Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com International Editor
September 07, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad plans to attend this month’s U.N. General Assembly session in New York City, and has again challenged President Bush to a public debate to compare the merits of democracy and Islam.

The news prompted a Likud lawmaker in Israel to urge his country’s government to demand that Ahmadinejad to be barred from attending the session.

…

The Irna news agency reported that Ahmadinejad told cabinet ministers Wednesday his attendance at the U.N session would provide a good opportunity for a debate with Bush.

The entire world, and especially Americans, would be able to watch the encounter “directly and without any censorship,” he said.

Media coverage of the event would enable the nations of the world “to hear the viewpoints [of the two sides] and to choose the best.”

Full article

I don’t know why, but, I would LOVE to see that debate! Talk about cringing from embarrassment…

It’s a good sign that one of our major newspapers is now writing on ABC’s anti-Clinton, pro-Bush propaganda piece The Path to 9/11. The article’s author, Howard Kurtz, sometimes gets a bad rap, but having read him for a long time now, I feel while he’s more conservative than he realizes, at his best he does valuable work. This will likely be an influential piece that allows others to do further, necessary digging, and I’m sure Kurtz will cover the issue this weekend on his CNN show as well.

While it’s infuriating to hear spin and lies from ABC and the film’s producer in the article, the ending paragraph is very encouraging (emphasis mine):

The assault on “The Path to 9/11″ assumed the trappings of a campaign yesterday. Four senior House Democrats — John Conyers Jr., Jane Harman, John D. Dingell and Louise M. Slaughter — have written Iger to demand that the inaccuracies be corrected. Spurred by the Center for American Progress, which is headed by Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta, 25,000 people have sent letters of protest to ABC.

Let’s keep that number growing!

Update: MSN.com is now headlining Kurtz’ article, and the AP now has a story out on this (headlined on Yahoo, among other places), in which Madeleine Albright denounces the “docudrama” as “false and defamatory.”  Some other key objections are reported: 

Berger objected to a scene that he was told showed him refusing to authorize an attack on Osama bin Laden despite the request from officials. “The fabrication of this scene (of such apparent magnitude) cannot be justified under any reasonable definition of dramatic license,” he wrote.

Lindsey and Band objected to advertisements for the miniseries, which they said suggested that Clinton wasn’t paying enough attention to the threat of terrorism.

“While ABC is promoting “The Path to 9/11″ as a dramatization of historical fact, in truth it is a fictitious rewriting of history that will be misinterpreted by millions of Americans,” they said. “Given your stated obligation to ‘get it right,’ we urge you to do so by not airing this drama until the egregious factual errors are corrected, an endeavor we could easily assist you with given the opportunity to view the film.”

Given that this sucker cost $40 million to make, and that it involves politics and 9/11, there is zero chance that at least some ABC bigwigs did not sign off on this.  

 

Fair is foul and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and the filthy air.
-Macbeth, 1.1, 12-13

Continuing our Macbeth theme! And riffing on Mirth’s post two down…

On Fresh Air for Wednesday, 9/6/06, Terry Gross spoke with journalist Wayne Slater, co-author of The Architect, a new book on Karl Rove (Slater is part of the same team that wrote Bush’s Brain). An excerpt is here at the Huffington Post (HP link courtesy of the indefatigable Dan Froomkin).