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Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Taking the low road on the Path to 9/11
I like historical fictional. Gore Vidal's novels are fascinating suppositions based on primary source material. Of course, we don't really know what Burr, or Lincoln, or McKinley was really like by reading one of Vidal's thoroughly researched tomes, but much like a painting can capture a part of its subject, Vidal's fiction presents a flavor of what the Ancient might really have been like.
And, in consuming the narrative, one can't help but to learn a few facts along the way. Stuff that probably was in ninth-grade history books but never caught my eye.
Not so ABC's Path to 9/11. The miniseries has not yet been aired, but it has been released to selected conservative voices. Releasing a supposedly nonfiction account to one side of the political aisle does not engender faith in its even-handedness.
The most widely discussed scene involves the cowardly, craven Sandy Berger hangs up on the heroic CIA agent and thereby misses the chance to capture Osama bin Laden:
This is the first Hollywood production I’ve seen that honestly depicts how the Clinton administration repeatedly bungled the capture of Osama Bin Laden. One astonishing sequence in "The Path to 9/11" shows the CIA and the Northern Alliance surrounding Bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan. They're on the verge of capturing Bin Laden, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to go ahead. They phone Clinton, but he and his senior staff refuse to give authorization for the capture of Bin Laden, for fear of political fall-out if the mission should go wrong and civilians are harmed. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in essence tells the team in Afghanistan that if they want to capture Bin Laden, they'll have to go ahead and do it on their own without any official authorization. That way, their necks will be on the line - and not his. The astonished CIA agent on the ground in Afghanistan repeatedly asks Berger if this is really what the administration wants. Berger refuses to answer, and then finally just hangs up on the agent.
Think Progress cites three sources to debunk this claim: Richard Clarke, the 9/11 commission report, and a Roger Cressy piece in the Washington Times ("Mr. Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al-Qaeda.")
Glenn Greenwald takes a slightly different approach to the issue. He reviews the 2000 Presidential campaign for any clue that Republicans believed Clinton wasn't taking al Qaeda or Bin Laden seriously enough. Not only does Greenwald demonstrate a lack of contemporaneous criticism, but he reminds us that Bush was focused on Iraq -- not al Qaeda -- throughout the 2000 campaign. One more reason why we invaded the wrong country.
