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One of this year's most powerful 9/11 stories is, in fact, ultimately about how little has changed since that day. The Path to 9/11, airing Sept. 10 and 11 on ABC, dramatizes the report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission. (Court TV airs a documentary on the report, On Native Soil, Aug. 21.) Fast paced and shot with handheld cameras, Path plays like a somber, dysfunctional 24, with all the grit but little of the success. A few days before 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet (Dan Lauria) and CIA officer Kirk (Donnie Wahlberg) are in a conference room with bulletin boards groaning with intel notes--and have no way to make sense of it all. "Everything's blinking red," Tenet says. "We're overloaded." Frustrated, harried, weary, he seems less like a movie spymaster than like an overworked sanitation commissioner.
From the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to Sept. 11, 2001, Path follows characters like John O'Neill (Harvey Keitel), the FBI agent who pursued bin Laden for years and died in Tower 2, and Kirk, a composite of CIA officers whose warnings--to get bin Laden in the 1990s, to better support the Taliban's enemies--went unheeded. (Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush appear only in news clips.) Over six hours, we see the signals missed, the officials obsessed with protocol and covering their backsides and the best intentions stymied by bureaucracy, fate and the complexity of the target. One of the few things that go right is the foiling of the millennium bombing plot in 1999, and that gets only a few minutes; the rebellion on Flight 93, maybe a minute.
Executive producer Marc Platt and writer Cyrus Nowrasteh say they wanted to match the just-the-facts tone of the report. ("The report didn't use any adjectives" is a mantra both men repeat. It's exaggerated but true to the commission's spirit.) Platt hired director David L. Cunningham, a documentary veteran, to give the movie a vérité look, without emotional tricks like zooming in on fraught moments. That's not to say all the actors are dispassionate. Lauria recalls his having volunteered at ground zero after 9/11: "You realize how good people are. A good leader would have mobilized that instead of 'Let's make sure my friends keep making money.'" But he adds that making the mini-series left him hawkish on giving government agents the tools to fight terrorism. "It's inevitable that the show is going to be politicized," Wahlberg says, "because everybody watching it is going to have a political take."
Any political take, however, pales next to the chagrin of watching Path move inexorably toward its climax. The last few minutes--inside the planes, the towers and the conference rooms on 9/11--are tastefully handled, though no less chilling. But they're beside the point. What matters is what happened before and what happened--and didn't--afterward. An epilogue notes the commission's report card, issued last December, which found that most of its recommendations--securing weapons of mass destruction, delegating antiterrorism funds by risk--have been carried out badly or not at all.