ABC's AA Slander: President Clinton and his former aides Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright are not the only ones to suffer at the hand of ABC’s “drama-ganda” about the run up to 9-11. American Airlines might also want to get its public relations people—and its litigators—ready to refute the show’s specious claims.

In an early scene, Mohammad Atta, the suicide pilot of one of the 9-11 planes, is seen at an American Airlines ticket counter. Warning lights flash on the screen and, according to one blogger who has seen the movie, “The AA employee called a supervisor who kind of shrugged and said, blithely, just let him through. The first employee, shocked, turned to her supervisor and said, shouldn’t we search him? The American Airlines supervisor responds, nah, just hold his luggage until he boards the plane.”

The only problem is that the incident in the 9-11 report on which that scene is based is different from the movie in several key respects: it happened at the airport in Portland, Me., not Boston, and more important, Atta was not trying to board an American flight, but one operated by USAirways.

This show is obviously a calculated insult to the Clinton administration and almost everyone involved in the attacks, but mostly—as Maureen Dowd points out today—it’s an insult to ABC’s viewers. Because by fictionalizing a tragedy that’s still fresh in a lot of memories, ABC is essentially saying that truth is not sufficiently dramatic, not sufficiently sexy.
So it’s been enhanced, distorted, “sexed up,” as they say in my new homeland, to make sure you don’t miss the moral of the story.