Former Clinton Aide Critical of Attempts to Shut Down ABC's 9/11 Special
by Chad Groening
September 12, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A national defense analyst who served as a military attaché to President Bill Clinton says the controversial ABC miniseries that has been lambasted by the former Chief Executive and his advisers was, in fact, very accurate. On Monday evening, ABC presented the second three-hour segment of "The Path to 9/11," a docudrama about the struggle facing America's counter-terrorism experts between the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the fatal attacks on September 11, 2001. The bombing occurred slightly more than a month after Bill Clinton first took office; George W. Bush had been in the Oval Office less than eight months when the two hijacked airliners smashed into the twin towers.
Drawn from detailed information contained in the 9/11 Commission Report and other sources, the six-hour miniseries promised to "take viewers on an unforgettable journey through the events that presaged that fateful day" so they could "understand what went right and wrong, and what can be learned from [the] crucial eight-year period" between the two events.
Sunday's three-hour segment, however, created a furor with Clinton and members of his former administration, who wanted the entire program shelved. They accused the filmmakers of including "fictitious" and "false and defamatory" scenes of how they responded to the terror threat. But retired Air Force Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson says his former boss had several chances to nab terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
"In fact, Clinton did sign the presidential finding saying that we needed to either kidnap him or kill him," Patterson recalls. "But just signing a piece of paper didn't result in any kind of action, because every time it came down to it and we had a chance to get bin Laden dead or alive, President Clinton chose not to."
Patterson is convinced several terrorist attacks would have been averted if Clinton had acted. "In the timeline of the movie and also [during] my time there, this was in early 1998 now," he explains. "And if you'll recall, later in 1998 we had the two embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed hundreds of people."
Those attacks and others, says Patterson, could have been prevented. "[W]e could have prevented the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, we could have prevented 9/11, and we could have prevented the bombings of the embassies in Africa if President Clinton had taken one of these opportunities," he states. "We had eight chances at least to either nab bin Laden or to kill him."
The former Clinton aide says the former president's desire to cover up the truth about his decisions related to bin Laden will not work. "I think President Bill Clinton is responsible for 9/11 and the war on terror, personally. That is his legacy," Patterson comments. "I think he's trying to change that legacy, which is what [he was] trying to do by not having this series shown." Instead, he believes Clinton will go down in history as the nation's worst Commander-in-Chief.
Patterson says the producer of the miniseries asked him about the accuracy of the events in "The Path to 9/11," and the former presidential aide replied it was a very accurate portrayal of the events.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
