The Path to Fantasy:

So, I did get to see a little bit of "the Path to 9/11" last might, between commercial breaks during the Giants/Colts game. I just happened upon the scene where Ahmad Shah Massoud is leading the CIA guys down to OBL's camp.

The portrayal of Massoud was very flattering I thought, which is odd because, though he may have been our bastard, he was a bastard nonetheless. Lest we forget, Massoud was an Afghan warlord responsible for atrocities during the civil war there. HRW issued a report in 2005 entitled: "Blood-Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity," which accuses Massoud of carrying out the infamous "Afshar Massacre."

In any case, as far as I know the US never came that close to capturing or killing OBL. This must be one of the dramaic fictionalizations so much in the news about this mocumentary. I think this scene was really about the attampt to bomb OBL while he was at his Afghan hunting retreat. The attack wasn't called off not because Sandy Berger was a wimp, but because members of United Arab Emerites where there visiting him and the US didn't want to take the chance of killing any of them. [Cooperative Research]

And, did they really have all those real-time video conferencing hook ups in 1999? I mean, the FBI just spent $160,000 million on a computer system that still can't seach "flight" and "school" at the same time.