9/11: The Full Story, 25 Years On with Richard Miniter

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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. You suddenly realize that your country is crowded with heroes wearing ordinary faces. The British government wants to force YouTube to down rank independent content like ours and replace it with approved messaging from the mainstream media. The only way you can fight back and continue to enjoy our content is to make sure you're subscribed. Like this video and comment below to have your say on what the government is doing. Richard Minita, welcome back to Trigonometry. We have you here on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, which for those of us who lived through was a moment of great tragedy, was a moment that changed the world. But more importantly, actually, there is now a whole generation, maybe two generations of people who don't even remember it because they either weren't alive at all or they were too young to really understand the significance of what was going on. So, on this day, what we thought would be fantastic is to have someone like you who's written a bunch of New York Times bestsellers about various aspects of this event, to come back on the show and talk to us about actually the basics, the sort of cover report to questions, the what, when, why. So welcome back again and let's talk about it. What happened on 9/11, 2001? On the day itself, 25 years ago today, four planes were hijacked and unlike normal hijacking, they did not communicate with the outside world, they did not demand ransom and instead they purposely flew these planes into buildings on what everyone describes as a clear perfect Tuesday sky, they crashed into the towers in 15 minutes, we got each other to jumbo jets collided with the World Trade Center towers, another plane went into Pentagon and we have horrifying voice recordings of people on the phone inside the plane as it slams into the Pentagon. And then there's the story of Flight 93, the fourth plane, which is hijacked somewhere over Cleveland after having left Maine and was believed headed toward the U.S. Capitol building itself. They had reached that target, roughly 5,000 people would have died, including members of the House and the Senate and their key staffs, other dignitaries were visiting on that day and the death toll would have been much higher than in the World Trade Center itself. 3,000 rough, almost 3,000 people died from more than 100 countries, there are conspiracy theories saying that the Jews were warned in advance, in fact, for the Orthodox Jews, there was a religious holiday that they had been following for thousands of years and they stayed home on that day due to religious holiday, not due to any advance warning, but that is one of those malicious Internet rumors, but let's not forget about the heroism of the people on Flight 93 because it tells us something distinctive about that day and about Americans in general. When the plane was seized by four hijackers over Cleveland and redirected from its intended destination of San Francisco south towards south and east towards the U.S. Capitol, immediately one passenger was killed apparently scuffling with the hijackers and the rest were heard into the back of the plane and these ordinary Americans who were encouraged to use their phones by the hijackers because part of the al-Qaeda plan, al-Qaeda being a terrorist group that had organized and planned these attacks, rehearsing them for years by the way. One of them to use the phones to magnify the terror across the American population, to harness the social networks of people who love those people who are about to die, to spread the sense of terror and pain, but on those calls people didn't just talk, they also listened and they learned that other planes had been hijacked and because they were uniquely American, these ordinary people said when they were heard into the back of the plane, we have to make a plan to retake this or they will kill us and whoever we ran this plane into. So they began boiling water which is used in the back of the plane to make coffee and tea. They began assembling whatever they could for weapons, we know just fragmentary bits from the cockpit voice recorder and from the transcripts of the phone calls and they attacked the hijackers. They did not launch their attack until they could see up the window, they were over rural area, they were away with tons of aviation gas which would explode and kill people on the ground. They wanted to spare as many civilians on the ground as possible. Flight 93 is the only flight in which no one on the ground died. Now it's a heartbreaking story, they did apparently according to the recordings, disabled two of the four hijackers and were ramming the cart into the cockpit door and may have gotten inside the cockpit itself. There is fragmentary last second recordings where they're demanding that they're fighting over the controls of the plane, or from a flightable but from a height of roughly 8,000 feet according to a small plane that was observing them at a time, they did dive into the dirt, killing everyone aboard and there's a monument for them now near Chainsville, Pennsylvania. But that is an incredible example of people in real time making decisions without any outside guidance going against 40 years of conventional wisdom. They were always instructed by their betters. Just cooperate with the hijackers, be peaceful, they will, that's the best chance of your survival is just to cooperate with them, they fought them, they ignored all the expert advice, they made weapons, they made a plan, they told the people that they loved that they loved them but that they had to go and we hear them on the cockpit voice recorder. Those messages are still clarified, classified, but they are more played for the families and I interviewed a number of the family numbers several years after those recordings. But it's an extraordinary story. One last detail of context here. When I was on the Casual Pooter River in Colorado, a boat ahead of me was composed entirely of Japanese people and the boat started sinking the rapids and all the Japanese people turned to the group leader and were waiting for him to make a decision as the water climbed up to their necks and eventually over their heads before he dispersed them to swim for their lives. That might be how Japanese people react in a crisis. Flight 93 tells us how Americans act in a crisis. They ignore the experts, they make plan, they consider all the ramifications, they take great risks and in the case of Flight 93, they get heartbreaking and close to retaking that plan. They are heroes. Richard, and there were many stories of heroism that day, of course, and we will talk about all of them, including in New York with the firefighters, with other first responders. Many of them gave their lives like the people aboard Flight 93. But I really think it's very, very important for us to try and unpack the why because of the way the world changed. Why did this happen? That's a big question. The short answer is 1979. In 1979, in the Carter years of the American presidency, there was a series of missteps, there was a revolution in Iran, an interesting