Secret 9/11 Miniseries Planned

[lucky wilbury]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,155247,00.html

Secret 9/11 Miniseries Planned
Monday, May 02, 2005
By Roger Friedman

Sept. 11 'History' Soap Opera: Secret Miniseries Planned

Here it comes, the miniseries no one wanted to see.

Nevertheless, ABC seems to be readying a major and secret "fictionalized" multi-parter about the history of terrorism, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the disasters of Sept. 11, 2001.

From the looks of it, the story is going to be about how stupid the government was: If only they'd listened to one man, all would have been right!

The title offered on call sheets for actors is "The Untitled ABC History Project."

Last week, the call went out for dozens of Arab actors. Today, ABC showed a little more of its effort by putting out requests for 16 characters.

The main one? Former FBI agent John O'Neill, who seems to be the lead figure in this 'history.'

O'Neill left the FBI in 2001 when he claimed his superiors wouldn't listen to his warnings about Al Qaeda, and became the head of security at the World Trade Center. He was the subject of a PBS Frontline special called "The Man Who Knew."

The miniseries seems to be based on the PBS show, which is outlined in painstaking and unintentionally humorous detail on the PBS Web site.

In the TV version, O'Neill is described as "Early 40s to early 50s, a New Jersey native, a tall, burly, no-nonsense man with a taste for the high life, he's an FBI Special Agent, smart, determined, and tenacious in pursuing the big picture.

"O'Neill is known for his sharp elbows and Irish temper. He is on the trail of Usama Bin Laden from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Hungry to make busts in the pursuit of those responsible for taking American lives, O'Neill becomes a bitter opponent of Al Qaeda along the way, and is loudly and impatiently angry with the State Department honchos who balk his investigations..."

Think Brian Dennehy.

Historians should have a field day with this version of the decade-long terrorist plot. But why not? Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh got his start on another soap opera, "Falcon Crest." He also wrote the upcoming miniseries "Into the West" and was cited for "The Day Reagan Was Shot." Marc Platt is the producer, and David L. Cunningham — who helmed the recent miniseries revival of "Little House on the Prairie" and several B-movies — will direct.

The remaining 15 characters needed to make this story of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history include former local New York TV reporter John Miller, who interviewed Usama in 1998; Richard Clarke ("soon finds himself at odds with high-ranking members of the Administration, even as he chairs meetings devoted to the extermination of Al Qaeda..." ) ; Sandy Berger, national security adviser to President Clinton; a number of FBI agents such as Neil Herman and Bill Miller; some of the actual plotters, such as Mohamed Atta; as well as former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine.

And there will be more to come, as the miniseries casts for just about everyone involved in national security and the plotting of the Sept. 11 tragedies. Who will play bin Laden? Or Saddam Hussein? Agents, consult your clients: History is going Hollywood.

[FORD]

It's gotta be better than the dumb Showtime series that tried to make the Chimp look like a hero. Though realisitically I don't expect the full truth of what O'Neill knew and who he was investigating to be portrayed in a corporate media miniseries.

[lucky wilbury]

yeah i don't think they'll show the clinton administraion railroading him out the door or louie freeh and janet reno squashing investigations throughout the 90's

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
yeah i don't think they'll show the clinton administraion railroading him out the door or louie freeh and janet reno squashing investigations throughout the 90's

I know they'll squash any mention of how there were 52 warnings of hijackings between April and September of 2001. And Condi Rice was made aware of each of those threats.

But I guess the prospect of terrorists killing themselves in a suicide mission, after hijacking an airliner was a new twist on things; and we couldn't have seen it coming!:rolleyes:

Air France (http://www.globalterroralert.com/pdf/0105/airfrancehijack.pdf)

[lucky wilbury]

maybe they'll leave out the part where the clinton admin was told of a specific flight, time and date that was to be highjacked and did nothing about it which is a little more specific then some vague warning then again maybe they'll bury the gore report on airline security(which is interesting since the report was on the twa flight that crashed because of an accident shouldn't there have been a report on airline SAFETY not security) from 96 that said we needed air marshals,stonger cock pit doors bomb screening better watch lists etc etc all which was to be manditory but all that was changed after the dems got all the money form the airlines. maybe they'll leave out the part where obl was offer to us by sudan or better yet maybe they show the video again of the clinton admin having obl in our sites but they refused to take the shot. that is bullshit about highjack warnings after all its not like theres ever been a plane highjacking before:rolleyes:

[lucky wilbury]

heres some info on the gore commision. i even got a leftie site for ya click the link for even more :

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/01/airlines.html

Just before the 1996 Olympics, TWA Flight 800 went down off the coast of Long Island in what was initially believed to be a bombing or missile attack. The explosion had eerie resonances for Victoria Cummock, who had lost her husband over Lockerbie. The Miami widow, who had become an advocate for air crash victims, flew to New York to meet the families of TWA passengers. In a hangar at Kennedy Airport, she met with President Clinton, who invited her to serve on the brand-new White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. The commission would be chaired by Vice President Al Gore, lending it considerable credibility and power. It would include scientists, military experts, and high-ranking government officials. "My heart sang," Cummock says, recalling her conversation with the president. "I thought, 'Oh my God, thank God.'"

