The Path to 9/11

Ked and I watched the first couple of hours of ABC's The Path to 9/11 last night, the much-debated docudrama about the 8 1/2 years leading up to the day we all remember so well. Ked had to go to sleep at 10pm, so we recorded the rest of the film to watch later. As far as we got into it, it didn't seem nearly as controversial as the brouhaha surrounding the airing made it sound. I know some were very worried that the movie set out to make the Clinton administration look bad for not preventing the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or the loss of Flight 93. My husband and I really didn't see any such intent in the movie. Maybe the really accusatory stuff comes farther into the program, but two hours in it seemed to simply tell the story. They put a disclaimer in LARGE TYPE, making it clear that they weren't telling every detail, but a summary of events. Here's exactly what it said:

DUE TO SUBJECT MATTER, VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

THE FOLLOWING MOVIE IS A DRAMATIZATION THAT IS DRAWN FROM A VARIETY OF SOURCES INCLUDING THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT AND OTHER PUBLISHED MATERIALS, AND FROM PERSONAL INTERVIEWS. THE MOVIE IS NOT A DOCUMENTARY.

FOR DRAMATIC AND NARRATIVE PURPOSES, THE MOVIE CONTAINS FICTIONALIZED SCENES, COMPOSITE AND REPRESENTATIVE CHARACTERS AND DIALOGUE, AS WELL AS TIME COMPRESSION.

It seems pretty clear to me that they were saying, "We think this is a true account, in spirit, but don't believe every word was spoken, or every scene played out the way we depict it." By the way, the quotation marks I used just now were not intended to imply that I was quoting the producers at Disney literally, merely that that's what I thought was the tone of their disclaimer. The producers also put it a quote from the 9/11 Commission report. It read:

The 9/11 Commission is an independant, bipartisan commission created by Congress in late 2002.

"Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned."

"In an event of this scale, touching so many issues and organizations, we are conscious of our limits."-9/11 Commission

One thing my husband and I both noticed was that while we didn't see, thus far, people in our government being made to look bad through the film, what we did notice were the people being made to look good--those people being the Muslims in the film who risked their lives, and the lives of their families to warn the American government of the dangers posed by terrorists, including the growing threat of Osama bin Laden. It was noble and brave and self-sacrificing.

We'll have to watch the rest to see how the people in power fare, whether the film is too harsh in casting blame. However, we all know that hindsight is 20/20. In the long run, it really doesn't matter who's to blame, as long as their actions weren't criminal. What's done is done. From what we saw in the movie, much of the problem in stopping the terrorists, and their attacks that led up to 9/11, was the layers of bureaucracy that had to be dug through to get anything done. In any bureaucracy, there are going to be oversights, and mistakes made, and even a certain amount of incompetence. As far as I know, incompetence is not a crime, although it should make us want to consider carefully who we elect into office in future. We also should trim that bureaucracy where we can. As far as the specific people who were in power, and their culpability, who knows whether anyone else, before 9/11, would have taken the threat any more seriously, or handled it better if they did. What does matter, and I hope the thing the movie is trying to get at, is that we learn from what has happened, that we don't underestimate the intelligence, or fervor, or capabilities of the fanatics who want to see us all dead, or converted to their belief system. What I drew from the first night of Path was a deep impression of how seriously we ought to be addressing the threat, and, again, as far as we watched it, it seemed fitting to commemorate the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with such a focused remembrance of how we got there.