This entry was posted on 9/9/2006 7:20 PM and is filed under All Posts, The Truth.
You may or may not have been following the brouhaha over ABC's upcoming docudrama "The Path to 9/11". The "historical" mini-series, airing Sunday and Monday nights, chronicles the U.S. Government's efforts, or lack thereof, to track down and stop Osama bin Laden in the years preceding 9/11. The controversy centers around its overarching theme and two suggested events it depicts.
The overarching theme—that Bill Clinton's administration did not do enough to stop bin Laden pre-9/11—is, frankly, debatable. There is plenty of evidence to support bothsides of that argument.
What is not debatable are the two suggested events: 1) that Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally tipped off the Pakistani government to an impending airstrike on bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan, who in turn tipped off bin Laden, who thus escaped in time and was spared; 2) that Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger intentionally hung up on a CIA officer, w/bin Laden in his sights, who was asking for permission to shoot. Neither are true. Albright says it never happened. Berger says it never happened. The writer and director of the film say neither ever happened. They're just making "drama". Along with a little slander.
He also did an honorable thing yesterday. He calmly deconstructed and exposed the lies in "The Path To 9/11" point-by-point, lending right-wing credibility to the many left-wing critics of the film:
Ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's anger is unquestionably justified. The version that I saw has her self-righteously owning up to actions that effectively tipped off Osama bin Laden to a strike against his Afghan training camp. "We had to inform the Pakistanis," the movie's Albright insists.
The real Albright says she neither did nor said such a thing and that the meeting we see in the movie never took place. The 9/11 Commission report, on which the film is partly based, says it was a senior military official who told the Pakistanis.
The portrait of Albright is an unacceptable revision of recent history and an unfair mark on a public servant who, no matter her shortcomings, doesn't deserve to be remembered by millions of Americans as the inadvertent (and truculent) savior of Osama bin Laden.
Samuel Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, also seems to have just cause for complaint. The version of the film I saw portrays him as having ruined the CIA's one clear shot at bin Laden himself.
"Do we have clearance" to shoot, the CIA asks Berger, with Osama in their sights, and Berger responds, "I don't have that authority." That scene never took place in real life. The imputation that an actual living person named Sandy Berger refused to give a specific OK to an operation that would have put an end to Osama bin Laden three years before 9/11 is a libel.
