Apos
September 9, 2006, 2:09am
141
One of the removed scenes showing another missed opportunity to cap Bin Laden when they had a chance:
Squink
September 9, 2006, 2:26am
142
I don’t recall a list of GoP Senators sending a letter using veiled threats of FCC harassment as leverage for supression/editing of Fahrenheit 911 .
The alleged lefty skew of F911 and the alleged right skew of the current effort do not disturb me: anyone with an IQ exceeding that of a warm rock should know that all sources have bias, and that a movie, however diligently labeled otherwise, is still just a movie.
What scares me is the use of the threat of governmental harassmement in lieu of political dialog.
wring
September 9, 2006, 3:42am
144
does the FCC have jurisdiction over theatrical releases?
Because nobody is suggesting broadcasting F9/11 ?
Yeah, Disney is trembling at the prospect of Democratic jackboots. Hugh Betcha!
Squink
September 9, 2006, 4:06am
146
What an astonishing coincidence! Or perhaps the mysterious hand of benign Providence…
Media Matters had a pretty good piece last night about the docufalsity:
ABC’s heavily promoted miniseries, The Path to 9/11, billed as being “based solely and completely on the 9/11 Commission Report” has now proven to be a fraudulent attack on former President Bill Clinton and whitewash of President Bush’s record.
Filmmakers have acknowledged basing the film in part on a book by a Bush administration PR official.
They acknowledge making up scenes.
The film’s star, Harvey Keitel, said the film has factual errors that should be fixed.
Scholastic, the educational publishing company, has renounced all ties to the film and pulled a discussion guide tied to the movie it had distributed to accompany the film.
ABC News completely disavows the film.
Five members of the 9-11 Commission – including one who served as a consultant to the film – said The Path to 9/11 is flawed.
Nine prominent historians have asked ABC to cancel the broadcast.
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said of the film: “[W]hen you put somebody on the screen and say that’s Madeleine Albright and she said this in a specific conversation and she never did say it, I think it’s slanderous, I think it’s defamatory and I think that ABC and Disney should be held to account.”
Everyone, it seems, is getting in on the act. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz wrote that “[e]x-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s anger is unquestionably justified.” Former Reagan administration cabinet secretary and right-wing pundit Bill Bennett said, “The Path to 9/11 is strewn with a lot of problems, and I think there were problems in the Clinton administration. But that’s no reason to falsify the record, falsify conversations by either the president or his leading people. And, you know, it just shouldn’t happen.” Conservative author Richard Miniter said parts of the film are “based on an Internet myth” and have “no factual basis.”
BTW, the original has links in every paragraph sourcing the statements.
The current state of play: the credibility of this piece has come crashing down around their heads, but ABC seems to be ready to roll with it anyway.
Memo to Disney/ABC: last chance for a Tylenol moment . This isn’t exactly the sort of product you want The Mouse linked with in the public mind. At this point, I’m kinda hoping you go through with it, just to see what effect this has on your brand.
What scares me is big corporations that essentially control access to the public airwaves, having the untrammeled power to use those airwaves to advance their (or someone else’s) political agenda.
Where’s the Fairness Doctrine when you need it?
Ya know, when Fox “News” comes out and says something unfairly slanders the Clinton Administration,. . .
Zebra
September 9, 2006, 4:56pm
151
Satan is buying iceskates?
I’m sure this won’t cause people to miss anything important – maybe some dry-as-dust Presidential Daily Briefing might get cut out, I suppose…
And this just in…
Daily Kos is a progressive news site that fights for democracy by giving our audience information and resources to win elections and impact government. Our coverage is assiduously factual, ethical, and unapologetically liberal. We amplify what we...
Daily Kos diarist STOP George has uploaded one of the foreign trailers for the Disney/ABC conservative fan fiction to YouTube, and the advertisement makes it very clear just what sort of Limbaugh-style political porn this thing was intended to be. Featured prominently? The words: “OFFICIAL TRUE STORY”…Disney/ABC’s stuttering statements aside, this advertisement and the others make it crystal clear. The fictionalized scenes weren’t just accidental – the movie was (and still is, apparently) being advertised based on them.
Go to Daily Kos for linkety-links.
BJMoose
September 9, 2006, 10:08pm
154
Six feet under, having been offed by Reagan’s FCC.
Scylla:
I understand that things must be condensed and spelled and altered for narrative purposes, and I’m aware of poetic license, but I sincerely beleive that this incident as described in CNN alters very germaine facts and provides a false impression and casts blame falsely, leaving viewers with a false impression. (link added by me – kd99 )
Scylla , you know I love ya, but…
Could somebody please take Mr. Scylla out back with a dictionary and help him learn the proper spelling of the word germane ?
