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This morning I tuned into CNN’s video pipeline where the news network is re-enacting coverage of 9/11 as it took place five years ago. The raw emotions I felt that day have come back in full force as I see for the first time how the crisis unfolded on television.

I knew two people who died that day, one on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania and one in the World Trade Center towers. Also, someone very close to me now was in the Pentagon but narrowly managed to escape injury.

Unfortunately this tragedy has been spun out of all recognition for political purposes. It has been used to justify the invasion of another country not involved in any way with the attacks of September 11th. A “docudrama” grinds a partisan ax on national television trying to rewrite history by creating fiction and attempting to pin the blame where it doesn’t belong.

In light of the disgraceful twisting of the tragedy that has taken place I thought it important to view the raw unedited footage as it happened, free of political agendas and partisan spin. The images themselves speak loud and clear as to how America changed that day.

Clearly we lost something dear and precious to us on that fateful morning. America is not what it was. Today’s news and debates of what constitutes torture, of secret gulags, of indefinite detentions of Americans without access to courts or a lawyer, of warrantless wiretapping would have been utterly unthinkable five years ago. We live in a different world now, and obviously we need to aggressively pursue our national security…but we must do so in a way that doesn’t compromise our core values. We can fight terrorism without trampling the Constitution.

I watched the ABC docudrama disgustedly last night as it attempted to make the case that it was because of pesky “obstacles” like the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement that prevented the US from fighting terrorism–clearly implying that such obstacles should be eliminated. They should not. We can streamline the process, quicken the decisionmaking, allow emergency arrests and searches to take place without a warrant as long as you get one later–all these measures address national security concerns. But when you entirely remove the authority of our justice system from judging the fairness of a search or seizure against Americans then we no longer live in a democracy, but in a police state.

The legacy of September 11th five years later is that we are handing the terrorists a victory by threatening to become that which we once hated. Bin Laden remains free to laugh at us in a cave somewhere. We are creating terrorists by the day throughout the Arab world by virtue of our irresponsible military “adventure” in Iraq. We are not safer as our ports and cities remain vulnerable, though credit must be given for the fact that there has not been another attack. The treasury continues to bleed money at an alarming rate.

Yet there is hope–Americans are waking up from their stupor and seeing the wolf in the henhouse. They are angry. They know in overwhelming numbers that America is headed in the wrong direction. They are understanding that our national identity, security and prestige are at stake both at home and abroad. They understand that we can fight terrorism and win without losing our nation’s soul in the process. They will hopefully vote their minds in November.

In the meantime I continue to watch the footage to remind myself of how much is at stake, lamenting the loss of a carefree America that our kids will probably never know, hopeful for a safer nation that hasn’t completely lost sight of its values.

We must never forget.

ABC is getting the message loud and clear that people are unhappy with the distortions and fabrications evident in its upcoming docudrama about the September 11th attacks.

After hearing from members of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission itself about how assertions in the docudrama were patently false (such as the assertion that Clinton was unconcerned about terrorism when that is exactly the opposite of what the Commission found in its conclusions), ABC agreed to make what it is calling “minor” changes to the docu-drama in order to be more accurate.

ABC also repeated the assertion that the movie was a “dramatization” including “fictionalized scenes.” Wasn’t 9/11 dramatic enough, with scores of “heroic scenes?” Why does ABC need to fictionalize it and then pass the program off as factual? Creating fiction around the events leading up to and including that day only degrades the magnitude of how 9/11 shook America to its foundations.

I’m still hopeful that ABC shows enough dignity to pull this garbage off the air altogether.

ABC and resource-guide contributor Scholastic are feeling the heat for the lies-ridden “Path to 9/11″ docudrama, which attempts to place the blame for September 11th on former President Clinton.

Several Clinton officials, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, have written to the CEO of ABC/Walt Disney demanding that it drop blatantly false claims from the program. Excerpt from the AP article:

The letters pointed out examples of scenes they had been told were in the miniseries, but which they said never happened. Albright objected to a scene that she was told showed her insisting on warning the Pakistani government before an airstrike on Afghanistan, and that she was the one who made the warning.

“The scene as explained to me is false and defamatory,” she said.

Berger objected to a scene that he was told showed him refusing to authorize an attack on Osama bin Laden despite the request from CIA officials. “The fabrication of this scene (of such apparent magnitude) cannot be justified under any reasonable definition of dramatic license,” he wrote.

Media Matters has pointed out additional distortions and outright fabrications in the docu-drama and related “discussion materials” prepared for it by Scholastic for discussion between high school teachers and students. For example, on Iraq:

While providing background information to assist viewers in “becom[ing] familiar with the people, places, and organizations that played a role in the events of 9/11 and those that led up to that tragic day,” the [teacher/student discussion] resource sheet asserts that prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, “[t]he U.S. government believed that [Saddam] Hussein had been developing weapons of mass destruction that he planned to use against American and other targets.” But the material omits any mention of the fact that, as we now know, Iraq did not have WMDs. Nor is there any mention of the voluminous and growing body of evidence that indicates that the Bush administration knew, prior to the 2003 invasion, that its claims about WMDs were unsupported.

On the connection between Iraq and 9/11:

The material also appears to suggest a link between Iraq and 9-11, by both apparently including Iraq as a “place[] … that played a role in the events of 9/11,” and by later tying Iraq to the “War on Terror.” The resource sheet stated:

As part of the “War on Terror,” President Bush has led the United States into Afghanistan and Iraq and reorganized the national government in an attempt to combat terrorist activity.

In fact, even Bush — despite repeated suggestions by Bush himself and other administration members of a link between Iraq and 9-11 — acknowledges that Iraq had no connection to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. During an August 21 press conference, Bush was specifically asked: “What did Iraq have to do with … [t]he attack on the World Trade Center?” He replied: “Nothing.”

As if all that weren’t enough to prove that the docu-drama is nothing but a thin cover for a neo-conservative agenda, one of the “debate” questions posed for students to answer was “whether the media help or hinder our national security.” There is absolutely no context for the question related to the docu-drama, and the implication that the media may hinder national security is clearly a talking point of the neo-con Right.

Faced with the sheer magnitude of distortions found in the discussion materials, Scholastic just announced it is pulling its support from the ABC docu-drama, replacing them with materials “stressing critical thinking and media literacy.”

“After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues,” said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic, in a press release.

You would think the review would have taken place before the materials were unveiled, not after..but whatever. The Truth always wins out in the end.

Now it remains to be seen whether ABC will run a program that threatens to sully its reputation and that is frankly beneath its dignity.

In order to commemorate the upcoming 5-year anniversary of September 11th, ABC plans to show a “docu-drama” entitled “The Path to 9/11” that attempts to place the blame for the events in large part on former President Clinton. A blog that had been set up to support the program was recently pulled by ABC after it was subjected to a large amount of protest expressed there over the right-wing slant of the presentation despite ABC’s claim that the docu-drama shows “an objective telling of the events of 9/11.” A full copy of the blog as it appeared before being pulled can be found here.

Let’s not forget a couple of basic facts about 9/11. The attacks occurred in 2001 while Bush was president, not Clinton. Bush is where the buck must stop, notwithstanding excuses to the contrary. Bush had plenty of notice about Al-Qaeda’s intent to strike, not the least of which was the presidential daily briefing on August 6th, 2001 that warned the president about Bin Laden and about efforts underway to hijack aircraft.

Could Clinton have done more than launch a few missiles in response to the USS Cole and other attacks? Sure, and he should have. But to place the blame for 9/11 on Clinton instead of where it belongs simply smacks of revisionist history and relegates this “docu-drama” to being a worthless piece of garbage not worth watching.