September 10, 2006

ABC's The Path to 9/11

I just finished watching the first installment of the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11.

First off, kudos to ABC for not giving in to the bullying of Bill Clinton and the Democrats. Yes, some of the "offending" scenes were cut, such as Sandy "Papers Down My Pants" Berger saying he could not give authorization for US agents to capture Osama bin Laden when they had him in their clutches...but what was left certainly looked damning enough. Good...let him squirm some more.

I think the documentary is extremely well done. I had knots in my stomach for much of it...especially when an informant who didn't agree with killing innocent people in the name of jihad was working with Americans to take down Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The knots gave way to chills in the last few minutes, when the film turned to terrorists on one of the 9/11 flights prepare to take the plane down.

Yes, the movie is just that: a movie. It's a dramatazation, not a documentary. We cannot take it at face value if we want all the hard, cold facts. However, I feel it gives a definite flavor for the years leading up to 9/11: intelligence agencies hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape; officials afraid to make a decision for fear of being politically finished; a general failure by many involved to see the big picture.

Some of the most powerful scenes were those of Muslims (presumably in Afghanistan) hanging and burning then-President Clinton in effigy, shooting at a movie screen upon one of his speeches was being shown, calling Clinton "Satan." It shows the burning hatred these people had toward America before President George W. Bush took office. It doesn't matter who was or is sitting in the Oval Office. While the rest of the world was fawning over Bill Clinton, Islamic fascists hated him simply because he was then the president of the United States, a country they have designated as evil and deserving of conquest...or annhialation.

The best line in the film was just after the mission to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan was aborted. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan anti-Taliban opposition leader, said to the American operative, "Are there any men left in Washington? Or are they all cowards?"