(BTW - The Monday episode will feature a 20-minute "commercial" featuring President Bush. It looks like Rove is implementing Himmler's media playbook...)
Discover the Secret Right-Wing Network
Behind ABC's 9/11 Deception
By Max Blumenthal - Truth Out
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.
(When can we expect to see the movie blaming Clinton for the failure of the Iraq War?!?)