coalition of communists, Kurds, and radical Islamists, led by Iotal Khomeini, who was in exile first in Iraq and then in Eris, flew back to Iran and was able to launch an Islamic revolution in that country. What that did, the revolution was a Shia Islamic revolution. But for Sunnis outside Iran, it was a watershed. Suddenly it seemed like radical Islamic utopia was possible. Then we saw takeovers in Mecca in 1979, where the great mosque was taken and And for several months, Saudi forces were unable to retake it. And many radical Muslims believed that Allah was protecting the people holding the Grand Mosque hostage. Ultimately, the Saudis under Prince Turkey al-Faisal were able to bring in French paratroopers who they made all say the Shahada, converting to Islam before they went in, who cleared out the terrorists, but it took months. Those two effects, turbocharged, radical Islam from an idea that existed among intellectuals and school teachers and a handful of people inside the Iqwan Muslimine, the Muslim Brotherhood, and brought it out into the realm of political possibility. And then the third thing happens in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a traditional Muslim country invaded by an atheist communist superpower. And those three things acting together meant that Shahad, the preaching of Abdullah Azam who was in 1979, a mentor to a son of a modern, that Shahad is the way, and Shahad does not mean spiritual change in the thinking of Abdullah Azam and in the various Salafis who follow him and his dogman, his doctrine. It means fighting on this earth and killing infidels in order to bring about the last days the end of the world so that Allah may reign supreme over all the world. And they were cycles so to spare themselves, revolutions like what they saw in Iran across the Sunni Arab countries. They began encouraging these terrorists, even in fact later in the 1980s, opening their prisons and sending these radicals to Afghanistan to fight Soviets. The thinking of Saudi intelligence especially was that if they die in Afghanistan, they are holy martyr and they're not our problem. And if they don't die, they will be busy for a long time and not causing problems here at home. This creates an opportunity for a young sion of a construction, a magnate named Asamah Bin Laden. Asamah Bin Laden is forged by two things that his life, in order to get his father's attention as a young boy, yet he did two things that stood out among all of the other children. Otherwise, most weeks of the year he was all but ignored. But on Friday after Juma prayers, he, when his father would gather with other adult men, and seven, eight, nine year old Asamah would be summoned to recite portions of the Quran from memory. So he memorized the Quran as a way to command attention and to get his father's approval. This is the very beginning before he gets introduced to the radical philosophy of Adela Asam and of the Muslim Brotherhood and the other radical groups. And I don't want to get on too many rabbit holes, but al-Qaeda is not a direct sin that of one thing but the fusion of many things. The other way he got his father's attention and this is important is that for one, sometimes two weeks a year, depending on the year, the head of the family would take all of the extended family, including Al Asamah, into the desert to live in tents without human conflicts. And in this harsh environment of Asamah, tribe, he loved the wild places. He loved capturing and killing animals. And while everyone else complained about the lack of air conditioning of cold water and so on, everyone wanted to take shower or bath. He thrived and he got his father's approval there. From those two ingredients, once you had the radical thinking of Adela Asam, then Lawn 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. So he created something initially called al-Qaeda-suba, the secure base, and it was just a place where you could, as a fighter, a jihad fighter against the Soviets, store your things, you watch, you wallet, and so on. And they began a paper database. So a base can also mean database in this form, in this form of Arabic. And he made a database of all of the fighters that came through and whose belongings were stored. Often they kept passports. These passports would resurface, by the way, on 9/11. So some of the people who leave to have died in the 1980s in Afghanistan, their passports reappear held perhaps by other people when they apply for visas to come to the United States and go to flight school and begin their more than a year of operations inside the United States before the 9/11 attacks. So bin Laden ends up as a well-known figure in the 1980s in Afghanistan. He has the names and contact information for tens of thousands of radicals, Muslims, from the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Arab Gulf, and so on. It is an incredible advantage from which he starts to build a terror network. The first, he's just a financier, the very first mention of some of bin Laden in the US government documents as a State Department report from 1995 that says they're refers to dismissing for, dismissively, they're refers to bin Laden as a moving bank. But by the 90s, but the State Department was wrong by the 90s, he was organizing and planning his own attacks. They spent more than a decade planning and carrying out attacks against Americans throughout the Clinton years. We saw attacks on a US hotel in Yemen that was supposed to house US servicemen. We saw attacks against the two US embassies in Africa simultaneously with eight minutes of each other and so on, right? So he's planning for 9/11. The catalyst was a fellow named college Sheikh Mohammed. He is like the independent producer who brings the studio head bin Laden, the script. And together they began the plot and plan that leads to 9/11. They wanted a war, bin Laden had held press conferences in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, and in other places. For many years, ultimately declaring war against the United States, using those words. And the United States didn't respond with 3,000 Americans dead on the morning of September 11th. America would have to respond. In the lead up to 9/11, there were two key attacks. It seems to me. One of them was the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. And the other was the attack on SS Cole. So let's talk about those very briefly and how they paved the way for the horrific offense on 2001. Sure. So Al-Qaeda launches attacks or attempted attacks on the United States or its interests. Every year from 1992 to 2001, these attacks increase in sophistication and lethality. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing is carried out by a man we now call a Ramsey Yusuf. Ramsey Yusuf grows up with Halicic Muhammad in a town outside of Kuwait city. Both are not Kuwaiti citizens. They are in fact, because of their place of birth, permanently ineligible, to become Kuwaiti citizens. 