Some off-the-top-of-my-head questions (to which I think I know the answers) about what may have been left out of ABC's 9/11 propagandamentary

We already know about some of the stuff that the propagandists who produced ABC's docu-fantasy about 9/11 invented, with the obvious intent of laying the blame on the Clinton administration.

This has left me wondering about some of the important stuff we know happened--along with some of the important stuff we know should have happened but did not.

Now, we know that the "docudramatists" fabricated a scene in which Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger [right] refused to give the OK to assassinate Osama bin Laden. However, it's a matter of record that during the Bush administration's transition period, Berger made repeated efforts to issue the most urgent warnings he could to his successor, Condi Rice, and anyone else he could get to listen, about the importance of dealing with Al Qaeda. And we know that no one in a position of any prominence in the foreign policy apparatus of the incoming administration GAVE EVEN A SECOND'S CONSIDERATION to what Berger was telling them.

I always enjoyed the suspicion that the mere fact that the warning came from a Clinton official was enough to make the Bush thugs ignore it, on the ground that whatever Clinton did, we should always do the opposite. The reality is probably less romantic, though. From the day those thugs gathered in Washington, their interest in the Muslim world was preparing to invade Iraq. So naturally they could care less about this Osama fellow, whose family was in any case tightly woven into our good friends the Saudi elite.

We have had all kinds of documentation of things that Bush administration officials failed or expliciitly refused to do with regard to Al Qaeda--many of them after 9/11 as well as before. Now I know it's tough to make tension-filled TV drama out of people doing nothing, but if you want to dramatize the Bush administration record on Al Qaeda, that's it. I wonder if that's in the ABC dramatization.

We know too that the CIA did keep an eye on Al Qaeda, as reflected in the famous Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing to which our make-believe president paid no attention whatsoever. The ABC screenliars could have concocted a hilarious scene in which everyone involved cracks jokes about he alarmist PDF and makes fun of all those CIA conspiracy nuts. I don't know that that actually happened, but such a scene would be totally true to the spirit of what did.

On a personal note, I'm sorry to see Tom Kean providing cover for the ABC propagandists. Yes, he's backed off his original gung-ho endorsement, but he's left the impression that it's just a question of some questionable details. As far as I know, he hasn't revisited his insistence that the writers were "fair-minded" and based their work closely on the 9/11 commission report.

I'm sure the producers "played" Kean, but he's supposed to be smart enough to know when he's being played. Of course I haven't seen the film (and don't intend to, even assuming ABC goes ahead with its plan to show the thing), but you don't have to be clairvoyant to figure with a high degree of certainty that what the writers did was: (a) cherry-pick bits of the report that suited their purposes, (b) ignore everything that didn't, and (c) invent anything else they needed.

It's sort of the feeling I had when poor old Clark Clifford, presumably succumbing to greed late in life, got himself enmeshed in the massive BCCI international bank-fraud scandal. Despite his decades of earnest, engaged public service, that's the first thing that most people will remember about him. At least Kean's foolishness doesn't involve outright corruption. It just seems a shame to take a lifetime's accumulated reputation for principled behavior and throw it out for . . . for what?