ABC - ABC'S 9/11 MINISERIES COMES UNDER FIRE

ABC'S 9/11 MINISERIES COMES UNDER FIRE

ABC's upcoming miniseries The Path to 9/11, which airs next Sunday and Monday nights, is being criticized as biased and inaccurate from all sides, the New York Times reported today (Wednesday). Among the critics, the newspaper observed, is former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, who says that one of the scenes showing Osama bin Laden being allowed to escape the capture of American military officers and North Alliance forces prior to 9/11 "didn't happen. ... It's utterly invented." Clarke is currently a paid consultant to ABC News. ABC issued a statement observing that the miniseries was "a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources." And former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, a member of the 9/11 commission, defended the drama, calling the controversial scene a "composite." However, Richard Ben-Veniste, another member of the 9/11 commission, said that he and several other commission members saw the film last week and were now "trying to think how [the producers] could have misinterpreted the 9/11 commission's finding the way that they had." Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review reported on its website Tuesday that it appears that CBS will "cave in to puritan activists" and remove offending four-letter words in a documentary depicting the 9/11 events. Two earlier versions of the same documentary had allowed the language to be included.

06/09/2006