- Share This Post
- submit
- 3
-
Sparkle (0)
ABC’s 9-11 docudrama, The Path to 9-11, is stirring up controversy before it has even been aired. The two-part miniseries, set to run without commercials on the evenings of Sept. 10 and 11, is said to be largely based on the 9/11 Commission Report, and its chairman, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, is a paid consultant on the project. But leaks about the content of the miniseries have raised the ire of some of the people depicted in the show – as well as the bloggers who support them.
One of the major controversies has to do with a scene in which the CIA has Osama bin Laden cornered but then-President Bill Clinton refuses to authorize his murder – something that Clinton staffers say never happened. Kean told an interviewer that he expressed misgivings about the scene when the project was in the works:
“I pointed out that the scene involving Afghanistan and the attempt to get bin Laden that was thwarted is a composite. There were a number of these scenes, there were a number of tribes involved. Some of the people who were shown there probably weren’t there. But, when you’re — as it was pointed out to me — when you’re doing a miniseries of this kind, you just can’t show that there were 15 tribes involved [laughs] at various times, and so on. So it is a — it’s a composite. But the basic fact is that on a number of occassions, they thought they might have been able to get bin Laden, but for any number of reasons the plug was pulled on those operations.�
Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, is one of
several former Clinton aides who reportedly wrote protest letters to ABC demanding that the film be edited or pulled because of its inaccuracies.
A September 7 ABC statement responds to the critics by saying that the film does not claim to be a documentary, uses fictionalization and other storytelling techniques, and is still being edited.
Blogger Prometheus 6, an ardent critic of Pres. Bush, calls the project a “massive, decamillion dollar donation ABC is making to the Republican National Committee� that uses the docudrama label to excuse its inaccuracies. He’s also upset that ABC has teamed up with Scholastic to offer free study guides to help teachers use the program in their classes.
But BlogHer All Things Beautiful argues the protests against the miniseries are an attempt at left-wing censorship:
The militant Left is escalating a firestorm with the clear goal to either censor as 'politically unacceptable', or to completely suppress the upcoming ABC miniseries, "The Path to 9-11". Rhetoric suggests the imminent breakout of hostilities, rapidly turning initial protests into a frenzied witch-hunt, akin only to our Islamofascist foes' response to the Islamic cartoons.
Personally, I’m not ready to watch the show. I’m not comfortable with the fictionalization of horrific events such as this. When it comes to depictions of 9/11 and the events leading up to it, I’m reminded of what human rights activist said about fictional accounts of the Holocaust – either it’s not fiction, or it’s not about the Holocaust. It’s irresponsible to tell a story this painful and important as docudrama – particularly when its being peddled as an educational program.
cross-posted at Professor Kim's News Notes
