The Path to 9/11 Part 2 (2006)

With the first three hours covering events from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 to the Millennium bomb plot, the final two hours cover things from the attack on the U.S.S. Cole to the collapse of the Twin Towers. Prepare to get upset watching the mix of re-enactments and real footage in this riveting second part.

The review of Part 1 can be found here.

Part 2 picks up where the previous night left off, with the hijackings beginning. Flight attendant Betty Ong (Jean Yoon) makes a desperate cellphone call to American Airlines booking desk to report the hijacking of flight American 11. Confused controllers try to raise the plane but are surprised to hear Mohammed Atta addressing the passengers. The terrorist flipped the wrong switch in the cockpit.

This is enough to justify notifying the Air Force who ask if it is a drill. It isn’t and they scramble fighters. An aviation buff’s note here: that is a Navy F-14 Tomcat shown taking off. I know the media doesn’t like the military, but they really need to do their research. A correct F-16 is later shown as the screen capture above testifies. Ten years later we find out that the Air National Guard pilots scrambled unarmed and were to ram the airliners. The pilots were willing to die to protect innocents on the ground.

The hijackers are cut from a different cloth and want to die to kill innocents. With the terrorists at the controls, other cellphone calls come in and one is chilling saying she can see the New York City skyline and they are too low.

Back nearly a year to October, 2000. Having narrowly dodged one bullet after another thanks to luck and the stupidity of the terrorist foes, the  United States government officials start to get lax again. John O’Neill (Harvey Keitel) gets an early morning phone call that the U.S.S. Cole destroyer has been attacked in Yemen. American lives have been lost and it bears all the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda attack.

This leads to two scenes guaranteed to raise any red blooded American’s blood pressure. The first involves the autocratic and hostile ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine (Patricia Heaton). Running afoul of her is the beginning of the end of O’Neill’s FBI career. It is a great short performance – you will hate her.

The second is another meeting of the putative minds handling the defense of the United States against terrorist attacks. Richard Clarke (Stephen Root) finally mans up and wants to hit Afghanistan again. See, he has a new tool in his bag of tricks called the Predator drone. With it, Osama Bin Ladin can be hunted for and targets can be pinpointed.

But there is zero support for it other than General Hugh Shelton suggesting “boots on the ground.” Say, 50,000 or so. With three months left in the Clinton administration and it being an election year, this is viewed with disdain.

Meanwhile, the usefulness of the Predator is limited by it being unarmed, as it is tragically depicted. A lost opportunity that might have changed history goes down in flames.

Things aren’t going great elsewhere as Massoud (Mido Hamada) wants real weapons for the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, but can’t get help from the CIA thanks to an uninterested administration. At the same time, a fresh bunch of recruits arrive at an Al Qaeda training camp for a very special mission.

Before long they are in the States at flight schools learning to fly. Not taking off or landing, which raises flags with local authorities in Arizona and Minnesota. Most of which are ignored or shelved for being “racial profiling.”

A lost briefcase becomes the undoing of our main protagonist, O’Neill. Simple mistakes can be blown into scandals if the right people are there to run a person out of a job. Once again, politics trumps protecting the country.

But sometimes a local official has enough power and guts to do what needs to be done. INS Officer Jose Perez (Geoffrey Rivas) shows he has both and refuses entry to one would be hijacker, Mohammed Al-Khatani (Elie Gamael) from Saudi Arabia. Bucking political correctness, this immigrant sticks to his guns in a wonderful scene.

Al-Khatani is currently in GITMO and is a poster child to the left for alleged war crimes against prisoners. I have no sympathy whatsoever.

With the fanatic Mohammed Atta (Martin Brody) safely ensconced as leader, he shows how angry and impatient he is by demanding additional personnel for the terrorist attack. Told to be patient, he is to use Zacarias Moussaoui (Zee Sulleyman), a French citizen from Morocco to make up for the short fall. That doesn’t work out well when the idiot gets himself arrested in Minneapolis. Even the terrorists viewed him as a dim bulb.

Still, Washington won’t take it seriously and the local agents are ignored. If this sounds like a stuck record, it is because there was a serious pattern of negligence by the authorities. That is one reason watching this is infuriating. It all could have been prevented…

A warning from Massoud to the CIA that an operation on U.S. soil involving aviation and hijackers is imminent goes ignored due to lack of proof. With the Clinton and Bush administrations giving tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban as humanitarian aid, the Northern Alliance commander is very miffed. He also warns his death will be “a signal.”

Intelligence chatter goes through the roof, alarming CIA Director George Tenet (Dan Lauria) but he can’t find the details. But at least he gets Condi Rice (Penny Johnson) to finally read a report that gets her moving. The new administration had not been receptive to the worries of Clarke earlier.

Though Rice is now onboard and has brought President Bush on too, Tenet doesn’t want to arm the Predator drones. He insists it is illegal to use them against Bin Ladin despite what the State Department lawyers have concluded. Fears of legal issues still dominate and paralyze the government. It is September 4, 2001.

Five days later, Massoud is assassinated in Afghanistan. The Lion is dead and the signal has been given. Despite cramming many people and events into the miniseries, there are scenes of great emotional depth in it and this is one of them. Having built up a sympathetic portrayal of the man, his death is shown to be devastating to his followers. Their grief is believable and there is a feeling of great loss.

It is a prelude of what is to come.

 

It is a powerful ending to a powerful miniseries. Words fail me at the moment, for it has evoked feelings and memories from ten years ago.

The heroic deaths of John O’Neil, Reverend Mychal Judge, and John Burnett with his fellow men on Flight 93 are all touched upon briefly without actually showing them. To do more would have been too much, for this was aired a mere five years after.

Our government failed us miserably and 9/11 was the result. Though many precautions have been taken since then, on December 5, 2005 the 9/11 Commission Report graded the governments progress on its 41 recommendations. As the ending sequence shows, there were five “F’s”, twelve “D’s”, and one “A”.

I wonder how many of them are due to political correctness? That point is hammered home throughout The Path to 9/11. Things have only gotten worse that way since then.

I should address the film making from a more technical point of view before ending this review. $40 million was spent making it and it shows in every scene. The directing is very good and succeeds at eliciting emotions in most scenes. Cinematography is very good, though I am not a fan of the shaky cam style. It did add some feeling of “you are there”, I suppose. Filming on location with Morocco doubling for Afghanistan, Spain, and Pakistan added authenticity to the foreign scenes.

As far as acting goes, only one performance bothered me and that was the nonperformance of Dick Cheney. Not only did the actor not look like him, he could have been replaced by a cardboard photo of the real man. Since he barely appears in this, not a big deal in the slightest.

The use of Arabic with subtitles was very much a plus and I was impressed by the casting.

As you can tell from the screen captures, the copy I obtained isn’t the best quality.

I highly recommend The Path to 9/11 for teenagers on up – it is a pity it isn’t easily available.