In spite of all the huffin’ and puffin’ (and probably bluffin’) from the Clintonistas and prominent elected Democrats, the problem with the ABC two-part miniseries, The Path to 9-11, wasn’t that it unfairly made Clinton and his gang look bad, the problem was just the opposite — that it didn’t make them look bad enough — then and only then, would this stylized quasi-documentary would have been more truthful.
Particulary egregious was its portrayal of (then) President Clinton as himself being merely aloof and insouciant about the problem of Islamic terrorism. What was missing from the movie were depictions of Clinton himself being blatantly dismissive of the issue.
Also, Richard Clarke, (”Dick Clarke’s American Grandstand”) was portrayed as something of a Goody Two Shoes who was on the cutting edge of understanding Islamic terrorism and its threat to manifest on American soil. All credible real-life accounts tell this blogmeister that he was anything but.
We also didn’t see any sort of depiction of Jamie Gorelick, a Deputy A.G. under Janet Nero, much less any filmographic representation of her real-life perfidy in prohibiting Federal law enforcement and spy agencies from sharing information interdepartment. Presumably, her directive therein was meant to protect Clintonistas from what would inevitably become prosecution for Federal law violations, but the disparate impact was that it, combined with the “Turf” mentality that is pervasive in governmental structures, made combatting radical Islamic terrorism impossible.
Commendably, though, the movie did portray these events correctly:
* The woman who played the Clinton-Albright Ambassador to Yemen during the time that the USS Cole was a victim of a terrorist attack there in October 2000, as well as the characterization of S.O.S. Madeline Albright herself, were accurate in that it portrayed both women as more concerned with good diplomatic relations with Arab/Muslims than combatting their terrorist schemes.
Where ABC should have carried this mentality was to Clinton himself. As this was his second term as President, he was, as Rush Limbaugh described it, in “legacy mode.” Clinton was fanatical about getting the Israelis and the Palestinians to broker a landmark peace treaty under his watch, which, at least in Clinton’s mind, would have placed his face in the pantheon of Great Peace Architects like Jimmy Carter, as well as win him a Nobel Prize (being mindful that the Nobel Prize also carries a nice cash honorarium, which Clinton/Rodham needed at the time to pay debts incurred from their legal defense efforts). Also, for the majority of his second term, getting his intern/whore off the headlines and keeping her out of the history books became an ulterior motive.
Therefore, Clinton, and by deduction, his people, were loath to do anything about Islamic terrorism, in fear that this would have precluded a Peace Treaty.
* There were no-goodisms and hanky panky going on at flight schools in Arizona, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Florida. You know, Johnny Jihad wants to learn how to fly a plane, but is uninterested in learning the “landing” part. Like, DUH. Any gumshoe with a shoe-sized IQ would glean suspicions from those activities, and plenty of real-life FBI agents did. But the FBI National Headquarters in Washington, DC squelched further investigation, because of overriding concerns about “racial profiling” that were en vogue pre-9/11, when the term meant Negroes in automobiles.
* The one time Clinton was portrayed like Clinton was during the half-baked bombing of the Sudanese aspirin plant in “retaliation” for the African embassy bombings of 1998. Of course, the intern/whore was also a big issue during 1998, so Clinton needed something to push Monica’s mug off the front pages, and the movie suggested that as a motive.