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. The only place where they could, and to give you an idea of how low the status was, during much of his childhood, Pellichake Muhammad's mother, her only source of living after the father died suddenly, was to wash the female bodies of the dead and be paid on a perbot peak. So this is a desperate, precarious existence with very low status, despite their high abilities. They do very well in school, but they are not given places university will not be set aside for them, because those reserved primarily for the Kuwaitis and for foreign visitors. The only place they can find social advancement is inside the various youth groups of the Muhammad of the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition to so, the College of the Muhammad Unrens use it become active in the theater and singing troops of the Muslim Brotherhood in near Kuwaiti city. The College of the Muhammad himself is a gifted performer and very popular, and when he goes to university in North Carolina, he is also popular for performing skits and songs there. this creative talent remains. But they are frustrated and angry. And in the course of finding the social outlet, they invite the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology. And so in 1993 World Trade Center attacks, the plan is very simple. To take a truck loaded with, I forget how many pounds, hundreds of pounds of explosive, and to detonate it outside the wall of the South Tower parking garage. I'm used to, it does not care, but on the other side of that small concrete black wall, is a woman who's seven months pregnant in Monica Smith, seven months pregnant with a boy. And she's eating her lunch. Another person is behind another wall, looking to get to do an inventory count for a restaurant that exists hundreds of feet above and cold windows on the world. They set the bomb. They tried desperately to leave the parking garage, but there's a truck in front of them that is very slow. They're glaring their horn, and they roar out onto West Street and make their getaway just seconds before the bomb explodes, killing Monica Smith. And the workers on the world, inventory counter, a waiter actually, and five other people. At first, the U.S. is deeply confused by what happened. The bomb is massive. It opens a crater that is, mouth of the crater is more than 60 feet across and goes down nearly 100 feet. It drops concrete blocks into the path train station below. It severs pipes. So you have water and sewage flowing into the crater. The building is evacuated. And one valuable thing happens that is gonna be important on the morning of 9/11. The New York City Police and a separate commission in panel by the legislators and Albany, which is the state cap of New York, study the evacuation plan. All of the problems that went wrong. And so they change how between towers are to be evacuated, how the lights, there were no lights in 1993 in the stairway, but as soon as the power was cut, the stairways were dark, and therefore people moved down those staircases much more slowly. Thanks to the attack, the 9/11, most of those lights were battery powered. And so with the power went out, people can still evacuate close. So if, and those lines move much more quickly, there were many, many other changes made. But as a result, 3,000 people died on 9/11. - I'm rich in it. - Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but what was their fascination with the World Trade Center? - That's a really interesting question Francis. When you go through, so at the combating terrorism center at West Point, they have about two and a half million pages worth of captured documents from Al Qaeda. And those have been translated into English, mainly by the US Army or by US other government. And the FBI separately translated the notebooks left behind in the rental cars of the hijackers. They drove rental cars to the airports where they launched the hijackers. And so two things come from that. One is, they thought that the World Trade Center was literally the center of world trade. They thought if they blew it up, all global trade would come to a stop. It never occurred to them that property developers created a marketing name, World Trade Center. And in fact, there are other world trade centers in the United States, right? And it's kind of that was the thing that's about as meaningful as the term international airport, right? The small town airports in the US that have one flight a week to Canada, but it's an international airport, right? And they also, another thing that comes of this is people say, oh, they were making a political statement, but the captured notebooks tell us, they really didn't know that much about us. So one of the notebooks left behind the hijackers is a lengthy description on page one of the notebook of the difference between shampoo and conditioner. Right, so these were not, this was not a detailed political protest. They wanted to attract the attention of the great state in the United States and go to war with it and hopefully to triumph over it. This is a battle in their mind. It wasn't really about something the United States did. - So they wanted to drag America into a war, which they wanted to win. That was the purpose of all of this. - Yes, the story in their head is we defeated the Soviets. Now, in reality, the jihad forces from the Arab countries had very little impact on the Soviets, right? We can point to one or two battles in which they may have played an important role. Mostly they didn't join the main war effort. They did random terror attacks. One fun aspect of this is they didn't just have car bombs, they had camel bombs with a quick bombs on camels and had them explode in marketplaces. Most of the war fighting, which actually did drive the Soviets out was carried out by Afghans themselves. And so an important detail here, which many people miss, is while the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs funded the jihadis, the U.S. did not. U.S. never funded Al Qaeda. I talked to every living CIA station chief responsible for Afghanistan and many other officials. And the record on this is overwhelming. U.S. never supported Al Qaeda or bin Laden himself or for that matter any Arab jihadis. They supported Pushtun's and other groups which later became known as the Northern Alliance. And that's who they were. The people who were doing the Polk of the fighting. But nonetheless, in the mind of the jihadis, they defeated the one superpower, the Soviets. With 9/11, they were expecting another battle and they would defeat the other superpower, America. And that would make them the best in the world. And they hope bring about the end times and read to the end of the world and Allah transit. And that being the case, what about the SS coal? What was the impact of that? And what was the significance of that particular attack? - So from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, there was a series of attacks. There's an attempt at assassination of the Pope. There's planned assassinations of Bill Clinton. There's a foiled bot called Jinka that was going to start out of Manila with a hijack 11 planes over the Pacific that was foiled by a very enterprising Filipino police chief who was pregnant and in flip flops when she arrests Ramsey Yusuf's hope and spiriter. That's a whole other wonderful story. And so these attacks escalate. There are attacks on two US embassies in 1998 in Dara Salam, Tanzania and in Nairobi. Yeah, and then climax of the Clinton years