The growing controversy over The Path to 9/11, an ABC-television docudrama depicting the events leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has now encompassed a group of prominent historians.

A number of historians, including Sean Wilentz of Princeton University and Ted Widmer of Brown University, have signed an open letter to Robert A. Iger, president and chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, asking him to halt the broadcast of the film, which is scheduled for Monday—the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

The TV network has advertised that the film is based on the official report of an independent bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks. A co-chairman of that commission, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, also served as a consultant on the film. But former officials in the Clinton administration, including Bill Clinton himself, have attacked the film as erroneous, misleading, and in some cases directly contradicted by the commission’s report. The film has also come under attack from the liberal wing of the blogosphere.

The open letter from the historians picks up on those themes, noting that “key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence in order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000.”

The signatories also argue that “whatever ABC’s motivations might be, broadcasting these falsehoods, connected to the most traumatic historical event of our times, would be a gross disservice to the public. A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it.”

They called on Mr. Iger to “halt the show’s broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.”

Rick Perlstein, an independent scholar based in Chicago and the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001), was a key organizer of the effort. He told The Chronicle that “an open letter like this might help convince ABC/Disney that this is serious business. It is not just an issue of hotheaded bloggers or partisan Democrats. This is about the historical record.”

The letter and a list of signatories can be found at this address.