Cyrus Nowrasteh's op ed has been published in the Journal, with my thoughts below.
i'm still going to try to get cyrus to post here, but it's a long shot.
so off we go...
and as usual more thoughts at my blog, link below.
Cyrus's op-ed is out and he makes some valid points while avoiding some of the most serious charges with a facile "we had a lot of researchers" riposte.
when he talks of the reaction to him personally and to the accusations made against him and david cunningham, i believe he is most persuasive. thus:
It would have been good to be able to report due diligence on the part of those who judged the film, the ones who held forth on it before watching a moment of it. Instead, in the rush to judgment, and the effort to portray the series as the work of a right-wing zealot, much was made of my "friendship" with Rush Limbaugh (a connection limited to two social encounters), but nothing of any acquaintance with well-known names on the other side of the political spectrum. No reference to Abby Mann, for instance, with whom I worked on "10,000 Black Men Named George" (whose hero is an African-American communist) or Oliver Stone, producer of "The Day Reagan Was Shot," a film I wrote and directed. Clearly, those enraged that a film would criticize the Clinton administration's antiterrorism policies--though critical of its successor as well--were willing to embrace only one scenario: The writer was a conservative hatchetman.
i've made some of the same points. also, regarding david cunningham, this:
The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film. And in director David Cunningham, the searchers found paydirt! His father had founded a Christian youth outreach mission. The whiff of the younger Mr. Cunningham's possible connection to this enterprise was enough to set the hounds of suspicion baying. A religious mission! A New York Times reporter wrote, without irony or explanation, that an issue that raised questions about the director was his involvement in his father's outreach work. In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission.
it is true that in hollywood one can be sensitive for obvious reasons to those who want to suppress speech here because of beliefs--read vic navasky's "Naming Names" to understand why. i hold no truck with christian fundies, and david cunningham's dad's group is not my cup of tea, any more than hutton gibson's. but that in and of itself is not a reason to avoid working with someone, in my opinion.
so on both points i believe that personal attacks on the writer and director of this mini-series were ultimately distracting and misguided. the gotcha quality of so many diaries here and elsewhere, of max blumenthal's piece in The Nation and so on were just fluff as far as i'm concerned. and the "when did his family REALLY leave" thing was the nadir--who knows whom his family was fleeing: the shah and SAVAK? the ayatollahs? i don't know, neither do you diarists, so leave it. that stuff was just pathetic.
however, this simply isn't good enough:
I know, too, as does everyone involved in the production, that we kept uppermost in our minds the need for due diligence in the delivery of this history. Fact-checkers and lawyers scrutinized every detail, every line, every scene. There were hundreds of pages of annotations. We were informed by multiple advisers and interviews with people involved in the events--and books, including in a most important way the 9/11 Commission Report.
no explanation of why advisors quit, of the backtracking away from "based on the 9/11 Commission Report" (though that was out of cyrus's hands as no writer ever gets to tell marketing what to do), or why scenes were reshot (or had to be reshot in the first place), or why on kean was hired and not lee hamilton as well.
"The Path to 9/11" was set in the time before the event, and in a world in which no party had the political will to act. The principals did not know then what we know now. It is also indisputable that Bill Clinton entered office a month before the first attack on the World Trade Center. Eight years then went by, replete with terrorist assaults on Americans and American interests overseas. George W. Bush was in office eight months before 9/11. Those who actually watched the entire miniseries know that he was given no special treatment.
i both agree and disagree with this assessment. assertions were made about clinton's behavior that were tendentious at best, outright fabrications at worst. bush, in my opinion, didn't fare much better in the second night (this was no hagiography along the lines of lionel chetwynd's Showtime movie), but details that weren't covered were those that would have made him look terrible, like My Pet Goat and the PDB of August 6th 2001 (CYA indeed). that was where i believe bias of thought was apparent, conscious or otherwise. of course, that's speculation on my part, but then one thing i've learned here is that Peggy Noonan's "it would be irresponsible not to speculate" is the operative style, not just a sick joke.
as some here know, that's gone poorly for my family.
ignorant speculation adds heat, not light, and muddies issues that are important, buried under an avalanche of Drudge-ry.
and i will also add that on the weekend i saw a list of top notch writers, what we call here the "A List" and that Cyrus was on that list. he's considered that talented. i can also add that he will not be getting jobs most likely, given that he is now toxic to a lot of people. food for thought.