‘The Worst Draft of History’--Docudramas

News flash: Made-for-TV movies are not unimpeachable sources of truth. Two conservative columnists join the liberal critics of the ABC docudrama “The Path to 9/11.” John Podhoretz, writing in The New York Post, says it is “entirely unworthy of your time”:

The real truth about the failures of the U.S. government under both Clinton and Bush is not, as “The Path to 9/11? would have it, that the diabolical nature of the al Qaeda threat was obvious and unmistakable and that it was ignored by fools, charlatans and other downright unpleasant people who refused to listen to the Few Who Knew the Truth (meaning the late FBI official John O’Neill and that legend in his own mind, former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke).

The simple fact of the matter is that, with a million other things going on all at once – all of which seemed more pressing at the time, the threat went uncomprehended.

The 9/11 Commission rightly called this a “failure of imagination.” It’s the docudrama’s failure to portray the False Peace accurately as a “failure of imagination” that makes “The Path to 9/11? entirely unworthy of your time on the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund divines a much broader lesson: “Five years after 9/11, it’s easy to find partisan divisions. But here’s an issue we should be able to agree on: Docudramas – the portrayal of real events and people by actors – are a poor way to teach children and adults history.”