RUSH: Well, in the trade paper Variety, the movie and television industry newspaper, the possibility has been posed that Disney will totally scrap the movie, The Path to 9/11, that Iger is not happy with it, and just may broom the whole thing. I don’t know if that will happen, but I’ll tell you what has happened here is so eye-opening and illustrative that I wish it were self-explanatory to a lot of people, but sadly it probably isn’t. What happened yesterday is that the Senate Democrats, a bunch of the leadership in the Senate, sent Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, a threatening letter. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a mob-like reaction from partisan hacks to intimidate an American broadcast network — and that network, ABC, is being intimidated. 
“The Communications Act of 1934,” goes the letter from the Democrats, “provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.” There’s the threat. These guys are saying that their license could be under review if they produce something that Democrats don’t like. Now, what is it about this the Democrats don’t like? What in the world are they complaining about? All this movie does is illustrate that there were numerous terrorist attacks throughout the nineties that never were dealt with in any serious fashion by the Clinton administration. And, by the way, the Bush administration doesn’t get off any better here.
The idea that Bush is made to look good? Bush isn’t even in the movie! Condoleezza Rice is. But this is just mystifying — well, no. Wrong word. It’s not mystifying. Here’s what it illustrates. It illustrates that the Democrats fear, deathly fear the issue of national security becoming forefront in this campaign. They are deathly afraid of it, deathly, because they cannot compete against it. They know the truth about themselves in this regard. They know that because of their actions and because of their words and because there are people like me and others who can go back in time and report and remind people of their words and actions, that they can’t win that debate. They can’t win any debate, anyway. All they can do is silence their critics.
All they can do is attempt to shut people up who criticize them, or discredit those who are critics of theirs, rather than debate the issues. It also shows that they are fully aware that they cannot get anywhere without accomplice-type assistance from those in the so-called mainstream media. And so the full force of big-government intimidation was put to paper yesterday. Dingy Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats sent this letter off to Bob Iger. There is one scene in The Path to 9/11 that is — and, by the way, folks, I’ll tell you, you know it’s getting to the point now we need a docudrama
We need a docudrama of the docudrama that illustrates exactly how big government is intimidating free speech in the entertainment community, and we need to see how the representatives of big government, in this case the Democrat Party, are acting. We also need this: Since everybody (Clinton, everybody else) is so concerned about the truth, all right! I’m up for that. We need a docudrama on what happened that caused the genocide in Rwanda during the Clinton administration, for which he has apologized and gotten great credit. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have done more about that, you know, but…’ Oh, he cares. After that we need a docudrama on Bill Clinton’s approval of the aerospace firm Loral, a big contributor to his campaign, selling satellite technology to the communist Chinese — and after that we need a docudrama on the Red Chinese contributions to the Clinton Legal Defense Fund and his reelection campaign — and how about a docudrama on all the Lincoln bedroom sleepovers? By the way, when are we going to get the docudrama on Monica Lewinsky?
There are all kinds of docudramas just waiting to be made. You could have a whole docudrama on the Clinton presidency, but unfortunately, it would have to be written as a sitcom if it weren’t so serious, or an X-rated movie or what have you. Now, the offending scene in this movie, as I have shared with you on previous occasions in this busy broadcast, shows the Northern Alliance, Afghanistan warriors, with CIA officials outside a compound in Afghanistan, inside of which is Osama bin Laden. They are on the verge of capturing bin Laden; they know what building he’s in, and all of a sudden when the CIA agent on the ground — whose name in the movie is Mike, which is a composite; there’s a composite figure here — on the phone with people at the National Security Council and the White House war room or whatever it is. In this scene, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger refuse to give authorization. George Tenet refuses to give authorization, and Berger hangs up on the CIA agent, and they say, ‘Look, if you do this you gotta do it on your own. You’re taking the heat if it doesn’t work well.
‘If you kill bin Laden, we’re not going to be saddled with an assassination charge. We can’t do it. It’s against it law. If you kill any innocent civilians, there’s going to be hell to pay, so you don’t have authorization to do this.’ So they backed out. The Clinton people are saying this is totally fabricated. Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright say it never happened. Except: the fact that the actual CIA agent named Mike says that it did. His actual name is — and you’ve probably heard of this guy’s name. I’m not sure how to pronounce his last name because I’ve never watched with the sound up on TV. S-c-h-e-u-e-r. Scheuer? It doesn’t matter. He’s a 22-year veteran of the CIA who used to head up ‘Alec Station,’ the counter terrorist center’s Osama bin Laden unit. Now, just so you know, Michael Scheuer is the individual regularly referred to in the 9/11 Commission report as ‘Mike.’
