TRIGGERnometry - 9⧸11： The Full Story, 25 Years On with Richard Miniter

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00:00:30.000 what were they trying to accomplish they were trying to get the attention of the united states

00:00:36.960 they wanted a war they didn't understand us and come to hate us they have a very rudimentary idea

00:00:44.600 of who we are people say oh they they were making a political statement but the captured

00:00:50.380 notebooks tell us they really didn't know that much about us so they had studied our system

00:00:55.140 found a weak point, took advantage of it. They looked at the FAA's website and found the airports

00:01:00.780 with the largest number of security violations. They did go to these flight schools where chillingly

00:01:06.360 they said they didn't need to learn how to take off or land. They just needed to know how to

00:01:10.400 operate the aircraft in the air. You suddenly realize that your country is crowded with

00:01:15.780 heroes wearing ordinary faces.

00:01:18.800 The British government wants to force YouTube to downrank independent content like ours

00:01:27.020 and replace it with approved messaging from the mainstream media. The only way you can fight back

00:01:32.920 and continue to enjoy our content is to make sure you're subscribed. Like this video and

00:01:38.600 comment below to have your say on what the government is doing. Richard Mineta, welcome

00:01:43.940 back to Trigonometry. We have you here on the 25th anniversary of 9-11, which, for those of us

00:01:50.840 who lived through it, was a moment of great tragedy. It was a moment that changed the world.

00:01:56.440 But more importantly, actually, there is now a whole generation, maybe two generations,

00:02:01.640 of people who don't even remember it because they either weren't alive at all or they were too young

00:02:07.380 to really understand the significance of what was going on. So on this day, what we thought

00:02:13.880 would be fantastic is to have someone like you who's written a bunch of new york times bestsellers

00:02:19.500 about various aspects of this event uh to come back on the show and uh talk to us about actually

00:02:27.080 the basics the sort of cub reporter questions the what when why um so welcome back again and uh

00:02:34.820 let's talk about it what happened on 9 11 2001 on the day itself 25 years ago today

00:02:43.640 four planes were hijacked and unlike normal normal hijacking they did not communicate with

00:02:53.760 the outside world they did not demand ransom and instead they purposely flew these planes

00:02:59.000 into buildings on what everyone describes as a clear perfect uh tuesday sky it uh they crashed

00:03:06.480 into the towers within 15 minutes. We got each other two jumbo jets collided with the World Trade

00:03:14.120 Center towers. Another plane went into the Pentagon and we have horrifying voice recordings

00:03:20.540 of people on the phone inside the plane as it slams into the Pentagon. And then there's the

00:03:25.560 story of Flight 93, the fourth plane, which is hijacked somewhere over Cleveland after having

00:03:31.860 left Maine and was believed headed toward the U.S. Capitol building itself. If they had reached that

00:03:39.320 target, roughly 5,000 people would have died, including members of the House and the Senate

00:03:44.500 and their key staffs, other dignitaries who were visiting on that day. And the death toll would

00:03:50.400 have been much higher than in the World Trade Center itself. 3,000, rough almost 3,000 people

00:03:57.280 died from more than 100 countries. There are conspiracy theories saying that the Jews were

00:04:04.100 warned in advance. In fact, for the Orthodox Jews, there was a religious holiday that they had been

00:04:09.500 following for thousands of years, and they stayed home on that day due to a religious holiday, not

00:04:14.560 due to any advance warning, but that is one of those malicious internet rumors. But let's not

00:04:20.680 forget about the heroism of the people on Flight 93, because it tells us something distinctive

00:04:26.420 about that day and about americans in general when the plane was seized by four hijackers

00:04:32.220 over cleveland and redirected from its intended destination of san francisco

00:04:37.040 south towards uh south and east towards the u.s capital uh immediately one passenger was killed

00:04:44.900 apparently scuffling with the hijackers and the rest were herded to the back of the plane

00:04:49.020 and these ordinary americans were encouraged to use their phones by the hijackers because part

00:04:55.780 of the Al-Qaeda plan, Al-Qaeda being the terrorist group that had organized and planned

00:05:00.000 these attacks, rehearsing them for years, by the way, wanted them to use the phones

00:05:06.160 to magnify the terror across the American population, to harness the social networks

00:05:11.840 of people who love those people who are about to die, to spread the sense of terror and

00:05:17.380 pain.

00:05:18.240 But on those calls, people didn't just talk, they also listened, and they learned that

00:05:22.380 other planes had been hijacked. And because they were uniquely American, these ordinary people said

00:05:30.220 when they were herded to the back of the plane, we have to make a plan to retake this or they 0.51

00:05:35.900 will kill us and whoever we ram this plane into. So they began boiling water, which is used in the

00:05:42.680 back of the plane to make coffee and tea. They began assembling whatever they could for weapons.

00:05:47.460 We know just fragmentary bits from the cockpit voice recorder and from the transcripts of the phone calls.

00:05:54.740 And they attacked the hijackers.

00:05:57.120 They did not launch their attack until they could see out the window.

00:06:00.080 They were over a rural area.

00:06:01.760 They were aware of tons of aviation gas, which would explode and kill people on the ground.

00:06:07.240 They wanted to spare as many civilians on the ground as possible.

00:06:11.920 Flight 93 is the only flight in which no one on the ground died.

00:06:17.460 now it's a heartbreaking story they did apparently according to the recordings disabled two of the

00:06:22.740 four hijackers and were ramming the cart into the cockpit door and may have gotten inside the

00:06:28.420 cockpit itself there is fragmentary last second recordings where they're demanding that they're

00:06:34.980 fighting over the controls of the plane or from a flight of but from a height of roughly 8 000

00:06:40.420 feet according to a small plane that was observing them at the time they dived into the dirt killing

00:06:46.180 everyone aboard and there's a monument for them now in near shanksville pennsylvania but that is

00:06:52.460 an incredible example of people in real time making decisions without any outside guidance

00:06:59.160 going against 40 years of conventional wisdom they were always instructed by their betters

00:07:05.100 just cooperate with the hijackers be peaceful they will that's the best chance of your survival is

00:07:12.580 just to cooperate with them.

00:07:14.440 They fought them.

00:07:15.540 They ignored all the expert advice.

00:07:18.940 They made weapons, they made a plan.

00:07:22.160 They told the people that they loved,

00:07:23.740 that they loved them, but that they had to go.

00:07:26.720 And we hear them on the cockpit voice recorder.

00:07:30.860 Those messages are still classified,

00:07:33.800 but they were played for the families.

00:07:37.200 And I interviewed a number of the family members

00:07:40.080 several years after those recordings, but it's an extraordinary story. One last detail of context

00:07:47.740 here. When I was on the Cashlaputa River in Colorado, a boat ahead of me was composed entirely

00:07:54.420 of Japanese people, and the boat started to sink in the rapids, and all the Japanese people turned

00:07:59.740 to the group leader and were waiting for him to make a decision as the water climbed up to their

00:08:05.360 necks and eventually over their heads before he dispersed them to swim for their lives. 0.99

00:08:11.240 That might be how Japanese people react in a crisis. Flight 93 tells us how Americans act 0.51

00:08:17.260 in a crisis. They ignore the experts. They make a plan. They consider all the ramifications. 1.00

00:08:22.620 They take great risks. And in the case of Flight 93, they came heartbreakingly close

00:08:28.740 to retaking that plan.

00:08:30.840 They are heroes.

00:08:33.280 Richard, and there were many stories of heroism

00:08:35.840 that day, of course,

00:08:37.540 and we will talk about all of them,

00:08:39.700 including in New York with the firefighters,

00:08:42.000 with other first responders.

00:08:44.320 Many of them gave their lives

00:08:45.840 like the people aboard Flight 93.

00:08:49.000 But I really think it's very, very important

00:08:51.820 for us to try and unpack the why

00:08:55.760 because of the way the world changed?

00:08:59.660 Why did this happen?

00:09:03.060 That's a big question.

00:09:05.040 The short answer is 1979.

00:09:08.000 In 1979, in the Carter years of the American presidency,

00:09:14.140 through a series of missteps,

00:09:16.460 there was a revolution in Iran,

00:09:18.740 an interesting coalition of communists,

00:09:22.660 Kurds, and radical Islamists

00:09:24.740 led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in exile first in Iraq and then in Paris,

00:09:30.740 flew back to Iran and was able to launch an Islamic revolution in that country.

00:09:38.460 What that did, the revolution was a Shia Islamic revolution. But for Sunnis outside Iran,

00:09:48.700 it was a watershed suddenly it seemed like radical islamic utopia was possible that we 0.91

00:09:57.280 saw takeovers in mecca in 1979 where the great mosque was taken and for several months saudi

00:10:05.440 forces were unable to retake it and many radical muslims believed that allah was protecting the

00:10:16.020 people holding the Grand Mosque hostage. Ultimately, the Saudis, under Prince Turkey

00:10:22.100 al-Faisal, were able to bring in French paratroopers, who they made all say the Shahada,

00:10:27.620 converting to Islam before they went in, who cleared out the terrorists. But it took months.

00:10:35.000 Those two effects turbocharged radical Islam from an idea that existed among intellectuals

00:10:44.860 and school teachers and a handful of people inside the Ikhwan Muslimin, the Muslim Brotherhood,

00:10:52.020 and brought it out into the realm of political possibility. And then the third thing happens in

00:10:58.940 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a traditional Muslim country invaded by an atheist 0.62

00:11:05.500 communist superpower. And those three things acting together meant that jihad, the preaching 0.99

00:11:14.680 of Abdullah Azzam, who was in 1979 a mentor to Osama bin Laden, that jihad is the way,

00:11:22.480 and jihad does not mean spiritual change in the thinking of Abdullah Azzam and in the various

00:11:28.080 Salafis who follow him and his dogma and his doctrine. It means fighting on this earth and

00:11:38.860 killing infidels in order to bring about the last days, the end of the world, so that Allah may 1.00

00:11:45.380 reign supreme over all the world. And they were cycled, so to spare themselves revolutions like 1.00

00:11:55.000 what they saw in Iran across the Sunni Arab countries, they began encouraging these terrorists,

00:12:01.140 even in fact later in the 1980s, opening their prisons and sending these radicals to Afghanistan 0.59

00:12:08.480 to fight the Soviets. The thinking of Saudi intelligence especially was that if they die

00:12:16.720 in Afghanistan, they're a holy martyr and they're not our problem. And if they don't die, they will

00:12:22.600 be busy for a long time and not causing problems here at home. This creates an opportunity for a

00:12:28.780 young scion of a construction magnate named Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden is forged by 0.88

00:12:37.020 two things in his life. In order to get his father's attention as a young boy, 0.57

00:12:42.780 he did two things that stood out among all of the other children. Otherwise,

00:12:46.520 most weeks of the year, he was all but ignored. But on Friday after Juma prayers,

00:12:54.420 he, when his father would gather with other adult men, and seven, eight, nine-year-old Osama would

00:13:00.520 be summoned to recite portions of the Quran from memory. So he memorized the Quran as a way to

00:13:07.120 command attention and to get his father's approval. This is the very beginning before he gets

00:13:12.580 introduced to the radical philosophy of the dola azam and of the muslim brotherhood and the other

00:13:18.460 radical groups and i don't want to get on too many rabbit holes but al-qaeda is not

00:13:23.020 a direct descendant of one thing but the fusion of many things uh the other the other way he got

00:13:29.700 his father's attention and this is important is that for one sometimes two weeks a year depending

00:13:35.280 on the year the head of the family would take all of the extended family including young osama

00:13:41.200 into the desert to live in tents without human comforts and in this harsh environment

00:13:48.080 osama thrived he loved the wild places he loved capturing and killing animals uh and while everyone

00:13:57.080 else complained about the lack of air conditioning of cold water and so on everyone wanted to take

00:14:02.120 a shower or bath he thrived and he got his father's approval there from those two ingredients

00:14:08.520 Once you had the radical thinking of Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden knew he had to get to Afghanistan and create an opportunity for himself because tens of thousands of radicals were leaving jails, leaving mosques, and going to Afghanistan.

