A Sept. 12 WorldNetDaily article featuring an after-the-fact defense of the ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11” by Cyrus Nowrasteh, its screenwriter and chief producers, glosses over the real controversy over the show — Nowrasteh’s conservative politics.
Before Moore even addresses that, though, he and Nowrasteh get in their digs at Clinton administration officials who protested the show’s false portrayals of them. Moore cited ‘unprecedented pressure from former President Clinton, his aides and top Democratic Party leaders that resulted in edits,” then quoted Nowrasteh as saying, “To lose only a minute [due to the edits] is a success, is a victory. … I think ABC stood tall.” Nowrasteh also lamented the elimination of a “masterfully directed sequence” that falsely portrayed Clinton-era national security adviser Sandy Berger hanging up on CIA director George Tenet as Tenet sought permission to go ahead with a capture of Osama bin Laden, even though Nowrasteh himself admitted it was “a conflation of events” and the setup of the scene — a visual sighting of bin Laden being cornered in his compound — never happened in real life. Moore also repeated his earlier misleading description of Robert “Buzz” Patterson, one of Nowrasteh’s sources for his screenplay, as a “a former military aide to President Clinton” when, as we’ve detailed, Patterson is in fact a Clinton-bashing conservative activist.
It’s not until the 22nd paragraph that Moore touches on the issue of Nowrasteh’s political leanings by repeating the claims of Huffington Post blogger Max Blumenthal that a “secret right-wing network” was behind the ABC miniseries, and that was “produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias.” But rather than detail Blumenthal’s allegations any further, Moore states that “Nowrasteh dismissed the criticism” and quoted Nowrasteh as saying, “This project was generated at ABC at the highest network levels” — a “denial” that denies nothing Blumenthal reported about Nowrasteh’s conservative activism.
Remember that Moore is the same WND writer who’s in charge of whitewashing and falsifying Peter Paul’s long criminal history in order to play up Paul’s attacks on the Clintons, so it’s no surprise that Moore would perform a similar service regarding Nowrasteh’s conservative politics.