He has also written some books: Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War On Terror, and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America. He’s an outspoken critic of the Bush administration and its prosecution of the war on terror. He is also an opponent of the war in Iraq. So the point that I am making to you here is that he is not a
“However,” Mr. Sheppard writes, “before I do, let me first share a more recent opinion offered by Scheuer as answers to some questions I asked of him in response to his first e-mail message: ‘Is the scene in question as depicted by Rush an accurate account of the plan to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan. If so, who do you believe gave the order to halt it?” And here is what Scheuer responded, who is the CIA agent Mike, composite figure as portrayed in the movie. He says, “Regarding the scene, it was never clear to my officers or myself who canceled the operation.” Well, right there, the lie is put to the lie that the Clinton administration says it never happened! It
“What I don’t think people know, however, is that the Agency had thoroughly reviewed the plan and had approved its execution at the highest level — that is, at the level of DCI Tenet and his immediate subordinates. My officers and I were told that the plan had been sent to Clarke and the NSC for approval. The next thing we knew, the Chief of CT at CIA told us that the plan had been canceled because civilians might get killed, there was not a hundred percent chance that we would get bin Laden, and that if bin Laden was killed in the capture effort the CIA might get accused of assassination. The implication to us at the time was that the NSC canceled the operation, but Tenet later claimed he did it himself. I don’t know what the full truth is on this issue. Interestingly, after our east Africa embassies were bombed on 7 August 98, Clarke ordered us to immediately revive the capture plan, but of course by then the chance had been well and truly lost.”
These statements are affirmed somewhat in the 9/11 Commission report. The 9/11 Commission report says, quote, “‘Mike’ thought the capture plan was ‘the perfect operation.’ It required minimum infrastructure. The plan had now been modified so that the tribals would keep Bin Ladin in a hiding place for up to a month before turning him over to the United States — thereby increasing the chances of keeping the U.S. hand out of sight. ‘Mike’ trusted the information from the Afghan network; it had been corroborated by other means, he told us. The lead CIA officer in the field, Gary Schroen, also had confidence in the tribals. In a May 6 cable to CIA headquarters, he pronounced their planning ‘almost as professional and detailed…as would be done by any U.S. military special operations element.'”
The 9/11 Commission report even says it did. Scheuer thinks that the ultimate order came from the National Security Council, and that, ladies and gentlemen, happens to be how it is portrayed in the movie. The question that I have is why in the world are we going to believe the Clinton administration, and who says the 9/11 Commission is infallible? The people that put this movie together — well, I shouldn’t even have to say this! The people that put this movie together probably have a whole bunch of sources telling them things. I’ll betcha there is somebody out there who knows what really happened, and I’ll bet they can’t come forward. I bet they can’t come forward because of a whole bunch of reasons — propriety, security, anonymity, and this sort of thing.
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Now, here is Michael Scheuer’s op-ed. I’m not going to read the whole thing, but I’ll read some excerpts of his op-ed that was published in the Washington Times on July 5th of this year. Let me read to you the open. “With one credible September 11 movie, ‘United 93,’ under our belts, it will be interesting to see whether ABC-TV will complete the September 11 Commission’s whitewashing of the pre-September 11 failure of U.S. intelligence-community leaders in its forthcoming mini-series based on Richard Clarke’s memoir, ‘Against All Enemies.’ Media teasers about the mini-series have said that Mr. Clarke — the former ‘terrorism czar’ — and a senior FBI officer, the late John O’Neill, will be the heroes of the saga. If true–” and, by the way, they are — “and if ABC’s fact-checkers are not diligent in verifying Mr. Clarke’s stories and claims, the mini-series will be the September 11 commission’s dream come true: The Bush administration will be blamed for September 11, the feckless moral cowardice of the Clinton administration will be disguised and Mr. Clarke and Mr. O’Neill — in my view, two principal authors of September 11 — will be beatified.” 
Now, again, this is Michael Scheuer, and he’s a regular on Hardball, I think. He’s one of Chris Matthews’ favorite guests. He hates the Bush administration the way they’re doing the war in Iraq. So I don’t want to you to think we’ve got a partisan hack writing here. “Mr. Clarke’s book, on the basis of my involvement to varying degrees in the issues it covers, is a mixture of fact, fiction and cover-up. Mr. Clarke seems to get most names and dates right, and is correct in damning the early Bush administration for obliviousness to the al Qaeda threat. We must also take him at his word on his touching, if sycophantic, tales of Mr. Clinton instructing a young boy to be good to his mom and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s secluded moment praying on her knees.