00:14:24.600 So he created something initially called Al-Qaeda Suba, the Secure Base.

00:14:31.080 And it was just a place where you could, as a fighter, a jihadi fighter against the Soviets, store your things, your watch, your wallet, and so on.

00:14:41.840 And they began a paper database.

00:14:44.960 So base can also mean database in this form of Arabic.

00:14:50.960 and they made a database of all of the fighters that came through

00:14:55.400 and whose belongings were stored.

00:14:57.040 Often they kept passports.

00:14:59.940 These passports would resurface, by the way, on 9-11.

00:15:03.760 So some of the people who believed to have died in the 1980s

00:15:07.440 in Afghanistan, their passports reappear,

00:15:12.140 held perhaps by other people,

00:15:14.880 when they apply for visas to come to the United States

00:15:19.440 and go to flight school and begin their more than a year of operations inside the United States

00:15:25.360 before the 9-11 attacks. So, Bin Laden ends up as a well-known figure in 1980s Afghanistan.

00:15:34.140 He has the names and contact information for tens of thousands of radicals, Muslims, from the

00:15:41.220 Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Arab Gulf, and so on. It is an incredible advantage

00:15:48.680 from which he starts to build a terror network.

00:15:52.260 At first, he's just a financier.

00:15:54.700 The very first mention of Osama bin Laden

00:15:58.100 in U.S. government documents

00:16:01.180 is a State Department report from 1995

00:16:04.000 that says, dismissively,

00:16:08.820 that refers to bin Laden as a moving bank.

00:16:12.460 But the State Department was wrong.

00:16:14.740 By the 90s, he was organizing

00:16:16.920 and planning his own attacks.

00:16:18.680 They spent more than a decade planning and carrying out attacks against Americans.

00:16:24.300 Throughout the Clinton years, we saw attacks on a U.S. hotel in Yemen that was supposed to house U.S. servicemen.

00:16:33.920 We saw attacks against the two U.S. embassies in Africa simultaneously with eight minutes of each other and so on.

00:16:42.620 So he's planning for 9-11. 0.88

00:16:44.840 The catalyst was a fellow named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. 0.82

00:16:47.300 He is like the independent producer who brings the studio head, bin Laden, the script. 0.73

00:16:52.640 And together, they began the plot and plan that leads to 9-11.

00:16:56.900 What were they trying to accomplish?

00:16:59.360 They were trying to get the attention of the United States.

00:17:02.660 They wanted a war.

00:17:04.340 Bin Laden had held press conferences in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, and in other places for many years,

00:17:11.460 openly declaring war against the United States, using those words.

00:17:16.180 And the United States didn't respond.

00:17:18.460 With 3,000 Americans dead on the morning of September 11th,

00:17:22.160 America would have to respond.

00:17:23.740 In the lead-up to 9-11, there were two key attacks, it seems to me.

00:17:29.880 One of them was the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993,

00:17:34.400 and the other was the attack on SS coal.

00:17:38.120 So let's talk about those very briefly

00:17:40.060 and how they paved the way for the horrific offense on 2001.

00:17:46.520 Sure. So Al-Qaeda launches attacks or attempted attacks on the United States or its interests

00:17:54.420 every year from 1992 to 2001. These attacks increase in sophistication and lethality.

00:18:03.460 The 1993 World Trade Center bombing is carried out by a man we now call Ramzi Yusuf.

00:18:11.460 Ramzi Yusuf grows up with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a town outside of Kuwait City.

00:18:20.700 Both are not Kuwaiti citizens.

00:18:24.800 They are, in fact, because of their place of birth, permanently ineligible to become Kuwaiti citizens.

00:18:32.560 So they grew up, they and their families, with second-class status and the anger and frustration that that implies, because they were both high IQ, people who did very well in school.

00:18:44.900 The only place where they could, and to give you an idea of how low the status was, during much of his childhood, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's mother, her only source of living after the father died suddenly,

00:18:56.760 was to wash the female bodies of the dead

00:19:01.520 and be paid on a per-bought fee.

00:19:04.980 So this is a desperate, precarious existence

00:19:07.880 with very low status despite their high abilities.

00:19:13.040 They do very well in school,

00:19:14.920 but places in the university will not be set aside for them 1.00

00:19:19.100 because those are reserved primarily for the Kuwaitis

00:19:22.560 and for their foreign visitors.

00:19:25.520 The only place they can find social advancement 0.76

00:19:28.760 is inside the various youth groups of the Muslim Brotherhood.

00:19:34.620 And, but in addition to, so Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Unran's youth

00:19:39.560 have become active in the theater and singing troops

00:19:42.540 of the Muslim Brotherhood near Kuwait City.

00:19:48.880 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself is a gifted performer and very popular.

00:19:53.260 And when he goes to university in North Carolina, he's also popular for performing skits and songs there.

00:20:00.600 This creative talent remains.

00:20:03.920 But they are frustrated and angry. 0.99

00:20:06.140 And in the course of finding the social outlet, they imbibe the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology. 0.98

00:20:13.700 And so the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, the plan is very simple. 0.98

00:20:19.660 to take a truck loaded with, I forget how many pounds,

00:20:24.200 hundreds of pounds of explosive,

00:20:25.740 and to detonate it outside the wall of the South Tower parking garage.

00:20:30.720 M.C. Youssef does not care,

00:20:32.580 but on the other side of that small concrete block wall

00:20:35.160 is a woman who's seven months pregnant named Monica Smith,

00:20:39.100 seven months pregnant with a boy,

00:20:40.800 and she's eating her lunch.

00:20:43.120 Another person is behind another wall

00:20:45.240 looking to do an inventory count,

00:20:49.660 for a restaurant that exists hundreds of feet above them called windows on the world

00:20:53.820 they set the bomb they try desperately to leave the parking garage but there's a truck in front

00:21:00.300 of them that is very slow they're glaring their horn and they roar out onto west street and make

00:21:06.460 their getaway just seconds before the bomb explodes killing monica smith uh and the

00:21:12.700 the workers on the world, inventory counter, a waiter actually, and five other people.

00:21:21.040 At first, the U.S. is deeply confused by what happened. The bomb is massive. It opens a crater

00:21:27.460 that is, the mouth of the crater is more than 60 feet across and goes down nearly 100 feet.

00:21:35.520 It drops concrete blocks into the half train station below.

00:21:41.140 It severs pipes, so you have water and sewage flowing into the crater.

00:21:46.640 The building is evacuated.

00:21:49.120 And one valuable thing happens that is going to be important on the morning of 9-11.

00:21:54.740 The New York City police and a separate commission impaneled by the legislators in Albany,

00:22:00.640 which is the state capital of New York, study the evacuation plan.

00:22:04.400 all the problems that went wrong and so they change how twin towers are to be evacuated

00:22:11.680 how the lights there were no lights in 1993 in the stairway as soon as the power was cut

00:22:17.700 the stairways were dark and therefore people moved down those staircases much more slowly

00:22:22.740 thanks to the attack um the on 9-11 most of those lights were battery powered

00:22:30.920 and so when the power went out people could still evacuate close so if and those lines moved much

00:22:38.120 more quickly there were many many other changes made but as a result 3 000 people died on 9 11

00:22:43.700 and richard sorry sorry to interrupt but what was their fascination with the world trade center

00:22:49.680 that's a really interesting question francis when you go so at the combating terrorism center

00:22:56.500 in West Point, they have about two and a half million pages worth of captured documents from

00:23:00.880 Al-Qaeda. And those have been translated into English, mainly by the U.S. Army or by U.S. other

00:23:07.740 government. And the FBI separately translated the notebooks left behind in the rental cars

00:23:15.720 of the hijackers. They drove rental cars to the airports where they launched the hijackers.

00:23:19.420 um and so two things come from that one is they thought that the world trade center was literally

00:23:28.860 the center of world trade they thought if they blew it up all global trade would come to a stop

00:23:35.140 it never occurred to them that property developers created a marketing name world trade center and

00:23:42.100 in fact there are other world trade centers in the united states right um and it's it's kind of

00:23:47.440 thing that's about as meaningful as the term international airport, right? The small town

00:23:52.340 airports in the U.S. that have one flight a week to Canada, but it's an international airport,

00:23:56.720 right? And they also, another thing that comes of this is people say, oh, they were making a

00:24:03.060 political statement, but the captured notebooks tell us they really didn't know that much about

00:24:07.320 us. So one of the notebooks left behind with the hijackers is a lengthy description on page one of

00:24:15.340 notebook of the difference between shampoo and conditioner. So this was not a detailed political

00:24:25.900 protest. They wanted to attract the attention of the great Satan in the United States and go to

00:24:32.700 war with it and hopefully to triumph over it. This is a battle in their mind. It wasn't really about

00:24:40.760 something the United States did. So they wanted to drag America into a war, which they wanted to

00:24:49.260 win. That was the purpose of all of this. Yes. The story in their head is we defeated

00:24:57.440 the Soviets. Now, in reality, the jihadi forces from the Arab countries had very little impact 0.96

00:25:04.620 on the Soviets, right? We can point to one or two battles in which they may have played

00:25:10.180 an important role. Mostly they didn't join the main war effort. They did random terror attacks.