from an al-Qaeda perspective is the attack on the USS coal. They had attempted an earlier attack on the USS Sullivan's that ship is named after five brothers who died on the same ship in World War II and fighting the Japanese. And it is, but their attack fails because they've boat sinks before it reaches the target. They adapt very quickly and they launch an attack on the USS coal. And what we have is the first time the US Navy ship is in danger of sinking and total loss since World War II. They blow a hole that I think is 40 feet wide in the side of the hole and only through the heroic efforts of the captain and the crew. By the way, dozens are killed and injured through pumping that at three a round the clock and at eight, same the ship. To port and safely evacuate and the ship itself is still afloat, they have a lead. Then modern, it does not hide is involvement. He writes a poem glorifying the attack, which is widely published and there are phone calls linking the various people carried out the attack both in Yemen and to their paymasters in parts of Africa and calls to Afghanistan. So we have a complete chain of evidence. It's been long to the attack on the USS coal. We've just the largest attack on the US warship since World War II. Richard, sorry, just going back a little bit, I was so shocked by what you said about 'cause you will be aware that in the wake of 9/11 and frankly prior to that, the universal belief was that America had created the al-Qaeda by funding it. Disting is and all of that. So not that I don't trust you, you know how much we love you on the show, but I went on Venezuela and had a quick look. And it says that US funds did not go directly to Ben Laden, but they did go to native Afghan Mujahideen commanders who were part of the movement that then became al-Qaeda. Is that accurate? The first part of it is absolutely accurate. So there was an explicit deal, and this is not secret. This was reported on the front page of the Washington Post in 1986, right? An explicit deal, the dollar for dollar matching, the Reagan administration would spend up to $1 billion, and they did funding native Afghans, and the Saudis would spend up to $1 billion funding the Arab-Holy Warriors, if you will. These are separate groups of people, 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 lumped at all as one thing and say, "We funded that one thing, therefore, and Bin Laden. That is just not the case." Right. So just for clarity, what you're saying is the U.S. funded people who were fighting the Soviets but not Bin Laden and not the foreigners who came to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. That's right. You're funded by the Saudis and by the Gulf Air Force. In fact, the whole time of the 1980s of Bin Laden is openly anti-American and said so, and there is a memo, it's in my book, "Losing Bin Laden," there was a member of Congress for the name of Afghanistan, and he was told to stay away from these Bin Laden camps that they were hiking around because it had been lawden and captures him. He will torture and kill him. So this is not somebody on the CIA farewell. Fascinating. There's much more evidence, if you want to talk about this in detail, there's much, much more evidence, but also think about it from the CIA's point of view, right? A bunch of ideologically driven, ill-trained foreigners are not an ideal indigenous force to fight the Soviets. The people who are fighting for their native lands is speak local languages whose political goal is simply to drive the Soviets out not to create a religious utopia. These people are much easier to work with, far more controllable, and far better trained. They've been in combat for decades. Remember, Afghanistan has a civil war following the departure of the king in the 1970s where native Afghans were fighting communists, right? And then when it looked like they were going to succeed in driving the communists from power, the Soviet Union intervened to save their ideological allies, rolling tanks across the Opses bridge on Christmas Eve, 1979. So these people have been fighting the Soviets in communists for decades. They had organized training regimens, command structures. They were focused on the objective of the CIA cared about. CIA did not care about trying to create a religious Muslim utopia in Afghanistan. Not only that, but Al-Qaeda and the other Arab jihadis were very hard to control. Most of their attacks were on other Muslims, not on Soviets themselves. And for example, look at what is now called "neurostan," what used to be called "Kafiristan" in a region in Afghanistan. "Kafiristan" means land of the unbelievers. And these people did not start to convert to Islam until the 1960s, and by the time the radicals arrived in the 1980s, maybe 5%, maybe 10%, I mean, there's no good census data here, or Muslim. But through war and conquest, they wanted to convert them to Islam. A lot of the modern and associated Arab terrorist groups were attacks against these tribal people in what was called "Kafiristan" as now known as "neurostan" land of light, because they did succeed in converting the majority of them. So that's the ideological and targeting focus of the Arabs was on the Afghans who were not following their form of Islam. The Native Afghans, the CIA was funding, their goal was getting rid of the Soviets, which was the U.S. foreign policy goal. So it would have been pointless to fund these groups. They're hard to control, hard to manage, built train, and don't share your objectives. And on top of all that, they want to kill you if you're a CIA official, right? So it just rationally makes no sense. But when I talk to a bearded news one of the CIA, I talked to every living CIA station chief of Afghanistan who served between 1980 and 1992, right? Now you could say, okay, these are self-interested, fine, but no one else would track them down and talk to them. And they laid out and very clear, non-adiological, non-defensive terms. We had no orders to fund these people, we had no money to fund these people. We had no desire to fund these people. And these people were trying to kill us. So we don't write checks to people who were trying to kill you. That makes sense. Did the people that they funded then, with many of them, part of the Taliban? No, the Taliban are created much later. The Taliban are born in 1994. So remember the story. What I mean is did they become the Taliban? Sorry to interrupt again. The Mujahideen did not become the Taliban. The Taliban is created mainly by the Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI, and a bunch of local Islamic teachers. They're trying to get the Taliban or trying to impose the severe version of the official version of Islam according to Pakistan. And later the so-called Mujahideen, the Arab foreign fighters, allie themselves with the Taliban because the Taliban are not on their own. But the U.S.