9/08/2006

Path to 9/11

Well I see that ABC is finally going to regain some of its credibility as a viable news entity. It is going to, as of THIS date, air a two part mini-series starting on Sunday night. It is called, The Path to 9/11, a movie made by the Disney people wherein it lays out the WHOLE incredible path of events leading up to the actual occurrence of the two towers being destroyed. Apparently it is an absolutely factual account of what happened. How am I so sure of this? Because the four top Democratic Senators sent a letter to Micheal Eiger, president of Disney, threatening him and ABC with the loss of their licenses to broadcast over the US airways if they regain power in the House and Senate this fall! Don't believe that statement? Google up, Democratic Senators letter to Disney, and read it yourself. This is a blatant attempt to squash a movie that portrays Bill Clinton in his true light. When the CIA guys in Afganistan had the house where Osama was hiding, surrounded and they put in a call to the White House to see if it was still okay to go in and get him, Our Uncle Billy sid no, right along with Sandy Berger, one of his top aides(NSA?). I guess Bill had other things on his mind, or other parts of his anatomy, another aide under the desk I suspect.
So lets all watch Sunday night and see if ABC retains its newfound supply of intestinal fortitude and goes ahead with its intended showing of Disneys $40 million dollar movie. I am sure it will portray events in a more factual light than that piece of crap by M. Moore, farenheit9/11. BTW, Mr. Bill has been on the phone with the Disney folks trying to get them to rewrite history more favorable to him. I ferverently hope they didn't cave in. Tell it like it WAS, and let the chips fall where they may. TIFN

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Geeze Everette...you seem to be the only one who thinks that this show is totally factual. Not even the individuals who wrote it are calling it a doccumentary...They are calling it a "doccu-drama." They have even said it is not factual!

It is very dangerous to play with the facts of such an important in world history.

Anonymous said...

Geeze Everette...you seem to be the only one who thinks that this show is totally factual. Not even the individuals who wrote it are calling it a doccumentary...They are calling it a "doccu-drama." They have even said it is not factual!

It is very dangerous to play with the facts of such an important in world history.

Anonymous said...

Actually, Ted Koppel was on the Today show and said it is listed as a 'docudrama' but is indeed factual and that the network probably will cave and cut some of it out before airing.

Everett said...

To anonymous above. If you think it is so dangerous to have something like this put out there for consumption, you might want to take it on yourself to write to all the "revisionist" history people who are doing such a good job of distorting actual history and shoving it down the throats of our kids in school, just because that is a forum where they can and do get away with it.Some of what they teach now as absolutely true is frickin' incredible. And yes I did hear that ABC was going to CHANGE the presentation from a factual documentation to a docu-drama after being coerced by billy and his minions because it portrayed him in a bad light. Tough shit for him I say, GWB doesn't come out smelling like a rose either. Billy had 7 years to get it right and Bush 8 months. A litle slow un the up take was he?

Anonymous said...

Just to broaden the perspective:
This is a TV show. It can ony present broad brushstrucks and will not capture the complexity of the policitical issues surrounding Bin Laden.
A few years back, I read the book "Sacred Terror" (At least that's what I think it was called) that was in the stacks at the Island library. It was a well-written, intriguing and worrisome sketch of the rise of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. One of the rather compelling sections of the book is its docuentation of hte NY Times articles mocking the Clinton Adminstration for "making a big deal" about a mid east nobody like Bin Laden.

Another interesting assertion in the book is how the Lewinsky scandal may have hampered Clinton's response to Bin Laden. You may recall the "Wag the Dog" film that was critiquing what some felt were the exploitation of "Al Qaeda" fear-mongering by the Clinton Adminstration in order to focus attention away from Monica and Bill and onto these impotent Mid-eastern terrorist organizations.

The book is really a great read and provides a big-picture look at what was going on in those days.

Ironically, while the press has pointed to the failures of both presidential administrations in responding to Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, it has never critiqued its own part in dismissing the potency of the organization and dismissing the concerns of the US government regarding terrorist activities.

I'd recommend this book.

Sam said...

Good point, whirrled. It appears the media is chasing its own tail, and if you look at the history of how the media reported the issues over time, was as much to blame as anyone else. The politicians read the newspapers and watch TV, too - and now the President even reads books! Wow.

But it will be interesting to see how "facts" are percieved and linked together with pictures. Pictures are often dangerous to use because they have an emotional appeal that can colorize the truth, sometimes in very powerful ways.

