Disney/ABC's spokesman now admits that at least one key scene from its 9/11 "documentary" was simply made up.
Berger, portrayed as a pasty-faced time-server by Kevin Dunn (Col. Hicks in “Godzilla”) freezes in dithering apprehension when a manly and virtuous CIA agent played by Donnie Wahlberg radios in from the wilds of Afghanistan to say that he and his noble band of local tribesmen have Osama bin Laden within sight and begs for the green light to terminate him with extreme prejudice. In the film, the line goes dead before Berger offers any reply.....Ah yes, Disney/ABC's misinformation is already spreading. And now, it seems, the standard Disney/ABC is applying to their tv show is to strive for "reasonable accuracy" when educating American schoolkids about what happened on September 11 and how it happened.
So when the post-screening question-and-answer session began, Ben-Veniste stood to say that the Berger-bashing scene didn’t square with the research he and the other commissioners conducted. “There was no incident like that in the film that we came across. I am disturbed by that aspect of it,” Ben-Veniste, a loyal Democrat, told the panel, which included both the producer and the commission’s GOP chairman, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey.
Berger, reached by phone after the screening, seconded Ben-Veniste’s criticism. “It’s a total fabrication,” he said tersely. “It did not happen.”
That is not likely to prevent the film from being embraced far and wide among Bush supporters. Even before its airdate, the show is being hailed as a breakthrough in the conservative blogosphere. One blogger marveled in an interview with scriptwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh that “one unbelievable sequence shows how . . . Sandy Berger . . . actually hung up the phone on the CIA agent on the ground.”
Reasonably accurate?
Is that like saying Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11, and Iraq had WMD? Hasn't America had enough hedging about accuracy regarding September 11 and the war on terror?
But hey, so what if Disney/ABC makes the after-school-special version of the largest mass murder of Americans in decades, if not ever? What counts to Disney/ABC isn't the truth, it's that the murder of 3,000 Americans be good entertainment.
