There's a walk through of the story of Against All Enemies ( / ), the new film from Director Robert Redford which is adapted from the Richard A. Clarke novel which tells the story of his CIA career and primarily his attempts to stop Osama Bin Laden before the September 11th attacks.

The story outline reads well, but there are already a few moments that seem embellished over fact, or if they really did happen, it seems amazing that they did occur this way.

The plot walk through of Against All Enemies over at Latino Review begins with Clarke heading towards the Whitehouse as he's notified of the attacks, his immediate attempts to deal with the immediate situation and to try and bring events under control.

It reads really well, and I can see this being a great Robert Redford film, and tackling some seriously strong issues, but there are a couple of things that stand out for me, and perhaps they are true, or perhaps they've been reworked for the film, I'd have to read the book to be sure.

The first is that when Clarke enters the Whitehouse Condoleezza Rice effectively puts him in charge of the Government!

“We meet dozens of people as Clarke et al. try to figure out and what’s going on who should be in charge – CONDI RICE tells him that the President is in Florida and someone needs to run point. Clarke takes charge and starts talking to the head of the FAA...”

Well I could understand that, but then he starts to issue other commands:

“He tells her [Jane Garvey, FAA] to ground all flights in the U.S...Clarke puts all embassies on high alert and tries to get military cover for major cities...Clarke tries to set up Continuity of Government – making sure that the government runs as normal in safe locations.”

Now it struck me just how much power he had at this point, all the time the President is in Florida and the story takes a while for the Vice President to page Clarke and ask him over to the secure bunker. Shouldn't the Vice President have been running things, is this how it really happened?

Now I've read the 9/11 Commission Report and I'm also surprised to find out that just after the attacks Clarke called the FBI and not only did he find out that al-Qaeda operatives were on the flight manifests, but that they weren't noticed because the CIA didn't tell the FBI – note that this is before the towers collapse – and yet it seems in the Commission Report that this took some time to track down and discover.

Now I may have events wrong, or perhaps Clarke has the true story, however it does seem that somewhere along the line events are being pulled together for the film. I hope I'm wrong because I'd like this to remain as factually correct as possible.

The final issue I had was the description of the moment the film realises the scale of the situation, and I do hope that this is just the write up from memory of reading the script rather than actually how it plays out:

“Clarke takes a detour and steps outside into the Rose Garden. He sees a perimeter of guards, armed to the teeth, guarding the area. F-15s fly over, almost knocking him to the ground.”

F-15s almost knock him to the ground? In the Rose Garden? They'd have to be flying pretty damn low to do that, it has to be dramatic license, I certainly didn't read that they were flying that low.

Has anyone read the book and can comment on these points and the story as a whole? Is the write up of the script plot as per the book? Is Clarke's book factually correct?

Apart from these issues I had with it the opening does sound dramatic, and as the enormity of the situation is revealed the story pulls back to the start of Clarke's career and we begin to see how early he started chasing terrorists and hunting down Osama Bin Laden.

We are apparently going to see the attempts that failed to kill him, and even the attempts to move Clarke out of the way and push the al-Qaeda issue to the background.

Robert Redford could really bring some power to this political tale, let's hope he keeps it slow and factual.