News of Oliver Stone’s new 9/11 film just in from our Shaun @ UPI. Funny, I recall trying to get an interview with Stone way back when I heard he was sniffing around a possible film about the assassination of Martin Luther King. I hassled a couple of his PR people but naturally being a stone-cold loser got nowhere. Stone says now it wasn’t gonna be a conspiracy movie, just so you know. But thanks to blogging, it’s now news! Anyhow, here’s the 9/11 week ahead:

Oliver Stone’s movie about Sept. 11, “World Trade Center,” is released Thursday. Ten percent of the gross take from the first five days of theatrical release will be donated to four New York-based charities that are working in different ways to memorialize the victims of the attack or provide ongoing support to their families. Several organizations (including this one and this one) have already indicated that they will use the movie to try and promote conspiracy theories about the attacks.

All-in-all, there’s likely to be quite a bit of Sept. 11 revisionism around this week, as the chairs of the blue-ribbon commission that investigated the attacks, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, are also due to publish their account of the commission’s behind-the-scenes-struggles with the administration and congress. In advance of the book, there’s already been one new revelation — that the commission considered a criminal referral over the way they were decieved by NORAD and the Department of Defense.
The extent of that deception is thrown into sharp relief for your humble correspondent by the audio tapes published on the Vanity Fair Web site by a producer of the last Sept. 11 movie, Flight 93.

Now Kean tells the Washington Post that the commission was never able to ascertain why NORAD had tried to hide the real sequence of events. The Jersey Girls say that this admission “puts into question the veracity of the entire Commission’s report.”
I think that’s a stretch, personally, but I do think it shows there’s a danger that in hyping the importance of the book, coverage of it could end up leaving question marks over Kean and Hamilton’s earlier work — the commission’s own report.

Come to think of it wasn’t it Shaun when at BBC R4 who got me the job of covering the MLK 30th anniversary.