“On the fantasy level, Mr. Clarke lays it on thick. His claim that the Clinton administration ‘defeated an al-Qaeda attempt to dominate Bosnia’ is nonsense; bin Laden sent few fighters there because he had no contiguous safe haven for them. Mr. Clarke’s claim that ‘the CIA had taken months to tell the FBI’ several hijackers were in America is a lie. FBI officers sat in the unit I first commanded and then served in and they read the same information I did. If the data did not get to FBI headquarters it is because the FBI then lacked, and still lacks, a useable computer system. The FBI did not know the September 11 hijackers were here because Judge Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller have failed to provide their officers computers that allow them to talk securely to their headquarters and other intelligence community elements.
‘Mr. Clarke’s book is also a crucial complement to the September 11 panel’s failure to condemn Mr. Clinton’s failure to capture or kill bin Laden on any of the eight to 10 chances afforded by CIA reporting.’ Let me read that to you again. ‘Mr. Clarke’s book is also a crucial complement to the September 11 panel’s failure to condemn Mr. Clinton’s failure to capture or kill bin Laden on any of the eight to 10 chances afforded by CIA reporting. Mr. Clarke never mentions that President Bush had no chances to kill bin Laden before September 11 and leaves readers with the false impression that he, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, did their best to end the bin Laden threat. That trio, in my view, abetted al Qaeda, and if the September 11 families were smart they would focus on the dereliction of Dick, Bill and Sandy and not the antics of convicted September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. About John O’Neill, little needs to be said. In my own experience, Mr. O’Neill was interested only in furthering his career and disguising the rank incompetence of senior FBI leaders.’ Now, when you hear this, you’ve got to understand there is a constant rivalry battle between the CIA and the FBI. You factor that in here.
‘He once told me that he and the FBI would oppose an operation to capture bin Laden and take him to a third country for incarceration. When I asked why, he replied, ‘Why should the FBI help to capture bin Laden if the bureau won’t get credit among Americans for his arrest and conviction’? ‘So,’ writes Mr. Scheuer, ‘I look forward to ABC’s mini-series, as well as to seeing the quality of the network’s fact-checkers. If they do their job well, some of the September 11 Commission’s whitewash may start to be peeled away. If they fail, however, the reality that Bill, Dick and Sandy helped to push Americans out of the windows of the World Trade Center on that September morning will be buried in miles of fantasy-filled celluloid.’ So the plot thickens here. The event happened. Scheuer has written of it three times and discussed it on air a number of times, and it apparently — well, there’s more here. I gotta run. The clock is ticking away here, ladies and gentlemen.
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RUSH: There’s a lot of other things out there today. I’ve just got a couple more bits of information, a Dick Morris piece and some more points to make. But this is really, really, really Stalinist what’s going on here. Do you remember when Richard Nixon did this? I don’t know if you were paying attention long enough ago, but Richard Nixon was supposedly threatening broadcast licenses of news divisions that he didn’t like, but this makes Nixon — and there’s a guy writing about this at the American Thinker today, one of our all-time favorite blogs, Nixon was a piker! He was vilified for this, but he was a piker compared to what’s going on now.
How many of you people out there remember George W. Bush being referred to as a dictator? He wants to violate everybody’s freedoms. He wants to violate civil rights. He wants to violate human rights. He wants to spy on you with a domestic spy program. He’s been called Hitler and so forth. This miniseries, this docudrama, criticizes both sides. The irony here is the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, both sides did not react the same way. President Bush, who is labeled a near dictator, has not said a word about the program, hasn’t asked for it to be killed, hasn’t asked for it to be recut. Former President Clinton, who we are always told is the greatest president since FDR, did do both those things. He did call Iger last Friday, by the way. He called Iger personally before this four-page letter that Bruce Lindsey actually wrote, was mailed to Iger and Disney this week. You know, these guys are beyond description.
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If you want to think about a conspiracy to deny the truth and to present a lie, take a look at the willing accomplices in the Democratic Party, the criminal justice system, and the Drive-By Media. And now you’ve got these Stalinists in the Democratic Party threatening ABC’s broadcast licenses. By the way, let me, as a network, they do not have a broadcast license. The owned and operated stations have licenses. So they could go after ABC’s owned and operated stations’ licenses, and those are huge profit centers, ladies and gentlemen, those TV stations that they own. You know, they spend nothing producing the local news, just put a camera at an intersection, record a wreck, but a camera at a poor part of town, report a robbery, and you’ve got your local news. So it doesn’t cost much. Those are just huge profit centers.
I got an idea for these guys. Here’s a better way to handle this. Leave the movie uncut, Mr. President, and then when the scene goes by that you don’t like, have ABC run a graphic, ‘this scene not approved by Bill Clinton.’ And when a scene goes by that you do like, have it say ‘this scene approved by Bill Clinton’ so that every scene in the movie we get Clinton’s stamp of approval or disapproval, and then let Madeleine Albright have the same privilege. ‘This scene never happened, says Madeleine Albright.’ And then let Sandy Burglar get in on the action, too. ‘This scene questioned by Sandy Burglar.’ I mean, because that’s what’s it appears is going on. Whatever complaints these guys have, they are being addressed to one extent or another.
