This is Cyrus Nowrasteh. According to Wikipedia, he is a conservative screenwriter. Most of the documentary is him talking about the movie he wrote, and all the terrible and unfair things that the liberal media did. If you can't tell from this picture, he comes off as a douchebag. The first major difference I noticed about Blocking The Path to 9/11 from other straight-to-dvd conspiracy films, is that the narrator sounds like a conservative talk show host, and, in fact, he is. While "liberal" conspiracy films (this is a strange distinction to make when talking about conspiracists, because the binary liberal-conservative thing is hard to apply, especially when a lot of dudes who think the Bush Administration orchestrated 9/11 also think that Jews secretly control the earth) like Loose Change often feature hip, young sounding narrators. John Ziegler sounds like your crazy uncle who is always yelling about killing all the sodomites or something.
This guy directed The Path to 9/11, the ABC docudrama, sorry if this is confusing. He is also on screen a lot in the documentary. He's a little sensitive, and looks like he spent to much time surfing when he was in his mid twenties. He says that he "learned too much" in the making of The Path to 9/11, like that things can be "wrong and unfair."
Liberals went after his father, who is the founder of a christian organization that reaches out to poor people in the third world, claiming that Danny himself was a fundamentalist. I don't really understand the attack, or why it would hurt his feelings so much.
There's also a bunch of conservative journalist douches like this guy.
And this guy.
This guy is a reformed liberal. After working on The Path to 9/11 he was shocked by the lengths to which powerful liberals would go to censor their film. He voted for Clinton twice before making the film. Twice!
What and idiot! This is sort of a bad segue to the main focus of the documentary:
He looks pretty good there. No wonder that guy voted for him twice. So the main claim of Blocking The Path is that Clinton forced ABC to edit and eventually suppress The Path to 9/11 because the first part of the docudrama makes him appear responsible for allowing the terrorist attack on 9/11, which would not only hurt Hillary's chances in 2008, but tarnish the legacy of his presidency. To it's credit, after watching the documentary, I'm pretty convinced that Clinton had something to do with the ultimate decision, which was handed down from the parent company, Disney, to ABC, not to release the docudrama on DVD, and to air a heavily edited version, only once. While it doesn't really show that Clinton was in some part responsible for the lack of defense on 9/11, it becomes clear that Clinton and other politicians used their political power to influence Disney's CEO Robert Iger, who was a frequent contributor to both Clinton's campaigns. That kind of sucks. Coincidentally, I have been reading a book about Clinton, Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy, which covers the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment in exhaustive detail, starting with Paula Jones and not excluding a single phone call or naughty affidavit. The book isn't very biased, or one-one-millionth as biased at Blocking The Path, but Clinton still doesn't look very good. I'll blog about it soon.
Here's Bill with Monica. Nowrasteh claims that the connection between Clinton's impeachment scandal and his inability to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and that it just came out in writing the docudrama. The documentary doesn't dwell on this particular issue, but it makes it states clearly the theory that Clinton was more involved in his political life, which was inundated in the scandal, then keeping America safe. I guess that's a pretty sound theory. The scene in the docudrama that caused the most controversy was a composite of several events that are as much rumor as fact, in which Clinton stopped military actions that could have killed or captured bin Laden. They also criticize Clinton for not making the connection between the 1993 World Trade Center attack and al Quaeda, bin Laden, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Clinton denies these claims. It creates a sort of murky water for censorship, journalism, and truth, because the film is admittedly fictional. It was originally concieved as a documentary, but was changed to a docudrama for reasons that are not given, causing liberal critics to, understandably, attack the truthfulness and motive of the docudrama.
This is possibly a poor choice of imagery on the part of the film makers.
The only verifiable claim of foul play by the Clinton administration made by the docudrama is that Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor, stole unauthorized material from the National Archives before testifying before the 9/11 commission. They make a big deal about this. Apparently he stuffed them into his pants. That ends up being the most interesting part, because not only were the documents not the original copies, there are electronic copies as well.
The biggest villain ends up being Disney.
So overall Blocking The Path to 9/11 is fairly disappointing. I was hoping for some bizarro counterpart to Michael Moore's documentaries, but instead it's just another lame story about the liberal media bias. My reccomendation to Cyrus Nowrasteh and Danny Cunningham is to use whatever footage you still have of the film, take out all the "dramatization" subtitles, repackage it as a documentary, stick it on the Internet and give DVD copies to those crazy guys who sell conspiracy DVDs in the subway.
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