…”The Path to 9/11″ is 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. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.
Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry.” As part of TFI’s long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission’s in film industry jobs “so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,” according to a YWAM report.
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Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to write the script of his secretive “Untitled” film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.
Nowrasteh’s conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too “politically incorrect” to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo — both friends of Nowrasteh — announced they were “partnering” with right-wing activist David Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as “A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.”
Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group’s headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a “think tank” bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugardaddies like eccentric far right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)
With the LFF now under Horowitz’s control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh’s “Untitled” project, which finally was revealed in late summer as “The Path to 9/11.” Horowitz’s PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film’s assault on Clinton’s record on fighting terror. “The 9/11 report details the Clinton’s administration’s response — or lack of response — to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests,” Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag’s Jamie Glazov. “There simply was no response. Nothing.”
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Murty’s efforts were supported by Appuzo, who handles LFF’s heavily-trafficked blog, Libertas. Appuzo was instrumental in marketing The Path to 9/11 to conservatives, writing in a blog post on September 2, “Make no mistake about what this film does, among other things: it places the question of the Clinton Administration’s culpability for the 9/11 attacks front and center… Bravo to Cyrus Nowrasteh and David
Cunningham for creating this gritty, stylish and gripping piece of entertainment.”
When a group of leading Senate Democrats sent a letter to ABC CEO Robert Iger urging him to cancel The Path to 9/11 because of its glaring factual errors and distortions, Apuzzo launched a retaliatory campaign to paint the Democrats as foes of free speech. “Here at LIBERTAS we urge the public to make noise over this, and to demand that Democrats back down,” he wrote on September 7th. “What is at stake is nothing short of the 1st Amendment.”
At FrontPageMag, Horowitz singled out Nowrasteh as the victim. “The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh’s ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11″ are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11,” Horowitz declared.
The neocon strategy is basically this: when the truth doesn’t fit your storyline, just scream the storyline you want as loud as you can. Facts are irrelevant to the project, which has it’s own “truth.” Believe that, and that’s where the magic begins. Eventually, the money will come. When it does, the true believers will fall in line. And then you can really sell some popcorn.
Horowitz is truly a scoundrel of the first order. Having him and Scaife back in the news is a good reminder that they will never, ever stop trying to destroy their political enemies, and there is nothing in the American political tradition that they will not trample. And that includes the Bill of Rights, the integrity of the Supreme Court, the law, the U.S. Constitution, whatever it takes. They need to be exposed and re-exposed, every time they turn up. They may not get a lot of mainstream coverage, however; Horowitz is often a guest on the political talk shows. He’s one their go-to guys, facts and decency be damned.
As much as conservatives like to demonize George Soros (a man who actually does a lot of good with his billions) — it’s the Scaife fortune that is undermining American democracy by fueling the neocon quest for power at all costs. Of course, the last six years have been very good to the Scaife fortune, so it looks we may have more than a sequel on our hands. This could very well be a franchise.
“PT9/11″: Whitewater II, Electric Boogaloo
Max Blumenthal provides some very interesting backstory on the people ABC/Disney hired to produce its $50 million 9/11 witch hunt about a fictional Clinton administration. Turns out it’s the same group of dirty tricksters who produced an $80 million witch hunt during the actual Clinton administration:
The neocon strategy is basically this: when the truth doesn’t fit your storyline, just scream the storyline you want as loud as you can. Facts are irrelevant to the project, which has it’s own “truth.” Believe that, and that’s where the magic begins. Eventually, the money will come. When it does, the true believers will fall in line. And then you can really sell some popcorn.
Horowitz is truly a scoundrel of the first order. Having him and Scaife back in the news is a good reminder that they will never, ever stop trying to destroy their political enemies, and there is nothing in the American political tradition that they will not trample. And that includes the Bill of Rights, the integrity of the Supreme Court, the law, the U.S. Constitution, whatever it takes. They need to be exposed and re-exposed, every time they turn up. They may not get a lot of mainstream coverage, however; Horowitz is often a guest on the political talk shows. He’s one their go-to guys, facts and decency be damned.
As much as conservatives like to demonize George Soros (a man who actually does a lot of good with his billions) — it’s the Scaife fortune that is undermining American democracy by fueling the neocon quest for power at all costs. Of course, the last six years have been very good to the Scaife fortune, so it looks we may have more than a sequel on our hands. This could very well be a franchise.
This entry was posted on September 8, 2006 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Color Commentary, Foreshadowing, Kabuki, Misdirection, Phantom News. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.