Now, here’s Greg Richards at the AmericanThinker.com. ‘Sens. Reid, Durbin, Stabenow, Schumer, and Dorgan sent a letter to Disney today containing the following passages,’ and I have read you the passages, and you know what they are now, threatening the broadcast license. ‘Nixon was a piker. This is a threat far more direct than ever made by the Nixon Administration on the TV licenses of the Washignton Post about which so much was made in the Watergate affair. But it is just business as usual for the party that thinks they can do what they want without consequence. If this had been issued by the Nixon Administration, we would still be reading about in it the history books as the next-to-last step to a fascist takeover of the Republic.’ And that is right on. And this is close to what this is. But you have to understand again what this represents.
It represents the flimsy foundation on which the Clinton legacy is built and constructed, and it cannot withstand a five-hour movie. Number two: it shows the utter fear and paranoia and panic of a Democratic Party cannot
‘As NewsMax has reported, Clinton through his surrogates have demanded that ABC ‘correct all errors’ in the docudrama or pull it from the air, charging that it is a ‘fictitious rewriting of history’ regarding Clinton’s handling of the terrorist threat. But Morris claims that Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and the president himself ‘were both responsible for failing to catch or kill Osama bin Laden on several different occasions,” as claims former CIA agent Michael Scheuer. ‘Morris served Clinton as an adviser for 20 years and notably as Clinton’s senior campaign strategist during his 1996 re-election. Morris states that the evidence for this failure is documented in the 9/11 Commission’s report and summarized in ‘Because He Could,’ the book about Clinton that Morris co-authored with his wife Eileen McGann… ‘The report’s account shows the president and his advisers at their worst.’ One time, the United States ‘canceled an attempt to kidnap bin Laden out of concern that we might injure or kill him and be accused of using assassination as a policy tool,’ Morris told NewsMax. ‘The president had yet to make a finding that it was OK to kill bin Laden. The reason he had not is that he did not yet know bin Laden’s connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The reason he did not know that is that he did not fast-track the investigation. A second time, we did fire missiles but alerted the Pakistani military to our plans and they tipped off bin Laden, and he escaped.”
Now, this is another controversial issue and scene in the movie. ‘According to the commission’s report, the United States alerted Pakistan because the missiles targeting bin Laden, who was in Afghanistan, had to cross Pakistan, and U.S. officials did not want Pakistan to think the missiles came from India. A third time, our plans to attack by missile were canceled, partially out of chagrin over having missed him before and partially because we had just bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by mistake and were worried about being called trigger happy.’ Numerous attempts to get bin Laden and the Clinton administration always found a reason not to do it.
This scene that Madeleine Albright doesn’t like? We are going to launch the missiles into the terrorist camps in Afghanistan. They gotta cross Pakistani airspace to get there, and somebody had to alert the Pakistanis — and they, Pakistanis, somebody there, then alerted bin Laden and he escaped. (Ex-caped for those of you in Rio Linda.) The movie says that it is Madeleine Albright that does this, that alerts the Pakistanis, and Madeleine Albright in the movie says that we have to do this because the president is in intense negotiations with the Palestinians and the Israelis on a Mideast peace plan. We have to do this. Albright says, ‘I didn’t make the call. Somebody else made the call.’ The event
The Democrats are just plain panicked and fearful over the notion that national security is going to become an issue in the campaign. They know they can’t possibly win on that basis. Speaking of that, Washington, DC, at this moment is probably going nuts. A two-year investigation by the Senate intelligence committee has been concluded. Report issued today. The essence of the report is that, ‘There’s no evidence Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al Qaeda associates, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. Democrats said the report undercuts President Bush’s justification for going to war. The declassified document being released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied by the anti-Saddam exile group the Iraqi National Congress had in the march to war… Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, a member of the committee, said the long-awaited report was ‘a devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts’ to link Saddam to al Qaeda.’
Zarqawi was in Iraq before we went to 9/11. Al-Qaeda was there. It’s not in dispute. This report says that Zarqawi and his presence were not known by Saddam? All of this is irrelevant! The Democrats want to refight the issue of the 2004 presidential race: going to Iraq was a mistake and that Bush and the CIA manipulated intelligence along with Cheney in order go to war in Iraq. They can’t let it go now. They can’t let it go and they want to refight the same thing. This is an irrelevant report. But the Democrats are screaming. They’re happy, by God! ‘We got something that can cover up the 9/11 movie! This is super! See? Bush lied! Bush lied! We’ve been telling you it all along Bush lied. Bush lied! We don’t need to be in Iraq. Al-Qaeda was not there.’ Well, the fact of the matter is we
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