00:25:18.060 One fun aspect of this is they didn't just have car bombs, they had camel bombs where they put 0.95

00:25:22.640 bombs on camels and had them explode in marketplaces. Most of the war fighting, which 0.64

00:25:29.080 actually did drive the soviets out was carried out by afghans themselves and so an important detail

00:25:36.840 here which many people miss is while the saudis and other gulf arabs funded the jihadis the u.s

00:25:44.680 did not the u.s never funded al-qaeda i talked to every living cia station chief responsible for

00:25:52.120 Afghanistan, and many other officials. And the record on this is overwhelming. The U.S. never

00:25:58.760 supported al-Qaeda or bin Laden himself, or for that matter, any Arab jihadis. They supported 0.99

00:26:06.620 pushtuns and other groups, which later became known as the Northern Alliance. And that's who

00:26:15.100 they were, the people who were doing the polka, the fighting. But nonetheless, in the mind of

00:26:20.400 the jihadis, they defeated the one superpower, the Soviets. With 9-11, they were expecting 0.67

00:26:25.860 another battle, and they would defeat the other superpower, America. And that would 0.52

00:26:30.500 make them the best in the world. And they hope bring about the end times and lead to

00:26:37.820 the end of the world, and Allah triumphed.

00:26:40.420 and that being the case what about the ss coal how what was the impact of that and what was the

00:26:50.900 significance of that particular attack so from the 1993 world trade center bombing there are a series

00:26:56.940 of attacks there's an attempted assassination of pope there's planned assassinations of bill

00:27:02.380 clinton there's a foiled plot called bojinka uh that was going to start out of manila where they

00:27:08.120 hijack 11 planes over the Pacific that were foiled by a very enterprising Filipino police chief

00:27:16.700 who was pregnant and in flip-flops when she arrests Ramzi Yusuf, a co-conspirator. 0.51

00:27:23.540 That's a whole other wonderful story. And so these attacks escalate. There are attacks on

00:27:30.540 two U.S. embassies in 1998, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in Nairobi, Kenya. And then the

00:27:40.980 climax of the Clinton years, from an Al-Qaeda perspective, is the attack on the USS Cole.

00:27:47.500 They had attempted an earlier attack on the USS Sullivans. That ship was named after five

00:27:52.960 brothers who died on the same ship in World War II and fighting the Japanese. But their attack

00:28:03.620 fails because their boat sinks before it reaches the target. They adapt very quickly and they launch

00:28:09.840 an attack on the USS Cole. And what we have is the first time a U.S. Navy ship is in danger of

00:28:17.760 sinking and total loss since

00:28:20.040 World War II. They blow

00:28:22.100 a hole that I think is 40

00:28:23.940 feet wide in the

00:28:25.980 side of the hole, and only

00:28:28.020 through the heroic efforts of the captain

00:28:29.820 and the crew, by the way,

00:28:31.920 dozens are killed and injured,

00:28:33.860 through pumping, and a three-day

00:28:36.060 round-the-clock effort are they able to

00:28:37.960 save the ship.

00:28:41.500 Get it to port and safely

00:28:43.740 evacuate, and the ship itself is still

00:28:45.820 afloat today, I believe.

00:28:47.760 uh bin laden does not hide his involvement he writes a poem glorifying the attack which is

00:28:54.420 widely published uh and there are phone calls linking uh the various people who carried out

00:29:01.060 the attack uh both in yemen uh and to their paymasters in parts of africa and calls to

00:29:08.180 afghanistan so we have a complete chain of evidence uh bin laden to the attack on the

00:29:14.140 this skull which is the largest attack on a u.s warship since world war ii uh richard sorry uh

00:29:21.440 just going back a little bit i was so shocked by what you said about because in my in i you will

00:29:27.040 be aware that in the wake of 9-11 and frankly prior to that the universal belief was that

00:29:33.480 america had created uh the al-qaeda by funding it um the sting is and all of that so not that i

00:29:41.540 don't trust you. You know how much we love you on the show. But I went on Venice IR and had a quick

00:29:45.420 look. And it says that U.S. funds did not go directly to bin Laden, but they did go to native

00:29:51.880 Afghan Mujahideen commanders who were part of the movement that then became al-Qaeda. Is that

00:29:58.740 accurate? The first part of it is absolutely accurate. So there was an explicit deal. And

00:30:07.500 this is not secret. This was reported on the front page of the Washington Post in 1986, right?

00:30:12.460 An explicit deal, dollar for dollar matching. The Reagan administration would spend up to $1

00:30:18.800 billion, and they did, funding native Afghans. And the Saudis would spend up to $1 billion 0.71

00:30:27.280 funding the Arab holy warriors, if you will. These are separate groups of people.

00:30:34.280 They speak different languages. They have different beliefs. And they have different aims for the future of Afghanistan. The idea that the CIA funded bin Laden is an attempt to conflate a very broad movement with very different groups in it, as lump it all as one thing and say, we funded that one thing, therefore, bin Laden.

00:31:03.040 that is just not the case and in fact so just for clarity just for clarity what you're saying is the

00:31:10.940 u.s funded people who were fighting the soviets but not bin laden and not the foreigners who came

00:31:17.860 to afghanistan to fight the soviets that's right that's right funded by the saudis and by the

00:31:22.780 and in fact the whole time of the 1980s of bin laden is openly anti-american um and says so

00:31:32.000 and there is a, it's in my book, Losing Bin Laden,

00:31:36.440 there was a member of Congress visiting Afghanistan

00:31:38.100 and he was told to stay away from these Bin Laden camps 1.00

00:31:41.460 that they were hiking around

00:31:42.560 because if Bin Laden captures him, 1.00

00:31:45.280 he will torture and kill him. 0.81

00:31:47.880 So this is not somebody on the CIA payroll. 0.97

00:31:52.860 Fascinating.

00:31:53.880 There's much more evidence.

00:31:55.500 If you want to talk about this in detail,

00:31:57.280 there's much, much more evidence.

00:31:58.740 um but also think about it from the cia's point of view right a bunch of ideologically driven

00:32:05.900 ill-trained foreigners are not an ideal indigenous force to fight the soviets the people who are 0.91

00:32:13.040 fighting for their native lands who speak global languages whose political goal is simply to drive 0.99

00:32:18.880 the soviets out not to create a religious utopia those people are much easier to work with far more

00:32:25.140 controllable and far better trained. They'd been in combat for decades. Remember, Afghanistan had

00:32:32.240 a civil war following the departure of the king in the 1970s, where native Afghans were fighting

00:32:39.740 communists, right? And then when it looked like they were going to succeed in driving the communists

00:32:44.800 from power, the Soviet Union intervened to save their ideological allies, rolling tanks across

00:32:51.340 the Oxus Bridge on Christmas Eve 1979. So these people had been fighting Soviets and communists

00:32:58.000 for decades. They had organized training regimens, command structures. They were focused on the

00:33:07.120 objective the CIA cared about. CIA did not care about trying to create a religious Muslim utopia 0.91

00:33:13.420 in Afghanistan. Not only that, but Al Qaeda and the other Arab jihadis were very hard to control 0.99

00:33:20.980 most of their attacks were on other other muslims not on um soviets themselves

00:33:29.060 and for example look at what is now called nuristan what used to be called kafiristan

00:33:36.260 and a region in afghanistan kafiristan means land of the unbelievers and these people did not start

00:33:45.520 to convert to Islam until the 1960s. And by the time the radicals arrived in the 1980s,

00:33:51.940 maybe 5%, maybe 10%. I mean, there's no good census data here, or Muslim. But through war 0.89

00:33:58.800 and conquest, they wanted to convert them to Islam. A lot of bin Laden and the associated 1.00

00:34:05.980 Arab terrorist groups were attacks against these tribal people in what was called once

00:34:12.240 kafiristan is now known as nuristan land of light because they did succeed in converting the majority 0.56

00:34:19.540 of them right so that's the ideological and targeting focus of the arabs was on the afghans

00:34:28.160 who were not following their form of islam the native afghans the cia was funding their goal 0.82

00:34:34.220 was getting rid of the soviets which was the u.s foreign policy goal so it would have been pointless 0.99

00:34:39.600 to fund these groups they're hard to control hard to manage feel trained and don't share your 1.00

00:34:45.580 objectives and on top of all that they want to kill you if you're a cia official right so it

00:34:52.040 just operationally makes no sense but when i talked to uh beard knew as one of the cia i talked to

00:34:58.980 every living cia station chief for afghanistan who served between 1980 and 1992 right now you

00:35:06.480 could say, okay, these are self-interested, fine, but no one else would track them down and talk to

00:35:10.740 them. And they laid out in very clear, non-ideological, non-defensive terms. We had no

00:35:18.820 orders to fund these people. We had no money to fund these people. We had no desire to fund these

00:35:22.760 people. And these people were trying to kill us. So we don't write checks to people who are trying

00:35:28.740 to kill you. That makes sense. Did the people that they funded then, with many of them part

00:35:35.960 of the Taliban? No, the Taliban are created much later. The Taliban are born in 1994.

00:35:43.160 So remember the Soviets... What I mean is, did they become the Taliban? Sorry to interrupt again. 0.69

00:35:48.680 The Mujahideen did not become the Taliban. The Taliban is created mainly by the Pakistani 1.00

00:35:59.440 intelligence services the isi uh and a bunch of um local islamic teachers they're trying to get 0.60

00:36:07.200 the taliban are trying to impose a severe version of the official version of islam according to

00:36:13.020 pakistan um and later the so-called mujahideen the arab foreign fighters ally themselves with

00:36:21.940 the Taliban because the Taliban are not on their own. But the U.S.-backed forces become known as

00:36:30.820 the Northern Alliance. And if you remember, two days before 9-11 on September 9th, the head of

00:36:37.060 the Northern Alliance is murdered by an Al-Qaeda cell posing as a Belgian camera crew. They have a 0.67

00:36:43.400 bomb inside the camera and it detonates. That's how Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance,

00:36:48.040 is killed on September 9th. So they saw the Northern Alliance as the enemy. The Taliban

00:36:56.400 is something that's created later. It's driven by different causes and different flows of money, 0.64

00:37:01.180 but the Mujahideen do ally with it, not in 94, but after. Remember, there's a whole group,

00:37:09.140 a whole galaxy of these groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and people move between groups.

