Sept 11

It's September 11th today, and the mood is appropriately sombre. The news channels have been full of 9/11 stories for the last week. Last night ABC screened the first part of "The Path to 9/11", a 'docu-drama' that, despite their disclaimer declaring "for dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalised scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression", has been panned for giving a distorted view of the Clinton administration's attitude to the terrorist threat. The three main sticking points are:

1. The film's claim that the Clinton administration was too preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski affair to deal with the threat.
2. The administration was too wimpish to kill Bin Laden when they had the chance.
3. The Secretary of State informed the Pakistanis of the missile attacks before they occurred, and someone in Pakistan then tipped off Bin Laden.

I suppose the accuracy of the film will be debated for a long while. I watched it, mainly because it was on one of two channels that I can watch on my TV. (Yes, I have a TV! It was brought round by someone from work who was going to tip it anyway. But I haven't got cable yet and the signal at my gaff is terrible, so I have a choice of ABC news or a channel of infomertials. I find it quite ironic that since I came to the US I have a fewer TV channels than when I was back in Blighty.)

Of course, while the main focal points of the 9/11 tragedy were New York City, Washington DC and the field near Shanksville where the fourth plane ditched, the two planes that went into the WTC took off from Boston's Logan Airport. It's that proximity that I have here now that makes the whole thing more 'real' - and scary - than it did from the other side of the Atlantic.