At the Flight 93 National Memorial visitors can listen to the anguished phone calls passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 made to loved ones after their jet was hijacked by Islamic terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. They can also see the field where the hijackers piloting the airplane intentionally crashed it, after heroic passengers overpowered two of the hijackers and started breaking through the cockpit door. When the plane slammed into the earth, it was 20 minutes by air from the U.S. Capitol, its intended target. The plane was also upside down. The inverted plane is a fitting symbol for the day on which the social contract itself inverted and ordinary citizens were forced to protect the government from harm rather than vice versa.

One year from now, we shall observe the 25^th anniversary of that fateful day. It will also be the 20^th anniversary of the last, best effort to educate Americans about the nature and causes of 9/11.

Published in 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report was the product of an independent, bipartisan investigation into the events surrounding 9/11. The preface of the Report states “Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.” To make the 9/11 Commission Report accessible to a general public no longer accustomed to reading books, ABC-TV quickly began adapting the Report for television. The network spent $40 million bringing the 9/11 Commission Report to life in a two-part miniseries featuring a huge ensemble cast.

From the start, the project was a “docudrama,” or a dramatization of the events bookended by the two attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001. Compressing eight years into a five-hour miniseries naturally involves the creation of composite characters, representative scenes, and paraphrased dialogue. Despite this, the creators of The Path to 9/11, as the miniseries was eventually titled, made sure the truth was not lost in the process. ABC required writer Cyrus Nowrasteh’s teleplay to be annotated with footnotes corroborating each scene. It was also vetted by an army of lawyers. The chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean, even served as an executive producer.

The finished product is truly impressive. The Path to 9/11 is arguably the best and most important miniseries ever to appear on the small screen. Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of 9/11, it was broadcast, without commercial interruption, on Sept. 10-11, 2006 and seen by over 20 million viewers in the U.S. alone, far more than will ever read the 9/11 Commission Report. It even won an Emmy Award.

But it almost did not air at all. In the weeks prior to the airdate, former President Bill Clinton, various Clinton Administration alumni, and congressional Democrats raised holy hell about the miniseries, demanding ABC and its corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, kill it. The fact that none of them had seen the miniseries did not matter. They would not tolerate anything that might remind the public of the Clinton Administration’s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden.

The pressure campaign resulted in the miniseries airing with a few unsubstantial cuts and a disclaimer reminding viewers of the inherent nature of a docudrama. But it did not end there. Scholastic Press cancelled the production of classroom materials that were to be presented to schoolchildren accompanying showings of The Path to 9/11. The miniseries never re-aired on television nor has it been released on DVD.

What are the consequences of this? If The Path to 9/11 had been re-aired on television every year (as originally intended), been presented in classrooms, and made available on DVD and streaming, would full enforcement of the Real ID Act have been delayed for nearly two decades? Would the border wall remain unfinished? Would sanctuary cities be ubiquitous? Would 19 states and D.C. allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses? Would justice still have not been meted out on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (for comparison, the mastermind of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel was killed 53 weeks later)? Would the Taliban now control a greater percentage of Afghanistan than they did on 9/11? Would 10 million illegal immigrants have been allowed to enter the county in just the last four years?

The preceding paragraph was made possible by a citizenry unfamiliar with the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report. To remedy this, wide dissemination of The Path to 9/11 is necessary. It is probably too late to prevent the next 9/11, but with the cooperation of Disney CEO Robert Iger, maybe we can thwart the next one.