Other objections have come from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who is shown in the ABC series as having warned Pakistan of the August 1998 missile strikes that many considered a ploy to distract Americans from the Monica Lewinsky scandal then in play.
Albright says she never warned Pakistan, though the 9/11 commission reported that a senior official notified Pakistan that missiles crossing that country's airspace would not be coming from India.
Albright's outrage is understandable, and should be shared by fair-minded Americans. These are not minor slights of no importance. They are critical to people's integrity as well as to our understanding of what happened. Surely conversations and events leading up to 9/11 are sufficiently dramatic without the application of poetic license.
In these fragile times, when Americans are subjected to so much information and disinformation -- and when the consequences of ignorance are so potentially lethal -- we can ill afford to play loose with the facts.
That said, Americans are smart enough to know that what happened on 9/11 was in the works long before the Bush administration took office. No amount of protest will change the fact that some of the dots now clearly visible were available for connecting during the Clinton administration.
Meanwhile, we are proving the overarching point of this film, which is that while we're busy squabbling over political scraps, our enemies are busy plotting our demise. They don't care who sits in the Oval Office -- or which political party prevails in November.
They do care that they were enormously successful on Sept. 11, 2001, and are surely inspired by our weak attention to their goals.
The 9/11 commission determined that Clinton's 1998 missile attack was not, after all, a wag-the-dog attempt to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal. But the commissioners also said that the intense partisanship of the time ``likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against bin Laden.''
To our great peril, nothing much has changed.