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ABC to air Sept. 11 miniseries


Harvey Keitel plays FBI counterterrorism expert John O'Neill in ABC's miniseries
Scott Collins and Tina Daunt Los Angeles Times

HOLLYWOOD – Walt Disney Co.’s ABC is forging ahead with plans to air a miniseries starting Sunday despite controversy over its efforts to dramatize – and some say unfairly politicize – the events leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Producers said late Friday they had finished making minor edits to “The Path to 9/11” after a firestorm of protests from leading Democrats including Nevada’s Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, who threatened that telecasting “right-wing political propaganda” may violate the terms of ABC’s government-mandated broadcast license.

Critics say that, among other things, the film unfairly blames the Clinton administration for failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The network, for its part, has urged critics to withhold judgment until the final version airs.

Whatever viewers ultimately see, it is clear that the five-hour, $40 million docudrama, highlighting years of intelligence failures and political bickering prior to the attacks, has detonated an election-year bomb that’s reverberating from Hollywood to Capitol Hill.

The movie is also threatening the bipartisan work of the 9/11 Commission, whose Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, served as a paid consultant on the project and has played a key role in ABC’s public-relations campaign. At least two other commission members, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste and a former deputy attorney general under Clinton, Jamie Gorelick, have vehemently criticized the miniseries project.

Two former top Clinton officials, Madeleine Albright and Samuel “Sandy” Berger, expressed dismay with Kean’s involvement. Clinton spokesman Jay Carson dubbed ABC’s actions “despicable” and called the film “indisputably wrong.”

Kean, in an interview Friday, continued to defend the movie as “a first-class project,” adding that while the filmmakers took the recent criticisms seriously and made adjustments when warranted, much of the hostile reaction was simply political grandstanding from partisans who have seen little if any of the film. “That’s the blogosphere, frankly,” Kean said of the controversy.

The flap also underscores the challenges that docudramas face in such a hyper-politicized environment. In 2003, supporters of President Reagan were incensed by a CBS movie that fictionalized scenes and put words into the former president’s mouth. CBS ultimately yanked “The Reagans” prior to its airdate and moved it to a much less-watched sister network, the cable outlet Showtime.

When ABC first announced “Path to 9/11” in the summer of 2005, executives seemed to expect a groundbreaking movie that could deliver high ratings, even if they did not anticipate the political uproar.

But the network may have at least inadvertently politicized the film by hiring writer-producer Cyrus Nowrasteh, an Iranian-American Muslim with an impressive list of writing credentials (including TNT’s acclaimed miniseries “Into the West”) who also happens to be politically conservative.

In an interview last month with the magazine Front Page, the writer said the ABC film would be unsparing in its view of antiterrorism during the Clinton years. “The 9/11 report details the Clinton’s administration’s response – or lack of response – to al-Qaida and how this emboldened bin Laden to keep attacking American interests,” Nowrasteh said.