Writer of 'Path to 9/11' Movie Hits Back at Media Coverage

By: E&P Staff Cyrus Nowrasteh, who penned the screenplay for the recent ABC miniseries ?The Path to 9/11? ? widely criticized for factual inaccuracies and concocted or conflated scenes ? hit back today at critics, including reporters at The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

His column, ?The Path to Hysteria,? appears online today at the Wall Street Journal's site. Its subhed: "My sin was to write a screenplay accurately depicting Bill Clinton's record on terrorism."

The movie was edited at the last minute under orders from ABC after complaints of inaccuracies and alleged unbalanced treatment of the Clinton and Bush administrations, which came from liberals, former Clinton aides, an FBI agent who quit as a consultant to the film, 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton, and some conservatives, as well. The movie also lost its original description as being primarily based on the 9/11 Commission report.

?Clearly, those enraged that a film would criticize the Clinton administration's antiterrorism policies--though critical of its successor as well--were willing to embrace only one scenario: The writer was a conservative hatchetman,? Nowrasteh writes.

Nowrasteh has publicly referred to himself as a conservative in the past, and his film was marketed very strongly to conservative media while ignoring the liberal side. In today's article he objected to his "grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger" offered by critics.

He concludes: "It's good to have come to something approaching the end of this saga, whose lessons are worth remembering. It gave us, for one thing, a heartening glimpse (these things don't come along every day) of corporate backbone in the face of phenomenal pressure--and an infinitely more chilling one testifying to the power and reach of politically driven hysteria. A ripe subject for a miniseries, if ever there was one."

Other points in the piece:

-- ?In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, ?No.? I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings--wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.?

-- ?A New York Times reporter wrote, without irony or explanation, that an issue that raised questions about the director was his involvement in his father's outreach work. In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission.?

-- ??The Path to 9/11? was set in the time before the event, and in a world in which no party had the political will to act. The principals did not know then what we know now. It is also indisputable that Bill Clinton entered office a month before the first attack on the World Trade Center. Eight years then went by, replete with terrorist assaults on Americans and American interests overseas. George W. Bush was in office eight months before 9/11. Those who actually watched the entire miniseries know that he was given no special treatment.?

Critics have charged -- besides pointing to made-up quotes and scenes -- that the film pictured Clinton as so distracted by the Lewinsky scandal that he took his eyes off terrorism (even thought the 9/11 Commission disputed this); and made up out of whole cloth President Bush calling for strong action after reading the August 6, 2001 ?PDB? warning that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike the U.S. homeland.

In his column, Nowrasteh claims that the "only intention" of the film was to show how early warnings of terror attacks might be ignored. He likened the movie's purprose to his watchdog hero in the script, John O'Neill of the FBI.