A controversy rages concerning a climactic scene in the ABC drama “The Path to 9/11,” airing in two parts, commercial-free, Sunday and Monday.
In the scene in question, CIA agents and the Northern Alliance had spotted Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan in 1998. They knew the al-Qaeda leader was there; they could level the place with missiles but needed the go-ahead from Washington. Up and down the chain of command, the U.S. was unable to move on the information, fearing negative fallout. Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, is depicted as indecisive, hanging up on the field team. Supremely frustrated, the team stood down.
Whether the U.S. let bin Laden slip as depicted here, or whether the event never happened, as former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke alleges, is beside the point. Dramatic license doesn’t affect the underlying theme, that America was naive and bureaucratically stymied through the terrorist buildup before 9/11.
It would be a shame if the politicization of this laudable effort kept viewers away.
A saga of missed opportunities, “Path to 9/11” was written by Cyrus Nowrasteh (“The Day Reagan Was Shot”), using the 9/11 Commission Report and numerous interviews as source material. By the end of the five- hour film, it’s tough to say who comes off worse – Berger, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, George Tenet, the CIA, the FBI, Clinton or George W. Bush.
Compared with Oliver Stone’s gut-wrenching “World Trade Center,” the ABC miniseries “Path to 9/11” is a more intellectual, rigorous and important film. The television project is grand-scale and thoughtful, while the theater piece stays personal and emotional.
“Path to 9/11” airs Sunday and Monday at 7 p.m. on KMGH-Channel 7. ABC is also making it available for free download on iTunes.
Stone went micro, focusing on intimate details of the tragedy in “WTC,” the story of trapped policemen and their rescue. Nowrasteh, the creator of ABC’s “Path to 9/11,” chose the macro view, painting a sweeping canvas of governmental failure over eight years. Stone’s film suggests that in the midst of a hellish tragedy, the best of humanity rose to meet the challenge; Nowrasteh’s miniseries suggests that, faced with impending tragedy, institutional inertia and timidity overpowered a hero’s warnings.
While it’s been described as anti-Clinton and pro-Patriot Act, “Path to 9/11” actually depicts U.S. bungling in the Middle East as historic and bipartisan. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations come off as inept and squeamish in the face of the terrorist threat.
The film depicts the bureaucratic rivalries and red tape (including the wall between the FBI and CIA that kept the feuding agencies from sharing crucial information), and chronicles the buildup to 9/11 in stunning docu-drama style, opening with the 1993 truck bombing at the World Trade Center and following the growing terrorist conspiracy around the world.
The hero of the piece is John O’Neill, the FBI agent and dedicated al-Qaeda hunter who warned for six years that a large-scale terrorist plan was taking shape. Dismissed as a maverick by his superiors, O’Neill was consistently thwarted. He finally left the FBI in the summer of 2001, taking a job as head of security at the World Trade Center, where he was killed in the attacks. Played with grim authority by Harvey Keitel, O’Neill comes across as the unheeded, disrespected conscience of the country.
Keitel is just the start of the great casting lineup that includes Penny Johnson Jerald (“24”) as Condoleezza Rice; Shaun Toub (“Crash”) as Emad Salem, an FBI informant who helped bring down the Blind Sheikh; Donnie Wahlberg as “Kirk,” a composite undercover CIA agent; Mido Hamada as Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance and a pivotal American ally; and Shirley Douglas (“A House Divided”) as Albright.
In a teleconference Tuesday, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission and consultant on the project, said he “would be surprised if people didn’t object” to their portrayals. “It’s a colossal failure of government. People in both administrations are not going to be happy if portrayed accurately.”
These are “historically open questions: did Sandy Berger hang up? Did they have Osama bin Laden in sight? This is not a documentary.” In fact, the scene in Afghanistan is a composite.
Remember, Kean said, the idea of the assassination of bin Laden at that point was a serious question. “It was a very different time.”
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
