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Monday, September 11, 2006

Horowitz defends Americans’ civil liberties against “brazen,” “damaging” attacks

On Friday, David Horowitz, general secretary of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and commissioner ex officio of Minitrue, lashed out at critics of “The Path to 9/11,” ABC-Disney-Rove’s factual docudrama about the factual history of Bill Clinton’s criminal negligence and how it left America unprepared for the attacks on the homeland that occurred five years ago today.  In a FrontPage exclusive essay, Secretary Horowitz wrote,

The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh’s ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11” are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11.

Secretary Horowitz, widely known and revered for his lifelong work as a civil rights activist, pointed out that criticism of “The Path to 9/11” violates the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Act of 2004, which expressly forbids liberals from taking exception to imaginative re-enactments of their high crimes and misdemeanors.  Secretary Horowitz noted that the Swift Boat Act has political roots that go back to the founding of the Republic, when Thomas Jefferson wrote his famous letter to James Madison on the importance of maintaining a free and open society that promotes the work of historical revisionists and fantasists:

There remains little Doubt among the opinions of Men, that the legitimacy of liberal Society rests on its willingness to support the Harangues of deranged and vicious Persons of the far Right, particularly if they be subsidized by media Conglomerates of vast Size.

To which, Secretary Horowitz added, Madison replied,

Nay, Thomas, I know of none who would doubt such a thing.  And yet these be but empty Words, if we of liberal Mind do not further seek to ensure that these well-subsidized Harangues of the “Wing-Nuts” be promulgated throughout the breadth of the Nation, by means of every Channel public and private.  For no Nation can long endure or prosper, unless it be sure to foster a mature political culture of Lying and Calumny.

Secretary Horowitz then called for the prosecution of far-left blogofascist Max Blumenthal, who, on Friday, wrote:

“The Path to 9/11” is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision. . . .

Horowitz’s PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with [scriptwriter Cyrus] Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film’s assault on Clinton’s record on fighting terror. “The 9/11 report details the Clinton’s administration’s response—or lack of response—to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests,” Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag’s Jamie Glazov. “There simply was no response. Nothing.”

A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review for FrontPageMag that emphasized the film’s partisan nature. “‘The Path to 9/11’ is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I’ve ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible,” Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty’s article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and LA Times by more than a week.

Blumenthal’s illegal essay was published at “The Huffington Post,” a far-left website operating on an unauthorized sector of the Internet.  As a result, ABC-Disney-Rove has asked President Bush for authority to shut down all unauthorized and illegal websites and web “logs,” including that of Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest, who on Friday provided an illegal link to an April 2, 2000 Washington Post article detailing Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism initiatives prior to the millenium:

As the national coordinator for infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, Clarke has presided over a huge increase in counterterrorism budgets over the past five years to meet a wide array of new—and some would argue, still hypothetical—challenges, such as cyber warfare or chemical or biological attacks in New York or Washington. Last month, the administration submitted an $11.1 billion request to Congress to strengthen “domestic preparedness” against a terrorist attack. In the meantime, by contrast, security assistance to the former Soviet Union to tackle proliferation problems has been stuck in the region of $800 million a year.

“In America, there is a morbid fascination with greater-than-life technological threats, which you don’t see in other countries,” says Ehud Sprinzak, a terrorism expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Clarke has an ax to grind. It makes him big. If nobody talked about catastrophic terrorism, what would people like Dick Clarke be doing?”

Such talk irritates national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clarke’s direct supervisor, who insists that the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is “a reality, not a perception.” “We would be irresponsible if we did not take this seriously,” he says. “I hope that in 10 years’ time, they will say we did too much, not too little.”

Clarke’s warnings about America’s vulnerability to new kinds of terrorist attack have found a receptive ear in Clinton. With little fanfare, the president has begun to articulate a new national security doctrine in which terrorists and other “enemies of the nation-state” are coming to occupy the position once filled by a monolithic communist superpower. In January, he departed from the prepared text of his State of the Union address to predict that terrorists and organized criminals “with increasing access to ever more sophisticated chemical and biological weapons” will pose “the major security threat” to the United States in 10 to 20 years.

Secretary Horowitz pointed out that citation of the Washington Post article on Richard Clarke violates Executive Order 13414, which amended Executive Order 13233 and is usually referred to in official Washington as the “Order for the Disposal of Inconvenient Information about Past Presidents.” “The article itself should never have been available in the Internets archives,” said Horowitz.  “The fact that an illegal website, operating on a pirate Internet frequency, can reproduce an article that should have been eliminated from the public record constitutes one of the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11.”

On Sunday, in response to Blumenthal, Secretary Horowitz insisted that he has no connection to the creators of “The Path to 9/11.”

This is just one of many of attempts by the left to create a right-wing caricature they can attack. Apparently the real David Horowitz—a free speech liberal, a supporter of artistic freedom in Hollywood and academic freedom in the university—is too much of a challenge for their feeble minds to handle.

“It just so happens that I’ve spent the last two years telling the truth about how the Left undermined national security before 9/11,” Secretary Horowitz said today upon re-posting his March 2004 essay on the subject.  “The fact that I now have independent factual corroboration of my work, from a wholly independent and completely factual source which I’ve never even heard of and has no connection to me whatsoever, is apparently too much of a challenge for liberals’ feeble minds.” Thoughtfully stroking his goatee, Secretary Horowitz added, “Their feeble, feeble minds.  Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah!  Bwah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah.”

A spokesman for the David Horowitz Freedom Center added that while citation of the April 2000 Washington Post article on Clarke is a felony violation of the Inconvenient Information Disposal Order and the Swift Boat Act, the article itself should have been sent to Minitrue for revision under the Richard Clarke Unperson Order of 2004, which forbids all references to Clarke’s counterterrorism activities prior to 2001.

“The Path to 9/11” concludes this evening on ABC-Disney-Rove.  At the conclusion of this factual docudrama, which has no connection to the work of David Horowitz other than agreeing with it in great detail, there will be a two-minute period during which citizens are encouraged to express their feelings about Democrats’ history of incompetence and malfeasance in matters of national security.

Posted by Michael on 09/11 at 08:38 AM
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