With the Path to 9/11 due to air in two days, and the left up in arms about the “numerous” inconsistancies” (which to this point are only three in a five-hour movie), we need to remember that the 911 Commission Report was NOT the primary source for this movie.

As I have eluded to actual present and former CIA/DOS/FBI personnel were exhaustively interviewed, including some members of the “Bin Laden issue unit”, who worked with, among others, with the tribal unit TRODPINT,assigned to root out Bin Laden in the late 90s. Here are some excerpts from a series that ran in the Washington Post in 2004, that detailed some of what was really going on:

“In the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA carried out a secret but ultimately unsuccessful manhunt for bin Laden. It was based at first on the band of Afghan tribal agents, and later expanded to include other agents and allies, especially the legendary guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. But the search became mired in mutual frustrations, near misses and increasingly bitter policy disputes in Washington between the Clinton White House and the CIA.

Why did the hunt bog down?

“An ambitious plan for the TRODPINT team to kidnap bin Laden from his bed and hold him in an Afghan cave telegraphed the CIA’s audacity, despite what operatives saw as a restrictive mandate from the president” (Clinton)

Restrictive is a nice way to put it. It made it damn near impossible to pick him up with all the red tape that the administration threw in the way. It was frustrating.

“On the front lines in Pakistan and Central Asia, working-level CIA officers felt they had a rare, urgent sense of the menace bin Laden posed before Sept. 11. Yet a number of controversial proposals to attack bin Laden were turned down by superiors at Langley or the White House, who feared the plans were poorly developed, wouldn’t work or would embroil the United States in Afghanistan’s then-obscure civil war. At other times, plans to track or attack bin Laden were delayed or watered down after stalemated debates inside Clinton’s national security cabinet.”

Those who were there, active in the hunt for Bin Laden talk about “stalemates” occuring all the time. The movie scene where Berger slammed down the phone may not have happened, but the attitude displayed was most assuredly present.

“By mid-1999, the sense both at the White House and in Tenet’s seventh-floor suite at CIA headquarters in Langley was that the Counterterrorist Center had grown too dependent on the TRODPINT tribal agents. One of Tenet’s aides referred to them derisively as “weekend warriors,” middle-aged and now prosperous Afghan fighters with a few Kalashnikovs in their closets.

At the White House, among the few national security officials who knew of the agents’ existence, the attitude evolved from “hopeful skepticism to outright mockery,” as one official recalled it.

At one point the agents moved north to Kabul’s outskirts and rented a farm as a base. They moved in and out of the Afghan capital to scout homes where bin Laden occasionally stayed. They developed a new set of plans in which they would strike a Kabul house where bin Laden slept, snatch the Saudi from his bed and retreat from the city in light trucks. The CIA supplied explosives to the agents because their plan called for them to blow up small bridges as they made their escape.

The agents never acted. Their rented farm was a working vineyard. William B. Milam, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, who was briefed on the operation, asked his CIA colleagues sarcastically, “So what are they waiting for — the wine to ferment?”

To shake up the hunt, Tenet appointed a fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor, known to his colleagues as Rich, to take charge of the bin Laden unit. Tenet also named Cofer Black, a longtime case officer in Africa who had tracked bin Laden in Sudan, as the Counterterrorist Center’s new director. The bin Laden unit and its chief reported directly to Black; during the next two years they would work closely together.

When Black took over, the bin Laden unit had about 25 professionals. Most of them were women, and two-thirds had backgrounds as analysts. They called themselves “the Manson Family,” after the crazed convicted murderer Charles Manson, because they had acquired a reputation within the CIA for wild alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat.

Their reports described over and over bin Laden’s specific, open threats to inflict mass casualties against Americans. They could not understand why no one else seemed to take the threat as seriously as they did. They pleaded with colleagues that bin Laden was not like the old leftist, theatrical terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s who wanted, in terrorism expert Brian Jenkins’s famous maxim, “a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead.” Bin Laden wanted many American civilians to die, they warned. They could be dismissive of colleagues who did not share their sense of urgency.

“The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and at times fanatic,” recalled a former chief of the bin Laden unit. “It was a cult,” agreed a U.S. official who dealt with them. “Jonestown,” said another person involved, asked to sum up the unit’s atmosphere. “I outlawed Kool-Aid.”

It was just Clinton, Berger, Albright or Tenant, it was the entire Administration apparatus that paid “lip service” in talking up a good game on getting Bin Laden, but in reality stalled and in essense “wished the threat away”.

In this way the movie, Path to 9/11 is important. You don’t have to be specific to show that during the Clinton Administration years, the focus was not fighting terrorism, but of public relations and appearances of sturdiness. That picture has now begun to crumble and that’s why the principals do not want anyone to see the film.

Powerline Blog details some of the other reasons.

democrats elections politics bush war on terror path to 9/11