Path to nowhere

You remember that ABC mini-series The Path to 9/11 that caused much controversy last year because it invented dialog, invented meetings between people, invented events and slanted history to blame Bill Clinton for the attack on New York. The ratings turned out not to be so good for what they had to call "docudrama" since it wasn't historical enough to be called a documentary and "historical fiction" was too close to the truth to be good for sales. Had anyone heard the term docudrama before? I hadn't.

Apparently sales of any possible DVD aren't expected to be very good either because ABC has expressed no interest in releasing it, but the Iranian refugee who wrote and directed this tedious and tendentious program is making the circuit drumming up right wing rage with the story that the Clintons are trying to block the video. As with the series itself that contained much fiction and fantasy masquerading as fact, his claim has no verifiable factual basis.

Cyrus Nowrasteh, whose family fled Iran after the fall of the US installed Shah and thus has a likely motivation for hating Democrats, has claimed in the Los Angeles Times and on Fox News and through Rush Limbaugh, that an unnamed ABC executive gave him a vague warning that the Clintons were trying to block the video release. Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer denies even hearing about the DVD until he read about it in the paper. ABC, who along with their parent company Disney received an enormous negative response in advance of the series and decided to edit out the most egregious inventions denies that it has any plans to release it on disc.

Nowrasteh would of course like to have it out in time to slander Hillary Clinton by proxy and profit by the sleaze that is sure to be launched against her. His supporters see the absence of a DVD as a violation of his "artistic freedom" but it's impossible not to consider that having had their reputation tarnished once already, ABC would just as soon forget about being involved in or seen supporting a party whose integrity is harder to locate than Osama bin Laden.