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The think tank American Freedom Alliance said today it will screen the full unedited version of the 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 on Sunday, Sept. 11, the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The group bills the event at the Intercontinental Hotel in Century City as the first time the unedited version will be shown, after ABC trimmed about a minute of footage ahead of its original broadcast airing — a move the mini’s writer-producer Cyrus Nowrasteh said was due to political pressure from Democrats who disputed the facts portrayed in the script, which was critical of President Bill Clinton for not killing Osama bin Laden when given the opportunity in 1998. (ABC advertised that the mini was based on the 9/11 Commission report, but commission member Richard Ben-Veniste and the Clinton Administration were among those that disputed its version of events). That same pressure, Nowrasteh has claimed many times since, has delayed the 4 1/2-hour miniseries from being released on DVD. In other words, it all became a big morass that nobody could really fix (see ABC’s 9/11: Big Mystery! Where’s Disney Chairman George Mitchell In This Mess?).
The American Freedom Alliance, which bills itself “a non-political, non-aligned movement that promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals,” will show the mini in two parts: 10AM-12:30 PM and 5PM-7PM, with a forum and commemoration for 9/11 victims held between screenings. Nowrasteh will be interviewed live at 4:30 PM by John Ziegler, whose documentary Blocking The Path to 9/11 chronicles efforts to prevent the miniseries from airing.
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The ‘unedited’ version is called ‘dailies’. It isn’t a fair term for the many editors that worked on the extremely well edited aired version.
And the sections in dispute that were removed from the broadcast version were demonstrably untrue, as Mr. Ben-Veniste and several others have said. You can’t make things up and present them as factual when they are known to not be true.
This is the John Ziegler mentioned in the article. The first commentor here has no idea what they are talking about. The film was edited (censored) two days before airing specifically because Bill Clinton called Bob Iger to complain at a time when Hillary Clinton was the leading contender for the presidency. There was over two minutes removed from the film for no legtimate historical reason. The fact that Bill Clinton either called off or failed to give final approval for multiple opportunities to get Osama bin Laden is not remotely controversial. If anything, the film “The Path to 9/11″ is incredibly kind to Bill Clinton. The film was intended to be shown often after 9/11 but Disney has never allowed that and has not even released the DVD. It was also supposed to be used in schools as an educational tool, but that has never happened either.
I think that everyone knows what unedited means. We know that we aren’t going to sit down and see hundreds of hours of footage strung together of multiple takes in random sequence.
Unedited means that the original vision of the director is presented, without coerced changes.
Those are the best kind. I’ll look forward to seeing what is presented.
I would like to see it allowed to be sold as a DVD.
Fitting, John, that this screening is sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, which is the same group that sued to have a creationist view of human origin screened at a state institution of scientific learning. “Path” fits right in with the AFA’s promulgation of myth.
“Path To 9/11″ from ABC… in association with CIA-MI6-MOSSAD Productions.
We’ve yet to hear the truth about JFK, USS Liberty, Vietnam, Gulf War, Oklahoma City bombings, USS Cole, WMD -and on, and on. The mass media sold its soul many, many years ago. There’s no honest, open debate anymore. On this 10th anniversary of 9/11 or even the 50th, we’ll still be waiting to hear the truth!
I do hope the unedited version is released to DVD. We don’t have TV service, but I’d love to see this documentary. As to Bill Clinton’s role, I’m sure he does realize how his one inaction affected such a tragedy. So while I don’t agree with his initial insistence that certain scenes be omitted, I can understand given the presidential elections at the time.
The truly sad thing is that it really was a great miniseries. But the writer, in conjunction with Ziegler, turned it into a cause celebre for the idiotic right wing, and thus marginalized it into irrelevence. Thus a great work of art, not meant to be political, got buried. And now they “adopt” it as theirs. It’s disgusting.
DVD NOW! It is ridiculous that this one TV mini-series would be held up this long. Disney, do it NOW!
This movie can be called historical fiction at best. I’m sure critics can’t wait until they release the unedited version so they can get a good laugh at how many more facts they get wrong.
DVD now! We have a right to see this mini series, we are Americans we have a right to know, even if we didn’t personally lose someone on that horrific day, we lost a lot~our sense of security. We have a right to know why, how, what could have been done to prevent it.
I worked on the MOW for touchstone/abc and I can securely tell you that all this griping is over nothing. It’s basically unwatchable. That’s ABC greatest advantage amongst the politics. It’s a shitty piece. More editors were brought in the clean up a mess Cyrus kept making. Writing sucked, actors had no idea which direction to take their performances and their lines were being rewritten daily. Save your time. Just read a book.
@love’s labors lost You are completely missing the point. It was the Clintons and the far left, through imposing editing of the film and preventing the film from being released on DVD that made this a political issue. Ziegler and the film’s writer agree that the film should be a non partisan film to be viewed and celebrated.