TV

Miniseries asks: How could Sept. 11 have happened?

ABC's 'Path' follows commission report on terror's origins and government missteps

By Diane Holloway
AMERICAN-STATESMAN TELEVISION WRITER
Sunday, September 10, 2006

"The 9/11 Commission Report," that 568-page government tome that turned out to be a surprise best-seller two summers ago, comes to television tonight in a mammoth five-hour dramatization featuring 247 actors from 14 countries.

Pegged to the fifth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, ABC's "The Path to 9/11" is chilling, thrilling and, in the final analysis, depressing as all get-out. But it is fascinating at every turn.

The controversy that has erupted over the film, stemming from former Clinton aides' claims that too much blame is placed on them, seems superfluous considering there is ample blame spread between the Clinton and Bush administrations.

From the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to the attacks that brought down the twin towers, the film focuses on the conspirators, the conspiracy, the homeland officials who should have seen it coming but didn't and the few officials who did see it coming but were unable to rouse others.

"What we found was 19 people came into this country to do us harm, and our government failed in every way to stop or even slow down their plot at any stage," said Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey whom President George W. Bush appointed as chairman of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission in 2002.

Kean, who remains passionate on the topic, served as a consultant on the film, shepherding scriptwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh as he winnowed hundreds of real-life characters to a manageable few for the purpose of focus.

Executive producer Marc Platt refers to Kean as "the guardian of accuracy," which, considering that the drama comes from an official government document and is highly critical, is an important mission.

"The Commission Report is a work of nonfiction, and what is so sad about it is that it reads as a work of fiction, almost like a thriller," Platt said when he, Kean and Nowrasteh met with reporters in Los Angeles this summer.

Filmed on location for year and a half in Toronto, Morocco, New York and Washington, D.C., "The Path to 9/11" takes viewers inside the CIA, the FBI and the White House under two administrations.

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations take a licking for not putting a higher priority on terrorist threats. Clinton is seen as distracted by revelations of the Monica Lewinsky affair and his pending impeachment; Bush is portrayed as simply misinformed or uninformed.

Among the key players are John O'Neill (Harvey Keitel), a career FBI agent who spent years chasing Osama bin Laden; terrorism expert and then-ABC reporter John Miller (Barclay Hope); undercover CIA agent "Kirk" (Donnie Wahlberg); Ahmed Shah Massoud (Mido Hamada), an American ally and opponent of bin Laden in Afghanistan; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Penny Johnson Jerald); CIA director George Tenet (Dan Lauria); and White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke (Stephen Root).

"We were looking for those dramatic threads and characters that run the journey of the greater story," said Nowrasteh. "This is a movie about how we got there, and it covers eight years of time, so I was looking for those people who were involved in counter-terrorism that whole time.

"FBI Agent O'Neill leapt out at me. He was involved in the investigation of the first bombing of WTC, the first to focus on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. And he was constantly warning that the towers would be hit again. And, of course, there's a tragic symmetry to his story since he was in the towers on the day of the attack and lost his life."

Keitel is superb as the frustrated agent who tries and tries to get two different administrations to pay attention to the threats — specific threats about attacks in the U.S. using airplanes as weapons. And Wahlberg does a fine job as Kirk, the undercover CIA agent who is anguished over his futile attempts to get the U.S. to bolster Massoud against bin Laden in Afghanistan.

But some of the best, most authentic-looking scenes are those that take place in foreign locations where radical anti-Americanism is bubbling. Shot in Morocco, these scenes are a perfect portrayal of the hatred and poverty that led to Sept. 11, 2001. Going inside al Qaeda proves a spine-tingling, super-creepy mission.

"What I like about this project," Kean said, "is that more people will see it than will ever read our report. . . . If this miniseries helps the public really understand the story of 9/11 and if that leads people to press for the recommendations of the commission, that will be a very strong service for the country. Nobody has said our recommendations weren't the right things to do. They're just not doing them."

Viewers will see, as this real-life drama unfolds, that there were points along the way when bin Laden and al Qaeda could have been derailed. After the first bombing of the World Trade Center, authorities celebrated the capture and prosecution of the man known as the Blind Sheikh and, later, the bombing expert Ramzi Yousef.

"But there were people who knew this was a much larger conspiracy," Kean said. "We took it seriously but not seriously enough. We had bin Laden in our sights and didn't pull the trigger. The CIA had him a number of times and didn't pull the trigger. If we had gotten bin Laden early on, when he first went to Afghanistan or before he went, I think history would have been very different."

Hindsight can be frustrating or instructive. Kean and the film's producers hope "The Path to 9/11," which portrays with authenticity the people and events that led us to that terrible day, will enlighten us and help keep us safe.

dholloway@statesman.com; 445-3608