Writer of 9/11 Film Compares Critical Backlash to the Salem Witch Hunt

By: E&P Staff Not content with comparing a New York Times story about him to "McCarthyism," Cyrus Nowrasteh, who wrote the screenplay for the recent ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11," has now, in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, compared the critics' reaction to the film to a "witch hunt," a "book burning" and "Salem all over again."

The two-part movie, which aired Sept. 10 and Sept. 11, was criticized for inaccuracies, invented scenes and quotes, and alleged pro-Bush bias. Under pressure from liberals, some conservatives, and former Clinton aides, ABC made several last-minute trims, many minor, and went ahead with the airing of the movie as planned. It drew mixed reviews from TV critics but won the ratings' war on its final night.

Obviously angry about the uproar, Nowrasteh -- who also wrote an Op Ed for the Wall Street Journal on Monday hitting the Times and Washington Post coverage -- now says, in the Foreign Policy interview, that he disagreed with the need for any late edits but still stands by the film, both in its original and final form.

Asked if he was surprised by the reaction to the film, he said, "No, this was a witch hunt. It was like a national book burning. It?s Salem all over again."

He defended his screenplay, saying, "I had to collapse the events of eight and a half years into five hours. I don?t know any other way to do it except collapse, conflate, and condense." He called a "conflation" the quite fictional scene where Clinton aide Sandy Berger calls off the seizure of bin Laden by a nearby CIA team. As for trimming the climax of that scene -- when Berger cuts off the phone line -- Nowrasteh admitted it "wasn?t actually in the script. But I liked what the director had done with that sequence because I thought it symbolically represented what was going on."

Critics, he continued, "take everything literally. They don?t know how to watch a movie. What happened after the most powerful group of political power brokers and their lawyers tried to stop this from airing?the Clinton Foundation, et al? Seventy seconds were taken out of a five-hour movie."

The interviewer, citing obligation to truth and history -- and the fact that a large number of Americans, for example, still think Saddam was involved with 9/11 -- asked if he thinks he misled people. "No," he replied, "I think the hubbub is because we got to the truth. ABC was anticipating an attack from the Republicans. No one expected an attack from where we got it."

Asked about the film's opening sequence, which has prompted a protest from American Airlines because it wrongly put the onus on them for allowing Atta on board on Sept. 11, Nowrasteh answered:
"That whole sequence was vetted. Attorneys and advisors looked at it." He said he didn't know anything about American's threatened lawsuit.

How much of the movie is truth and how much fiction? "I'm not going to answer that," he replied. "Ultimately, and I?ve found this with every docudrama I?ve done, people in the same room at the exact same moment during a major historical incident can have completely different versions of what happened. It?s the Rashomon effect."