Still More Swill From ABC

Today's NYT: Two FBI guys bailed.

"One of the agents, Thomas E. Nicoletti, was hired by the producers of the mini-series in July 2005 to oversee its technical accuracy, but left after less than a month because of scenes he believed were misleading or just false.
"There were some of the scenes that were total fiction," said Mr. Nicoletti, who served as a supervisory special agent and a member of the joint terrorism task force before retiring in 2003. "I told them unless they were changing this, I could not have my name associated with it." [...]
Dan Coleman, who retired from the F.B.I. in 2004, said he also was concerned when he read the script last summer after being approached by producers about being a technical advisor.
"They sent me the script, and I read it and told them they had to be kidding," Mr. Coleman said. "I wanted my friends at the F.B.I. to still speak to me."

Coleman's the money quote here. He was one of John O'Neill's key aides. In Wright's book, there's a picture of them hugging at O'Neill's going-away party from the Bureau. These aren't lefty noisemakers. They're guys who were there. ABC is doing something really shameful here.


UPDATE: This actually IS from a lefty noisemaker -- and the son of one of the most obnoxious Clinton/Blair loyalists I can think of -- but it seems fairly well reported.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/discover-the-secret-right_b_29015.html

 

Dear FB: The board of Disney can spend the next two years wondering how many terrorist red alerts will shut down the Orlando airport during school vacation weeks during the Hillary Clinton administration.
They can also ponder pending copyright legislation under a Democratic congress. Two, three, many Mickey Mouses!

 

Michael --
Your faith in the Democratic Party's ability for subtle political vengeance is touching. I wish I shared it.
And, anyway, TV says people already have cancelled some DisneyWorld vacations over this. Maybe this thing won't run, after all.

UPDATE -- The frog-DNA filling in the gaps of this movie is taken from a novel by this guy, who used to work for ABC but who now has na new job with new bosses.
http://www.fbi.gov/libref/executives/miller.htm

Disney is in so much shit over this.

 

Wait a minute -- Hollywood fictionalized a real-life story?

I'm shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED!

 

And in case it hasn't already been mentioned, the director of the flick is in with an evangelical group trying to "transform Hollywood from the inside out."

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001491.php

 

You know, I didn't hear any conservative pundits supporting free speech rights and such when the Reagan docudrama was scheduled for CBS a few years back.
Did you?

 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/clinton_i_wasnt_soft_on_bin_la.html

 

Here is a conservative take that I agree with:

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/path_missed_real_9_11_story_opedcolumnists_john_podhoretz.htm

 

Frog DNA was a lot of hocus pocus/pseudoscience used pretty liberally (scientifically, anyway) in the Crichton dinosaur books and their film adaptations.

 

Hear, hear.

 

You gotta love a Clinton-bashing column that begins, "If the worst criticism of President Bush is that he lied to us about Iraq . . ."

Move on, nothing to see here.

Podhoretz:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083006J.shtml

William Rivers Pitt offers a thorough listing of the actions the previous administration did take, so I won't cut and paste. But I found this paragraph poignant:

I went to Pitt's column for expediency; many of the reports, memos and legislation are readily available. This stuff is really not that hard to look up, as are the instances in which Clinton probably dropped the ball. (However, wasn't it Bush who said, "We have to be successful every time. The terrorists have to be successful just once.")

But "Clinton did nothing" is the Beltway/media script du jour, and the deep thinkers in our Washington press corps would rather recite that than do their homework.

And if the AQ threat and the warnings in the late-'90s were so transparent -- I'm sure I could go to the Post's archives and find dozens of Podhoretz columns about it, right? -- I wonder if John thinks this is an example of not taking "bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and the West seriously enough":

 

On and on with this idiotic POB ...

"Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States." Well, NO SHIT.

What actionable intelligence was in that POB. Answer: None.