Clinton Officials Urge ABC To Pull 9/11 Series

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A miniseries about the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks is “terribly wrong,” and ABC should correct it or not air it, a group of former Clinton administration officials said in letters to the head of the network’s parent company.

But in a statement released yesterday afternoon in apparent response to the growing uproar, ABC said, “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.”

Secretary of State Albright, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Clinton Foundation head Bruce Lindsey, and Clinton adviser Douglas Band wrote in the past week to CEO of ABC’s parent the Walt Disney Co., Robert Iger, to express concern over “The Path to 9/11.”

The two-part miniseries, scheduled to be aired Sunday and Monday, is drawn from interviews and documents including the report of the 9/11 commission.

The letter writers said the miniseries contained factual errors and that their requests to see it had gone unanswered.

“By ABC’s own standard, ABC has gotten it terribly wrong,” Messrs. Lindsey and Band said in their letter.

“The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate, and ABC has a duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely. It is unconscionable to mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies our country has ever known. For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, and time compression,” ABC said in its statement. “We hope viewers will watch the entire broadcast of the finished film before forming an opinion about it.”

“ABC/Disney acknowledges this show is fiction and in direct contradiction of the 9/11 commission report and the facts, and it is despicable that ABC/Disney would insist on airing a fictional version of what is a serious and emotional event for our country,” a Clinton Foundation spokesman, Jay Carson, said in a statement yesterday. “No reputable organization should dramatize 9/11 for a profit at the expense of the truth.”

The letter writers pointed out examples of scenes that they had been told were in the miniseries but that they said never happened. Ms. Albright objected to a scene that she was told showed her insisting on warning the Pakistani government before an airstrike on Afghanistan and that she was the one who made the warning.

“The scene as explained to me is false and defamatory,” she said.

Mr. Berger objected to a scene that he was told showed him refusing to authorize an attack on Osama bin Laden despite the request from CIA officials. “The fabrication of this scene [of such apparent magnitude] cannot be justified under any reasonable definition of dramatic license,” he wrote.


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