Citizens United has a DVD. “Blocking the Path to 9/11: The
Anatomy of a Smear”, directed by John
Ziegler (2008, 94 min), a documentary examining the 2006 ABC documentary “The
Path to 9/11” reviewed on my “do ask do tell” site.
This film maintains that political interests in the
Democratic Party tried to get ABC to alter or even not air its 5-hour
television miniseries (240 minutes), which finally did air in September 2006. The
film says that Disney, in contradiction to the fiduciary interests of its
shareholders, refused to release a DVD of the miniseries (or even respond to
apparent interest from Lionsgate), in order to protect politicians like Hillary
Clinton. Imdb still does not show a DVD available, and Amazon says to sing up
to be notified when a DVD (of the original miniseries) is available. Disney
did not push the series into the Emmy’s (but it got some nominations
anyway). Participant Media declined to
support it. Also, other elements of Hollywood, like the WGA, have declined to support the ABC film.
A central controversy is whether the Clinton White House
missed a chance to get Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. There is one big well-known “miss” from a cruise missile in 1998; but Ziegler’s
documentary says that multiple occasions for strikes and raids are compressed
in the miniseries for simplicity, and in actual fact Clinton had numerous
opportunities for airstrikes that he declined (or could not be reached).
Lead Democrats (including Harry Reid) complained that ABC
had promised a “documentary” but changed it to “docudrama” and eventually
fiction.
The TV film originally carried the clandestine working title “A History Lesson” and the
principle screenwriter (Cyrus Nowrasteh)
had to present an annotation of his script so that ABC could get an “errors and
omissions” policy. The supervision of
this script sounds remarkable given the recent controversy about Columbia’s
“Zero Dark Thirty”, not yet in wide release (but due everywhere Jan. 11).
The film suggests that the controversy may have helped
Barack Obama get the 2008 nomination instead of Hillary.
It is true that as President, Bill Clinton seemed much more
concerned about North Korea than Al Qaeda.
That could have happened because
the US had a long history of conniving with Islamic militants after the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan.
The official site is here.
See also Citizen’s United “Hillary: the Movie” on the Movies
blog, March 25, 2009.
No comments:
Post a Comment