I've been doing a fair amount of work trying to understand the whole story behind 'The Path to 9/11' docudrama being presented on ABC this weekend.  The reason it's an important fight is because the right is making a sustained move to blame 9/11 on Clinton and delegitimize the mostly successful liberal foreign policy regime of the 1990s in favor of a hard-right nationalistic security state based on paranoia and propaganda.  Getting a major TV network to put out dishonest propaganda blaming the liberal foreign policy regime for the errors of the malicious right-wing, and then forcing this into schools, is a big deal.  We can't let this go without a real response.

As for the fraudulent docudrama itself, it really is a disgrace.  A senior Bush counterterrorism official just called the 'Path to 9/11' documentary shameful and straight out of Disney fantasyland.  President Clinton himself was denied an advance copy, and the movie fabricates scenes and directly contradicts the 9/11 Commission report.

Some reporters, not knowing any better, are buying the line that this movie is based on the 9/11 Commission.  It's not, as Digby points out, it's based on a weird book called 'The Cell' written by a dilettante reporter.  We need to correct the record as journalists come out with stories that don't appropriately note the errors in the film and the political campaign around it.

For instance, while Jesse McKinley's story in The New York Times is good, Suzanne Ryan of the Boston Globe falls for the lies.

The assignment: Executive producer Marc Platt was asked to take events from the surprise bestseller ``The 9/11 Commission Report" and convert them into a television drama so bracing that the American public would demand change in homeland security.

Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com.  She needs to know that she was manipulated.  Be polite.

Mekeisha Madden Toby of the Detroit News is similar.

The most sobering examination out of more than a dozen broadcast and cable tributes and specials, "The Path to 9/11" is a dramatization based on the 9/11 Commission Report and other published sources and personal interviews.

Mekeisha Toby can be reached at (313) 222-2501 or mmadden@detnews.com.  Toby needs to know that this review reprinted what is essentially not true, that this film was based on the 9/11 Commission.

Reporters need to know that we're here to help them get the story right.

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