00:37:15.120 we have captured documents that show the people get frustrated that their martyrdom opportunity

00:37:20.560 is delayed it's like lakshi taiba for example which is one of these groups and they'll move to

00:37:25.760 isis their martyrdom opportunity is further delayed there so they shift to al-qaeda like

00:37:32.940 they're moving around right and they're looking for they're looking to die and therefore change

00:37:42.120 their status in their community.

00:37:45.660 Like most people, I want more energy, better focus,

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00:37:57.760 and then you're in and out in 10 minutes.

00:37:59.600 Everything looks fine, they say.

00:38:01.000 Drink more water, sleep a bit more.

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00:39:02.600 And Richard, we can see, looking back at the events over the 90s, there's a clear trajectory

00:39:09.140 happening here. The attacks were escalating. They were not only escalating, but they were

00:39:14.180 becoming more frequent. They were attacking US soil. They were attacking US Navy. They were

00:39:20.760 also attacking embassies. Why was there someone not in government raising the alarm going, look,

00:39:27.560 we need to do something here. This is serious, and it's going to be inevitable that there's going to

00:39:32.540 be another Islamist terrorist attack on our soil. Well, the danger, to be fair to the Clinton

00:39:38.640 administration, right, we can look back from our point in time and say it was obvious this was

00:39:44.100 going to happen. But for people who are living in the moment, it isn't clear. So I talked to

00:39:49.840 both of Clinton's

00:39:52.480 national security advisors

00:39:54.140 and Tony Lake, who was

00:39:56.580 the national security

00:39:58.840 advisor in the early

00:40:00.560 Clinton years, says that he

00:40:02.580 received his first briefing on

00:40:04.780 Al-Qaeda sometime in 1994.

00:40:07.840 This is years

00:40:09.020 after the attacks have begun.

00:40:10.880 This is a year after the World Trade Center

00:40:13.040 bombing. At this point,

00:40:15.140 they hadn't linked

00:40:16.040 the World Trade Center bombing to Al-Qaeda.

00:40:19.840 um and he said he wasn't sure if he mentioned it to the president or not

00:40:25.920 uh maybe he thinks the first conversation with president clinton about al qaeda

00:40:31.400 was sometime in 1995 right why is he hazy about this he's not being defensive

00:40:37.280 a lot's going on and at the time this didn't seem among all the various threats they're facing

00:40:46.080 the most important right um the timeline becomes a lot clearer and a lot more definite we see a lot

00:40:52.740 more reports in late 90s but in the early 90s remember when the world trade center explodes

00:40:59.940 and the fbi is called in they're trying to figure out what if this was a work of terrorism in the

00:41:06.860 beginning they're not even the first few hours they're not even sure right they change the name

00:41:11.900 of the investigation to trade bomb only when they get enough bomb residue out of the crater

00:41:17.760 to say, okay, this was definitely a bomb, right? So, that happens five, six hours into the

00:41:25.780 investigation. But for days, they're like, is this a Yugoslav terrorist group? Is this

00:41:30.460 far-right extremists from, you know, white nationalists from the United States? Is this...

00:41:35.520 nobody knows right and uh even after the initial arrests and that's a whole interesting story

00:41:43.840 or they unwind the plot where the guy has returned to get the rental car um so he can get the deposit

00:41:50.560 back and use the money to buy a flight to escape because the ticket that muhammad atta the ring

00:41:56.080 leader has given him is not a real airline ticket it's a child's ticket he has to upgrade it or to

00:42:00.800 to get on a flight back to pakistan and um yeah this they it takes them months to put the pieces

00:42:09.880 together about that bombing itself connecting it to a larger global narrative doesn't really

00:42:16.440 cohere into anything until the middle of 1995 at the earliest um and that's also why when sudan

00:42:26.060 offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over uh to the United States that wasn't seen as that high

00:42:32.980 a priority either now Francis to your point were there mid-level people who were specialists saying

00:42:39.940 this is a major problem this is very important you need to do something absolutely but again

00:42:47.160 in fairness to the Clinton administration these people all these specialists think their specialty

00:42:53.740 is the most important thing right they're all right so how do you as the politically elected

00:43:01.160 or politically appointed decision maker say i should listen to expert 132 and ignore all the

00:43:07.620 others right it's it's difficult right another problem here is the government is very siloed

00:43:16.140 this is something the 9-11 commission report pointed out in great detail so i when i talked

00:43:22.080 to then Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, just died recently. Woolsey wanted

00:43:30.620 information that the FBI was gathering because it has obvious implications for CIA investigations.

00:43:38.280 And the FBI refused to share because he says, well, you'll mess up our case, right? The FBI

00:43:44.660 was completely focused on launching a criminal case. And so if we share any evidence with you,

00:43:50.120 we have to share it with uh the defense and we'll have to give up all our sources and methods to

00:43:56.440 defense so when you want these documents you can have them when we present them at trial which

00:44:03.160 turned out to be in the middle 1996. wolsey also begged for translators less than 10 percent of

00:44:10.820 the phone intercepts coming out of the middle east were being translated and cia wanted more

00:44:16.500 translators and um because wolsey had committed a political offense unknowingly right he had he was

00:44:27.400 told um by bruce lindsey in the white house that they want to replace the general counsel of the

00:44:34.840 cia with a friend of bill a president someone who had supported the president in his election efforts

00:44:43.080 and wolsey said no we have a very capable general counsel now there's no reason to replace her

00:44:50.160 uh or him i can't remember but uh and as soon as he did that he was shut out of all meetings with

00:44:58.720 the president so he never got to meet the president one-on-one he was in the room with

00:45:03.740 crowds of other people at a few handful of occasions to try to get the president's attention

00:45:09.720 he would go with the cia daily briefer and sit outside the president's office but he can't just

00:45:16.580 walk in and was never asked inside so he never got to present his case to the president about

00:45:23.820 al-qaeda he was never able to get the president to force the fbi to share his information uh and

00:45:31.100 the fbi didn't translate things unless it had a direct what they thought a direct bearing on the

00:45:36.460 case so example uh in earlier before the world trade center bombing there had been a killing

00:45:44.080 of a jewish leader named mayer khan and those uh documents were not translated for

00:45:49.660 eight ten years when they were they showed you that the the very infrastructure used by the people

00:45:57.080 and the places by ramzi yusuf were the same but they didn't want to spend the money to translate

00:46:03.820 the Arabic. So there were translation problems, there were bureaucratic infighting, there were

00:46:08.980 silos, and then there were political gains. And if al-Qaeda was seen as a real existential threat,

00:46:17.360 all of those things would have been pushed aside by the force of the executive.

00:46:21.280 But because it wasn't seen that way, those things weren't pushed aside.

00:46:25.940 and also we had people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was in college during the 90s

00:46:35.260 in the United States who was a literal enemy on home soil and when you look at that you think to 0.79

00:46:43.540 yourself I guess the question is could it have been prevented could we have caught KSM earlier 0.67

00:46:53.860 and how many times was he able to slip through the net oh wow yeah well there's a famous case

00:47:01.740 in 1995 where uh the fbi misses him by hours out of a safe house in uh and i think qatar

00:47:08.560 because the qatari minister i think of religious instruction anyway one of the ministers

00:47:14.800 warns uh you know khalid shik muhammad that the u.s is coming for him um well let's go back to

00:47:23.140 of the schooling in North Carolina of College Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9-11.

00:47:28.680 So when you talk to his family in Kuwait and other places and his school teachers,

00:47:36.220 they will tell you that he was a normal kid who got radicalized in the United States.

00:47:43.200 And there actually is pretty good evidence for this. Yes, he was coming out of the youth groups

00:47:49.960 of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, and the school didn't cooperate very well on this,

00:47:55.960 but there appears to have been a Muslim Brotherhood scholarship paid for his schooling in the

00:48:03.780 United States.

00:48:05.320 But the U.S., especially before 9-11, but even now, doesn't really do background checks

00:48:12.200 of the foreign students' heads.

00:48:14.460 so um and sometimes the foreign students it admits are less qualified than the u.s students

00:48:24.640 they could have admitted in their place um because they're trying to meet at this time period

00:48:31.020 certain racial or ethnic quotas right so khalid sheikh muhammad would not have been admitted if

00:48:37.760 had to compete openly because his english that stage was very poor uh and his knowledge of

00:48:44.960 engineering which he said he was going to study wasn't very good either um so he would not have

00:48:51.840 been a normal candidate except they were trying to tick certain boxes and he came with scholarship

00:48:57.840 money from abroad which is high margin for the university um so it's clearly additional

00:49:04.960 regulations need to be applied on the admissions of foreign students and on what basis and so on

00:49:10.500 right i think the u.s should educate the highest iq the most capable foreign student in the world

00:49:16.840 without question we should attract them and train them and teach them but the second thing we need

00:49:22.080 to think about is the social dynamics so he he went to two different universities in the united

00:49:30.340 States. One of them was avowedly Christian. He felt isolated. And so he gravitated toward other

00:49:41.540 people whose language, he was isolated by language, right? His English just was at that stage very

00:49:47.880 poor. So he sought out other Arabic speakers who were far more radical than himself. And he fell

00:49:55.820 into a group of them where in order to maintain his friendships, he had to share their ideological

00:50:01.880 commitments. So it's a lot like a guy joining a group because there's a hot guy or hot girl in it

00:50:08.560 and he will just conform his beliefs in order to be this person. In his case, he desperately needed

00:50:16.060 a social outlet and not to feel isolated. And so when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's family members say,

00:50:21.920 you know hey he he was going to discos and picking up girls in kuwait and he comes back

00:50:28.280 and he's a salafi he's very strict he uh he doesn't you know many many changes in his personal

00:50:36.400 life this was and they blame the united states well really the culprit here is the social network 0.57

00:50:42.840 at the university of other foreign students and in order to survive in that very small ecosystem

00:50:48.900 of 20, 25 Arabic speakers, he had to conform.

00:50:53.800 And ultimately, he becomes a kind of leader among them

00:50:56.160 because he over-conforms and they get in trouble

00:51:01.740 for slaughtering a goat in a baseball dugout

00:51:05.060 in the university so that they can eat

00:51:07.360 in a certain ritualistic way and so on, right?

00:51:10.320 But he becomes increasingly militant

00:51:13.080 because this binds the group to him

00:51:15.440 and makes them feel less alone.

00:51:18.900 So when we admit people into our universities

00:51:22.180 who lack the language and social skills to connect, 1.00

00:51:28.320 we're setting up a dangerous situation 1.00

00:51:31.820 where they will go to other people

00:51:34.220 and you get an island of misfit toys.

00:51:37.360 Now, most of the time, these are just sad train spotters.

