Accuracy aside, ABC's '9/11' deserves to bomb
September 8, 2006
BY DOUG ELFMAN TELEVISION CRITIC
I once sat in a car forever waiting for my mom to come out of a grocery store. I thought that was the definition of "interminable." I had no idea "The Path to 9/11" was in my future.
This is what happens during 4 1/2 lonnnng hours of "Path." Terrorists talk about killing Americans for Allah. FBI and other security officials try to track them but fail. 9/11 happens.
You don't say.
This is the most anticlimactic, tension-free movie in the history of terrorist TV.
It's hard to fathom a brouhaha brewed over such a bore. ABC has received tens of thousands of letters -- including one from Bill Clinton's office -- insisting "Path" is wildly inaccurate and should not air. But ABC still plans to air the two-part movie.
Controversy could boost viewership, except "Path" is the dullest, worst-shot TV movie since ABC's disastrous "Ten Commandments" remake. It substitutes shaky handheld cameras and dumb dialogue for craftsmanship. It could not be more amateurish or poorly constructed unless someone had forgotten to light the sets.
An appalling secondary concern is the tone makes almost every pre-9/11 American look like a fool.
Look, there's a security guard yawning while terrorists plant the 1993 bomb at the World Trade Center. How dare a security guard work while tired.
Oh, hey, there's an airline agent checking in a 9/11 terrorist even though he has a carry-on bag. Stupid airline agents.
Excuse us all, writer Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham, for not acting like Hitler Youth in the glory days before ordinary Americans knew commercial planes could be turned into missiles.
Idiots.
Cheap emotions are on orange alert. Of all the people who died in the 1993 attack, who does the camera focus on? Ding-ding-ding, you are a winner if you said "a pregnant woman rubbing her belly."
Harvey Keitel and Donnie Wahlberg portray key U.S. agents who give canny speeches about how they can't take out Osama bin Laden because politicians and high-ranking officials balk at giving them the OK. This is the big lie around which other lies scurry, according to both Republican and Democratic policy experts.
If you read some of the investigations into 9/11, you realize fault spreads far and wide, from FBI and CIA agents to politicians of both parties. "Path" depicts most of these Americans as villainous morons, rather than as flawed people committing errors.
The film uses composite characters and ignores some real players. A section centering on Yemen is laughable to anyone who read Lawrence Wright's recent New Yorker piece on Ali Soufan, who was the only Arabic-speaking FBI agent in New York. He was thisclose to busting the terrorists but got stonewalled by CIA agents who didn't share information.
Soufan was a pivotal point man on the path to 9/11. He is not a character in "The Path to 9/11."
Ground Zero is a sobering soil worthy of facts, not flimsy fiction. The victims of 9/11 deserve 2,996 times more careful and compelling filmmaking than what Nowrasteh, Cunningham and ABC have bored together. They are bearing false witness to the memory of the fallen.
Key scenes draw flak as false or misleading
More than 25,000 people have written to ABC to complain about "The Path to 9/11," penned by Cyrus Nowrasteh, whom Rush Limbaugh calls a friend. On Thursday, Bill Clinton's office called for ABC to "fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely."
James Bamford, an author who writes about national security agencies, told MSNBC an FBI agent hired as an adviser on "Path" quit halfway through production "because he thought they were making things up."
ABC's defense: "The movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, and time compression. No one has seen the final version of the film because the editing process is not yet complete, so criticisms of film specifics are premature and irresponsible."
Most of the furor concerns a few key scenes.
Scene: The CIA and Northern Alliance come within killing distance of Osama bin Laden, but former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger is portrayed saying they don't have the presidential authority to kill. ABC reportedly has toned down this scene in recent days.
Reaction: None of that happened, according to the film's senior adviser, Thomas Kean, a Republican who chaired the 9/11 Commission. He admits the scene is a "composite," as are some agents in the film.
"It's utterly invented," President Bush's former terrorism czar Richard Clarke said this week.
"No such episode ever occurred -- nor did anything like it," Berger wrote to ABC. "In no instance did President Clinton or I ever fail to support a request from the CIA or U.S. military to authorize an operation against bin Laden or al-Qaida."
Scene: Agents complain Clinton is too caught up in the Republicans' impeachment effort to act against bin Laden.
Reaction: Citing the 9/11 Commission report, the Clinton letter insists that he and Berger told former CIA Director George Tenet to get bin Laden. "Secondly," the letter says, "Roger Cressy, National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism from 1999-2001, has said, on more than one occasion, 'Mr. Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al-Qaida.' "
Scene: Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, is portrayed as giving Pakistan a heads-up about a U.S. air strike against bin Laden, allowing him to get away. The strike failed, and Republicans complained it was a political ploy.
Reaction: "It is my understanding that the notification to Pakistan was delivered once the missiles were already in the air," Albright says in a letter to ABC. "At no time did I inform the Pakistanis independently that a strike was to take place. The scene as explained to me is false and defamatory."
The 9/11 Commission report claimed the alert came from someone on the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Scene: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush officials are shown taking no action at pivotal moments when terrorists may have been stopped.
Reaction: Bush officials have not complained to ABC.
Doug Elfman