-backed forces become known as the Northern Alliance. And if you remember, two days of 4 9 11 on September 9, the head of the Northern Alliance is murdered by an al-Qaeda cell, posing as a Belgian camera crew, they have a bomb inside the camera. And it detonates. That's how Masood, the leader of the Northern Alliance, is killed on September 9. So they saw the Northern Alliance as the enemy, the Taliban is something that's created later. It's driven by different causes and different flows of money. But the Mujahideen do allie with it, not in '94, but after. Remember, there's a whole galaxy of these groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan. And people move between groups. We have captured documents that show that people get frustrated that their martyrdom opportunity is delayed. It's like Lakshmi Taiba, for example, which is one of these groups. And then move to ISIS, their martyrdom opportunity is further delayed there. So they shift to al-Qaeda, like they're moving around, right? And they're looking for, they're looking to die. And therefore, change their status in their community. Like most people, I want more energy, better focus, and to still be sharp and strong years from now. But every time I've gone in for my annual checkup, it's the same thing. Wait weeks to get an appointment, sit in a waiting room, and then you're in and out in 10 minutes. Everything looks fine, they say. Drink more water, sleep a bit more. No real insight, no plan. Just vibes. 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Tell them trigonometry sent you to support the show. And Richard, we can see looking back at the events over the 90s. There's a clear trajectory happening here. The attacks were escalating. They were not only escalating, but they were becoming more frequent. They were attacking US soil, they were attacking US Navy. They were also attacking embassies. Why was there someone not in government raising the alarm going, "Look, we need to do something here. Serious, and it's going to be inevitable that there's going to be another Islamist terrorist attack on our soil." Well, the danger to be fair to the Clinton administration, right? We can look back from our point in time and say it was obvious this was going to happen. But for people who are living in the moment, it isn't clear. So I talked to both of Clinton's national security advisors and Tony Lake, who was the national security advisor in the early click on the airs says that he he receives his first briefing on Al-Qaeda sometime in 1994. This is years after the attacks have been done. This is year after the World Trade Center bombing. At this point, they hadn't linked the World Trade Center bombing to Al-Qaeda. And he said he wasn't sure if he mentioned it to the president or not. Maybe he thinks the first conversation with President Clinton about Al-Qaeda was sometime in 1995, right? Why is he hazy about this? He's not being defensive. A lot's going on and at the time, this didn't seem, among all the various threats they're facing, the most important, right? The timeline becomes a lot clearer and a lot more definite. We see a lot more reports in late '90s. But in the early '90s, remember when the World Trade Center explodes and the FBI is called in, they're trying to figure out what if this was a work of terrorism and in the beginning, they're not even, the first few hours, they're not even sure, right? They changed the name of the investigation to trade bomb only when they get enough bomb residue out of the crater to say, okay, this was definitely a bomb, right? So that happens five, six hours up into the investigation. But for days, they're like, is this a Yugoslav terrorist group? Is this far right extremist from white nationalists from the United States? Is this nobody knows, right? And even after the initial arrests, and that's a whole interesting story, where they unwind the plot, where the guy has returned to get the rental car, so he can get the deposit back and use the money to buy a flight to escape, because the ticket, the Mohamed Ata, the ringleader, has given him is not a real alarm ticket, it's a child's ticket, he has to upgrade it or to get on a flight back to Pakistan. And yeah, this, they, it takes them months to put the pieces together about that bombing itself, connecting it to a larger global narrative, doesn't really go here into anything until the middle of 1995, at the earliest. And that's also why when Sudan offered to arrest and modern and turn him over to the States, that wasn't seen in that higher priority either. Now, Francis, to your point, where they're mid-level people who are specialists, saying this is a major problem, this is very important, you need to do something, absolutely, but again, in fairness to the Clinton administration, these people, all, all these specialists think they're specialties, the most important thing. - Right. - They're all, they're all right, right? So how do you, as the politically elected or politically appointed decision-maker, say I should listen to expert 132 and ignore all the others, right, it's, it's difficult, right? Another problem here is the government is very siloed. This is something the 9/11 Commission report pointed out in great detail. So when I talk to, then see the Clinton's first CIA director, James Wolsey, just died recently. Wolsey wanted information that the FBI was gathering because it has obvious implications for CIA investigations. And the FBI refused to share because he says, well, you mess up our case, right? The FBI was completely focused on launching a criminal case. And so if we share any evidence with you, we have to share it with the defense and we'll have to give up all our sources and methods to defense. So when you want these documents, you can have them when we present them a trial, which turned out to be in the middle 1996. Wolsey also begged for translators, less than 10% of the phone intercepts, coming out in the least, were being translated. And the CIA wanted more translators. And because Wolsey had committed a political offense, unknowingly, right? He was told by Bruce Lindsay in the White House that they want to replace the general counsel of the CIA with a friend of Bill, a president, someone who would support the president and his election efforts. And Wolsey said, no, we have a very capable general counsel now. There's no reason to replace her, or him, I can't remember, but, and as soon as he did that, he was shut out of all meetings with the president. So he never got to meet the president one-on-one. He was in the room with crowds of other people and a few handful of occasions. To try to get the president's attention, he would go with the CIA daily griefer and sit outside the president's office, but he can't just walk in and was never asked inside. So he never got to present his case to the president about al-Qaeda. He was never able to get the president to force the FBI to share its information. And the FBI didn't translate things unless it had a direct, they thought a direct bearing on the case. So, example, earlier, for the World Trade Center bombing, there'd been a killing of the Jewish leader named Mark Hahn. And those documents were not translated for eight, 10 years. When they were, they showed you that the very infrastructure used by the people and the places by Graham's use of were the same, but they didn't wanna spend the money to translate the Arabic. So there were translation problems, there were bureaucratic infighting, there were silos, and then there were political games. And if al-Qaeda was seen as a real existential