'Path to 9/11' inaccuracies nothing new for writer

The blogs did a nice job of uncovering the right-wing and fundamentalist ties of the creators of 'The Path to 9/11.' The NY Times reports that the film's writer was brought on board for his screenplay of the 2001 Showtime movie 'The Day Reagan Was Shot,' but fails to note that there's more than a passing connection between the two. To wit, completely fabricating events to make certain people look bad.

In both movies, administration officials were portrayed as dangerously incompetent, bringing the United States to the brink of disaster. In "The Path to 9/11," it is National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who come in for the harshest, and most disputed, treatment. In "The Day Reagan Was Shot," it was Secretary of State Al Haig whose reputation was impugned. He was portrayed as bringing the country to the verge of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

In December 2001, when "The Day Reagan Was Shot" premiered, Richard Allen, formerly the national security advisor under Reagan, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to castigate the film's creators, calling the movie's portrayal of the events inside the White House that day "fictional."

"How do I know it is fictional? Because I was there. Oh, and I had a tape recorder ...

"Situation Room meetings are rarely tape-recorded, but because we were dealing with a national emergency that afternoon, I placed my own small recorder in the center of the table. I captured the entire proceedings, about six hours. Written versions of these events have appeared since, some mostly accurate, others mostly inaccurate, but none has approached 'The Day Reagan Was Shot' for brazen distortion ...

"The film places generals in the Situation Room when they were not there; introduces conversations that never occurred; claims that a 'red alert from NORAD' was in progress (there is no such thing) and that a Soviet 'wolf pack' was off our coast with malign intent. (It wasn't: There were more Soviet subs than usual because it was the end-of-the-month changeover day, as we figured out within 20 minutes.) ...

I guess the good news is that the 9/11 film is over and done with, and didn't get terribly good ratings-- twice as many people tuned in to Sunday's football game, and just as many chose to watch a rerun of another network's documentary on 9/11.