Take the now-famous picture of WTC 1 falling down. You cannot help but feel something deep inside your gut.

Thanks for the posting, Everett, I'll watch some of it and draw my conclusions at a later time. Good catch that if people are furious about certain parts, well, they must be onto something!
-Sam

Anonymous said...

Do you know a recent poll concluded that 30% of Americans believe that the US government either did, or knew that 9/11 was going to happen?

You should check out the videos of building 5 falling...It looks just like one of those implosions of the old hotels in Las Vegas.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous,
But don't you think these kind of polls are a bit worthless? They're conducted after the fact, so its like 20/20 hindsight.

Moreover, I find them somewhat problematic in that the tend to shift the blame to our own government. Let's be real and let's focus. Americans weren't flying those planes on Sept 11th.

Sam,
Images are not necessarily more inflammatory than words. Both require that we bring our intelligence to bear upon the material presented to our eyes. Post-enlightenment thinking tended to shift our consciousness to verbal language because it's easier to present detachable conclusions--- the 'therefore' thought that comes at the end of the paragraph.

Images do not necessarily have a detachable conclusion, but they are an essential part of our reasoning capabilities.
Both language and images can be emotion laden. Language has its own inflammatory capabilties and can incite the emotions.

Emotions, too, should not be treated as non-rational. They have always been one of humanity's forms of rationality and are inherent in value systems.

Just some thoughts here.

Sam said...

I agree, Whirrled and I wasn't trying to be a stick in the mud. I've been using pictures and maps and graphics in my blogs because people love the eye candy and often like the picture better than (my sometimes cumbersome) words. I write about plumeria flowers and people write back 'nice red one there in the photo, Sam!'

It is just that sometimes the nature of things simply cannot be photographed. For example, there was a famous picture (Reuters?) of the huge fuel tanks burning in southern Beruit at the power station. The storyline was that thousands of barrels of gooey residual fuel flowed into the seafloor of the Med, ruining it for generations for fishing and recreation.

So yes, words are pictures and pictures are words and it is all part of our experience. Gotta have some tunes, too. BTW I love the music of Block island, from the foghorns to the gulls and the whispering of the wind through the vegetation ... to the crash of the surf and the occasional airplane. I close my eyes and I am there!

Take care - watch for big waves starting maybe Monday. /Sam

Sam said...

A nice TV show with lots of good entertainment, then?

Anonymous said...

Sam?
A nice tv show with good entertainment?
Do you consider the death of thousands of people good entertainment?
You probably loved Schindler's list.

Sam said...

Wow, somebody must be putting saltpeter in with your Fruit Loops because I didn't mean that in the least.

Listen, I have been to the WTC and I saluted the spot and shed a tear. So am I supposed so salute some freaking TV dramatization, too? The show was entertainment, my friends, pure and simple.

Even a child can separate reality from those TV cartoons.

I don't think any new ground was plowed, no shocking discoveries, and little to disagree with, just as Ex-Manissean suggested.

But you're right, maybe I do need that plastic surgery to get rid of the horns and tail! LOL, I love you man.

Anonymous said...

We had family that didn't come home from work that day.
We have family that cared for the dying scattered all around the towers that day. ( They still struggle with the memories of that.)

There's a difference between "saluting" a show and calling it entertainment.
The show was a docudrama that played quite loosely with the facts of the 9/11 report.
Entertaining--according to Webster's dictionary.
Interesting and pleasurable, diverting and amusing.

Entertainment--something that entertains, interesting, diverting or amusing thing.

Saw the show. Didn't find it entertaining. I usually choose something that doesn't involve the deaths of innocent people, police officers, firefighters and others who did what they could to save someone that day when I want to watch something entertaining.

Try to choose your words with some care.

Sam said...

I am with you ... but let's look at it this way: while terrible, terrible things happened, ABC spend 40 million bucks on a show as a commercial gamble to see if advertising revenue and selling the rights to other stations would exceed that and make a tidy profit.

And that pisses me off.

I truly apologize to the readers out there who deeply identified with those horrifying thoughts, images, deaths, and folks today who are darn near incapacitated from the event, the walking dead. But the fact is it was commercialized pap, in pursuit of a few million dollars of profit.

Is nothing sacrosanct these days? People want to commercialize the Bible and Jesus. It is the Church of Mammon all over again. Stuff like that deeply offends me.

Next time I will keep my thoughts to myself. Again, I beg your forgiveness.

Anonymous said...

thanks