The BBC was last night standing by its decision to broadcast controversial docudrama The Path To 9/11, despite massive protests in the US denouncing the American-produced series as "right-wing propaganda".

The two-part drama is due to be shown tonight and tomorrow evening on BBC Two.

It depicts events in the US leading up to the terrorist attacks of 2001, but the decision to mix evidence given to the official 9/11 Commission with dramatic embellishments have drawn condemnation for the programme from the Democratic party, former president Bill Clinton, the star of the drama Harvey Keitel and more than 200,000 Democratic supporters.

On Friday, US broadcaster ABC, which has spent around $40 million on the production, reacted to the criticism by saying last-minute edits were under way. And a spokeswoman for the BBC defended the decision to go ahead with the broadcast, by saying: "The BBC are broadcasting the Path To 9/11 as planned. We will be showing the same version as is shown in the US."

Yesterday advisors for former US president Bill Clinton continued their attacks on the decision to broadcast the programme, which will be shown in two parts tonight and tomorrow both in the UK and the US.

It alleges that he was consumed in the Monica Lewinsky affair and did not concentrate on the the growing terrorist threat to the US.

Clinton, who was denied access to an advance copy of the programme despite it being shown to a range of other politicians, instructed his lawyers to write to ABC boss Bob Iger demanding that the programme be dropped completely.

They wrote: "We remain concerned about the false impression that airing the show will leave on the public.

"The Path To 9/11 calls into question the accuracy of the 9/11 Commission's report and whether fabricated scenes are, in fact, an accurate portrayal of history.

"Indeed, the millions spent on the production of this fictional drama would have been better spent informing the public about the commission's actual findings."

Clinton has called the programme "factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate", while former secretary of state Madeline Albright has also called for it to be scrapped, saying that one scene depicting her in the programme - which she admits she has not seen - was false and defamatory.

Joining the clamour for changes in the mini-series was star Harvey Keitel, who said he accepted the role of FBI counter -terrorism expert John O'Neill under the premise the story was to be told as "history".

"It turned out not all the facts were correct," the actor said, speaking to an American television station. "You can't put things together, compress them, and then distort the reality You cannot cross the line from conflation of events to a distortion of the event."

On Friday, the Democratic Party gave ABC a petition with more than 200,000 signatories on it, demanding that the drama was re-edited.

The Path To 9/11 claims to "loosely" draw on the evidence presented to the 9/11 Commission which was established to examine security failings around the terrorist attacks.

The mini-series opens with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York and traces subsequent events leading up to the coordinated suicide hijackings five years ago that killed nearly 3000 people.

Much of the controversy focuses on a scene depicting CIA agents and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only to have then-White House national security adviser Samuel Berger refuse to authorise the completion of their mission. This is one of the key scenes Democrats have objected to.

A group of historians have also written to ABC's parent company Disney, urging it to scrap the series. They said that permitting inaccuracies in a fact-based programme to heighten drama is "disingenuous and dangerous".

"A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it," they wrote.

Yesterday Richard Kilborn, an expert in contemporary television drama and docudramas at the University of Stirling, warned that the genre could be "a hazardous business".

"Recently there has been an increased desire from broadcasters to create instant histories' of events, and to get mileage out of near-contemporary events," he said. "There have been controversies and scandals in the past, stretching back 20 or 30 years, with monkeying around with actualities."

The Path To 9/11's executive producer, Marc Platt, responded that many of the film's most vocal critics have not yet seen it.

"I'm not sure that what they think is there, is there," he said. "I hope people will watch the film and draw their own conclusions."

As well as being broadcast on BBC Two tonight at 8pm and 8.30pm tomorrow evening, the programme will also be shown in Australia.