Cyrus Nowrasteh, the avowed conservative activist who wrote the screenplay for ABC’s infamous docudrama The Path To 9/11, complains today in the Wall Street Journal that his fictional drama is being censored. On the one-year anniversary of the release of his film, Nowrasteh writes:
Left-leaning pundits, politicos and bloggers waxed hysterical about its supposed inaccuracies and anti-Clinton bias, though the vast majority of them had not seen it.
It wasn’t just the left, Cyrus. Conservatives protested almost as vociferously, calling his portrayal of 9/11 “defamatory,” “unacceptable,” and “strewn with a lot of problems.”
Nowrasteh repeatedly claimed his film was based on the 9/11 Commission report, but numerous members of 9/11 Commission spoke up to indicate that the docudrama did not reflect their findings. Counterterrorism analysts Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey, both of whom served in the Clinton and Bush administrations, said that key scenes in the film had no basis in reality.
Now Cyrus is trying to revise history. He complains that ABC’s decision not to release the DVD version of Path to 9/11 is censorship worthy of Stalin:
This passive self-censorship is just as effective as anything Joseph Stalin or Big Brother could impose. The result is the same: the curbing of free speech and creative expression, and the suppression of a viewpoint that may be an inconvenient truth for some politicians.
The real inconvenient truth for Nowrasteh is the fact that his film was never about objectivity. Much of the public first learned about the movie when Rush Limbaugh began talking about it. Limbaugh said, “The film really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration in doing anything about militant Islamofascism or terrorism during its administration. It cites failures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Sandy Burglar.”
Nowrasteh later was forced to concede that his fictional drama was “not a documentary.” He even acknowledged that key scenes in the report were dramatized. “Accidents occur,” he explained.