Clinton pissed about ABC docudrama
Former President Bill Clinton wanted ABC to tell the truth. “I just want people to tell the truth,” he said.
Senior officials and advisers in Clinton’s administration have attacked the accuracy of “The Path to 9/11,” accusing filmmakers of including “fictitious” and even “false and defamatory” scenes of how they responded to the terror threat.
“I think they ought to tell the truth, particularly if they’re going to claim it’s based on the 9/11 commission’s report,” Clinton told reporters in Arkansas on Thursday.
“They shouldn’t have scenes that are directly contradictory to the factual findings of the 9/11 commission. I just want people to tell the truth.”
The film is scheduled to air with limited commercial interruption Sunday and Monday, the fifth anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The ABC network has rejected criticism, saying the film was not a documentary and no one had seen the final version as it was still being edited. The Times, citing Thomas H. Kean, the Republican who chaired the bipartisan 9/11 commission that investigated what led up to the attacks and who has been a consultant to the film, reported that a scene portraying former national security adviser Samuel R. Berger hanging up on a CIA officer at a critical moment is being altered. Two others under review, according to Kean, portray former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright apparently obstructing efforts to capture Osama bin Laden and Clinton being too distracted by impeachment and his marital problems to focus on bin Laden.
In the past week former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former national security adviser Samuel Berger, Clinton Foundation head Bruce Lindsey and Clinton aide Douglas Band have written letters to Disney CEO Robert Iger to express dismay with the film.
Berger objected to the reported portrayal of him refusing to authorize a strike targeting bin Laden when CIA operatives had the al Qaeda leader in their sights.
“No such episode ever occurred — nor did anything like it,” he wrote to Iger.
Plans to snatch bin Laden in Afghanistan in early 1998 were canceled by then-CIA chief George Tenet before any proposal was sent to the White House, according to the 9/11 commission’s final report.
Kean, the commission’s chairman, said he told ABC that the scene involving Berger was inaccurate, and he told CNN that ABC informed him it would revisit the scene.
Albright called a reported depiction of her in one scene as “false and defamatory.”
She said the scene shows her refusing to support a missile attack against al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden without notifying Pakistani officials, whose territory the missiles would have to cross. She said the film depicts her notifying Pakistan of the attack over U.S. military objections.
CNN
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