The Path to 9/11 screenwriter takes Path to Denial

September 18, 2006

I would have been more than happy to let ABC’s absurd docudrama, “The Path to 9/11,” fade away into obscurity, but we can’t let it go just yet. Cyrus Nowrasteh, the conservative writer who did the screenplay for the movie, wrote a full-throated defense for the debacle for today’s Wall Street Journal. It wasn’t particularly persuasive.

I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal–to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. […]

I know…as does everyone involved in the production, that we kept uppermost in our minds the need for due diligence in the delivery of this history. Fact-checkers and lawyers scrutinized every detail, every line, every scene. There were hundreds of pages of annotations. We were informed by multiple advisers and interviews with people involved in the events — and books, including in a most important way the 9/11 Commission Report.

Seriously? Even after all of the obvious and borderline-libelous fiction, Nowrasteh wants to convince WSJ readers that his docudrama was scrutinized, line by line, by fact-checkers and lawyers? Even ABC was willing to acknowledge the shortcomings. In its disclaimer for viewers, the network explained, “For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression.” Does Nowrasteh not realize that the disclaimer contradicts his “scrutinized every detail” argument?

Moreover, Nowrasteh insists he’s not ideological. “I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe,” he wrote, adding that he is not a “political conservative.”

But as Judd noted, this is the same Nowrasteh who described himself as a libertarian; spoke on a panel titled, “How Conservatives Can Lead Hollywood’s Next Paradigm Shift”; and spoke extensively to far-right websites to promote his docudrama. Of course, he also wrote a screenplay that invented scenes that made Clinton and his team look negligent. He certainly doesn’t sound like a neutral, dispassionate observer.

The entire WSJ op-ed reeks of desperation and Nowrasteh probably would have benefited more by just leaving the issue alone. The first rule when you’re in a ditch: stop digging. Unfortunately, in this unpersuasive defense, Nowrasteh was shoveling quite a bit.

“Fact-checkers and lawyers scrutinized every detail, every line, every scene.”

This is true. They didn’t check to see if they were telling the truth, they were checking to see how far they could twist it before they crossed into actionable defamation of character.

Believe me, the lawyers worked overtime on this one.

  • Looks like he just pulled up with a backhoe – what the heck is this hypocritical fool thinking? He must have had a few too many when he decided it would be a good idea to dredge up this issue again. Im pretty sure it will blow up in his face. Putting something on the WSJ editorial page is practically an admission of guilt to begin with – that section of the paper is such a rag that it can basically be considered the poster-child for irresponsible and misleading “journalism”.

  • Honestly, I think I am going to start drinking the Kool-Aid, I want/need to become as detached from reality as these guys.
    Serenity Now… Serenity Now…

  • CB said, “Unfortunately, in this unpersuasive defense, Nowrasteh was shoveling quite a bit.”

    Amen. He must be of the school that even bad publicity is good publicity. I’m sure he felt attacked and maligned, and that some of the criticism he received may have been over the top. His reaction: complete guiltlessness. I don’t buy it.

    BTW, there are left-wing libertarians too.

  • The following excerpts are directly copied from Cyrus Nowrasteh’s editorial. For dramatic and narrative purposes, they contain textual compressions.

    “I am an activist partisan. What I am is a conservative hatchetman.”

    “What am I? I am, most devoutly, a maddened right-winger.”

    “The Path to 9/11 was intended to remind us of the common enemy we face, Bill Clinton.”

  • “I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe,” he wrote, adding that he is not a “political conservative.”

    Oh we know that Mr. Nowatrash. You are what we in the business call a 24 carat arsehole. I too wonder why he brings this up now? Perhaps he’s hoping to boost DVD sales. Or perhaps it is another manifestation of the Admin.’s approach to reality: Lie until enough people believe you and then it must be true.

    “…the need for due diligence in the delivery of this history…”

    (emphasis mine)

    Oh so its history you’re delivering? Nice attempt to legitimize your six-hour propoganda-thon but I ain’t buying.

  • By refusing to back down, ABC and Nowrasteh managed to get the “Path” into the public mind, and now Nowrasteh is attempting to cement it. Unless law suits emerge over the untruths that were told, I fear the “controversy” will be most often portrayed as something created by crybaby “Clintonistas,” and the docucrap will stand as history.

  • What he’s doing is trying to blame all the real factcheckers for the fact that his “mighty work of fiction” was a ratings failure in spite of the huge budget and all the hype, which seriously emperils his chances of more work coming his way and therefore negatively impacts his wallet.

    The fact that he’s an incompetent, blatantly partisan right wing tool has nothing to do with it, of course. It’s all the media’s fault!

  • What motivated Mr. Nowrasteh to write a defense for his debacle in today’s Wall Street Journal? One word: fear. Fear that his lack of credibility has been so exposed that Hollywood will not accept any treatment, any screenplay, any script with his name on it. And as far publishing goes, the big book houses of New York are probably out too. Though I’m sure Regency Press can make him an assistant editor, but they won’t let him fact-check—it’s beneath him.

  • PS — Bob Iger at Disney is still praying that the revenue at theme parks doesn’t fall off. (Due to the left-wing backlash.)

    Moral to keep in mind: Hurt the corporate “bottom line” for million of dollars and you become toxic waste.

  • I can see the television commercial now….

    ***Cyrus Nowrasteh—You’ve just hoodwinked millions of Americans with your criminally-dishonest d***-u-drama, “Path to 9/11.” What are you going to do now?