Her enthusiasm was short-lived. The Gore commission, as it was known, became one of the clearest examples of how politics and profit have eclipsed public safety. At their very first meeting, the commissioners were surprised to receive a pre-written set of recommendations prepared by staff members. "We were just going to rubber-stamp them," Cummock recalls. "With each recommendation, I remember saying, 'With all due respect, Mr. Vice President, do you realize that…?' People were horrified that I was interrupting the flow. They kept telling me, 'Ms. Cummock, the vice president has a press conference, then he needs to get on to other meetings.'"

Cummock didn't know it at the time, but the commission's initial report was a done deal before she ever saw it. A CIA memo written the day before the meeting indicates that the agency was working with the staff behind the scenes to ensure that the panel offered no dissent to the preapproved proposals. "The government members of the commission are lined up to support the recommendations," Richard Haver, a CIA official assigned to assist the committee, reported to his agency's director. Cummock, though, was a different matter.
"She is a very intelligent, intense, and attractive individual," he wrote, noting that he had tried "schmoozing" her several weeks earlier. "My estimate is that she can be kept in line if she believes progress is going to result from the effort. If she believes the effort is headed in the direction of appeasing the airlines, whom she distrusts, then she could become a major problem."

Immediately after the first meeting, Gore and his aides held press conferences to highlight the panel's "common-sense solutions." One of the proposals, which Cummock endorsed, was called "full bag match." Every piece of luggage loaded onto an airplane would have to be matched to a passenger on board. Any unmatched suitcase, like the one containing the bomb that killed Cummock's husband, would have to be removed before takeoff. The airlines claimed that matching bags would be time-consuming and expensive, but a study by the University of California, partly funded by the FAA, found that full bag match would take barely one minute per flight. "You probably won't even notice it," said Elaine Kamarck, one of Gore's top political advisers, at a press briefing held on September 11, 1996.

The airlines noticed. "We were vigorously opposed to it," says Dick Doubrava, managing director of security for the Air Transport Association. Insisting that the delays from bag matching would "impact the whole integrity of the system," the association and its member airlines launched a full-bore lobbying campaign. They met with the commission staff. They made the rounds on Capitol Hill. They leaned on members of Congress, who in turn pressured the commission to back off. And although Kamarck insists that "the vice president never met with the industry," officials at the Air Transport Association recall otherwise, noting that their president, Carol Hallett, had plenty of access to the White House. "She would routinely see Gore all the time," Doubrava says.

Eight days after Kamarck's press briefing, Gore sent a letter to Hallett backing off on his call for an immediate move toward full bag match. "I want to make it very clear that it is not the intent of this administration or of the commission to create a hardship for the air transportation industry or to cause inconvenience to the traveling public," he wrote. Instead of sticking with the original plan to match all bags to passengers, Gore began calling for an industry-backed alternative, in which a computerized profiling system would monitor suspicious travelers and remove their bags if they failed to board planes. The new plan was blasted by security experts, who concluded it would be simple for terrorists to evade the profiling system.

The nation's airlines wasted no time in expressing their thanks. The day after Gore's letter, TWA sent $40,000 to the Democratic National Committee, which was headed into the final weeks of the 1996 campaign. A month later, American Airlines came through with three contributions of $83,333 made over five days—a $250,000 burst of beneficence that it has never again matched. In the last days of the push to re-elect Clinton and Gore, Democratic Party committees also raked in $83,000 from Northwest Airlines, $117,465 from United Airlines, and $15,000 from US Airways. In all, the major airlines poured more than $500,000 into various Democratic soft-money accounts in the weeks following Gore's letter—two and a half times what they gave Republicans during the same period.

Michael Wascom, vice president of the Air Transport Association, calls the contributions "strictly coincidental." Kamarck, the Gore political adviser, says the prospect of campaign donations had no influence on Gore's decision to write the letter. "It didn't make a f—ing difference," she says. "It was October of an election year. We were 15 points ahead of Bob Dole. Everyone was giving money." In fact, the commission's staff seemed as intent on raising money as it was on improving airline safety. According to documents obtained by Mother Jones, campaign aides on the staff used the commission's offices, fax machine, and letterhead to draft a speech for the Democratic National Convention and to assist Maria Hsia, the party operative later convicted in the Buddhist temple fundraising scandal. When industry executives were asked to assist the commission, the requests often came from staffers who were assisting the campaign.

As the commission kept meeting in preparation for the release of its final report, the industry continued to lean on commissioners. A few months after the election, Billie Vincent, former director of civilian aviation security for the FAA, spoke with commission member Brian Jenkins, an antiterrorism consultant whose clients included the airlines. "He was distraught," recalls Vincent. "He related to me that somebody from the airline industry—he wouldn't say who—had contacted him and told him they were angry with his positions. They told him he should remember how much business the airlines were giving him."

