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Originally Posted by Scrooge McSam
Perhaps someone would be so kind as to direct me to the page number in the 9/11 commission report that makes this charge. We've all read the 9/11 commission report, haven't we?
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Page 135 of the PDF version of the report lists four factors that the report says likely had a cumulative downward pressure on the willingness to use violence against bin Laden. The four factors are:
1) The apparent failure of the missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan to accomplish anything of significance.
2) The "wag the dog" stories in the press and the Republicans. This is the idea that aggressive acts by Clinton were to distract the nation from his Lewinsky problems. The report does not say that they
were intended to distract just that the idea that they were caused problems for the Clinton administration.
3) Intense partisanship (that is, any action, regardless of merit, resulted in bickering)
4) The apparent evidence that the strike in Sudan had been on a non-threatening site.
I don't know how exactly it is presented in the movie. The report also notes that Tenet and Berger testified that they didn't feel contrained by these things. But the report does explicitly contradict that claim.
It does not lay out any kind of relative importance of any of those factors, just says that they probably were factors.
To the extent that the pages following this lay "blame" with Clinton it seems to be for an environment of communication that created confusion between various agencies as to what actions were allowed in regard to bin Laden. The Clinton White House apparently felt that they had authorized pretty much carte blanche to kill bin Laden but the CIA felt they were only authorized to kill bin Laden under very limited circumstances and that Clinton and Berger used different and ambiguous language in issuing instructions to different people.
Again, I don't really blame anybody for 9/11. Hindsight will find many, many points where the future could have been changed by different action. That doesn't mean they were options that could reasonably have been taken at the time.
Without watching the ABC show myself I'm not ready to outright condemn it. But I'll probably never see it either (I'm not even home this weekend and it isn't going to find its way to my Netflix queue). In general, though, I am disapproving of the "docu-drama" genre because they
all generally have significant historical flaws and usually are a case of trying to have your cake and eat it too. You can claim historical fidelity in spirit while saying any specific distortions were made for artistic, time compression, or various other factors allowed in fiction.
As for the idea that this is an effort by ABC to boost Bush or the Republicans for the upcoming elections, who are the people in on this? Pretty much the entire top leadership of The Walt Disney company and ABC are Democrats (at least to the degree that such things can be determined by campaign contributions). Iger, for example, so far this year has given $15,200 directly to Democrats and $2,500 to Republicans (and $5,200 to individual D candidates and none to individual R candidates).