{"id":1224,"date":"2007-09-11T03:22:37","date_gmt":"2007-09-11T03:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/911-truth\/author-under-gag-order-assails-producer-abc-for-path-to-911\/1224\/"},"modified":"2007-09-11T03:22:37","modified_gmt":"2007-09-11T03:22:37","slug":"author-under-gag-order-assails-producer-abc-for-path-to-911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/911-truth\/author-under-gag-order-assails-producer-abc-for-path-to-911\/","title":{"rendered":"Author under gag order assails producer, ABC for ‘Path to 9\/11’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Lance<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Last Wednesday, in a front page LA Times<\/em> Calendar piece \u201cClinton and the missing DVD<\/a>,\u201d reporter Martin Miller gave voice to the latest series of charges from the mini-series\u2019 neo-con writer\/producer Cyrus Nowrasteh who now claims that out of deference to Hillary Clinton, ABC is shelving the five hour mini-series which was hyper-critical of her husband\u2019s counter-terrorism record.<\/p>\n

Nowrasteh<\/a>, an Iranian-American who wrote the much criticized Showtime docudrama The Day Reagan Was Shot<\/a>, has enjoyed a second career over the last year, working the right-wing lecture circuit and giving interviews to conservative webmags like FrontPageMag.com<\/a> charging that ABC had watered down his original vision and that he\u2019s received \u201cdeath threats\u201d for speaking out.<\/p>\n

In his latest FrontPage booking, Nowrasteh whines, \u201cLast year at this time it was a coordinated effort from the Clintons, Sandy Berger, the DNC, and the far-left loony blogosphere to swamp ABC with emails and phone calls and threats to get them to block the broadcast, or recut the movie. Since then it\u2019s been more subtle. I know there have been phone calls to top execs at Disney from President Clinton himself, and friends of the Clintons, of which there are many in Hollywood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seemingly without challenge, the LA Times<\/em>\u2019 Miller reported that \u201cThe $40 million\u2026 ABC miniseries, which recently received seven Emmy nominations\u2026\u201d is listed as \u201ccurrently unavailable\u201d on Amazon.com. \u201cWith no date for the release, questions are being raised about whether political pressure is behind its current status as a stalled or discarded DVD project.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller seemed so taken with Nowrasteh that he elevated him to the status of First Amendment gladiator: \u201cWhatever anybody may think about me or this movie,\u201d he quotes Cyrus, \u201cThis is a dangerous precedent, to allow a movie to be buried\u2026 I think the town needs to stand up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other side of The Path to 9\/11 story<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

As the author of one of the three books on which The Path was based, I\u2019m now weighing in \u2014 despite a gag order – to suggest that ABC may have other reasons for shelving Nowrasteh\u2019s Clinton bash; a mini-series that virtually blames 9\/11 on the ex-President\u2019s failures to get bin Laden, yet gives a pass to Bush 41 for failing to stop the first World Trade Center bombing and Bush 43 for \u201cThe Day Of;\u201d arguably the greatest defense failure in US history.<\/p>\n

How do I know this? First because my book 1000 Years For Revenge<\/a>, was one of the three works on which ABC based the mini. They acquired it for a quarter of a million dollars in 2005 under threat of litigation, after they\u2019d lost the book in a bidding war with NBC.<\/p>\n

Nowrasteh then proceeded to launder most of my critical findings on negligence by the FBI and the two Bush administrations and give Path a twisted pro-Bureau slant through the eyes of ex-ABC News correspondent John Miller, who now works as Assistant Director of Public Affairs for the FBI.<\/p>\n

Like Miller I was a former correspondent for ABC News<\/a>. In the mid 1980\u2019s, I won two Emmys for my investigative reporting on 20\/20 and multiple awards for reporting on Nightline and World News Tonight. After almost a decade as a screenwriter, I returned to investigative reporting<\/a> full time after Sept. 11.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve published three investigative books for HarperCollins on the failures of the FBI and Justice Department on the \u201cpath\u201d to 9\/11 including Cover Up: What The Government is Still Hiding about the War on Terror (2004)<\/a> and Triple Cross: How bin Laden\u2019s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the FBI and the Green Berets (2006)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1000 Years, which ABC bought, was read by 9\/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, who arranged for me to testify in March of 2004. Kean became an advisor to ABC for The Path and in early 2005, ABC\u2019s Touchstone Television division entered into a competition with NBC to acquire the book.<\/p>\n

The bidding war<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

Nowrasteh begged me to let him \u201cconvince\u201d me that he would be the best interpreter of my work, which was hypercritical of the FBI\u2019s New York Office (NYO) and the Office of The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), the two bin Laden \u201coffices of origin.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of January, 2005, he met me and proffered a copy of 1000 Years, which he had dog-eared and underlined throughout. He said that he was interested in telling all three of the untold intersecting stories from the book:<\/p>\n