    Well, I was going to say, “I’m going to Disney World!”—but Bob Iger won’t let me in, because some heinous liberal ba$tard$ cancelled their family reservations to the theme parks.***

    Personally, I sent Disney a videotape of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”—after letting it sit on top of an operating vacuum cleaner or several minutes. Just chock full of white snow, and nothing else—which is where they stand in our household now. (By the way, I got the tape at a garage sale—for all of 25 cents. You didn’t think I’d spend good money on a “new” tape, did you?) Sending these dwarvish dolts a piece of their own merchandise—damaged beyond all hope of repair—can be an effective method of getting your point across….

  • “What motivated Mr. Nowrasteh to write a defense for his debacle in today’s Wall Street Journal? One word: fear. Fear that his lack of credibility has been so exposed that Hollywood will not accept any treatment, any screenplay, any script with his name on it.”

    In case anyone’s interested, this is pretty much exactly the case. Cyrus the Putz has had two projects dropped already, from the rumor mill I am plugged into. Even his great hero and fearless leader David Horowitz can’t do anything for him right now.

    For him to make those kinds of arguments, with the kind of electronic paper trail he’s got is stooooooooooooooooopid.

    His director David Cunningham has also had a project “lose steam.”

  • slip kid, you beat me to the punch.

    i for one have no intention of letting the path to 9/11 fade away. I’m going to be sure that my 2-year-old son never attends a disney theme park, watches a disney movie, or purchases a disney product, and that he understands why.

    just like i told mitchell and iger i would do in my emails with them before this travesty aired.

    they want us to let it fade away: we shouldn’t oblige them.

  • Last week all the comments I read on this website bragged about NOT watching the show. So why are any of you now commenting on Nowrasteh’s article if you did not see the entire show? Or did you just watch the scenes depicting the Bush administration?

  • http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/9111-s11.shtml
    Five years since 9/11: A political balance sheet
    Part one
    By David North
    11 September 2006

    The events of 9/11 provided precisely the sort of “sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being” that created, at least in the short term, a constituency for the unleashing of American military power, justified in the name of vengeance and self-defense. This does not prove by itself that the attack on the World Trade Center was directly planned and engineered by elements within the state. But Brzezinski’s analysis demonstrates high-level awareness that the vast geo-strategic ambitions of the United States, which entailed waging war thousands of miles from its own borders, required a dramatic and sudden change in public consciousness.

    Whatever the actual degree of involvement and complicity of state operatives in the planning, abetting and execution of the 9/11 conspiracy, there is absolutely no question but that the events of that day were seized upon immediately as a pretext to set into motion a militaristic agenda that had been elaborated and perfected over the entire previous decade.

    Let us not forget that the entire history of the United States provides numerous examples of dramatic episodes being used to justify military actions whose ultimate and essential aim was the realization of critical strategic objectives. These trigger events provided, at most, a “good” reason for military action, but not the “real” reason.

    We are not being wise after the event. Within hours of the attack on the World Trade Center, the World Socialist Web Site warned of what was to come. On September 12, 2001, the WSWS, in condemning the attack, declared that “terrorism plays into the hands of those elements within the US establishment who seize on such events to justify and legitimize the resort to war in pursuit of the geopolitical and economic interests of the ruling elite.”

    On September 14, the WSWS stated: “The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been seized on as an opportunity to implement a far-reaching agenda for which the most right-wing elements in the ruling elite have been clamoring for years. Within a day of the attack, before any light had been shed on the source of the assault or the dimensions of the plot, the government and the media had launched a coordinated campaign to declare that America was at war and the American people had to accept all the consequences of wartime existence.”

    To be continued

  • Part one
    By David North
    11 September 2006

    The global strategy of American imperialism

    The answer to this question requires that the events of 9/11 be placed in a broader historical context. The real origins of the policies pursued by the United States during the past five years are to be found not in the events of September 11, 2001, but rather in an event that occurred almost exactly a decade earlier—the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union was interpreted by broad sections of the American ruling elite as an unprecedented opportunity to establish the unchallenged global geo-strategic hegemony of the United States. Without the Soviet Union, there existed no effective restraint on the projection of American military power anywhere in the world. Indeed, the American ruling elite believed that the overwhelming supremacy of the United States in terms of raw military power could be deployed to offset the long-term decline in the country’s world economic position.

    Among the most significant consequences of the Soviet collapse was the radical change in the physical balance of power in the vast landmass of Eurasia. The transformation of the Central Asian republics of the former USSR into independent states had created an immense power vacuum that the United States was eager to exploit. Moreover, that vacuum facilitated the aggressive projection of American power into the Middle East.

    The American bourgeoisie had not failed to notice that the greatest portion of the world’s strategic oil and natural gas reserves were located in these geographically contiguous regions. The outlines of a new strategy began to emerge in the mid-1990s. In an influential article written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser under President Carter, and published in the September-October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, the critical importance of Eurasia for the world position of the United States was spelled out:

    “Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and historical legacy. …

    “In a volatile Eurasia, the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role.”

    However, as Brzezinski himself realized, the establishment of American dominance in Eurasia was a daunting project. In a book entitled The Grand Chessboard, in which he elaborated upon the ideas initially presented in the Foreign Affairs article, Brzezinski described Eurasia as a “megacontinent” which was “just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power.” There was yet another obstacle to the hegemonic aspirations of American imperialism. Brzezinski wrote:

    “It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifices (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization” [The Grand Chessboard, Basic Books, pp. 35-36, emphasis added].

  • http://tinyurl.com/jw6m8

    An article in today’s NYtimes (Business Day section) on the subject of the dreku-drama doesn’t even mention Cyrus, though all the other usual suspects are pictured or, at least named (Kean).

    The article starts well, but ends up being rather vapid, IMO.

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