From the WaPo, 4/2/00 - thanks to Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest for digging it up:
Operating from an Old Executive Office Building suite once inhabited by Col. Oliver North, Clarke has played a key role both in defining the new post-Cold War security threats to the United States and coming up with a response. But he also has come to personify what some critics, particularly abroad, view as an unhealthy American obsession with high-tech threats and a “Fortress America” approach to dealing with them.
As the national coordinator for infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, Clarke has presided over a huge increase in counterterrorism budgets over the past five years to meet a wide array of new–and some would argue, still hypothetical–challenges, such as cyber warfare or chemical or biological attacks in New York or Washington. Last month, the administration submitted an $11.1 billion request to Congress to strengthen “domestic preparedness” against a terrorist attack. In the meantime, by contrast, security assistance to the former Soviet Union to tackle proliferation problems has been stuck in the region of $800 million a year.
“In America, there is a morbid fascination with greater-than-life technological threats, which you don’t see in other countries,” says Ehud Sprinzak, a terrorism expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Clarke has an ax to grind. It makes him big. If nobody talked about catastrophic terrorism, what would people like Dick Clarke be doing?”
Such talk irritates national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clarke’s direct supervisor, who insists that the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is “a reality, not a perception.” “We would be irresponsible if we did not take this seriously,” he says. “I hope that in 10 years’ time, they will say we did too much, not too little.”
Clarke’s warnings about America’s vulnerability to new kinds of terrorist attack have found a receptive ear in Clinton. With little fanfare, the president has begun to articulate a new national security doctrine in which terrorists and other “enemies of the nation-state” are coming to occupy the position once filled by a monolithic communist superpower. In January, he departed from the prepared text of his State of the Union address to predict that terrorists and organized criminals “with increasing access to ever more sophisticated chemical and biological weapons” will pose “the major security threat” to the United States in 10 to 20 years.
“We should have a very low barrier in terms of acting when there is a threat of weapons of mass destruction being used against American citizens,” says Clarke, brushing aside suggestions that a preoccupation with bin Laden has caused errors in judgment, such as the decision to retaliate for the attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 by bombing a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, suspected of producing chemical agents. “We should not have a barrier of evidence that can be used in a court of law,” Clarke says.
And:
The Rising Cost of Fighting Terrorists
The U.S. budget to fight terrorism has grown by more than 90 percent over the past six years in response to a series of terror attacks at home and abroad. New programs have been launched to counter the threat of terrorists using nuclear, chemical or biological agents. But critics question how dangerous the threat remains.
1993: No budget figures for counterterrorism programs available
And:
While Clarke does not have direct authority over agencies such as the FBI or CIA, his position puts him at the center of the action when there is a terrorist alert. He chairs half a dozen agency groups including the powerful Counterterrorism Sub-Group (CSG), which coordinates the U.S. government response to terrorist incidents.
During the millennium alert, the CSG was in almost daily session, coordinating intelligence information and getting constant updates on the hunt for suspected terrorists, both in America and abroad. “At the end of the day, somebody had to pull it all together,” says Lisa Gordon-Haggerty, Clarke’s director for chemical and biological terrorism, “and that person was Dick Clarke.”
As the millennium countdown continued, the Clarke team moved its operations to the Y2K Center at 1800 G St. NW, where they set up a secure communications facility. Most of the team was dressed informally, but Clarke wore a tuxedo. Shortly after midnight, he received a congratulatory phone call from Sandy Berger, who was at the Lincoln Memorial with Clinton. “It’s still too early to celebrate,” Clarke told Berger, referring to fears that the terrorist cell linked to an Algerian arrested near Seattle in mid-December, Ahmed Ressam, might still be planning an attack on the West Coast.
It was too early to celebrate in a larger sense as well. “It’s not enough to be in a cat-and-mouse game, warning about his plots,” Clarke says, referring to bin Laden. “If we keep that up, we will someday fail. We need to seriously think about doing more. Our goal should be to so erode his network of organizations that they no longer pose a serious threat.”
Suppose for a moment that the CSG had not been reduced in authority during the early months of the Bush Administration, and Bush had had them go into crisis mode after the August 6, 2001 “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in United States” PDB.
Word has it that the Dutch will be airing F 9/11 tonight. I’m going right out and buy some tulips! And stinky cheese! Who’s with me?!
JohnT
September 10, 2006, 8:43pm
159
“In America, there is a morbid fascination with greater-than-life technological threats, which you don’t see in other countries,” says Ehud Sprinzak, a terrorism expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem…
Guess the guy has never watched a Godzilla film.