threat, all of those things would have been pushed aside by the force of the executive. But because it wasn't seen that way, those things weren't pushed aside. - And also we had people like Khaled Sheikh Mohammed who was in college during the 90s in the United States who was a literal enemy on home soil. And when you look at that, you think to yourself, I guess the question is, could it have been prevented? Could we have caught KSM earlier? And how many times was he able to slip through the net? - Oh wow, yeah, well, there's a famous case in 1995 where the FBI misses him by hours of his safe house and I think Qatar, because the Qatar minister, I think of religious instruction. Anyway, one of the ministers warns Khaled Sheikh Mohammed that US is coming for him. Well, let's go back to the schooling in North Carolina of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the architect, I don't know. So when you talk to his family in Kuwait, and other places, and his school teachers, they will tell you that he was a normal kid who got radicalized in the United States. And there actually is pretty good evidence for this. Yes, he was coming out of the youth groups of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait. And the school didn't operate very well on this, but there appears to have been a Muslim Brotherhood scholarship paid for his schooling in the United States. But the US, especially before 9/11, but even now, doesn't really do background checks of the foreign students' debts. And sometimes the foreign students in admits are less qualified than the US students they could have admitted in their place, because they're trying to meet at this time period, certain racial or ethnic quotas, right? So Khaled Sheikh Mohammed would not have been admitted if he had to compete openly, because his English at stage was very poor. And his knowledge of engineering, which you said he was going to study, wasn't very good either. So he would not have been a normal candidate, except they were trying to tick certain boxes, and he came with scholarship money from abroad, which is high margin for the university. So it's clearly the additional regulations need to be applied on the admissions of foreign students and on what basis and so on, right? I think the US should educate the highest IQ, the most capable foreign student in the world, a question we should attract them and train them and teach them. But the second thing we need to think about is the social dynamics. So he went to two different universities in the United States. One of them was a validly Christian. He felt isolated, and so he gravitated toward other people whose language he, he was isolated by language, right? His English just was at stage very poor. So he sought out other Arabic speakers who were far more radical than himself. And he fell into a group of them where in order to maintain his friendships, he had to share their ideological commitments. So it's a lot like a guy joining a group because there's a hot guy or a hot girl in it and he will just conform his beliefs in order to be this person. In his case, he desperately needed a social outlet and not to feel isolated. And so when Haulichik Muhammad's family members say, hey, he was going to discos and picking up girls in Kuwait and he comes back and he's a salafi, he's very strict. He doesn't, you know, he's many changes in his personal life. This is enabling the United States. Well really the culprit here is the social network at the University of other foreign students. And in order to survive in that very small ecosystem of 2025, Arabic speakers, he had to conform. And ultimately he becomes a kind of leader among them because he over conforms and they get in trouble for slaughtering a goat in a baseball dugout in the university so that they can eat in a certain ritualistic way and so on, but he becomes increasingly militant because this binds the group to him and makes him feel less alone. So when we admit people into our universities who lack the language and social skills to connect, we were setting up a dangerous situation where they will go to other people and you get an island of this pitoy. Now most of the time these are just, you know, said train spotters. But in other cases, the social dynamics there create a toxic environment that makes all of them or many of them into radicals. I talked to an email leader who was a student, he now runs several mosques in Greensboro, North Carolina, who was a student with college at Mohamed and he openly said he loved him. 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 it no slump. Now that's his reflection five, ten years after 9/11. But I thought it was fascinating. 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. You've got some have been laden over there in Afghanistan. How do these people, I mean, you're not, when I think about an organization that's capable of hijacking four planes, flying them into buildings, which is, as I understand, not particularly easy thing to do if you haven't been a pilot for many, many years. How do you get this bunch of misfit toys committing probably the greatest terrorist atrocity in human history with a high level of frustration? And for context, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed's nickname was KFC because of his predilection for it and he was overweight over 200 pounds, so he's not like he was a physical specimen either. Well, he becomes fatter in living in Pakistan, yeah, right? At the 90s, he was known as the brain, his nickname KFC is after, I love him. So he's smart. Yes, and look, if he had been a path to citizenship for him and his family in Kuwait, we may never have heard of it. He may have become an engineer in the oil fields or done something else. We will never know. However, to get to your question, people become terrorists because it solves an important problem in our life, either meaning or isolation, they're trying to solve for social isolation or they're trying to solve for meaning for purpose. Terrorism gives you a purpose, but to carry out that purpose, you need money because it's not easy to get people into it because you've got to recruit people, you have to get visas to get them to the United States, if you get them in the pilot school, they need to live somewhere, they need to eat something, any clothes, etc. So you need venture capital, right? Bin Laden had a lot of that. In college, McMahamad tried to sell many different plans to Bin Laden. He gets to meet Bin Laden by playing on his family connection to Ramsey Yusuf, who Bin Laden admired and who he carried up the 1993 World Trade Center Ball. So once he forges a connection with Bin Laden and is in a circle, he is pitching various plans. And the plans are refined repeatedly. So the earlier plans were simultaneously hijacking eight aircraft, four on the west coast and four on the east coast, with targets in San Francisco and Los Angeles and so on. They prune that out of the plan, it's just too operationally difficult. Four is when they think the largest number of planes they can hijack without a U.S. response. But it's very much like, I hate to keep going back to the Hollywood comparison, but it's very much like an independent producer with a very promising script, having