, is based on multiple sources, including the commission's report, but the network has been under fire for days from critics for fabricated scenes shown in early cuts. ABC Entertainment insists that the show is "a dramatization, drawn from a variety of sources" that has "for dramatic and narrative purposes … fictionalized scenes."
Some of the scenes in an early preview version have Clinton officials saying things they didn't say, doing things they didn't do, and obstructing attempts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.
ABC Entertainment now says some scenes have been edited, but would not specify which ones.
One scene that has been criticized as particularly inaccurate showed an actor playing Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger refusing to give the order to kill bin Laden for a CIA operation in which the terror leader was in the agency's crosshairs -- an event that never happened.
Over the weekend, the already-stuffed mailbox of Disney president and CEO Robert Iger -- who has been lobbied to pull the film from the airwaves by Clinton's attorneys, Berger, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and myriad Democrats -- received a note from John Beug, whose wife Carolyn, a former executive at Walt Disney Records, was on American Airlines Flight 11 when the plane struck 1 World Trade Center.
Beug said that since accounts from those who have seen the film "suggest that it contains inaccurate and invented scenes … I am deeply concerned that Americans will watch this film and not fully understand -- or be led to misunderstand -- the true history of this tragedy."
On the other hand, Michael Scheuer, former chief of the Osama bin Laden unit at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (and the previously "anonymous" author of "Imperial Hubris"), who is clearly no fan of either the Bush or Clinton administrations, nor the 9/11 Commission, e-mailed ABC News to insist that "the core of the movie is irrefutably true: the Clinton administration had 10 chances to capture of kill bin Laden."
This morning, 9/11 commissioners appearing on ABC News' "This Week" split along partisan lines.
"I hope ABC has taken steps to remedy the substantial fictionalization and the distortion of the facts that were in the version that I saw," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner.
"If you don't like the hits to the Clinton administration, well, welcome to the club," said John Lehman, a Republican. "The Republicans have lived with Michael Moore and Oliver Stone and most of Hollywood as a fact of life."
Commission chairman Tom Kean, a consultant on the film and a Republican, said the larger point of the film is what's important.
"Both administrations are faulted," Kean said. "And in the end, I think, you're led to our recommendations."
It remains unclear what changes ABC Entertainment has made to tonight's film. But no matter what the network does, it seems clear there will be strong criticism from liberals and conservatives.