On Friday, September 8, just forty-eight hours before ABC planned to air its so-called "docudrama,"
The Path to 9/11 ,
Robert Iger, CEO of
ABC's corporate parent, the
Walt Disney Company,
was presented with incontrovertible evidence outlining the involvement
of that film's screenwriter and director in a concerted right-wing
effort to
blame former President Bill Clinton for allowing the 9/11
attacks to take place. Iger told a source close to ABC that he was
"deeply troubled" by the information and claimed he had no previous
knowledge of the institutional right-wing ties of
The Path to 9/11 's
creators. He reportedly said that he has commenced an internal
investigation to verify the role of the film's creators in deliberately
advancing disinformation through ABC.
After stating that she was "looking into" my questions about the production of
The Path to 9/11 , ABC Vice President of Media Relations Hope Hartman declined to comment on this story.
All week, ABC has withstood withering criticism for
The Path to 9/11 's
imaginative screenwriting that depicts Clinton and members of his
administration either ignoring threats from Al Qaeda or botching
operations that could have eliminated terror-master
Osama bin Laden.
Iger conceded in a September 5 press release that key scenes in
The Path to 9/11
were indeed fabricated, calling the film "a dramatization, not a
documentary." Behind the scenes, Iger reportedly made personal
assurances to some of the film's most prominent critics that those
scenes would be edited out. But even though some deceptive footage was
cut from the original, much of its falsified version of events leading
up to 9/11 remains
Iger now bears ultimate responsibility for authorizing the product of
a well-honed propaganda operation--a network of little-known
right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly
liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather
is far-right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a
decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit
mainstream film and TV production. On this project, a secretive
evangelical religious right group long associated with Horowitz, founded
by
The Path to 9/11 's director, David Cunningham, that aims to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision, has taken the lead.
Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage,
Disney/ABC signed David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is
no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren
Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). According to Sara Diamond's book Spiritual Warfare ,
during the 1980's YWAM "sought to gain influence within the Republican
party" while assisting authoritarian governments in South Africa and
Central America. Cunningham, Diamond noted, was a follower of Christian Reconstructionism,
an extreme current of evangelical theology that advocates using stealth
political methods to put the United States under the control of
Biblical law and jettison the Constitution.
Cunningham instilled his
radical ideology in young missionaries by sending them to "Discipleship
Training School." A former student of Cunningham's school claimed
"similarities between cult mind controlling techniques and the
[Discipleship Training School] program instituted by YWAM."
When the young Cunningham entered his father's ministry, he helped
found an auxiliary group called The Film Institute (TFI). According to
its mission statement, TFI is "
dedicated to a Godly transformation and
revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry." Cunningham
has placed over a dozen interns from Youth With A Mission's
Discipleship Training School
in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform
Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.
Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled
Untitled History Project . "TFI's first project is a doozy," a
newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as:
The Untitled History Project ,
it is already being called the television event of the decade and not
one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!" (A
web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted last week after
its publication by the blogger Digby, but has been cached on Google at
the link above).
The following month, on July 28, the
New York Post reported
that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about
the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the
miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the
'Untitled History Project,'" the
Post noted.
Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named
Cyrus Nowrasteh to write the script of his secretive
Untitled
film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a
fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing
into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious
agendas, like Cunningham.
Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a
featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event
founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films
supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream
film festivals. This June, while
The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo--both friends of Nowrasteh--
announced they were "partnering" with Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."
Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored
to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood.
His Hollywood nest centers around his
Wednesday Morning Club,
a weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has
been graced with speeches by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis
Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the
offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think
tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugar daddies
like billionaire
Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife financed the
Arkansas Project,
a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for
negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)
In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, Horowitz led the right's
campaign to pin the blame for attacks on Clinton. On February 19, 2002,
Horowitz's organization
mailed
1,500 lengthy pamphlets to major media outlets which claimed to expose
how "the left" in general and Clinton in particular had "undermined
America's security," thus causing 9/11. Two years later, Horowitz penned
a lengthy manifesto for his FrontPageMag blaming Clinton once again for
having "accepted defeat" in the fight against Al Qaeda. Horowitz
singled out Clinton's National Security Council Director, Samuel "Sandy"
Berger, as especially culpable for allowing the terror threat to
fester, casting him as "a veteran of the Sixties 'anti-war' movement"
who "abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia."
This year,
Horowitz's Hollywood hothouse finally spawned his most
potent anti-Clinton propaganda device. With the LFF under Horowitz's
control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham
and Nowrasteh's
Untitled project, which finally was revealed last August as
The Path to 9/11 .
Like Iger, Horowitz has pleaded ignorance about the sectarian agenda of the film's creators. Responding to an
article I wrote for the Huffington Post exposing Horowitz's involvement in
The Path to 9/11 (on which this article is adapted), he claimed in a
blog post, "In fact, I never heard of David Cunningham or his group before reading about them in Max's hilarious column."
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