00:51:42.360 But in other cases, social dynamics there

00:51:45.480 create a toxic environment that makes all of them or many of them into radicals i talked to

00:51:54.240 an imam leader who was a student um he now runs several mosques in greensboro north carolina

00:52:00.180 who was a student with college jake muhammad and um he openly said he loved him he was um

00:52:10.160 But he thought that this political activity was a distraction, right, that they were constantly focused on trying to have a political outcome rather than getting people to really understand and know Islam.

00:52:26.920 Now, that's his reflection five, 10 years after 9-11.

00:52:32.200 But I thought it was fascinating.

00:52:34.020 What I was going to ask you, Richard, is we've talked about the ideology. These people want to start a war with the United States. But you're describing the mastermind, KSM. And it sounds like a bit of a loser.

00:52:50.740 you've got Osama bin Laden over there in Afghanistan how do these people I mean you're not 0.97

00:52:58.880 when I think about an organization that's capable of hijacking four planes flying them into buildings

00:53:06.580 which is as I understand not particularly easy thing to do if you haven't been a pilot for many

00:53:10.620 many years how do you get this bunch of misfit toys committing probably the greatest terrorist 0.86

00:53:19.960 atrocity in human history with a high level of sophistication and for context Khalid Sheikh 0.64

00:53:26.020 Mohammed's nickname was KFC because of his predilection for it and he was overweight over 0.77

00:53:30.800 200 pounds so it's not like he was a physical specimen either well he becomes fatter living in 0.94

00:53:36.200 Pakistan yeah right in the 90s he was known as the brain his nickname KFC is after uh 9-11 0.51

00:53:43.140 so he's smart uh yes uh and look if he had there had been a path to citizenship for him and his

00:53:51.020 family in kuwait we may never have heard of him right he he may have become an engineer in the

00:53:55.820 oil fields or done something else uh we will never know however um to get to your question

00:54:01.780 people become terrorists because it solves an important problem in their life

00:54:09.480 either meaning or isolation they're trying to solve for social isolation or they're trying

00:54:16.680 to solve for meaning for purpose terrorism gives you a purpose but to carry out that purpose you

00:54:26.740 need money um because it's not easy to get people into you gotta get visas to you gotta recruit

00:54:34.620 people you have to get visas to get them to the united states you have to get them in the pilots

00:54:39.400 school they need to live somewhere they need to eat something any clothes etc so you need

00:54:45.400 venture capital right bin laden had a lot of that

00:54:49.720 um and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried to sell many different plans to bin laden he gets to meet bin

00:55:01.760 laden by playing on his family connection to Ramzi Yusuf who bin laden admired and who had

00:55:08.520 carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bomb. So once he forges a connection with bin Laden and

00:55:14.320 his inner circle, he is pitching various plans. And the plans are refined repeatedly. 0.78

00:55:22.260 So the earlier plans were simultaneously hijacking eight aircraft, four on the West Coast and four

00:55:28.540 on the East Coast with targets in San Francisco and Los Angeles and so on. They prune that out

00:55:35.740 of the plan is just too operationally difficult four is when they think the largest number of

00:55:42.920 planes they can hijack without a u.s response but it's it's very much like i hate to keep going back

00:55:51.420 to the hollywood comparison but it's very much like an independent producer with a very promising

00:55:56.180 script having to negotiate with a studio for financing and distribution right so he needed

00:56:03.560 al-Qaeda's money. He needed al-Qaeda's ability to forge documents and to move people 0.56

00:56:11.420 in secure ways. He needed secure communication. He needed a lot of resources beyond money. 0.81

00:56:19.860 And to do that, he had to compromise with them. And they unfortunately made the plan

00:56:24.840 far more practical. But bin Laden was just desperate for his war. In his mind,

00:56:32.220 and this is in his writings this is not a theory of mine uh they had defeated the soviets even

00:56:38.820 though in reality the jihadis had virtually no impact on the soviets except for you can maybe

00:56:46.060 give them two battles the pivotal roles in two battles maybe um but in binlan's mind they

00:56:52.980 driven out the soviets they'd beaten one superpower they wanted to beat the other

00:56:56.680 they thought if they could force the united states to come to the mountains afghanistan to meet them

00:57:01.400 that they would crush them and that didn't happen when the u.s did deploy to afghanistan

00:57:08.600 um the military studies this of course they look at the number of times how many minutes

00:57:16.040 a firefight lasts uh and those times got shorter and shorter because the u.s got increasingly

00:57:23.680 efficient at killing them. And then there is a major battle in 2002 or 2003, Shemali Plains,

00:57:31.540 it's called, in which they fielded hundreds, maybe close to a thousand fighters against a U.S. unit,

00:57:41.580 a much, much smaller U.S. unit, and were utterly defeated and never tried a mass battle again.

00:57:47.400 so um this fantasy of bin laden said if we can force them to come and fight in afghanistan we

00:57:54.580 can beat them like we beat the soviets it's just probably false but in 90 before 9 11 of course

00:58:00.000 bin laden had no way of knowing that he thought if anything the americans were softer and easier to

00:58:04.500 beat um and and what was the logistics of the operation richard tell us how how do these just

00:58:11.660 random guys from the middle east get to the point where they know how to fly a plane they know how

00:58:17.100 to hijack a plane? How do they hijack a plane? Tell us the mechanics. Okay, so why are so many

00:58:23.980 of the 19 hijackers Saudis? It doesn't mean the Saudis hate us. It means that there was a special

00:58:30.840 program that the State Department had launched due to political pressure to speed up the visas

00:58:38.680 for Saudi citizens. So, for example, if you are Britain or France in this time period,

00:58:45.740 you had visa waiver access into the united states you didn't need a visa at all right you just say

00:58:51.120 here it is see see the passport let me in and um the saudis wanted that but of course that was

00:59:02.020 never going to happen because in the 90s the risk of people from saudi was well known um and from

00:59:11.280 that region in general. It wasn't an anti-Saudi bias. It's just an awareness. Look, there's the

00:59:19.060 same reason why, you know, there are certain geographies that present geopolitical risk,

00:59:25.340 let's say, that say France, Germany, Britain, Denmark don't, right? So to compromise with the

00:59:32.780 Saudis, they created Visa Express, which was a very quick system for getting a US visa.

00:59:41.280 so for the saudis it was a matter of prestige they wanted to be treated both the europeans

00:59:46.640 and australians uh and this was the compromise as a result the people who became the hijackers

00:59:54.460 were able to get to take advantage of this program if this program had been offered in

01:00:00.000 qatar instead of saudi arabia 19 of the hijackers would have been from qatar not saudi right so they

01:00:06.480 had studied our system, found a weak point, took advantage of it. How did they select the airports

01:00:12.600 where the planes were going to leave? They looked at the FAA's website and found the airports with

01:00:19.540 the largest number of security violations. They knew that Logan Airport in Boston, for example,

01:00:24.400 was run by a political appointee who had previously been the chauffeur for the governor

01:00:29.360 of Massachusetts. So they thought they picked airports, Dulles Airport in Washington, for

01:00:35.700 example was another where there were a long history of documented security lapses so they

01:00:41.580 used u.s government data publicly available in a free society it's how we work to plot where to

01:00:48.160 hijack which planes to hijack they needed planes that were going to travel the full length of the

01:00:55.060 continent of the united states because they would have the most tons of fuel on board and therefore

01:00:59.740 have the greatest explosive capacity so you wanted um aircraft that were fully loaded

01:01:07.260 that were coming from airports that were had weak security procedures and the ringleader 0.94

01:01:12.560 muhammad ought to flow out of a small airport in maine and then changed planes to join a flight

01:01:19.000 i believe out of logan i'm my memories but he's on that uh because they also thought that that

01:01:24.700 flight, uh, would be easier for them to get into the system. Uh, and the woman who gave him his

01:01:33.940 ticket testified that later that she thought he was a terrorist, but didn't want to discriminate

01:01:39.760 against him or be unwelcoming. So they knew this factor as well. They took advantage of existing

01:01:45.800 American weaknesses to exploit a system that they wanted to destroy.

01:01:52.440 and didn't they also classify the terrorists into which ones were going to be

01:01:59.560 the ones flying and which ones were going to be the muscle right not all of them went to

01:02:04.920 pilot school very few did so there was at least two muscle on the plane they were meant to control

01:02:11.980 the passengers and then there was a pilot and a co-pilot who had received some pilot training

01:02:19.120 The reason why we have so much transponder data is it took them a long time to figure out how to turn off the transponder.

01:02:25.920 Their training wasn't that good. They didn't know what all of the controls did on the aircraft.

01:02:48.220 And who's trying to call me here?

01:02:56.720 American 11, are you trying to call?

01:02:58.720 Nobody moves. Everything is okay.

01:03:01.720 If you try to make any move,

01:03:03.720 you'll injure yourself and the airplane.

01:03:06.220 Let's be quiet.

01:03:07.720 That's good, I think you reference us as moves.

01:03:11.720 Nobody moves, please.

01:03:13.720 We're going back to the airport. 1.00

01:03:15.720 Don't try to make any stupid moves. 1.00

01:03:18.720 United 1523, did you hear your company? 1.00

01:03:20.720 Did you hear some interference when the break was here

01:03:22.720 a couple of minutes ago, screaming?

01:03:24.720 Yes, I did, 787, and we couldn't tell what it was either.

01:03:28.720 United 93, Cleveland, if you hear the sound right then.

01:03:30.720 Police, I'm here.

01:03:32.720 Captain, please sit down.

01:03:34.720 Keep remaining sitting.

01:03:35.720 We have a power board.

01:03:37.720 So, it's there.

01:03:39.720 Hi, here's the captain.

01:03:40.720 I would like to remain seated.

01:03:42.720 But also, there was a culture of casualness among security.

01:03:53.220 Most cockpits were not locked.

01:03:55.720 And on the case of Flight 93, the airline, United Airlines, actually required in its internal regulations that the keys for the cockpit door be kept in an unlockable cabinet right next to the cockpit door.