to negotiate with a studio for financing and distribution, right? So he needed Al Qaeda's money, he needed Al Qaeda's ability to forge documents and to move people in secure ways, secure communication, he needed a lot of resources beyond money. And to do that, he had to compromise with them. And they unfortunately made the plan more and more practical. But Bin Laden was just desperate for his war in his mind and this is in his writings. This is not a theory of mine. They had defeated the Soviets, even though in reality the jihadis had virtually no impact on the Soviets, except for you can maybe give them two battles, the pivotal roles in two battles, maybe. But in Bin Laden's mind, they drew it out of the Soviets, they beaten one superpower, they wanted to beat the other, they thought if they could force the United States to come to the maps of Afghanistan to meet them, they would crush them. And that didn't happen when the U.S. did deploy to Afghanistan, the military studies this of course, they look at the number of how many minutes a firefight lasts. And those times got shorter and shorter because the U.S. would have got increasingly efficient at killing them. And there is a major battle in 2002 or 2003, Chamali planes, it's called in which they fielded hundreds, maybe close to 1,000 fighters against a U.S. unit, a much much smaller U.S. unit, and were utterly defeated and never tried a massed battle again. So this fantasy of Bin Laden said if we can force them to come and fight in Afghanistan, we can beat them like we beat the Soviets, it's just probably false. But in 9/11, of course, Bin Laden had no way of knowing that. He thought if anything, the Americans were softer and easier to beat. And what was the logistics of the operation, Richard, tell us how do these just random guys from the Middle East get to the point where they know how to fly a plane, they know how to hijack a plane, how do they hijack a plane, tell us the mechanics. Okay, so why are so many of the 19 hijackers, the Soviets, doesn't mean the Saudis hate us, it means that there was a special program that the State Department had launched due to political pressure to speed up the visas for Saudi citizens. So for example, if you are Britain or France in this time period, you have visa waiver access into the United States, you didn't need a visa at all, right, you just say, here it is, see, the passport, let me in. The Saudis wanted that, but of course that was never going to happen because in the 90s, the risk of people from Saudi was well known and from that region in general. It wasn't an anti-Saudi bias, it's just an awareness, there's the same reason why, you know, there are certain geographies that present geopolitical rest, let's say, that they say France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, goaps, right. So to compromise with the Saudis, they created visa express, which was a very quick system for getting a US visa. So from the Saudis, it was a matter of prestige. They wanted to be treated both Europeans and Australians and this was the compromise. As a result, the people who became the hijackers were able to take advantage of this program. If this program had been offered in Qatar instead of Saudi Arabia, 19 of the hijackers [BLANK_AUDIO] that have been from Qatar, not Saudi, right? So they had studied our system, found a weak point to could ban a joke. How did they select the airports where the planes were going to leave? They knew that Logan Airport in Boston, for example, was run by a political appointee who had previously been the chauffeur for the governor, Massachusetts. So they picked airports, Dulles Airport in Washington, for example, was another where there were a long history of documented security lapses. So they used US government data, public development for each society, it's how we work, to plot where to hijack which planes to hijack. They needed planes that were going to travel the full length of the continent of the United States because they would have the most tons of fuel on board and therefore have the greatest explosive capacity. So you wanted aircraft that were fully loaded, that were coming from airports that were at weak security procedures. And the ringleader Muhammad ought to flow out of a small airport in Maine and then changed planes to join a flight. I believe that of Logan, I'm a memories of Hezema because they also thought that that flight would be easier for them to get into the system. And the woman who gave him his ticket, testified that later, that she thought he was a terrorist but didn't want to discriminate against him or be unwelcoming. So they knew this factor as well. They took advantage of existing American weaknesses to exploit a system that they wanted to destroy. And didn't they also classify the terrorists into which ones were going to be the ones flying and which ones were going to be the muscle? - Right, not all of them went to the pilot school, very few did. So there was at least two muscle on the plane, they were meant to control the passengers and then there was a pilot and a co-pilot who had received some pilot training. 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. The training wasn't that good to know what all of the controls did on the aircraft. - It's an American 11 trying to call. - What is? - We have some planes. - Second. - Say hi to Andy B.O.K. Why is that even for the reports? - I'm 15, so I'm going to go into the hands and point. - And so who's trying to call me here now? - American 11, you trying to call? - Nobody knows, everything is okay. If you're trying to make any noise, the danger is down and the airplane. Let's take flight. - Let's get it to your reference and move. - So what do you want to see? - I'd like to go back to the airport. - One flight to make it two to four. - When I had a 15, 20, three, did you hear your company? Did you hear that, put some interference on a break from here, a couple minutes ago, screening? - Yes, I did, 7.87, and we couldn't tell what it was either. - Get out of 93, we want to be here at the center, I done. - Sorry, sorry, sorry, here. I got the fifth to dark. It's prevailing to be. We have a ball for us. So it's dead. - Hi, here's a captain. Now I would like to go out and see if the whole reports are not going to make some noise. And then I would demand the fifth to be quiet. - But also there was, there was a culture of casualness among security. Most cockpits were not locked. And on the case of flight 93, the airline, United Airlines, actually required in its regulation, internal regulations, that the keys for the cockpit door be kept in an unlockable cabinet right next to the cockpit door. So the students could just, this cabinet grabbed the keys and get into the cockpit to deliver coffee or whatever you want. One thing most people may not understand at this time period, right? The flight attendants would be going in and out of the cockpit pretty routinely, not just bringing meals and coffee, but depending on the rules set by the captain, in this time period, pilots could smoke in the cockpit. And so one or more of the flight attendants might pop into the cockpit on a long flight to catch a smoke. If the captain allowed smoking in the cockpit, in that