Path to 9/11 - some reviews

Boy, this sure has stirred up hornet's nest. Variety reports that

a bombshell decision may happen anyway: Sources close to the project say the network, which has been in a media maelstrom over the pic, is mulling the idea of yanking the mini altogether.

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, who has seen the film was interviewed on MSNBC :

Alison: [...] Since you’ve seen the movie. A few of the scene, one has former national security Sandy Berger refusing to give the go ahead to take out bin Laden. From your understanding, is this entirely accurate?

Mitchell: No. It is entirely made up. Which is one of the problem. The other thing, which actually just came out today was that the screenwriter admitted on talk radio on the west coast that this scene, while it was in the script, was partly improvised in the making of the movie. –and quite dramatically with Sandy Berger slamming down the phone and cutting off all communication on making this decision to go after Osama. And it is great cinema. Not only did it not happen. The screenwriter says it wasn’t even in the script. And it was improvised on the spot. He liked the way it looked and it went over well in the, when it was being filmed so they left it in. It seem like an appalling thing to admit for a film on such a serious subject. Really on the most serious, most sensitive subject and mass murder. And to treat the facts that cavalierly seems to be the reason that ABC is under such pressure now to do a heavy editing job.

[...]

It is actually a well made film. But it is incredibly flawed and raises real problems about how the subject is being tackle.

Jennifer Nix at FDL has this to say:

It has been a head-spinning day full of investigative revelations concerning the "Path to 9/11" saga. The blogs have been on fire–just trying to keep track of it all over at Open Letter to ABC has kept me hopping. DailyKos, Democratic Underground and TPM Muckraker have been all over the story of the movie’s ties to the secretive right-wing Christian group Youth with a Mission, and its sister company, The Film Institute. But Max Blumenthal, over at HuffPost, has also uncovered these groups’ ties to uber-wingnut David Horowitz and the twisted tale of how this fraudulent f***-up of a film moved through the ABC production channels and got promoted via Rush Limbaugh and all of wing-nuttery.

Taylor Marsh at FDL gets a statement from John Kerry:

What I find most stunning in all of this is that now five years after the real 9/11 – as if any fiction could somehow make more searing what each and every one of us lived with our own eyes and ears – is that we need less revisionism about the past and a hell of a lot more reality about what’s going on now. Right now.

Instead of the fiction written to excuse the invasion of Iraq by exploiting the 3,000 mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who were lost that day — they were attacked and killed not by Saddam Hussein but by Osama bin Laden – we need the truth.

Here’s a little truth: The President pretends Iraq is the central front on the war on terror. It is not now, and never has been. His disastrous decisions have made Iraq a fuel depot for terror – fanning the flames of conflict around the world.

The terrorists are not on the run. Worldwide, terrorist acts are at an all-time high, more than tripling between 2004 and 2005. Al Qaeda has spawned a vast and decentralized network operating in 65 countries, most of them joining since 9/11. The Taliban now controls entire portions of southern Afghanistan, and just across the border Pakistan is just one coup away from becoming a radical jihadist state with nuclear weapons. The Middle East is more unstable than it has been in decades. Hezbollah flags fly from rooftops in Shiia slums of Sadr City and Iran is rebuilding Southern Lebanon. We have an Iraqi Prime Minister sustained in power by our forces, who will not speak against the Hezbollah terrorists, who will not say that Israel has a right to exist, and who will not condemn the Iranian nuclear program, who will not even as a national leader support the national army over the Shiite militia. In other words, the Iraq government that the administration cites as the front-line force in the fight against terrorism won’t even take our side when we are fighting terrorists. No American soldier should be asked to stand up for an Iraqi government that won’t stand up for the values and interests that draw them into battle every day. Oh, and the 9/11 commission recently gave our government a failing grade on implementing intelligence reforms.

I love watching movies, but with the world looking the way it is right now I think this is a good time to stick with just the facts. After Iraq, we’ve all had enough fiction to last a lifetime.

Senator John Kerry

Matt Stoller at MyDD has some interesting speculation on what might have transpired at ABC/Disney to result in this potential turd on the carpet.

Of course, [Disney Chief] Mr. Iger was pitched a total fraud by his subordinates, who probably had it pitched to them in turn, with pitches upon pitches until you get to a nest of right-wing marketing people who think of themselves as internet savants, but are actually just kind of stupid and tied in to the dregs of the right-wing blogs. And now Iger probably feels tricked by his subordinates, who have allowed Disney to aid and abet a right-wing propaganda campaign. The higher-ups just didn't notice what was happening because their corporate controls are awful - ABC Entertainment made this piece of shit instead of ABC News.

The fallout from this is bad, but it's going to get worse. Disney has a full-on PR and political disaster on their hands, and they've handled it horribly. With real but oblique threats to their very broadcast licensing schema, ABC has clammed up and gone into full 'counterproductive big company clusterfuck mode', obviously lying to the public about the film still not being completed, and insulting its critics to boot.

That's not smart.