Path to 9/11 Reactions
Posted by Dean Barnett | 9:50 AM
First off, if you're only going to read one post of mine today, I'd far prefer you skip this one and scroll down to my 9/11 remembrance.
Responding to the hue and cry of many emails, I reluctantly watched "The Path to 9/11" last night. First the good: I thought it was quickly paced and well done. I especially enjoyed Harvey Keitel's performance. It was good to see him in a lean and feisty mode. As a work of art, I liked it.
Now the bad: As a historical document, its rampant inaccuracies both bothered and distracted me. Osama bin Laden did not fund Ramsi Yousef. Al Qaeda did not control the Taliban. The film's implication that the Taliban was bin Laden's puppet is absurd. Al Qaeda was not awash in riches; the organization was chronically impoverished. In other words, it really disturbed me how the film magnified and exaggerated the capabilities, reach and power of Al Qaeda.
Okay, now a word on THE SCENE, the one where the Northern Alliance and a few intrepid CIA men were ready to snatch or kill bin Laden only to have gutless Washington bureaucrats thwart their efforts. Nothing like it ever happened.
THE SCENE is likely based on a harebrained scheme cooked up by the CIA's Michael Scheuer to snatch bin Laden, rendition him back to Egypt where he would be subject to all sorts of unpleasant inquiries and then disappeared. The FBI's John O'Neill, preferring a law enforcement mode of dealing with terrorism rather than Scheuer's more war-like stance, got an indictment for Bin Laden in New York (accurately depicted in the show) and the plan was modified to snatch bin Laden and bring him directly to America.
Because of the plan's risky snatch and grab nature, it never got off the ground. The Clinton Administration, especially its feckless NSA, worried about a bloody and embarrassing fiasco and never gave it a green light. So what you saw last night was a gross distortion of actual facts. Sorry.
(For what it's worth, if left wing blogs continue to feel the need to quote me as an authority for their "Path to 9/11" Jihad, I wouldn't mind if they added that I strongly feel the cowardly and irresolute ways of the Clinton administration cannot be exaggerated. My beef with the movie is that it chose fictitious events to dramatize its pathos, rather than select from an extensive menu of things that actually happened.)
I'll be back a little later today to discuss the policy implications of the film, another area where I think the vehicle badly stumbled.
Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com
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