Discover the Secret Right-Wing Network Behind ABC's 9/11 Deception
By Max Blumenthal, Friday 08 September 2006

Less than 72 hours before ABC's "The Path to 9/11" is scheduled to air, the network is suddenly under siege. On Tuesday, ABC was forced to concede that "The Path to 9/11" is "a dramatization, not a documentary." The film deceptively invents scenes to depict former President Bill Clinton's handling of the Al Qaeda threat.

Now, ABC claims to be is editing those false sequences to satisfy critics so the show can go on - even if it still remains a gross distortion of history. And as it does so, ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of "The Path to 9/11" is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie.

In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's "global training network" in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.

Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled "Untitled History Project." "TFI's first project is a doozy," a newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!" (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted yesterday but has been cached on Google at the link above).

The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the 'Untitled History Project,'" the Post noted.

Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to write the script of his secretive "Untitled" film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.

Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo - both friends of Nowrasteh - announced they were "partnering" with right-wing activist David Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."

Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugardaddies like eccentric far right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)

With the LFF now under Horowitz's control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh's "Untitled" project, which finally was revealed in late summer as "The Path to 9/11." Horowitz's PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film's assault on Clinton's record on fighting terror. "The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response - or lack of response - to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests," Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag's Jamie Glazov. "There simply was no response. Nothing."

A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review for FrontPageMag that emphasized the film's partisan nature. "'The Path to 9/11' is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible," Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty's article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and LA Times by more than a week.

Murty followed her review with a blast email to conservative websites such as Liberty Post and Free Republic on September 1 urging their readers to throw their weight behind ABC's mini-series. "Please do everything you can to spread the word about this excellent miniseries," Murty wrote, "so that 'The Path to 9/11' gets the highest ratings possible when it airs on September 10 & 11! If this show gets huge ratings, then ABC will be more likely to produce pro-American movies and TV shows in the future!"

Murty's efforts were supported by Appuzo, who handles LFF's heavily-trafficked blog, Libertas. Appuzo was instrumental in marketing The Path to 9/11 to conservatives, writing in a blog post on September 2, "Make no mistake about what this film does, among other things: it places the question of the Clinton Administration's culpability for the 9/11 attacks front and center ... Bravo to Cyrus Nowrasteh and David Cunningham for creating this gritty, stylish and gripping piece of entertainment."

When a group of leading Senate Democrats sent a letter to ABC CEO Robert Iger urging him to cancel The Path to 9/11 because of its glaring factual errors and distortions, Apuzzo launched a retaliatory campaign to paint the Democrats as foes of free speech. "Here at LIBERTAS we urge the public to make noise over this, and to demand that Democrats back down," he wrote on September 7th. "What is at stake is nothing short of the 1st Amendment."

At FrontPageMag, Horowitz singled out Nowrasteh as the victim. "The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh's ABC mini-series "The Path to 9/11" are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11," Horowitz declared.

Now, as discussion grows over the false character of The Path to 9/11, the right-wing network that brought it to fruition is ratcheting up its PR efforts. Murty will appear tonight on CNN's Glenn Beck show and The Situation Room, according to Libertas in order to respond to "the major disinformation campaign now being run by Democrats to block the truth about what actually happened during the Clinton years."

While this network claims its success and postures as the true victims, the ABC network suffers a PR catastrophe. It's almost as though it was complacent about an attack on its reputation by a band of political terrorists.

Re: "ABC has teamed up with Scholastic, Inc -- a textbook publisher -- to offer this propaganda with an accompanying "study guide" to 100,000 teachers across America. ":

Dick Robinson the Chairmen of Scholastic, wrote the following on the Scholastic website (September 8, 2006):

"...We posted a discussion guide on Wednesday, August 23, which we believe was not in keeping with our high standards—and we took down that guide on Wednesday, September 6. We have rewritten this guide to focus more sharply on the issues of the docudrama as well as the background events."

Torturing The Truth
By Dick Meyer, CBS News, Thursday 07 September 2006

"I've said to people we don't torture. And we don't."

That's what President Bush told Katie Couric yesterday.

That was a very odd thing to say on the very day his Pentagon repudiated interrogation "techniques" it had been using and embraced international standards for humane treatment of all detainees in military custody. These standards, by the way, will still not apply to detainees in CIA custody who can still be subjected to "techniques" - translation: torture.

