The Path To Debate

Was ABC’s two-part series “The Path to 9/11” really so unfair? Not compared to what’s coming down the pipes the next several years. If the politics of 9/11 keep changing the way they currently are, “The Path to 9/11” will seem soft — soft on Clintonites, Bushies, and bureaucrats alike — as we enter a rough-and-tumble period in which a terror-war “Dr. Strangelove,” or something more farcical, is not only conceivable but probable.I make that claim in full cognizance that “The Path to 9/11,” which stirred a tornado of criticism before airing on Sunday and Monday and eventually aired with certain scenes and lines deleted, is the outlier in the current wave of uncontroversial cinematic depictions of September 11, 2001. The other 9/11 films, though generally excellent, each have the feel of consensus about them. They take pains to avoid political cacophony.They adhere closely to chronology. They tell slices of the story of the terrorist attacks. They avoid the kind of big narrative that invites controversy.“United 93” and “World Trade Center,” the exemplars of this trend, are both limited in scope and mostly factual. “World Trade Center” fictionalizes part of Sgt.Will Jimeno’s “Jesus with a water bottle” visions; “United 93” necessarily fictionalizes the final hair-raising moments of that historic flight, in which the revolting passengers stomp terrorists before forcing their way into the cockpit. But that’s about it. The rest tells things as straight as any reporter has been able or willing to so far.Then came “The Path to 9/11,” which beat up on the Clinton administration with composite characters and scenes. Talk about cacophony. It was wholly unflattering to President Clinton, Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright, and especially U.S. ambassador Barbara Bodine — who came off as the epitome of an angry liberal. It took plenty of liberties. There was “Kirk” (Donnie Wahlberg), the composite CIA officer who manages to see action on every front. There were scenes of pre-9/11 shouting and emotion that make anyone who’s entered an official Washington Department of Redundancy Department laugh.Of course, many of these depictions are justified. For all Mr. Berger’s evident unhappiness with a scene in which he is depicted cutting off a CIA videoconference and aborting a hit on Osama bin Laden, it rings true — which is probably what so irks the Clintonites. That administration did punt on opportunities to kill bin Laden. It worried about diplomatic repercussions, about laws prohibiting assassination, about seeming to wag the dog for political gain. As most of the characters in “The Path to 9/11” put it again and again, they just didn’t have it in them to “whack” Osama. Mr. Berger was central to all this. That’s a fact.Sorry, folks, but in a few years all this could seem downright establishmentarian.To understand why, consider CNN’s poll for September 11, 2006, which found that a staggering 45% of Americans blame President Bush “a great deal” or a “moderate amount” for the attacks five years ago. That’s up from 32% in 2002.Some of this is latent anti-Bush anger. But some of it is the intractable conspiracy-mongering we saw immediately after the terrorist attacks. Now, there is an unmistakable mainstreaming of such opinion taking place that threatens to upend what has thus far been a mostly civil post-September 11, 2001 period.Consider the group calling itself “Scholars for 9/11 Truth.” Founded last December, it sounds like any garden-variety conspiracy club. Its members believe the September 11 attacks were an inside job. It’s no street mob, though: Many of its members teach at well-regarded universities.“Sometimes I wonder if the general public realizes the government has been lying to us about 9/11 from the beginning,” James H. Fetzer, the group’s president and the Distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, wrote this week on the group’s Web site. “Even I find it difficult to believe that the American government could have attacked the American people and killed 3,000 civilians to promote its political agenda, but that is where the evidence leads.”Consider this group’s ties to mainstream academia: Among its 300 or so members are a few dozen faculty members and researchers at universities including Rice University, the University of Illinois, the University of New Hampshire, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.This stuff used to be confined to street corners and International Answer rallies. Now it’s in the faculty lounge.“Are there any men left in Washington? Or are they all cowards?” Afghan freedom fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud asks in “The Path to 9/11.” This may anger Sandy Berger, but it pales compared with the rowdier, angrier post-9/11 debate that could be coming.Mr. Conway is an editorial writer at the Washington Times, a 2006 Phillips Foundation journalism fellow, and contributing editor to Doublethink magazine.

The Path To Debate

The Path To Debate

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