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Friday, September 08, 2006

Even the wingnuts are drawing the line
Posted by Jill | 7:05 PM
Amazing. Even those usually known as die-hard defenders of everything Bush does are coming out against The Path to 9/11:

Fox News' Chris Wallace:

when you put somebody on the screen and say that’s Madeleine Albright and she said this in a specific conversation and she never did say it, I think it’s slanderous, I think it’s defamatory and I think that ABC and Disney should be held to account.—it better be what she said or I think she has a heck of a case…


William Bennett on CNN this morning:

The Path to 9/11 IS strewn with a lot of problems, and I think there WERE a lot of problems with the Clinton administration. But that's no reason to falsify the record, to falsify conversations of either the president or his leading people...and it just shouldn't happen. Conservatives have to be consistent, Soledad. When "The Reagans", that CBS show about the Reagans came out, and had all sorts of distortions and misstatements, conservatives went crazy, and had it relegated somewhere, I don't know, it never appeared on CBS. And I think they should be consistent. And when ABC comes out and has conversations taking place among cabinet members on recent history -- on matters that are still before us, I think they should correct those inaccuracies.


Even John freakin' Podhoretz weighs in:

Of course, the question obsessing everyone today is: Does the movie misrepresent events, conversations and policies of the Clinton administration?

Yes and no.

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.


Of course Bennett and the Pod peson then go on to cite the usual litany of Clinton did nothing, Clinton was too busy getting a blowjob, Clinton never took Bin Laden seriously, yada yada. What these guys refuse to acknowledge is that while Bill Clinton was trying desperately to fight a war against Al Qaeda while dealing with a recalcitrant Congress that refused to cooperate with anything he wanted to do, a Congress that screamed "No war for Monica" and "Wag the Dog", George W. Bush did nothing about Al Qaeda for his first eight months in office, and when presented with the August 6, 2001 PDB, was so annoyed at having his much-earned vacation interrupted, that he told the CIA agents who delivered it by hand, "OK, you've covered your asses now."

This is somehow better?
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