The Road to 9/11 Part 1

The Road to 9/11 isn’t a documentary its far more riveting and truthful than your average documentary. The film as I saw it was not strictly accurate considering that I doubt that many of the conversations took place but the substance is true. In the first part you see National Security Council debating what to do after the embassy bombings. They reject ground troops as an overreaction and show how they feel about terrorism. I don’t know if it actually happened that way but I do know that the Clinton Administration considered Bin Laden to be a minor nuisance to be dealt with some cruise missiles. It shows them calling off an attack because of fear of sopme collateral damage because they didn’t care about Bin Laden one of the questions they had was how good the indictment was because they were unwilling to detain him as a military target. The implication of the movie, the way I see it is that everyone was just hoping that the Bin Laden problem would be solved on its own and didn’t consider it a major problem the way they did Pakistan or Oslo. The person who looks the worst isn’t Clinton who seems to be delegating everything like a standard politician. It isn’t Berger, who gives the decision over to Tenet over whether to go through with the hit on Bin Laden. It’s Tenet who doesn’t have the guts to risk his career for a great cause. Maybe he shouldn’t have been put in this situation, but he wasn’t the politician, he was supposed to make these decisions. In response to those claims as quoted here that copies have only been given to Republicans because it is a prop for them is disproven by a quick view of the movie. The Republicans when mentioned are shown as obsessed with Lewinsky (which they were) the argument with the cruise missiles were that they were too violent and meant as a distraction. From what I understand Bush isn’t spared and he shouldn’t be. The problem was that nobody but the soldiers and the agents on the ground were willing to see it as a war. In fact only the soldiers in Afghanistan come off well. As to the asthetic value of the movie I’m no expert, but it seemed that most of the camera was less professional than usual movies are. In fact the most annoying thing was how ABC seemed to be the only network covering anything at the time. Every media appearance was some ABC reporter.