UPDATED: If ABC caves in substantially on the Path to 9/11, Conservatives and those who are serious about fighting Terror can thank some of the folks they consider allies. We have been watching for 5 long years while outrageous lies have been told about President Bush. Now for the first time in those 5 years a major TV studio has made a movie that didn’t whitewash either the Bush errors or at last the Clinton errors.
So what is happening? Bush’s erstwhile allies are complaining about the movie alongside of the Clintonistas because it isn’t perfect. I have always heard that those on my side of the aisle used shoot themselves in the foot standing on principal not budging even when it caused them to lose fights.
Boy is that true in this fight. Listen up folks, no movie ever made is going to duplicate history, it isn’t reality. But it can convey what sort of attitude destroyed those two building and the Pentagon and that it apparently does perfectly well.
Read the post below and tell me that Sandy Berger, Clarke and ultimately Clinton bear no responsibility. We cannot lose this fight. Our war demands that our will be strong. Our will is weakening and perhaps this movie can revive it in our citizenery…please don’t kill this movie. The enemy of good is indeed perfection.
Hugh arguing for ABC News to ignore the Censors is being too kind to Sandy Berger. Why should we take Richard Clarke at his word? He has distorted the truth before to fit his vision of himself: You claim in your just released book, that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s facial expression led you to believe she had never heard of al-Qaida, during a briefing in 2001. Yet an audio clip aired by Sean Hannity (Fox News Channel, March 24, 2004) proves unequivocally that Rice had mentioned OBL and al-Qaida as threats a full year before said briefing took place.
Hugh Hewitt
The objections of various Clinton-era figures –Berger rightly argues he didn’t hang up a phone in one scene, for example– are absurd complaints about the tiny details used to compress eight years and eight months into five hours of drama. From these complaints they have built a tissue-thin demand for an Orwellian memory-hole moment.
Perhaps Mr. Berger didn’t literally hang up the phone on a request to carry out an assassination of Bin Laden by combined CIA and Local forces. Though the Clinton administration did have a habit of being very clever in giving authorization for such actions. (All of the following available in the 9/11 commission report)
Clarke wrote to Berger’s deputy on February 10 that the military was then doing targeting work to hit the main camp with cruise missiles and should be in position to strike the following morning. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert appears to have been briefed on the situation.
No strike was launched. By February 12 Bin Ladin had apparently moved on, and the immediate strike plans became moot. According to CIA and Defense officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with Bin Ladin or close by. Clarke told us the strike was called off after consultations with Director Tenet because the intelligence was dubious, and it seemed to Clarke as if the CIA was presenting an option to attack America’s best counterterrorism ally in the Gulf. The lead CIA official in the field, Gary Schroen, felt that the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable; the Bin Ladin unit chief, “Mike,” agreed.Schroen believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.
Notice that it was policymakers who were concerned about the danger the strike would kill a Emirati Prince. Now maybe those policymakers received the news from our allies in Afghanistan by mail and so really didn’t hang up the phone. But it is probably a bit more likely that it was received by SAT Phone since the CIA liked to give those out to allies. Tenet himself believed it was a collective decision so unless Berger got the news by mail he can be said to have hung up the phone on a valid attempt to take out Bin Laden.
TENET: I believe this was a collective decision. I also believe this target went away because the camp was ultimately dismantled. So in reading through your staff inquiry — your staff notes on this, I can’t recall who made the call, but I know we were all in the same place about it, Mr. Fielding.
Lets also not forget that fearsome Terror fighter Clarke then went on to:
On March 7, 1999, Clarke called a UAE official to express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and Bin Ladin. Clarke later wrote in a memorandum of this conversation that the call had been approved at an interagency meeting and cleared with the CIA. When the former Bin Ladin unit chief found out about Clarke’s call, he questioned CIA officials, who denied having given such a clearance. Imagery confirmed that less than a week after Clarke’s phone call the camp was hurriedly dismantled, and the site was deserted. CIA officers, including Deputy Director for Operations Pavitt, were irate. “Mike” thought the dismantling of the camp erased a possible site for targeting Bin Ladin.
Gosh you know it looks like Clarke might have a bit to hide regarding this incident eh? Perhaps Sandy Berger as well? After all giving intelligence away that leads directly to the dismantaling of one of our best chances to take out someone the Clinton Administration was supposedly at war with might have gotten that fearsome terror fighter fired but that is apparently too much to hope for inside of our government.
Then you have the overall murkiness of the authorizations given by the Clinton Administration to find and take out Bin Laden. Sure it is strictly correct to say that they had given those authorizations but the authorizations were reportedly written in Talmudic form. Here is Lehman in the 9/11 Commission report.
LEHMAN: Well, but that’s Clarke’s point in way and of others of the thousand people that we’ve interviewed. Clarke calls those MONs Talmudic and written in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the bureaucracy and their lawyers to approve the operations that were intended.
Overall based on just what I have read about the scene ABC News took a bit of liberty with actual events to better present them inside of a 5 hour movie. But to say that they got the story wrong is to ignore what is documented to have happened. There can be no doubt that this is severely damaging to the Clinton Administration but so what?
To the left anything that casts some responsibility anywhere but on top of President Bush’s head will be rightwing propaganda. If they manage to cancel this show they might actually create more problems for themselves than allowing the show to proceed. The Democrats have in recent history taken to considering the American public as a bunch of rubes who have to be spoon fed information. This has always done more damage to the Democrats than to the Republicans. Is the Path to 9/11 another Rovian plot to allow Democrats to blow their own heads off?
Others who are discussing this story.
Today 9/13/2006 Washington Post gets the vapors about Path to 9/11
Decision ‘08 Hot Air Plus Ultra Wizbang Sister Toldjah Sticky Notes Ed Driscoll MacsMind Decision 08
Tags: 2008, BlogDesk, Cheney, Clinton, Hamas, Hesballah, Hezballah, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Israel, Khomeni, McCain, Muslim, Pajama Media, President Bush, Saddam, Syria, terrorism, terrorist, WMD
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[...] The truth is Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright were in fact extremely timid in prosecuting the war on terror. Does the right believe otherwise? The truth is Sandy Berger and the Clinton Administration did in fact pass on attempts to assassinate Bin Laden (ht Macs Mind ). Does the right believe otherwise? [...]