Remember this post? Looks like someone was listening: “The TV Watch column in Weekend yesterday, about the ABC mini-series The Path to 9/11, referred incorrectly to a conclusion of the commission that investigated the terror attacks. The commission said the accusation that President Clinton had ordered air strikes against Osama bin Laden in August 1998 to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal was one of several factors that ‘likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force’ against Mr. bin Laden. It did not conclude that the scandal distracted the Clinton administration from the terrorist threat.”
ThinkFast: September 9, 2006 — Path to 911 Edition
“Official True Story.” How Path to 9/11 is being marketed in Europe. The commerical also features the scene slandering Sandy Berger.
Widowed husband of Disney executive killed on 9/11 writes to ABC’s Iger: I “urge you not to air this film.” TPMCafe has the full text.
Another example of Path to 911 contradicting the 9/11 Commission Report. Americablog notes that the film wrongly points the finger at American Airlines.
Video of a Path to 9/11 protest outside of Disney headquarters.
The Washington Post’s Tom Shales has a review: “Factually shaky, politically inflammatory and photographically a mess, The Path to 9/11…has something not just to offend everyone but also to depress them.”
Better Late Than Never
The New York Times points out — just a couple of days late — that Bush’s speech on Abu Zubaydah was a crock of shit, though naturally they put it a bit more gently.
Taliban Resurgence Restricting Women’s Freedoms In Afghanistan
Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, President Bush has repeatedly stated that women’s rights are flourishing in that country:
“Three years ago, the smallest displays of joy were outlawed. Women were beaten for wearing brightly-colored shoes. … Today, we witness the rebirth of a vibrant Afghan culture.” [6/15/04]
“In January, Afghans approved a new constitution that protects the right of all Afghan citizens, including women.” [5/18/04]
But CBS News correspondent Lara Logan’s Sept. 5 broadcast from the Ghazni province cast a different picture. Two years ago, the U.S. military took Logan to the area to highlight its success. She was free to wear Western clothing. In her most recent broadcast, Logan noted that Ghazni is now controlled by the Taliban and when visiting, she was forced to “cover everything but my eyes.” Watch it:
[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/09/loganafghan1.320.240.flv]
A recent study by the U.N. Development Fund for Women found that while women have had some gains since the fall of the Taliban, acts of domestic violence against women are still “happening with impunity” and women “are often still regarded as second-class citizens.”
Full transcript below: Read more
“The story of exactly what happened.”
How Path to 9/11 is being marketed in Australia.
Balance of Interest-Group Terror
Tim Lee has a good post about the phenomenon of “regulatory capture”, where a scheme allegedly aimed at consumer protection or some other worthy public interest goal is really being pushed by incumbent companies seeking to keep competitors out. What’s interesting is that at the end Tim goes on to do what he has in the past — offer fears of regulatory capture as his basis for oppose net neutrality regulations. As he’s kind enough to acknowledge, the fly in the ointment of this argument is that incumbent telecom firms aren’t in favor of these regulations.
This and some related points are essentially the basis of my somewhat vulgar sense that net neutrality regulations are a good idea. The main companies opposed to them are companies that, it seems to me, could potentially have a lot to gain from screwing me over. Conversely, while net neutrality certain does have its corporate backers — just not in the telecom sector — the pro-neutrality companies overwhelmingly seem to be ones who have an interest in me getting high-quality internet access at a reasonable price. It’s possible that everyone’s just making a mistake, but I tend to trust the lobbyists and so forth of the world to figure these kinds of questions out more-or-less accurately.
Dreaming of the Caliphate
The President actually sort of curtailed the demagoguery in today’s radio address and offered a recognizable argument about his counterterrorism agenda:
So this week I’ve given a series of speeches about the nature of our enemy, the stakes of the struggle, and the progress we have made during the past five years. On Tuesday in Washington, I described in the terrorists own words what they believe, what they hope to accomplish, and how they intend to accomplish it. We know what the terrorists intend, because they have told us. They hope to establish a totalitarian Islamic empire across the Middle East, which they call a Caliphate, where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology.
Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks, “A great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous [Caliphate].” Al Qaeda and its allies reject any possibility of coexistence with those they call “infidels.” Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: “Death is better than living on this earth with the unbelievers amongst us.” We must take the words of these extremists seriously, and we must act decisively to stop them from achieving their evil aims.
Now if you take this with the appropriate level of seriousness, it really does lead to the conclusion that there’s no point in trying to redress Muslim grievances (i.e., engage in “appeasement”) since the emergence of a pan-Islamic Caliphate organized along Taliban lines and bent on recovering swathes of lost Muslim land that include all of Israel and, from time to time, all of Spain is not going to fly. The flipside, though, is that I don’t think we really should take these particular words all that seriously.
Atlas District
I’ve often mocked the Post‘s usually lame coverage of the local nightlife, but their only somewhat behind the curve article on the H Street Northeast scene is actually quite good and manages to move beyond Joe Englert’s boosterism for his own projects. It fails, however, to answer my really pressing question about the situation which is whether he personally concocted the Atlas District name for the neighborhood or whether there’s some genuine tradition of that. Google doesn’t indicate much authenticity, but you get a lot of results from Atlases talking about the District of Columbia, so real information may be lurking in there someplace.
At any rate, as Julian explains when I went out there last weekend with a posse of libertarians “Jane Galt” got her hubcaps jacked, so there’s more authenticity to the scene than a second glance would indicate. What’s more, authenticity is sort of overrated.
Rumsfeld forbade post-war planning for Iraq.
According to Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, in 2003, Rumsfeld said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a post-war plan. “The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”
Kean blows off blogosphere ‘grandstanding.’
Former Gov. Tom Kean (R-NJ), consultant to The Path to 9/11, “continued to defend the movie as a ‘first-class project,’ adding that…much of the hostile reaction was political grandstanding from partisans who had seen little if any of the film. ‘That’s the blogosphere, frankly,’ Kean said of the controversy.”
