Viewers Tune Out "Path to 9/11"

ABC went ahead Sunday with its slightly tweaked but still controversial miniseries, The Path to 9/11. And while former Clinton administration officials still seethed at, what former counterterrorism czar and current ABC News consultant Richard Clarke called "an egregious distortion," many of them joined the rest of the country and simply didn't watch.

A week's worth of complaints from the Clintonites and others didn't convince ABC to pull the five-hour, commerical-free $40 million docudrama. Instead, the network recut the movie, deemphasized its reliance on the 9/11 Commission Report as primary source material and urged naysayers to watch the finished product before making any judgments.

"Having now seen the first night of this fiction, it is clear that the edits made to the film did not address the factual errors that we brought to your attention," Bruce Lindsey, the former President's personal attorney and head of the Clinton Foundation, wrote in an open letter to Disney chief Robert Iger.

"The final product was fraught with error and contained contrived scenes that are directly contradicted by the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report. The film has undoubtedly cemented in millions of viewers' minds a false impression of critical historical events."

Clarke, who served under both Clinton and George W. Bush and now works for ABC News, was equally scathing.

"As someone who was directly involved in almost every event depicted in the fictionalized docudrama The Path to 9/11, I believe it is an egregious distortion that does a deep disservice both to history and to those in both the Clinton and Bush administrations who are depicted," Clarke said in a written statement.

"Although I am not one to easily believe in conspiracy theories and have spent a great deal of time debunking them, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the errors in this screenplay are more than the result of dramatization and time compression [as ABC initially implied]."

Ex-Clinton cabinet members, joined by such news commentators as CNN's Bill Bennett and Fox News' Chris Wallace, noted historians, progressive bloggers and even the miniseries' own star, Harvey Keitel, said that based on review copies of The Path to 9/11, the telefilm unfairly blamed the Clinton administration for the September 11th terrorist attacks.

The critics were especially irked that ABC touted the project as being based on the official 9/11 Commission Report, despite containing scenes that contradicted the report.

ABC ended up cutting about 20 minutes out of the first night's three-hour running time, much of it from the climax in which a team of CIA agents are positioned outside of Osama bin Laden's encampment, seemingly ready to strike.

In the original version, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger seems to balk at ordering an attack by hanging up on CIA boss George Tenet. That's followed by a scene in which an Afghan in the CIA party asks, "Are there no men in Washington, or are they all cowards?" The next scene includes archival footage of Clinton's video testimony in the Lewinsky affair, implying that he was too busy worrying about impeachment to focus on terrorism.

ABC's editors did some tinkering, removing the news footage of Clinton and cutting the shot of Berger.

But the network left intact a scene in which former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright alerts Pakistan to a missile strike, which, in turn, allows bin Laden to escape--despite the 9/11 Commission debunking the story.

Leftie bloggers also decried ABC's choice of director, David L. Cunningham, and screenwriter, Cyrus Nowrasteh, both of whom have documented conservative leanings.

Unlike the advanced copies sent out to TV reviewers hyping the production as based solely on the 9/11 Commission Report, ABC issued a disclaimer noting The Path to 9/11 was also based on "other published sources and personal interviews."

"For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well time compression," read the disclaimer.

Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, the Republican cochair of the 9/11 Commission who acted as a consultant on the project (though has still refused to confirm whether he was paid for those services), stated on ABC's This Week on Sunday that he thought The Path to 9/11 was accurate, though he admitted not having seen the final cut.

"If people blame Bill Clinton after seeing this, then the miniseries has failed," Kean said. "That's wrong and it shouldn't happen."

ABC declined further comment Monday.

As for Bill Clinton himself? "He made the choice that most Americans made," Clinton Foundation spokesman Jay Carson told the Associated Press. "Of a fictionalized drama version of Sept. 11 or the Manning brothers playing football against one another, he chose the latter."

Indeed, The Path to 9/11 was crushed by NBC's season premiere of Sunday Night Football, which pitted Peyton Manning and his Indianapolis Colts against brother Eli and his New York Giants. The football game drew an estimated 20.7 million viewers to 13 million for The Path to 9/11, per Nielsen Media Research. ABC did get a small measure of consolation by beating CBS' 9/11 documentary, which attracted 10.6 million in its third airing.

Part two of The Path to 9/11 , which presumably will focus more on the Bush administration's fumbles, airs Monday but faces the possibility of drawing even fewer viewers. ABC plans to split the broadcast in half to accommodate President Bush's speech from the White House.