RUSH: I told you people yesterday and the day before of a movie, a mini-series running on ABC on September 10th and 11th, called The Path to 9/11 and I told you that I have the DVDs. I also told you because I am in touch — I am poor when I’m in New York — I do not have a DVD player. I don’t. My apartment’s got an old media room in it, it’s got a laser disk player in it, but it doesn’t have a DVD. Well, actually it has a DVD player in it, but the TV doesn’t work. The projector does, and it’s the only room in the house where there’s a DVD player, and I can’t watch DVDs on computers because I can’t hear well through computer speakers. So I watched it. It’s four hours. 
I have the DVDs right here. I’m holding them in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. I watched on the plane flight home last night. I watched part of the first one. I had to go to the airplane to watch it. I’ll tell you, this is called being in touch with the average American. I couldn’t watch a DVD at home. At any rate, let me just give you the upshot of this, because I’ve mentioned to you even without having seen it I know what it’s about. The Path to 9/11 essentially chronicles everything we know that happened in the nineties that prevented the capture of Osama bin Laden. It indicts the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger.
It is just devastating to the Clinton administration. It talks about how we had chances to capture bin Laden in specific detail, which I will get to in just a moment. That’s not the point. I mentioned to you yesterday or the day before, the days are running together, that a friend of mine did this. His first name is Cyrus, and Cyrus has got some other film credits. He took it to Washington in the middle of last week and screened it for people and it caused nearly bloody uproar where they showed it. Richard Ben-Veniste went up in Cyrus’s face and told him it was disgusting. This film was disgusting. It caused all kinds of havoc and that led to the creation of efforts to try to get this program banned, put pressure on ABC to get it canceled and not run and so forth.
It also had a lot of people in the room that loved it. There were many people, Michael Barone saw it, a lot of people were in the screening there and loved it. Here is what is happening today. Bill Clinton himself is going to call Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, and demand or ask that this mini-series, The Path to 9/11, be reedited and recut so as not to depict Bill Clinton and his administration as they are currently portrayed in this mini-series. Bill Clinton himself is going to call Bob Iger — and this is not breaking news; I got the e-mail on this last night, and there have been some local hosts out in California who have been talking about this, but there is a huge movement afoot from inside the Clinton administration to put pressure on ABC to get this thing recut, reedited, if not more. Very powerful players obviously, much higher than just Richard Ben-Veniste and so forth.
You know, folks, the whole 9/11 Commission, if you go back and look at these things that we know now, the Clinton administration’s ability to camouflage history, to rewrite it, is just amazing. Look at who they got on the 9/11 Commission. They got Jamie Gorelick, who authored the wall, and this mini-series explains the wall and gives illustrations of fact of how it hurt our ability to capture Osama bin Laden. I’ll get to that in just a second. They had had Gorelick on there; they had Ben-Veniste (who was a partisan hack lawyer from the Watergate days), and Tim Roemer, who is a Democrat from Indiana, and that was to ensure that the Clinton administration was protected, and so that the top structural explanation for intelligence failure was white-washed.
The final report of the 9/11 Commission is a particular disgrace in that regard. They had Sandy Burglar, to this day we’ve never really been told what classified documents Sandy Burglar purloined and destroyed and maybe put back in the National Archives while he was helping prep Clinton for his 9/11 Commission testimony. Remember, we heard Bush had to take Cheney in there, because he couldn’t do it on his own and he was in there and Cheney and some lawyers. Clinton, why, he went in by himself, and Clinton was masterful. We found out Clinton was in there with Bruce Lindsey and other lawyers as well. All of this that we heard was a smoke screen.
I don’t understand why the Bush administration, the Department of Justice, gave Burglar the sweetheart deal of the century, then suppressed all the evidence involved in his action. Like I asked at the time, can you imagine if Condoleezza Rice had pled guilty to a misdemeanor mishandling of classified information, the media sitting silent about it? Anyway, the reason the Clinton administration keeps doing this, the reason they keep engaging in their camouflage of history and their whitewashing of history, is because they keep getting away with it. Why wouldn’t you keep doing it if you keep getting away with it? Now, take a brief break and come back and give you some examples of what this mini-series says and portrays.
It’s The Path to 9/11, Touchstone TV did it, and it’s nine o’clock out there on the Left Coast. I don’t know if Clinton’s called already or not, but the word is that he is personally going to call Bob Iger and do everything he can to get this thing reedited, recut. I wouldn’t be surprised if he asked him not to run it. ‘Hey, Bob, you know, the thing’s full of paste, pack full lies. I’ve heard about this. There’s nothing to it. This is crazy.’ If I were ABC, I would love the controversy because of the attention, the publicity the thing is getting. You know they’re not going to look at it that way. If they demand that it be reedited and recut the whole world is going to know that Bill Clinton was able to tell ABC what to do and what not to do with some of its programming. So, you know, ABC’s going to be in a little bit of a tight spot no matter what they do here, but I would think that they had to clear this already for it to have been put on the schedule.