01:04:11.440 so the stewardess could just this cabinet grab the keys and and get into the cockpit

01:04:16.140 to uh to deliver coffee or whatever um one thing most people may not understand at this time period

01:04:23.560 right um the flight attendants would be going in and out of the cockpit pretty routinely um

01:04:31.520 not just bringing meals and coffee but depending on the rules set by the captain

01:04:36.940 uh in this time period you pilots could smoke in the cockpit and so one or more of the flight

01:04:44.800 attendants might pop into the cockpit on a long flight to catch a smoke if the captain allowed

01:04:50.760 smoking in the cockpit in that time period union rules and aviation rules allowed them to do that

01:04:56.020 so they were constantly moving in and out of the cockpit earlier um cockpits used to be wide open

01:05:02.360 and in fact children rounded up once the plane had leveled off and brought into the cockpit to

01:05:08.040 meet the pilot and say hi and and look out the pilot's window right and so it was a that now

01:05:14.140 i'm describing the 70s and 80s earlier time and some airlines give out little children's wings

01:05:19.900 where after they visited the cockpit they would pin it on their shirt and you know it was it was

01:05:24.240 marketing but it was you know a great life experience for certain kids at a certain time

01:05:28.040 period. So it was still fairly casual like that. And the captain would come out of the cockpit

01:05:34.660 from time to time in the 90s and sometimes talk to the passengers in first class or

01:05:40.680 get something out of his bag or what have you. So it wasn't a hardened place. And so it was,

01:05:49.540 even though there had been hijacking since the late 1960s in the United States and the Middle

01:05:54.220 East and in Europe, they really hadn't changed the system from this much more casual, trusting

01:06:02.500 system that emerged in the 50s and 60s. And Richard, didn't they use small blades,

01:06:10.260 which were allowed by airports and airport security to actually take over the planes

01:06:16.800 once they were airborne oh so this is very tricky right so if you look at the transcripts

01:06:25.500 of the phone calls from the passengers they describe a range of weapons um they're very

01:06:33.300 unclear we don't know how long the blades were um a chemical weapon is described by one of them

01:06:40.340 um but that may have been a bluff they they apparently showed a fake device

01:06:48.020 uh that was a bomb or a chemical weapon on one of the flights the reason why the news coverage

01:06:54.320 repeatedly said box cutters is because box cutters which have a blade about this size

01:07:01.380 sitting in a metal tube literally for opening boxes were specifically permitted to be brought

01:07:08.360 on the planes. And so the FAA, to shield itself, said they used box cutters. We don't actually know

01:07:16.680 the box cutters, but they used blades of some kind. But given the laxness of airport security

01:07:24.400 and the airports they chose, and especially Logan, these could be much longer blades.

01:07:28.820 um and they were able to severely wound large angry adult american men

01:07:39.080 uh so the blade would have to be bigger than a box cutter um we just the the answer is we just

01:07:47.820 don't know but the box cutter thing was a bureaucratic way to safeguard and silo itself

01:07:54.840 the bureaucracy immediately shifted into CYA

01:07:57.660 from the afternoon of the attacks onward.

01:08:03.120 Richard? No, go ahead.

01:08:05.480 I was going to say, and obviously,

01:08:08.300 probably doesn't need to be said,

01:08:09.920 but they also had the element of surprise

01:08:11.820 once they were on the plane.

01:08:14.640 Yes.

01:08:16.180 There had been a long period, decades, in fact,

01:08:19.420 since there had been hijackings in the United States.

01:08:22.140 So no one was expecting it.

01:08:24.140 Before we move on, you also mentioned they'd rehearsed and practiced this whole thing. What do we know about that?

01:08:33.080 So there is, it's still classified, but there is, but I have a copy. I probably should have brought it.

01:08:40.600 So the FBI put together a complete timeline based on all of the movements of the hijackers from the moment they arrived in the United States to the moment they died, right?

01:08:57.500 And to do that, they put together large amounts of data, ATM receipts, restaurant receipts, witnesses, accounts, security cameras.

01:09:09.900 It's an incredible document, right?

01:09:12.880 Frankly, I almost thought about writing a book just about that.

01:09:15.540 um and in that uh they would um there was a number of they did scenario role playing

01:09:23.880 where um the guys who would be the muscle practiced against the other guys if they

01:09:29.240 were unruly passengers how would you fight if they tackled you at the waist or if they grabbed

01:09:33.400 you from behind and here's how you would throw them over your head and so on and so on right

01:09:37.480 um the reports that muhammad atta had um planned the plan rehearsed in iraq are

01:09:50.000 i think largely an internet rumor it is the case that the iraqis had a boeing 707 that they used

01:09:58.360 to train other terrorist groups uh before 9 11 um the idea of flying planes into buildings goes back

01:10:06.700 to, um, a document out of Iran in 1987, um, to the idea had been floating around in jihadi circles

01:10:14.420 for a while, but it does not appear that the 19 of the September 11th, 19 hijackers on September

01:10:21.060 11th rehearsed in Iraq. So any internet rumor to the side, there's no evidence for that. Be

01:10:27.560 fascinating if we're true. There's no evidence for that, but they did rehearse in the United States

01:10:32.400 in various hotel rooms

01:10:34.520 and in gyms

01:10:35.840 defending themselves

01:10:38.000 and they also practiced

01:10:40.360 what they would do

01:10:42.400 how they would take

01:10:44.820 once they had the cockpit

01:10:46.180 what they would do with the aircraft

01:10:48.240 how they would level it off and so on

01:10:50.080 and they also had quizzes, written quizzes

01:10:52.720 for each other as well

01:10:53.980 And how did they

01:10:56.880 practice the actual

01:10:58.940 flying element? Did they use

01:11:00.680 flight simulators or

01:11:01.940 There were flights in the tankers. Absolutely. And they did go to these flight schools where chillingly they said they didn't need to learn how to take off or land. They just needed to know how to operate the aircraft in the air.

01:11:17.660 it's i mean it's just some of the stuff i think particularly for our younger audience

01:11:26.220 when you talk about airport security or being able to smoke in the cockpit or all of this stuff

01:11:31.640 it must be very hard to believe and the reason is and coming on to to the consequences and the

01:11:37.320 aftermath is that i francis and i often talk about this where we are both in our early 40s

01:11:44.700 and we have a lot of guys in their 20s that work for us and we always talk about the fact that we

01:11:51.240 we think that nobody that generation has any idea how different the world was in the late 1990s

01:11:58.760 and i think 9-11 and then the financial crash are the two reasons for that what was the impact

01:12:06.600 and the response and the aftermath we also don't understand the world that the people in their 20s

01:12:13.240 see because when we see the same reality they see we're seeing it through the lens of 20 years of

01:12:19.480 experience and we may be putting things into the wrong intellectual categories right and they're

01:12:26.760 able to see it much more originally right so this is always the generational problem when you talk

01:12:33.520 to people in their 70s and 80s and these world war ii comparisons because they're the children

01:12:38.760 of World War II survivors in their conversation as a live thing, the way 9-11 is for us, right?

01:12:46.900 So the years of experience are a tool for insight, but they're also a tool for missing things,

01:12:55.020 right? And so even when someone who's 20, someone who's 40, someone who's 60 is looking at the exact

01:13:03.240 same object, they may see very different things. And it's not because the young people are dumb 0.98

01:13:09.020 or the old people. Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. That's not, I certainly wasn't saying that 0.99

01:13:13.060 they're dumb. This is human nature. Yeah, of course. What I was getting at is the fact that 0.99

01:13:21.260 the world changed very profoundly, and it seems to me permanently and irreversibly after 9-11.

01:13:30.200 What was the immediate reaction and the immediate aftermath of this terrorist attack?

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01:14:33.060 The most extraordinary thing happened in America after 9-11.

01:14:37.880 And this is going to be very hard for the people who didn't live through it to remember, to believe, but it's true.

01:14:46.940 The best way to show this is to tell you a quick story.

01:14:51.740 um my father and mother were on the west coast of the united states um to do a book signing for my

01:15:01.540 father and all flights were canceled all flights were grounded on 9-11 and didn't resume for a long

01:15:06.340 time my father had the idea to rent a car and drive back home to upstate new york

01:15:12.980 what is that about five and a half thousand kilometers six retail miles right uh and it

01:15:21.160 take days because they thought all rental cars are going to get booked up we should grab it

01:15:26.520 while we can and so they began this drive across the united states in the hours after september

01:15:35.000 and on lonely roads in wyoming he saw these signs over and over again handmade signs i love new york

01:15:44.440 that had been hastily put together and put up.

01:15:52.000 Wyoming is a deeply red state.

01:15:55.440 It does not surprise me when someone from Wyoming says,

01:15:58.240 I never want to visit Manhattan or the city of New York.

01:16:01.840 But yeah, we saw the signs.

01:16:04.480 And in the highway overpasses in northern Virginia,

01:16:09.520 there were bedsheets with signs written, you know,

01:16:12.380 messages written on them hanging over the side where you could as you went down the superhighway

01:16:17.920 read them messages of support and love um an idea that politics should be put aside

01:16:26.120 the country really came together even though there were jet for the jet fighter crowd at least in new

01:16:33.420 york and washington jet fighters roaring overhead um there was this idea that the country should

01:16:40.200 unify um political speech moderated there was a real coming together and it everyone was afraid

01:16:50.280 it wouldn't last and of course it couldn't and it didn't but it lasted far longer than you would

01:16:55.660 think and a lot of americans discovered that they had more in common with each other than they

01:17:03.640 realized and even families split aside by politics these are just anecdotal stories i don't have any

01:17:11.080 statistical data but people reconnected and forgave each other and it was as horrible as

01:17:18.460 the loss of 3 000 people was um the cultural impact was not what commentators say today of

01:17:30.260 of fear and anger that was part of it it was a desire to to right the wrongs

01:17:38.100 and when bush president bush w bush said in the crater that they were still digging out

01:17:48.260 at 9 11 the world trade center crater he grabbed a bullhorn from a construction worker

01:17:55.380 and he says i hear you and the rest of the world is going to hear from you very soon

01:18:00.260 I want you all to know that America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here,

01:18:26.800 for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn.

01:18:32.520 This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut

01:18:38.120 as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.

01:18:45.520 I can hear you.

01:18:47.140 i can hear you the rest of the world hears you and the people

01:18:58.120 and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon

01:19:06.860 and what the president didn't disclose is the cia paramilitary were already on their way

01:19:29.260 to afghanistan and they were reconnecting with the northern alliance who they had funded in

01:19:34.840 the 80s remember separate from the jihadis the arab buyers and you know there were personal

01:19:41.880 relationships and um they began setting up listing posts and and forward advance areas

01:19:50.620 and coordinating with horse uh soldiers uh and carrying out a time and within a few weeks

01:19:58.360 carrying out attacks against the Taliban and against al-Qaeda. So the desire to eliminate

01:20:06.600 al-Qaeda root and branch was definitely there. But, and maybe there's other data that I'm not

01:20:13.360 aware of, but I did not, there's not any evidence that I can see that there was a profound hatred

01:20:19.080 of Muslims in the United States. At least after 9-11, the idea of America being a profoundly

01:20:26.940 racist country, just wasn't there. In fact, people experienced the opposite. Unity,

01:20:34.780 reconnection, and incredible resolve to kill those who killed us.

