At least two local bloggers have earned their fame by reporting on the first part of the weirdly fictionalised "docudrama" The Path to 9/11, which screened here on TV One last night - before it aired on the ABC network in the US.
For reasons made clear below, there has been a furious debate about this film in the US in the past week. In response to complaints based on preview DVDs, ABC declared on Friday that critics had not seen a finished version, and that it would be re-editing some of the more controversial scenes. So there has been considerable interest in seeing exactly what went to air on TVNZ.
AmericaBlog links to this report from WebWeaver, in which she has live-blogged the show and revealed that the wholly invented scene in which Clinton security advisor Sandy Berger hangs up on field agents who have Osama Bin Laden surrounded and want permission to go in and take him out has been slightly edited - Berger now does not hang up on his plucky agents, he stares into space, end of scene. No part of this ever happened: there was no such phone call and CIA operatives never had Bin Laden cornered.
I was impressed with WebWeaver's work, but someone called xynz has gone above and beyond, with a comprehensive post to Kos which links to an array of annotated YouTube clips of the programme's more risible moments - most notably, the key events that are simply invented. Bravo.
I watched some of the programme last night. It had the trappings of edginess - Traffic-style jump-cuts and wobbly cameras - but the thing that struck me was the questionable taste of dressing real events in the usual thriller clichés; creating a Harvey Keitel character (brave, serious agent battles the establishment to get his man) for Harvey Keitel to play (although the person on whom the character John O'Neill, is based did actually exist, and his sense of purpose has been the subject of tribute by Richard Clarke) and generally giving it the flavour of an episode of 24. This really happened. It's still happening. And one would think it's compelling enough not to need fictionalising.
The second thing is, yup, there's a remarkably strong political agenda underlying the whole thing. There are repeated implications that 9/11 happened because people paid too much attention to girly-man stuff stuff like due process and human rights.
Who would make such a thing? Turns out it's actually the sharp end of a semi-secret evangelical Christian putsch on Hollywood, with links to the mad McCarthyist David Horowitz. More here.
ABC has been making this thing for over a year, even using secret code-names for the production. Two former FBI agents hired as consultants quit after only weeks on the job last year:
One of the agents, Thomas E. Nicoletti, was hired by the producers of the mini-series in July 2005 to oversee its technical accuracy, but left after less than a month because of scenes he believed were misleading or just false.
“There were some of the scenes that were total fiction,” said Mr. Nicoletti, who served as a supervisory special agent and a member of the joint terrorism task force before retiring in 2003. “I told them unless they were changing this, I could not have my name associated with it.”
Chief among Mr. Nicoletti’s concerns were scenes that placed people at places they had not been present at and scenes that depicted events that were out of chronological order.
“There were so many inaccuracies,” he said.
Mr. Nicoletti said he asked the producers to make changes, but was rebuffed. “I’m well aware of what’s dramatic license and what’s historical inaccuracy,” Mr. Nicoletti said. “And this had a lot of historical inaccuracy.”
For ABC to then go forth and declare it to be "The Official True Story" in a trailer cut from the most egregiously invented scene in the whole production is pretty cynical.
It seems that ABC had some idea of what it was handling. The production was carried out under code names. Previews were screened for right-wing commentators and activists, but no one else - even the people involved - was allowed to see it.
Apart from the big stuff, the film seems littered with minor untruths and inaccuracies. The airport where Mohammed Atta boarded a plane and the airline that let him on are real, just not the ones where the real events took place, and the circumstances are misrepresented. It even spells Madeleine Albright's name wrong.
Scholastic, which had agreed to distribute education material alongside the film, dumped the lot once it realised what it would be distributing:
Scholastic caved quickly, yanking educational materials tied to the movie that critics said linked Iraq to 9/11 and glossed over the grim situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues," Scholastic Chairman Dick Robinson said.
While an alarming number of right-wing opinion-leaders seem to think it’s just fine, even some Fox News commentators think that just making stuff up in a show like this is "slanderous" and "defamatory"
I don't particularly blame TVNZ for screening The Path to 9/11. When you're offered a $40 million network production on the claim that it's based on the official report into 9/11, you're going to take it, and you're not going to pull it because a couple of local law lecturers cry foul the day before it screens. The formal complaint isn't too much of a bother either. Of course, if one of those maligned in the film chose to take action under New Zealand's friendly libel laws, that might be very nasty, but I suspect that won't happen.
I'll leave you with the semi-literate billing for the programme that appeared in the MySky EPG:
"A dramatisation of the events published in the US bestseller 'The 9/11 Commission Report'."
Eh?