The president also told Ms. Couric that one of the things he felt badly about from his tenure was Abu Ghraib. Now Abu Ghraib was where torture was photographed and then shown to the world. Similar torture was carried out, we learned, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

But, "I've said to people we don't torture. And we don't."

What is being tortured here is the truth.

The president's statement here is beyond doublespeak and above spin. It's untrue, it's egregious. The Pentagon's backhanded, long-delayed and uncourageous acknowledgment that torture was used also repudiated what the president has been telling citizens for years. We've been lied to and we are still being lied to. By the president.

Now, foes of President Bush are indignant that he can "get away with it." They blame a biased press, a manipulative regime and, I suppose, an electorate they see as ignorant.

The president's defenders also blame a biased press. They split hairs about what torture is - sleep deprivation is OK, but jumper cables aren't. They also argue that torture may be justified in some cases, though that is not really what the president himself has asserted.

I'm guessing that one reason that the president "gets away with it" is that many people do what the president's formal defenders do: make strong arguments themselves even though the president doesn't. If a voter sees a rationale for, say, "interrogation techniques," even though the president has never stated it, and in fact speaks dishonestly about it, that voter may still give the president the benefit of the doubt.

In truth, many people pragmatically and ethically believe that what anyone would call torture may be permissible if it has a certainty of preventing other loss of innocent life. This is an ancient, ongoing debate. It is not immoral to come out on the tough side. But the international community, through vehicles such as the Geneva Conventions, has long been on the other side.

The president has danced all around this. We do what's necessary, he says, but we don't torture. Right.

I can't see what the downside would be of a simple honest declaration now that the Pentagon is formally changing its policy. Something like: "Yes, in the wake of 9/11, military and intelligence agencies trying to protect our country, interrogated terrorists using methods that can only be called torture. We felt this was necessary to prevent the loss of innocent life, perhaps on a massive scale. This did involve a compromise with international standards and American values and we paid dearly for that. We are changing that policy, which we once felt was justified. But we reserve the right to do what is necessary to protect human life and certain U.S. agencies will not be covered by the new Pentagon policies."

I may not agree with that - but it is honest.

The administration, of course, is in the midst of yet again repackaging its entire justification for the war on terror and the war on Iraq. By invoking Hitler, Stalin and Nazism, they are trying to rev up their conservative base and somehow discredit the Democrats by implying they aren't worthy of taking on Adolf bin Laden.

This is a fool's errand. Voters already have a very modest opinion of the Democrats' national security credentials, and that will not change in this election cycle. Most voters also have settled views on the threat of Islamist terrorism.

What is unsettled for voters is their view of the president's and the administration's honesty and competence in combating what it calls the "great battle of the 21st century."

Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, is the editorial director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington, DC.

Dear Teacher of Social Studies, grades 9-12

As you know, Scholastic has provided to teachers and students information, background, and explanations of current U.S. and world issues since our first Scholastic magazine was published in 1920 by my father, M.R. Robinson, the founder of our company.

Since then, Scholastic has explained the contemporary world in a clear, understandable way that is balanced and free of bias. Our mission is well-captured in our credo and editorial platform which includes the statement: “Good citizens may honestly differ on important public questions. We believe that all sides of the issues of our times should be fairly discussed—with deep respect for facts and logical thinking—in classroom magazines, books and other educational materials used in schools and homes.”

We also strongly believe that students should discuss the important issues of the day in classrooms so that they may gain the critical thinking skills which will help them become participating citizens and voters.

In that context, because the ABC docudrama The Path to 9/11 will be watched by many people in the U.S., including some of your students, we believe we should provide you with teaching ideas and background information on this series which will provide a “teachable moment” for an important issue of our time.

This program is highly controversial because:

As a docudrama, it contains imagined scenes that some of the political figures who lived through the period say are misleading and inaccurate.

It is an emotional portrayal of a period leading up to one of the searing events of our time—one which I personally witnessed first-hand from our Scholastic offices (less than a mile from the World Trade Center site). Several of our employees’ family members died in the attack.

It is being broadcast in a period just before the 2006 elections. A major election issue is the relationship between terrorism, the war in Iraq, and other conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan. As such, The Path to 9/11 is viewed by some as political and partisan.
The events leading up to 9/11 are important issues of our time. The docudrama, which covers the background of the period 1993-2001, is said to be largely based on the 9/11 Commission Report, and former Governor Tom Kean, Chair of the 9/11 Commission, is an advisor to the series.

