Truth and Fiction in the ABC Special Documentary The Path to 9/11 (2006)

On Sunday night of September 11 last year my mother and I watched the first part of the special drama on ABC called "Path to 9/11." I took careful notes, wondering whether this was fiction, history, or a strange or deliberate confounding of the two. One thing is certain; both the Clinton and Bush administrations were depicted as negligent and incompetent in the events leading up to the airplane bombings of the World Trade Center towers in 2001.

The ABC mini-series' dramatic characters were powerfully drawn in moral tones, as if we were watching a medieval Morality Play. We meet the villain Ramzi Yousef, an angry, unemployed Pakistani-born engineer. He is brilliant, taking dangerous risks to try out new cutting-edge explosive devices. He is deeply angry, blaming his unemployment and his country's poverty on the United States and her policies. And he is dangerously slippery, with a lust for escaping authorities second only to his blood-lust. He revels in the thrill of his terrorism.

The heroes are personified in John O'Neil, the FBI boss who has been tracking Yousef and his underground cohorts across several countries in the 1990s. O'Neil is relieved of duty from the FBI for being overzealous in the pursuit of these men. In a fateful twist, O'Neil resurfaces on the eve of 9/11/2001 with a brand new job: head of security at the World Trade Center! Thus, he dies tragically in the very bombing he tried to prevent.

Prince Musad, the "Lion of Afghanistan," relays messages and asks again and again for financial and material help from an American CIA operative played by Mark Wahlberg. The CIA's higher authority structure is shown as unwilling to listen to or help Musad, who is the only Afghani fighting the Taliban in his own country. Wahlberg's character meets covertly with Musad and begs his higher-ups for money and guns for the Lion. In the end, the heroic Prince is assassinated in his own tent by Taliban gunmen posing as a camera crew.

Then there are the story's "do-nothings": George Tenet, CIA director, who "refused" to kill Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s, when plans and exact locations were apparently known in clear detail; Madaleine Albright of the Clinton cabinet; who also was portrayed as choosing to look the other way; and President Bill Clinton, who is portrayed as too busy with domestic scandals to have time for dealing with the problem.

The story speeds through a whirlwind of locations so quickly that it is difficult to focus on the complexities of each place. One moment we are in the deserts of Afghanistan with Prince Musad, next we are inside terrorist hangouts in Spain, Egypt, Pakistan, and the Phillipines watching Ramzi make connections and win friends. At home in the United States we see Trade Center defenses and early warning signs of trouble in New York and we follow future terrorists training at Embry-Riddle school of aviation in south Florida. We accompany CIA agents zipping through Washington, D.C., Dulles International Airport, and the Boston air traffic control center desperately responding on the morning of the crashes. The picture is painted that it was one rapid series of events with only one possible outcome.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but this drama/documentary raises the question of how much was truth and how much fiction. Clinton's negligence may have been exaggerated. Images of Monica Lewinsky are suggestively interspersed with Ramzi Yousef making progress in his plot. A handful of FBI and CIA agents are depicted as heroic underdogs who have to fight the American power structure to make any progress in the case.

Interestingly, the documentary was timed to coincide with the airing of President Bush's 9/11 address on network television. Bush's message of "we've got it all under control" was undermined by this program's healthy dose of skepticism.