01:20:42.420 And do you think that reaction is exactly what bin Laden wanted?

01:20:47.860 no uh if you read what i mean i can't read his mind and he's dead but if you read his documents

01:20:57.380 the things he wrote and the things he said he thought that uh america was addicted to coca-cola

01:21:04.420 mcdonald's and it was weak that he could humiliate it as soon as he managed to get

01:21:10.820 u.s forces on the ground in afghanistan where they could fight them uh that they would defeat them

01:21:16.820 humiliate them and destroy america's superpower status and triumph over them

01:21:22.660 he thought he was pushing on a weak decadent society and he had many western academics he

01:21:32.460 could cite to support that mistaken view but in fact that is not western society

01:21:39.600 it is not a society of decline it is a society in which it's thinking elite and some of its

01:21:47.880 leadership have lost confidence in it but below the elite level it is still a high functioning

01:21:55.000 confident society that invents new things that adapts quickly to changes

01:22:01.000 and that is remarkably understanding for people with people different from themselves

01:22:06.760 I offered when I was one of the times in which I was in Iraq offered to take my Kurdish translator

01:22:15.700 and his family to dinner he says oh let's have dinner at our home and so after eating dinner

01:22:21.700 in their home three or four times like no let's let's pick the most expensive restaurant and let's

01:22:25.520 go there which turned out to be a Chinese place and as we sit down they are mystified by the menu

01:22:32.080 Even though the place was a kilometer from their home, they had never been there.

01:22:36.720 And he looks at me and says, why would you eat other people's food?

01:22:44.620 Western society is the opposite.

01:22:47.120 It's curiosity and openness to other people's food, words, ideas, perspectives.

01:22:54.520 And I don't think bin Laden was expecting the dynamism, the resolve, the courage, innovation that Western society, American society in particular, was still able to muster and develop and deploy with such a wall.

01:23:12.880 And Richard, when you look and you watch the footage from that day, it's so shocking.

01:23:19.960 It is.

01:23:20.560 Whilst I was researching for this interview, I was watching documentaries, and it was so horrific just watching what was happening.

01:23:29.860 I didn't realize the emotional effect they would have on me 25 years on.

01:23:35.760 It must have created such, in many ways, such a deep psychological scar in the American psyche.

01:23:42.420 Take two. Take two and two. One.

01:23:45.560 This is as close as we can get to the base of the World Trade Center.

01:23:48.260 You can see the firemen assembled here, the police officers, FBI agents, and you can see the two towers, a huge explosion now, raining debris on all of us.

01:23:58.140 We better get out of the way!

01:24:14.060 They shot them!

01:24:18.260 Oh my god

01:24:48.260 I'm just tired, I'm tired, I'm just tired, I'm just tired, I'm just tired, I'm just tired.

01:24:58.260 Alright, I don't have a, I don't have a radio about to talk.

01:25:04.260 Hey Pete, the North Tower, the North Tower is waiting.

01:25:10.260 Oh my god, there it goes!

01:25:16.260 Hwangi!

01:25:32.780 Hwangi!

01:25:34.860 Hwangi!

01:25:39.780 Virgil!

01:25:43.920 Marisha, my girl is crying.

01:25:46.260 In Washington, there is a large fire at the Pentagon, the Pentagon has been evacuated,

01:26:07.620 and there you can see perhaps the second tower, the front tower, the top portion of which

01:26:12.440 is collapsing.

01:26:14.440 good lord

01:26:16.540 there are no words

01:26:23.440 yeah i was watching a documentary on the united 93

01:26:27.860 recently and i was surprised i was transported right back in time i was

01:26:34.080 immediately angry um for these hijackers who for their own political goals

01:26:42.200 hijacked the lives of perfectly decent ordinary people and killed them for no reason

01:26:50.040 and it just the injustice of that anger of that it put it took me right back in time and i

01:26:59.240 understand why major media has been afraid especially in the wake of 9-11 the first

01:27:03.620 five or ten years they didn't reshow those videos very often and only and not for long and they

01:27:09.260 didn't do documentaries and specials for five or ten years and they were afraid of arousing the

01:27:18.120 great angry dragon that is a u.s an american sense of righteousness and anger um for the sheer

01:27:30.040 barbarity and how unnecessary it was um you know we all understand that as the firemen go into the

01:27:39.440 burning building to save the children some firemen may die we understand that when troops

01:27:43.720 some may die but the loss of life for a political drama in your head completely untethered from

01:27:52.720 reality coming from a completely alien intellectual ecosystem it's just beyond

01:28:01.420 beyond understanding for most americans the number one question that came up in google searches

01:28:07.340 you know weeks after 9-11 is why do they hate us like we don't we don't even know who you are

01:28:13.980 why do you hate us and it took americans a long time and many don't understand this yet

01:28:20.380 they didn't understand us and come to hate us they have a very rudimentary idea of who we are

01:28:30.420 it it was they had an ideological vision in their head about what will create

01:28:39.480 um the final showdown between themselves and the americans in the mountains afghanistan

01:28:45.240 And that was a moment they devoutly wanted to get to. And nothing else mattered toward achieving

01:28:52.840 that bizarre goal. And I should probably say a word here about al-Qaeda's 0.98

01:29:00.200 bin Laden's statement to Americans about Israel and Gaza and all this. That is pure propaganda.

01:29:07.820 And I took a look at every al-Qaeda statement and every bin Laden statement before al-Qaeda existed. 0.51

01:29:16.860 The references to Palestine, Gaza, Israel, the West Bank, you can count on one, maybe two hands in a list of nations.

01:29:27.780 It's never singled out. It's never been a focus.

01:29:30.340 then that is one message to americans in which he is so clearly um reiterating

01:29:40.180 left uh left-wing academics in in western europe in the united states uh and trying to use this

01:29:48.640 message to divide it's it's just enemy propaganda right it's never an animating purpose um you know

01:29:58.480 So fun fact, some of the 9-11 hijackers had been Christian converts into Muslim Islam.

01:30:05.780 One, Zayed Al Jara, I believe his name is, tried to leave the plot.

01:30:10.740 His Lebanese girlfriend, who was still Christian, wanted to get married and have him start a new life. 0.98

01:30:20.460 And why don't you get away from these crazy people? 0.88

01:30:22.760 and so he left and muhammad atta had to go after him and threaten him to get him to rejoin the

01:30:30.400 hijacking group right uh so the real reasons have nothing to do with bin laden's statements about

01:30:39.660 uh and if you look at zayat al-jarra he says nothing positively nothing about gaza or west

01:30:46.620 Bank or the Palestinians.

01:30:49.040 Not a single word.

01:30:51.360 So the idea that this was an animating principle of theirs is just not the case.

01:30:56.360 There's a book by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, which has been translated into English.

01:31:01.440 He's the number two person .

01:31:07.200 And the book is called Knights Under the Prophet's Banner.

01:31:11.060 I think you can read it online in English for free.

01:31:13.640 translated by the library of congress from arabic and it's very revealing as to what gets what they

01:31:20.600 get into their animating principles but again nothing about gaza uh the their argument against

01:31:27.480 the united states is in knights under the prophet's banner and in several other texts is very simple

01:31:33.800 they think the united states is supporting the arab dictatorships that they suffer under now

01:31:40.200 and so they blame the united states for supporting dictators in uh or a ruling class in saudi arabia

01:31:49.760 and egypt and other places that's it it's not a detailed critique of american society

01:31:55.780 this is not the democratic socialists uh right or the christian socialists in western europe right

01:32:02.760 this is not a detailed critique of the market economy or u.s foreign policy or anything like

01:32:08.140 that. It is a desire to create a new civilization in the Arabic-speaking world, organized along

01:32:17.720 certain eccentric religious ideas, which you can find, and they've written them down,

01:32:24.820 In the Shade of the Quran is one, Milestones, both by Sayyid Qutb. You can find it under

01:32:30.080 Knights of the Prophet's Banner. Go read their literature if you want to understand

01:32:33.960 what drives them. It's not even Islam. I mean, Islam's at the surface, but you dig into their 0.79

01:32:41.880 ideology, it's deeply influenced by Karl Marx and by Vladimir Lenin. This is a fusion of Leninism

01:32:51.960 and Islamism, right, or and Islam. And if you read their works, it becomes immediately clear. 0.94

01:32:59.900 that is the basis of their thinking it's not a particular aspect of u.s or western foreign policy

01:33:09.740 and one of the things that really impacted me when i was watching these documentaries is

01:33:18.480 the recordings from the people on board the planes to their families saying goodbye to them for the

01:33:26.320 last time. And just the way that a lot of these people just held it together and were just very

01:33:34.600 calm and were just telling their family members how much they loved them. There's no words to

01:33:44.380 describe it, really. I mean, you can try, but it's utterly, it's ultimately futile.

01:33:56.320 come to plane. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very

01:34:01.080 much, and I'm so sorry, babe. I don't know what to say. There's three guys that have

01:34:07.460 had that to plane. I'm trying to be calm. We're turned around, and I've heard that there's

01:34:12.180 planes that have been thrown into the World Trade Center. I hope to be able to see your

01:34:17.520 face again, baby. I love you. Bye-bye.

01:34:24.060 Elsa, it's Lynn. I only have a minute. I'm on United 93, and it's been hijacked by terrorists

01:34:31.680 who say they have a bomb. Apparently, they have flown a couple of planes into the World

01:34:36.260 Trade Center already, and it looks like they're going to take this one down as well. Mostly,

01:34:40.120 I just wanted to say I love you, and I'm going to miss you, and please give my love to love you, and mostly I just love you, and I just wanted to tell you that.

01:34:56.880 I don't know if I'm going to be innocent to tell you that I don't or not.

01:35:02.760 My stuff is in the safe.

01:35:05.500 The safe is in my closet in my bedroom.

01:35:09.580 The combination is you push T for clear and then 0913.

01:35:14.120 And then it should, and maybe pound, and then it should unlock.

01:35:20.180 I love you, and I hope I can talk to you soon.

01:35:23.140 Bye.

01:35:23.500 Yeah, one of the passengers on the United 93

01:35:51.300 is talking to his wife and he says he has to go because he's part of the plan to retake the plane

01:35:58.740 she says do you want to talk to the children he says i'll talk to them tonight after we land the

01:36:05.420 plane absolute confidence their plan was going to succeed um but he had to project that confidence

01:36:14.700 because that was those are the last words by which she was going to know him

01:36:21.300 and it was going to define who he was in the mind of his wife

01:36:26.100 and, more importantly, in the minds of his children for the rest of their days.

