LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Top brass at Disney were called on Thursday to defend their decision not to release the controversial miniseries "The Path to 9/11" on DVD and to justify CEO Robert Iger's $27.7 million pay package.

"Path," a 2006 ABC miniseries critical of President Bill Clinton's handling of terrorist threats, was so controversial that leading Democrats asked Disney not to air the program. Disney, after making some hasty edits, ran it commercial-free.

The problem with The Path to 9/11 is not that it was "critical of President Bill Clinton's handling of terrorist threats." The problem with The Path to 9/11 is that the film is full of blatant lies, the kind that are easily proven to be lies. From top to bottom, it was a neocon hack job intended to blame the Clinton administration for the Bush administration's outright failure to pay any attention to the huge warning signs of a looming Al Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001.

For example?

As Media Matters noted, despite ABC’s assertion in the

July 2006 press release that the network regarded it as "absolutely critical" to "get it right," The Path to 9/11 contained inaccurate and even fabricated scenes that cast the Clinton administration as insufficiently aggressive in combating terrorism and that showed President Bush taking aggressive action not indicated in the 9-11 Commission report. In addition, the film was sharply criticized by former Clinton administration officials, journalists, and conservatives alike, who noted that significant parts of the "docudrama’s" content were not supported by the 9-11 Commission’s findings.

Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, national security adviser to President Clinton, described one scene in the film as a "total fabrication." Further, Berger and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated in a September 8 letter, "Actors portraying us do contemptible things we never did, and say things we neither said nor believed." Conservative author and journalist Richard Miniter criticized parts of the film as "based on an Internet myth" and having "no factual basis." In addition to Miniter, numerous others criticized the film’s accuracy, as Media Matters has noted:

• On the September 8, 2006, edition of CNN’s American Morning, conservative radio host and former Reagan administration official Bill Bennett acknowledged that "the Clintons had a point" in pressuring ABC to correct the film and admonished ABC for "falsify[ing] the record," adding, "I think they should correct those inaccuracies."

• On the September 7, 2006, edition of CNN Headline News’ Showbiz Tonight, Harvey Keitel, the film’s star, noted that "[i]t turned out not all the facts were correct" and stated: "Where we have distorted something, we have made a mistake, and that should be corrected. It can be corrected."

• On the September 7, 2006, edition of CNN’s Paula Zahn Now, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz criticized ABC for "putting a movie on a serious, sensitive topic on the fifth-year anniversary of 9-11 that contains fiction."

• On the September 7, 2006, edition of MSNBC’s The Most, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, criticized the film for treating facts "cavalierly," as well as ABC’s response to critiques of the film, noting: "[T]hey [ABC] said that complaints about the film are irresponsible because they are still editing the film, yet they were very happy to send out review copies."

• On the September 8, 2006, edition of MSNBC’s Countdown, host Keith Olbermann interviewed former FBI agent Tom Nicoletti, who said he was hired as a consultant during the film’s production but objected to numerous scenes in the film that he said reflected "improper research." In particular, he faulted the film’s depiction of former FBI special agent John O’Neill, who was killed in the 9-11 attacks and is portrayed in the film by Keitel. Nicoletti told Olbermann that he resigned as a consultant to the film based on scenes that remained inaccurate despite his input, and that in his opinion The Path to 9/11, "should be reshot and a lot of it corrected."

Moreover, the film’s writer and producer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, has admitted that at least one scene was fabricated. That scene falsely portrayed Berger hanging up on CIA Director George Tenet as he asks for authorization to let CIA officers and Afghani fighters raid an isolated compound in Afghanistan in order to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The New York Times quoted Nowrasteh as saying that "Berger did not slam down the phone. That is not in the report. That was not scripted. Accidents occur, spontaneous reactions of actors performing a role take place."

They changed the facts, from top to bottom, not for "dramatic" purposes, but to make the Bush administration look good and the Clinton administration look bad. Yet all Reuters can manage to say about this is that it was "critical of President Bill Clinton's handling of terrorist threats." It was falsely critical of Bill Clinton's handling of terrorist threats, but the wingnut noise machine has been so successful in their efforts to change the rules that conservative lies about Democrats are not "lies," just "controversy."

Any falsehoods about conservatives, however, remain "unpatriotic," if not actually "treason." Yeesh.

(Via Reuters Entertainment News.)