THEY EVEN HURT THE ONES THEY LOVE. One of the real, overlooked tragedies of this whole ABC docudrama mess is that it plays political handball with the story of the late John O'Neill -- who is, by all accounts, superbly played by Harvey Keitel -- the relentlessly hellraising FBI cop who beat people over the head on the subject of al Qaeda until he finally ran out of friends and allies, and who died at the World Trade Center. I never met O'Neill, but I knew a lot of NYC reporters who knew him, and I trust all of them implicitly. Considering the rave reviews a half-crook like Bernard Kerik got in the wake of 9/11, and to say nothing about the ongoing canonization of Rudy Giuliani, it was more than past time for O'Neill's story to be told, and to be told well. (He is one of the few unquestioned heroes of Lawrence Wright's brilliant new book,The Looming Tower.) Obstreperous on the job, and deeply struggling off of it, O'Neill deserves to have his memory honored by something better than being the hero of this cheap piece of ideological hackwork. -- Charles P. Pierce
