While the wingnuts hype ABC's "Path to 9/11"
which blames the attacks on Monica Lewinski, there is another movie
coming out this week we should be talking about, instead. It's called
"9/11: Press for Truth" and the producers sent me a copy to review as a blogger at DailyKos.
It starts as the story of 9/11 widows and their failed efforts to find anyone willing to get to the bottom of the failures that led to 9/11. The PDB was easy to report, just run the memo, but the PDB was the tip of an iceberg.
Half way into the film, they lay out a stunning series of events that led up to the 9/11 attacks. First, they show an NBC news clip of an Al Qaeda defector who turned himself in a year before 9/11 and confessed he was part of a hijacking plot in US. Next, they show a clip from CBS, describing warnings the British gave Bush about multiple hijackings in the US. Then, they quote a July 2001 BBC news story describing fears that Bin Laden was planning to attack the G8 summit in Genoa, using air planes as weapons. The MSM still hasn't connected the dots.
Watch the trailer for "9/11: Press for Truth".
Check if the movie is playing in your hometown this week, or
pre-order the DVD online if you can not see it in person.
Some of the most powerful lines in the movie are from women who lost their husbands on 9/11. Those who became known as "The Jersey Girls" are featured prominently in the film. Here are some of their quotes:
Lorie Van Auken, "On 9/11, the media started out by doing it's job and somehow got waylayed and stopped doing its job. It began reporting soley on the administration and the governments activities."
Monica Gabrielle, "The one thing that I personally was hoping for was another Woodward and Bernstein with regard to 9/11. Someone, anyone that was willing to put their teeth into this."
Kristen Breitweiser, "If the public was better informed in the summer of 2001, lives would have been saved, maybe the attacks wouldn't have been prevented, but lives would have been saved. My husband was in Tower Two. If he knew that it was a terrorist attack, he wouldn't have stayed in the building."
Mindy Kleinberg, "The 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once, they were lucky over and over again. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one can not still call it luck. If at some point we don't look to hold the individuals accountable for not doing their jobs properly, then how can we ever expect a terrorist to not get lucky again?"
Two more lines from the movie also stuck in my mind:
Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern, "The whole mystique of intelligence is that you acquire this very valueable information covertly, but the truth be told about eighty percent - eight zero - of any of the information that one needs is available in open source materials."
Paul Thompson, "As I began researching I noticed this curious phenomenon, which is that there is a lot of information that comes out in the main stream press, but it comes out buried. As a casual observer of the news, I'd never noticed any of this stuff."
Let's hope America notices this movie, and starts to ask the hard questions about what truly led on 9/11, and who it is that we are really at war with in this conflict we have all come to know as the "War on Terror".