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RUSH: Let me just give you, as I say, I haven’t been able to watch the whole thing. It’s four hours, and I had a chance to watch a little bit of it flying home last night from New York. There is an amazing scene, a sequence, actually. It shows the CIA and the Afghanistan Northern Alliance surrounding bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan. They are on the verge — this is during the Clinton administration. This is long before 9/11, which is the point of the mini-series: “How did we get there?” So the CIA, the Northern Alliance, surrounding a house where bin Laden is in Afghanistan, they’re on the verge of capturing, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to proceed.
So they phoned Washington. They phoned the White House. Clinton and his senior staff refused to give authorization for the capture of bin Laden because they’re afraid of political fallout if the mission should go wrong, and if civilians were harmed. Sandy Burglar essentially tells the CIA team in Afghanistan, if they want to capture bin Laden, they’re going to have to do it themselves without any official authorization. In that way their necks would be on the line, not his and not Clintons. Now, the CIA agent in this is portrayed as being astonished. “Are you kidding?” He asked Berger over and over, “Is this really what you guys want?” 
Berger then doesn’t answer after giving his first admonition, “You guys go in on your own. If you go in we’re not sanctioning this, we’re not approving this,” and Berger just hangs up on the agent after not answering any of his questions. So the CIA team and the Northern Alliance of the Afghanistan people are just — I mean they’re right there, as it’s portrayed in the mini-series, give up. They abandon the whole mission, and not long after that, that bin Laden and Al-Qaeda bomb the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing over 225 men, women, and children and also wounded over 4,000.
There’s also a scene that I saw in which the CIA has crucial information identifying some of the 9/11 hijackers in advance of 9/11, but the CIA refuses to share the information with the FBI because of the wall that was erected by Jamie Gorelick and others to prevent information sharing between government agencies. So the CIA is depicted here as sitting in a meeting with the FBI, John O’Neill is present, showing the FBI surveillance photos of terrorism suspects, some of whom will later turn out to be the 9/11 hijackers. The CIA asks the FBI for help in identifying the guys in the pictures but refuses to give the FBI any of the information they have on who the men are. John O’Neill protests that it’s impossible for the FBI to help the CIA identify these guys if they won’t provide any information whatsoever on them.
So O’Neill tells the FBI to keep the photos so they can at least work on them. The CIA becomes hostile to O’Neill, takes the pictures back. Now, O’Neill, as you recall, tragically dies in the 9/11 attacks, in part because agencies like the CIA refused to share crucial information like this. I’ll tell you, the scenes like these really challenge what is the prevailing liberal mind-set by showing that the Patriot Act’s information sharing and surveillance provisions are in fact crucial to the safety of the country and that political correctness and bureaucratic inefficiency are Islamic terrorism’s greatest friend.
This thing is just incredible, and you watch it — if you get to see it uncut; I’m loathe to predict what ABC will do amidst mounting pressure from Bill Clinton and others who are going today to call Bob Iger at ABC to demand some of this stuff be edited out. I don’t know what specifically, but they’re not happy about this. This just caused a real ruckus at the screening, the private screening in Washington last week, and the week before last. When you watch this, when you see it, none of it will surprise you if you’re a regular listener to this program, because this is stuff what we have been told and we’ve known for the longest time. What surprises us is the whitewash of all this and how they were so successful at doing it at the 9/11 Commission.
Clinton is on tape talking about how — our buddies at NewsMax have this tape. He’s making a speech somewhere, I think in Long Island. Maybe it was Canada. I’m not sure where. But he was talking about how they had bin Laden but they couldn’t move on him. We know the Sudanese offered him a bunch of times. This episode in Afghanistan, the CIA and the Northern Alliance surrounding bin Laden, the administration wouldn’t give the go-ahead, and it’s amazing to watch something that in what we call the mainstream media reflects accurately what we believe, what we know to have happened. I’m so unused to seeing that; I’m so used to seeing a liberal agenda in everything. So you’re not surprised by what you see because you know it. I wasn’t surprised because this is the version of events that I believe happened and that I know to be true. We know the wall was erected. We know it was. Ashcroft read the memo at the 9/11 Commission hearing. We know all of this. You just don’t expect to see it, and that’s the pleasant surprise watching it.
RUSH : Here is a quote from Cyrus, who is a friend of mine who produced and wrote The Path to 9/11. There’s a review of the film, by the way, at FrontPage.com, David Horowitz’s website. “This mini-series is not just about the tragedy of the events of 9/11. It dramatizes how we got there, going back eight years to the first attack on the World Trade Center and dealing with the Al-Qaeda strikes against US embassies and forces in the nineties, the political lead-up, the hatching of the terrorist plots, et cetera. We see the heroes on the ground like FBI agent John O’Neill and others who, after the ’93 attack felt sure the terrorists would strike the World Trade Center again.
