Doug Ross @ Journal

"A Despicable, Irresponsible Fraud"

That's the headline of an email I received from the Democratic National Committee, a predictably frenzied reaction to the ABC docudrama entitled, "The Path to 9/11."

Because the film accurately depicts the long runup to the 9/11 attacks during the Clinton years, the Democratic PR machine has spun up faster than the flywheel on a Christopher Lloyd anti-gravity machine.

The Demos' PR consultants picked on a couple of scenes they claimed were "biased [and] irresponsible." By the way, note their failure to claim the scenes were falsely depicted:

...In [one] scene, a CIA field agent places a phone call to get the go ahead to kill Osama Bin Laden, then in his sights, only to have a senior Clinton administration official refuse and hang up the phone. Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security Advisor, called the same scene "a total fabrication. It did not happen."

Would that be the same Sandy Berger convicted of the theft and destruction of classified documents related to 9/11? Why, yes, I think that would be:

...One of the stories widely reported this week was the discovery that Sandy Berger had blocked four different efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, in one case because the US did not have him under indictment. Could it be that Berger attempted to replace the memo with his handwritten objections to these operations with a new version without the notes? Or, even more possible given the authorship of the draft memos he stole, could Berger have tried to replace the stolen documents with forgeries rewritten in order to coincide with the testimony that Richard Clarke later gave the 9/11 Commission in public hearings? John Lehman blasted Clarke for the changes in his testimony between the closed sessions and the open sessions of the commission hearings in an interview this week. Could this be related? ...

Having Berger comment on the film's veracity -- after his conviction for theft and destruction of classified documents related to 9/11 -- isn't just a bad idea, it's downright comical.

The Dems also lambast the docudrama for its expert consultants:

...ABC asked only the Republican co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean, Sr., to advise the makers of "The Path to 9/11". The producers optioned two books, one written by a Bush administration political appointee, as the basis of the screenplay -- yet bill the miniseries as "based on the 9/11 Commission Report."

The Democrats really nailed it this time - the aftermath of 9/11 was a "despicable, irresponsible fraud." But the fraud didn't arrive in the form of this docudrama; instead, one could argue it was the 9/11 Commission, which had a giant constipant by the name of Jamie Gorelick on its rolls.

If you look up "conflict of interest" in Wikipedia, odds are you'll see a mug shot of Gorelick. That's because, long before she served as a commissioner for the 9/11 report, she actually helped bungle the Clinton administration's horribly ineffective counter-terrorism efforts:

...there are serious questions about the independence of one Commissioner in particular, Jamie Gorelick... a recently declassified 1995 memo written by... [her] ...instituted a new set of procedures to raise "walls" within the FBI beyond those established by the Foreign Intelligence Service Act of 1978 (FISA)... ...there is no question that Jamie Gorelick has a conflict of interest in serving as a member of the 9/11 Commission - even Gorelick's defenders on the 9/11 Commission are not arguing that... she is the only member of the 9/11 Commission who served in either the Clinton or Bush administration. She was directly involved in matters that are currently under investigation by the 9/11 Commission including the "walls" that prevented the FBI from sharing information internally and with other parts of the government... ...knowing what we know now about the memo she wrote in 1995... would she have been asked to testify if she had not been in the 9/11 Commission. The answer is clearly "yes"...

Gorelick had no business adjudicating the aftermath of 9/11 since her actions were arguably a primary accelerant.

The Frontpage review of the movie put it succinctly:

...[Director] Nowrasteh and the producers of this miniseries have gone out on a limb to honestly and fairly depict how Clinton-era inaction, political correctness, and bureaucratic inefficiency allowed the 9/11 conspiracy to metastasize. Let me say here though that "The Path to 9/11" is not a partisan miniseries or a “conservative” miniseries. It simply presents the facts in an honest and straightforward manner (the producers have backed up every detail of the miniseries with copious amounts of research and documentation), and the facts are that for seven years, from 1993 to 2000, the Clinton administration bungled the handling of the world-wide terrorist threat. The miniseries is equally honest in depicting the Bush administration. It shows a few points where administration officials, following in the tradition of the Clinton years, do not follow certain clues about the terrorist plot as zealously as they should have...

I've got an idea for the Democratic National Committee: if the story is so untrue, sue for libel.

I won't hold my breath. Unless, that is, I'm being chauffered around Martha's Vineyard by Ted Kennedy.

p.s., No hyperlink provided, but you can cut-and-paste the Democratic link if you wish -- http://www.democrats.org/pathto911 -- I won't give them the benefit of the referral.