We posted a discussion guide on Wednesday, August 23, which we believe was not in keeping with our high standards—and we took down that guide on Wednesday, September 6. We have rewritten this guide to focus more sharply on the issues of the docudrama as well as the background events.

The guide helps teachers to discuss these important questions:

What are the matters of dispute in the docudrama? What are the scenes that were altered or did not happen? How do these scenes affect your understanding? Are the changes part of an effort by the producers to shape your beliefs about these events? In your view, is this an appropriate way to treat an event such as this?

What are the different views of the relationship between the attacks of 9/11, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, and the unrest in the Middle East? Many people believe that there is no connection between Iraq and the events of 9/11. Others believe that the broadly defined “War on Terror” justified the invasion of Iraq. As you study the background of events leading up to and following 9/11, what do you think?

There is a long history of conflict in the Middle East. How well do you understand each of the countries involved and what influences their behavior?
We believe that the rewritten discussion guide presented herewith will help your students interpret the ABC docudrama, The Path to 9/11, and hope that you will find it helpful in understanding the relationship between facts and drama, and the background of the different views about 9/11 in the U.S. and around the world.

Richard Robinson
Chairman, President and CEO
Scholastic

To view the new Media Literacy Discussion Guide go to www.scholastic.com/medialiteracyguide.

Bush: A "Plenty Tough" Torturer's Apprentice
By Ray McGovern, t r u t h o u t | Perspective, Saturday 09 September 2006

Addressing the use of torture Wednesday, President George W. Bush played to the baser instincts of Americans as he strained to turn his violation of national and international law into Exhibit A on how "tough" he is on terrorists. His tour de force brought to mind the charge the Athenians leveled at Socrates - making the worse case appear the better. Bush's remarks made it abundantly clear, though, that he is not about to take the hemlock.

As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches and with the midterm elections just two months away, the president's speechwriters succeeded in making a silk purse out of the sow's ear of torture. And the artful offensive will succeed if - but only if - the mainstream media is as cowed, and the American people as dumb, as the president apparently thinks we are. Arguably a war criminal under international law and a capital-crime felon under US criminal law, Bush is in even more serious legal jeopardy than when he deserted in time of war (Vietnam). And this time, his father's friends will not be able to fix it.

Bush's Official Authorization of Torture: Download It

Bush in jeopardy? Yes. The issue is torture, which George W. Bush authorized in a memorandum of February 7, 2002, in contravention both of the Geneva Accords and 18 US Code 2441, the War Crimes Act approved by a Republican-led Congress in 1996. That law incorporates the Geneva provisions into the federal criminal code. Heeding the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel, David Addington, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, the president officially opened the door to torture in that February 7, 2002, memorandum. His remarks yesterday reflect the determination of Cheney and Bush to keep that door open and accuse those who would close it of being soft on terrorists.

The administration released that damning memorandum in the spring of 2004 after the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib were published. It provided the basis for talking points showing that the president wanted "humane" treatment for captured al-Qaeda and Taliban individuals. And - surprise, surprise - mainstream journalists like those of the New York Times swallowed the bait, clinging safely to the talking points, and missed altogether Bush's remarkable claim that "military necessity" trumps humane treatment. That assertion over the president's signature provided the gaping loophole through which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA Director George Tenet drove the Mack Truck of officially sanctioned torture.

Using the arguments adduced by the Addington/Gonzales/Bybee team, Bush's February 7, 2002, memo made the point that the bedrock provision of Geneva - common Article 3 - does not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban detainees, but that the US would "continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva." (Emphasis added.)

Sounding very much like Mafia lawyers, the president's legal troika felt it necessary to warn him that playing fast and loose with the US War Crimes Act (Section 2441) could conceivably come back to haunt him. The bizarre passage that follows is the best they could offer in terms of reassurance:

It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.

While the imaginative lawyering of Addington (now Cheney's chief of staff), Gonzales (now Attorney General), and Bybee (now a federal judge) may have qualified for a presidential "heck-of-a-job" at the time, Bush is learning the hard way that, while sycophants are fun to have around, they can do a president in. Between the lines of Bush's rhetoric yesterday lies belated acknowledgement that his decision to condone the torture of al-Qaeda and Taliban captives is now back to haunt him - big time.