01:36:31.620 He knew his chance of living was slimy.

01:36:36.840 But he had to project that confidence.

01:36:39.940 He had to be a pillar of strength and not rebuild his inner turmoil

01:36:46.980 because he had to steel himself to take action,

01:36:51.300 But he also had to define himself in the minds of those he loved.

01:36:56.980 And there are so many calls like that.

01:36:59.780 You're absolutely right, Francis.

01:37:00.980 It's heartbreaking.

01:37:03.540 And if you read those transcripts, you end up admiring those so-called people.

01:37:10.420 The bravery they could summon to be calm and collected,

01:37:15.460 or appear to calm and collected in the face of the most extreme circumstances.

01:37:20.560 it's astonishing and as well it's obviously those people but it's also the emergency services

01:37:28.520 the ambulance men the police officers the fire officers just the fact that these people ran into

01:37:37.520 a burning building whether it was the towers whether it was the pentagon when everybody

01:37:43.100 else was running away i mean it's heroism of the highest order

01:37:48.340 i talked to donald rumsfeld a few weeks after 9 11 he was the secretary of defense

01:37:56.180 and he mentioned that he had safely gotten out of his office and how many people had died on

01:38:02.560 the pentagon and as he's talking he's moving his hands around and finally i said show me your hands

01:38:09.620 and he holds them up like this and I can see burns and he said oh yeah I was helping

01:38:16.800 remove the rubble before security dragged me away and I've burned my hands

01:38:22.700 think about that cabinet officers the United States joined everyone else at the Pentagon

01:38:29.360 in trying to dig out the rubble to save people fighting for their lives buried alive

01:38:36.380 in hot, burning bricks, twisted metal.

01:38:44.780 And the firemen who not only went in

01:38:49.020 to try to put out the fire in the World Trade Center

01:38:51.960 came back out to exchange their oxygen tubes

01:38:58.040 and then turned around and went back in.

01:39:02.080 that little moment of screwing in the fresh air readjusting your mask wiping some sweat off the

01:39:11.160 brow and turning around and going back in that's bravery turning around to go back into danger

01:39:18.980 to help others it's these little moments these little snapshots that define this day for me

01:39:26.600 I think you suddenly realize that your country is crowded with heroes wearing ordinary faces.

01:39:36.140 and that's such a profound point because in particularly nowadays in our culture the people

01:39:46.200 who we celebrate i mean it's it's pretty much tried to say but really shouldn't be celebrated

01:39:53.200 the people whose words we listen to you think do you have anything of value to say but you look at

01:39:58.840 the people who are actual actual heroes it's the people who are ordinary men and women

01:40:05.400 the firefighters the fire officers but even the office workers some of the stories of the office

01:40:11.360 workers on that day are just remarkable just the people turning around going to make sure that

01:40:19.580 every single person is out from their particular office making sure that the every the corridors

01:40:26.800 are clear and sometimes these people just they simply didn't make it out yes

01:40:32.180 yeah i mean on 9 11 i was working for the wall street journal in brussels and my brother brendan

01:40:41.960 was working for the wall street journal in new york and my brother and i would talk multiple times a

01:40:50.980 day. And like everybody else, all the phone lines were jammed. Everyone was trying to

01:41:04.760 reassure themselves that their family members were alive. And the journal was in the World

01:41:11.880 financial center i believe at that time right beside the twin towers and um

01:41:21.240 brandon was his phone and

01:41:27.320 we couldn't reach him but we had the journal we have these internal uh communications and then

01:41:34.600 they begin evacuating the building and they're reassembling the team i'm moving it by ferry to

01:41:40.680 well ultimately i think they went to princeton new jersey but we were going to have to put out

01:41:45.560 the wall street journal that day from overseas new york was shut down and they're counting heads

01:41:51.400 thousands of heads and the list of missing wall street journal people gets smaller and smaller

01:42:00.840 it's first it's hundreds and it's dozens and finally it's down to eight missing people and

01:42:08.200 my brother is still on that list.

01:42:12.540 And as I'm working with my colleagues in Europe and Asia

01:42:16.780 to put out the paper that day,

01:42:20.660 because New York was shut down,

01:42:22.320 we had to take over everything.

01:42:24.460 I was thinking to myself,

01:42:26.660 is this, have I already had the last conversation with my brother?

01:42:32.220 and i wish i could have said so many things that i hadn't said because i was thoughtless

01:42:42.620 or just not thinking about the gravity of the situation

01:42:46.640 and we end up working until three or four in the morning brussels time

01:42:54.820 and um we're editing the official view of the paper in the editorial

01:43:02.260 and i'm about to go home and go to bed that speech comes through

01:43:11.480 and it's marked with my brother's name and i'm like oh my gosh brendan is that you

01:43:18.280 and he did not follow the evacuation

01:43:22.860 with the other Wall Street Journal staff.

01:43:29.080 He had, usually he would take the 830 subway

01:43:33.100 into lower Manhattan.

01:43:35.820 And so he would have been inside the World Trade Center

01:43:39.520 looking to go up the bridge

01:43:42.140 and across to the World Financial Center.

01:43:45.760 But as he was about to get on the train

01:43:48.040 the platform in brooklyn he looked down and saw three spots of blood on his shirt

01:43:53.720 and he went home to change his shirt and he got on the 845 subway which turned out to be

01:43:59.960 one of the last into lower manhattan that day and he saw it all he saw the second plane

01:44:08.520 he saw people jumping or falling from the towers he was covered in the white dust as the

01:44:17.400 buildings collapsed and he walked across the brooklyn bridge covered in sweat dust

01:44:24.520 looking a bit like a ghost when he runs into a journal colleague who has also covered and who

01:44:30.760 said to him come with me brendan we're going to bob's house we're going to put out the paper from

01:44:35.640 there and so you've never made any official counts he wasn't showing up in the internal system

01:44:41.320 him because Bob's house wasn't part of it. Robert L. Hartley, the editor-in-chief of

01:44:46.660 the Wall Street Journal and the editor of the editorial page. And he responds, yeah,

01:45:04.260 of course it's me. And then I'm desperate to know how he survived and what happened.

01:45:08.340 and whether he's talked to any family members,

01:45:10.480 no one knew whether he was alive or not.

01:45:13.980 And many, many people had that same experience that day.

01:45:19.860 Some didn't end as happily as I'd mind it.

01:45:26.340 But this sudden erasure of lives for a political cause

01:45:31.480 is so morally wrong.

01:45:35.480 why people think politics in their head justify harmed other people always amazes me

01:45:43.640 yes richard uh that is a very worthwhile observation um that applies i think more

01:45:53.500 broadly to than just this particular incident um we'll we're going to uh continue the conversation

01:46:00.900 with our supporters on Substack, but before we do, what do you think is the one thing that people

01:46:05.680 don't talk enough about in relation to 9-11 that they really should?

01:46:13.180 Wow, so many things I could say to that. One is to realize that, one, terrorism is not an

01:46:22.240 Islamic creation. Terrorism was invented in the 1830s by a group of Russian radicals called the 0.58

01:46:29.540 Novemberists and the anarchists around them. This had been throughout the 19th century a technique 0.96

01:46:37.280 that the Germans learned from the Russians. In 1848, we see a lot of what we would describe

01:46:44.640 today as terrorist attacks. So the idea that this is some defect in Islam, no, no, it's something

01:46:50.740 the Muslim world learned from the Russians and the Germans. Terrorism is not a natural feature

01:46:59.460 in Islam. That's one thing. Second thing is people joined terrorist groups can be radicalized

01:47:08.560 by campus life like College Fik Muhammad. And we need to pay much more attention to how college

01:47:16.340 life structures the souls of the students who pass through it in order to reduce this conversion to

01:47:23.420 radicalism. We can never eliminate it, but we can sure reduce it. And we're not really doing anything

01:47:27.900 serious about that. Third, how social isolation makes a lot of terrorism possible by offering

01:47:39.060 it an endless supply of recruits. Muhammad Atta, who was the operational commander of the 9-11

01:47:46.140 attacks, was brought to Hamburg, Germany, who studied the Harburg Technical School.

01:47:54.440 and he had a host family of social democrats uh or convicted you know just have deep convictions

01:48:05.300 or progressive mind view they thought they were building a stronger relationship between

01:48:11.620 the west germany in particular and egypt by hosting him in their home and they had no skills

01:48:18.920 to identify that because he had gone through all boys schooling he found it very hard to deal with

01:48:26.160 german teenagers girls of his age because he had no social skills to deal with it and that as he

01:48:33.940 started to and they would take him to these arab events so he could feel more at home and he's

01:48:41.380 eventually identified by a recruiter and his behavior begins to change he stops eating with

01:48:46.920 the family insists on cooking his own food he wouldn't when he would watch television with them

01:48:52.900 he would cover his eyes whenever there would be an ad showing a woman in a bikini you know

01:48:57.460 advertising some tunisian vacation or what have you they were not able to identify any of the signs

01:49:04.440 of increasing radicalization and this sort of thoughtless do-goodism really needs to come with

01:49:13.660 some training. How is it the person you brought into your home is gradually being radicalized

01:49:20.660 by the difference of himself and the new society you thrust him into?

01:49:28.420 Sometimes pushing people before they're ready into Western society can be far more radicalizing

01:49:35.960 than leaving them at home and giving them good books to read in Egypt or someplace.

01:49:41.340 and it is not the case to know us it's to love us we westerners are deeply strange people that

01:49:50.360 are not like the other people in the world and that's we could go on about what the differences

01:49:55.060 are but when you're asking someone to join that don't think the answer is going to be kumbaya

01:50:01.740 it could be i don't fit in here and i hate you because i don't fit in here and i'm willing to 0.99

01:50:09.520 join an ideology that will kill and maim you to punish you for the way I feel now. 0.99

01:50:15.160 That is a very human response. People become terrorists for human reasons, not ideological 0.85

01:50:23.640 ones. Ideology is the cover, the excuse, the rationalization. Inside is a human being.

01:50:31.860 And if you don't change the mechanics that shape those human beings, you will have another

01:50:37.280 September 11. Richard, thank you so much for coming back on and talking to us about such a

01:50:44.880 tremendously important event on its 25th anniversary. Thank you all for watching

01:50:49.920 and listening. Please head over to triggerpod.co.uk where Richard is going to answer some of your

01:50:54.880 questions. What is your take on the fact that we now have people with Islamic backgrounds

01:51:01.120 running for office in the U.S. who say America had it coming. 1.00

TRIGGERnometry - September 11, 2026

9⧸11： The Full Story, 25 Years On with Richard Miniter

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