“It also dramatizes the frequent opportunities the administration had in the nineties to stop bin Laden in his tracks. But he lacked the will to do so. We also revealed the day by day lead-up of clues and opportunities in 2001 right up to the day of the 9/11 attacks. This is a terror thriller as well as a history lesson. I think people will be engaged and enlightened.” It illustrates the big problem in the administration was not Monica Lewinsky. The big problem was what the Lewinsky circumstance with Clinton caused to be ignored and not dealt with, and of course there are reasons other than Lewinsky as well. The Clinton administration simply didn’t want to tackle big things.
They were happy for the nineties to be thought of as a happy-go-lucky, carefree time, where there were no threats, because, of course, Bill Clinton was loved universally, adored universally all over the world. The economy was going great guns and all through the nineties we had repeated terrorist attack after repeated terrorist attack with no action taken to stop them. Now, I don’t know what Bob Iger’s going to say if Clinton does call him, which, believe me, last night that was — and I have this on good authority. This is not gossip. Last night Clinton was intending to call today Bob Iger to get him to edit the thing, to re-cut it in certain ways. I don’t know how you do that without — no time to go in and re-film things.
But, at any rate, if I were Bob Iger — and I’m not — you know what I would say if Bill Clinton does call me and say, “Hey, Bob, you know, I’ve heard about this thing you’re running. Some of my friends have seen this. It’s a pack full of lies, Bob, packed full of them. I mean, we did our best, I never worked harder at anything in my life, you know that, Bob? I kept you briefed on all this. I supported you when you wanted to be Eisner’s replacement. We all know Eisner was full of it, and I’m very much happy that you’re in the job right now, but I’ve gotta tell you Bob, this is BS. It’s not going to help ABC whatsoever.”
All right. If I’m Iger, I say, “Mr. President, I understand all that, but if you’re so upset about this, could you show me where it’s wrong? Could you sort of prove to me that what’s in this is not accurate? If you can do that, then, yeah, but I can’t just do this because you want me to. Since everybody now knows you called me anyway, if I order this thing redone, I’m going to look like a sock puppet of the Clinton administration, and I’m trying to establish my own identity here as the brand-new CEO of ABC and Disney. Mr. President, if you can prove to me that the charges made this thing, the evidence here is really wrong, I’d be glad to have them redo it.” I don’t think the Clinton administration wants to do that, because I don’t think they can.
If they could they would have done it long ago. Look, the 9/11 committee was nothing more than camouflage. In fact, you know what the word for it was? To get Gorelick and Tim Roemer and Ben-Veniste on the 9/11 Commission, they were censors. What Clinton wants ABC to do is censor certain things. Now, if Clinton could offer evidence that what Cyrus has put together here is BS, then let him do so, but they would have done it up to now, if they could. They wouldn’t have had to have Sandy Burglar sneaking into the National Archives, walking out of there with documents in his pants, in his socks or whatever, and then walking back in and, as I say, who knows what he put back in. Everybody was focused on what he took out of there.
I was, frankly, a little bit more interested in what he put in there. National Archives. The, quote, unquote, historical record. So, anyway, I hope this thing stands as is. It’s just brilliantly done. It’s not a docudrama. It’s a mini-series, a movie, but it’s historically based. As Cyrus describes it, it is a historical lesson, it’s entertaining, it’s terrifying. Danny Wahlberg is in it; Harvey Keitel is in it. It’s got some major actors in this thing. It’s not some phony put-together thing. They’re using footage in it, but I mean it’s written based on the historical record. Gale, cell phone call from Texas , you’re up first on Open Line Friday. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH : You bet.
CALLER: It’s a pleasure to speak with you.
RUSH : Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, I’m here with my husband, we’re driving through Texas listening to you and a thought came to our mind, if ABC won’t show the documentary uncut, perhaps you, Rush, could use the power of the EIB Network as a place where we 20 million listeners could purchase the CD and get the uncut version.
RUSH : Well, it’s an interesting question. We don’t own it. This is Touchstone Television that did this, which is a division of Disney.
CALLER: Well, you know lots of people. I’m sure you could work something out.
RUSH : Well (laughing) I am so flattered and moved by your confidence. It will be interesting to see what does happen with this and if there does become an alternate way to distribute it. But if Touchstone wants to bury it, they can. Now, I should tell you, I don’t want to get the wrong idea. They’re standing by it now. The Clinton phone call, I have no idea how this is going to go, but they’ve been pressured since a week and a half ago, folks. I mean, there are people going to take out ads against this thing, trying to discredit it, a lot of lib Democrats who saw this at the screening in Washington were just outraged by it, as you can well imagine. Their whole lives during service in the Clinton administration and in the years since has been to cover up the lack of action in this area taken by this administration and to try to present it as just the opposite of what happened. The Clinton administration has forever been in search of a legacy. It has been doing everything it can to try to come up with a legacy, and this involves the massaging of news, the censorship of certain things. I think it’s quite telling that they’re now upset about this, because this is going to, if it airs, cause people to think about everything they’ve heard about 9/11 from the 9/11 Commission and from the Drive-By Media.
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