The Supreme Court decision on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, announced on June 29, 2006, stripped the president of the magic suit of clothes procured by his courtiers, when it found illegal the "military tribunals" invented by the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to try terrorists. The Court rejected the artifice of "unitary executive power" used by the Bush administration to "justify" practices like torture, indefinite detention without judicial process, and warrantless eavesdropping. In other words, the Supreme Court of the US reaffirmed that ours should be a government of laws, not of the caprice of the vice president or president. And in condoning torture they are, demonstrably, outlaws.

The Defense Rests Not

The president's performance yesterday reflects the time-honored adage that the best defense is an aggressive offense - and especially with a mere two months before the midterm elections. Bush devoted fully half of his speech to cops-and-robbers examples, none of them persuasive - indeed, several of them grossly inaccurate - of how "tough" interrogation techniques have yielded information preventing all manner of catastrophes.

But someone in the White House apparently forgot to tell the Army, for Army Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, head of Army intelligence, spoke from a very different script at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. Kimmons explained why the new Army manual for interrogation is in sync with Geneva. Conceding past "transgressions and mistakes," the general said:

No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.

Grabbing recent headlines today is the fact that Bush actually admitted that the CIA has taken high-value captives to prisons abroad for interrogation using "tough" techniques. More telling are the facts that (1) CIA interrogators are not bound by the strictures in the new army field manual, and (2) the president is determined to maintain in place detention centers where CIA interrogators can ply their trade with more permissive guidelines.

The president brags about how his government "changed its policies," giving intelligence personnel "the tools they need" to fight terrorists, and makes it clear that the CIA was given permission to use "an alternative set of procedures." He said he could not describe the specific methods used, "But I can say the procedures were tough." Bush went on to recount how several plots were stopped, allegedly "because of the information from this vital program." The alumni of this school of hard knocks are now on their way to Guantanamo, but Bush made it clear that he wanted to keep the schools open for freshmen and transfer students.

Acknowledging that other terrorists are waiting in line to take the place of captured leaders, the president made it clear that he wants the "CIA program" for interrogating advanced placement terrorists to continue. Bush conceded that, after the Hamdan decision, "some believe" that intelligence personnel "could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act - simply for doing their jobs in a thorough and professional way." Thus, he is asking Congress to pass legislation squaring the circle, so that even while using "alternative" procedures, CIA personnel can be said to be in compliance with common Article 3 of Geneva. (The not-so-hidden threat, of course, is the virtual certainty that any member of Congress opposing this kind of legerdemain will be branded soft on terrorism in the weeks leading up to the November election.)

In a telling twist, the retroactive nature of this legislation, which the president said "ought to be the top priority," would immunize from subsequent prosecution Bush himself, as well as intelligence practitioners of "alternative procedures." It takes no lawyer to see how the legislation Bush proposes would complicate any effort to charge him under the US War Crimes Act in effect when he authorized torture and other abuse.

And so the stage is set, and Bush's advisers see still more opportunity to highlight "national security" issues on which they hope to put Democrats on the defensive. The president can now be expected to focus more on playing up the importance of being able to eavesdrop on Americans without the court warrant required by law. This practice has been ruled unconstitutional and illegal by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit on the grounds that it violates the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But, speaking in Atlanta yesterday, the president reiterated that his administration "strongly disagrees" with Taylor's ruling and hopes to reverse it on appeal. Still more grist for the political mill.

The White House has been putting pressure on Senate Judiciary Committee chair Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who initially called the warrantless eavesdropping activity extralegal and vowed to put it under close scrutiny. Specter has now come full circle, drafting legislation that would hold harmless the president and others involved in that program - again, retroactively. Hard to tell what changed Specter's mind. Not to be ruled out is the possibility that NSA coughed up some juicy detail on his political or even personal life - and that the administration used the kind of "alternative procedure" employed so successfully by former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It is worth remembering that it was precisely this kind of illegal activity that the FISA law was designed to stop.

Accountability

Is there no one to hold our leaders to account? The Bush Crimes Commission, a grass-roots citizens' initiative determined not to follow the example of the obedient, passive Germans of the thirties, has taken testimony on torture and other key issues to establish whether President Bush is guilty of war crimes. Testimony was given in October 2005 and January 2006, indictments have been brought and served on the White House, and the judges will issue their verdict on Wednesday, September 13 in Washington (See http://bushcommission.org.) (Full disclosure: I was privileged to have been invited to take part in the proceedings of the Bush Crimes Commission.) Join us next week.