In public hearings, commissioners sat quietly through testimony by various experts, rarely asking tough questions. In the final months, they grew even less interested in security issues after the crash of TWA Flight 800 was traced to faulty wiring rather than an act of terrorism. The FBI and CIA continued to warn the commission that serious holes remained in the security system, and Cummock urged her colleagues not to back off. When she pressed for more meaningful give-and-take on security issues, a commission staff member pulled her aside and told her that the Christmas decorations had been put up at the White House. "If you'd like," she recalls the aide telling her, "we could arrange a VIP tour."




When the Gore commission issued its final report in February 1997, the industry was pleased. The commission called for a slow approach to bag match, calling it a "contentious and difficult area." It suggested private security companies be certified by the government, but made no mention of improving wages or benefits. And it gave the FAA two more years to implement FBI fingerprint checks on airport workers. The Air Transport Association praised the document as a "good compendium of the issues that the industry and the FAA and the government at large have been looking at for some time."

Armed with the report, the FAA vowed to develop rules to accomplish the broad mandates outlined by the commission. Over the next four years, however, the airlines mounted an all-out campaign to forestall or weaken the already-diluted security proposals. The industry filed myriad objections to the rules, asking for delays and calling for public hearings. "The rule-making process is very easily manipulated by someone with a lot of money and expertise, and the airlines have that in spades," says Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat. "Anything that would cost them money they could fight, and delay rule making for years and years." According to Elaine Kamarck, federal regulators didn't bother to fight back. "The FAA decided to pick its battles with the airlines," she says. "You had a sluggish bureaucracy under pressure from the corporate world. They paid lip service, but let the rules drag on." Paul Takemoto, a spokesman for the FAA, insists the agency took the rules seriously but needed input from the airlines. "We move as fast as we can, with the understanding that we need to make sure that we're doing it right," he says. But according to a study by the General Accounting Office, it sometimes takes the agency 5 years or more to begin the rule-making process—and up to 15 years to complete it. All that while, says DeFazio, "the Air Transport Association, with its huge staff and budget, is working day in and day out to prevent things from happening."

The FAA did suggest criminal-background checks on more airport employees with gaps in their employment records, including workers who screen passengers, baggage, and cargo. But the airlines claimed that vetting their current workers would be an administrative headache. "They have been good employees and do not pose a threat to aviation," TWA argued in a letter to the FAA in May 1997. "This proposed requirement would not do anything to increase aviation security. It would only add unnecessary costs and paperwork to the industry." The same day, a lobbying group for airport-service companies called the National Air Transportation Association weighed in, protesting that it would be difficult to run checks on baggage and cargo screeners, fuel truck operators, and other workers whose previous employers often kept few records.

In the end, the FAA narrowed its rule even further. It exempted baggage and cargo screeners from background checks, and called for checks only on new applicants for passenger-screening jobs with long employment gaps—less than 1 percent of all airport workers hired. Federal agents are now investigating the possibility that the September 11 hijackers were aided by renegade airport employees.

While the FAA did issue a modest rule on criminal checks, it issued no rule at all on another key recommendation of the Gore plan. The commission had recommended that before an airline hires a private security firm to screen passengers and baggage, the federal government must certify that the company provides minimal training for workers and periodically tests their performance. Congress ordered the FAA to create a certification rule by May 2001.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
maybe they'll leave out the part where the clinton admin was told of a specific flight, time and date that was to be highjacked and did nothing about it which is a little more specific then some vague warning then again maybe they'll bury the gore report on airline security(which is interesting since the report was on the twa flight that crashed because of an accident shouldn't there have been a report on airline SAFETY not security) from 96 that said we needed air marshals,stonger cock pit doors bomb screening better watch lists etc etc all which was to be manditory but all that was changed after the dems got all the money form the airlines. maybe they'll leave out the part where obl was offer to us by sudan or better yet maybe they show the video again of the clinton admin having obl in our sites but they refused to take the shot. that is bullshit about highjack warnings after all its not like theres ever been a plane highjacking before:rolleyes:

I'm sure you'll leave out a lot of facts, like Bush was president for nine months.

Maybe you'll also leave out the fact that Clinton ordered Osama killed on three separate occasions, and the military either missed him, or Tenet had his head up his ass (or wanted to save some fucking Saudi sheiks by holding his fire) and Bin Laden was offered back to the Saudis, NEVER TOO THE US!

[lucky wilbury]

clinton was pres for 8 years! 8 years! 8 years of doing nothing and squashing investigations. they fired cruises missiles once. and thats it. they were worried about civilian casualties. look it up. all the oppurtunities were passsed up because of the risk of civilian casualties and bad pr. once they didn't take the shot because the was a school 500 yards away. another time they nixed helping out the northern allience setting up an ambush. they went ahead with it and got whacked without our help.again look it up. look up how they passsed up the shot when obl was on a "hunting trip" obl WAS offered to us but clinton turned it down saying we had no evidence to hold him so it was then refered to the saudis. go ahead look it up.