time period, union rules and aviation rules allowed them to do that. So they were constantly moving in and out of the cockpit. Earlier, cockpits used to be wide open, and in fact, children rounded up once the plane had leveled off and brought into the cockpit to meet the pilot and say hi and look out the pilot's window, right? And so it was a, now I'm describing the 70s and 80s earlier time. And some airlines give out little children's wings where after they visited the cockpit, they would pin it on their shirt. And it was marketing, but it was a great life experience for certain kids at a certain time period. So it was still fairly casual like that. And the captain would come out of the cockpit from time to time in the '90s, and sometimes talk to the passengers in first class or get something out of his bag or have you. So it wasn't a hardened place. And so it was, even though they had been hijacking since the late 1960s in the United States and in the Middle East and in Europe, they really hadn't changed the system from this much more casual, trusting system that emerged in the '50s and '60s. And Richard, didn't they use small blades which were allowed by airport and airport security to actually take over the planes? Once they were airborne. Oh, so this is very tricky, right? So if you look at the transcripts of the phone calls from the passengers, they describe a range of weapons. They're very unclear. We don't know how long the blades were. A chemical weapon is described by one of them. But that may have been a bluff, they apparently showed a fake device that was a bomb or a chemical weapon on one of the flights. The reason why the news coverage repeatedly said box cutters is because box cutters, which have a blade about this size, they're sitting in a metal tube, literally, for opening boxes, were specifically permitted to be brought on the planes. And so the FAA to shield itself said they used box cutters. We don't actually know the box cutters. They used blades of some kind. But given the laxness of airport security and the airports they chose and especially Logan, these could be much longer blades. And they were able to severely wound large angry adult American men. So the blade would have to be bigger than a box cutter. We just-- the answer is we just don't know. But the box better thing was a bureaucratic way to safeguard and silo itself. The bureaucracy immediately shifted into CIA from the afternoon of the attacks onward. And Patrick, you know, go ahead. I was going to say-- and obviously probably doesn't need to be said. But they also had the element of surprise once they were on the plane. Yes. There had been a long period decades, in fact, before there since that had been hijackers the United States. So no one was expecting it. Before we move on, you also mentioned they rehearsed and practiced this whole thing. What do we know about that? So there is-- it's still classified. But there is-- but I have probably should have brought it. 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. And to do that, they put together large amounts of data. ATM receipts, restaurant receipts, witnesses, accounts, security cameras, it's an incredible document. I almost thought about writing a book just about that. And in that, there was a number of-- they did scenario role-playing, where the dice who would be the muscle practiced against the other guys if they were unruly passengers. How would you fight if they tackled you with the waste or if they grabbed you from behind? And here's how you would throw them over your head, and so on and so on. All right. The reports that Muhammad Ata had planned-- rehearsed in Iraq are-- I think largely an internet rumor. It is the case that the Iraqis had a Boeing 707 that they used to train other terrorist groups before 9/11. The idea of flying planes in the buildings goes back to a document out of Iran in 1987 to the idea and floating around in Jihadi circles for a while. But it does not appear that September 11th, 19 hijackers on September 11th, rehearsed in Iraq. So, any internet rumor to the side, there's no evidence for that. Be fascinating if there's no evidence for that. But they did rehearse in the United States in various hotel rooms and in gyms, defending themselves. And they also practiced what they would do, how they would take, once they had the cockpit, what they would do with the aircraft, how they would level it off and so on. And they also had quizzes, written quizzes for each other as well. And how did they practice the actual flying element to these flight simulators or training of the actual flight? Absolutely. And they did go to these flight schools. We're chillingly they said they didn't know how they didn't need to learn how to take off or land. It's just some of the stuff. I think particularly for our younger audience, when you talk about airport security or being able to smoke in the cockpit or all of this stuff, it must be very hard to believe on the reason is, and coming on to the consequences on the aftermath, is that, Francis and I often talk about this, where we're both in our early 40s. And we have a lot of guys in their 20s that work for us. And we always talk about the fact that we think that nobody, that generation has any idea how different the world was in the late 1990s. And I think 9/11 and then the financial crash are the two reasons for that. What was the impact and the response and the aftermath? We also don't understand the world that the people in their 20s see. Because when we see great reality they see, we're seeing it through the lens of 20 years of experience. And we may be putting things into the wrong intellectual categories. And they're able to see it much more originally. So this is always the generational problem. When you talk to people in their 70s and 80s and these World War II comparisons, because they're the children of World War II survivors in their conversation, as a live thing. The way 9/11 is for us. So the years of experience are a tool for insight. But they're also a tool for missing things. And so even when someone who's 20, someone who's 40, someone who's 60 is looking at the exact same object, they may see very different things. And it's not because the young people are dumb or the old people. Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. I was certainly wasn't saying that they're dumb. This is human nature and you're better or for long. Yeah, of course. What I was getting at is the fact that the world changed very profoundly and it seems to me permanently and irreversibly after 9/11. What was the immediate reaction and the immediate aftermath of this terrorist attack? Homer wrote two of the most important books in Western literature. The Odyssey is the one that's had all the attention recently. The early ad, the one about pride, rage and leadership, which is just as essential, now has a free course from Hillsdale 2. Hillsdale College's new free online course is taught by Professor Stephen Smith. It's not a highlight reel and it's not Homer for beginners. It's a proper walk through the text. Honor, courage, leadership, friendship, sacrifice, and what it means to live a noble life. You come away understanding why a killer's real fight isn't with the trozans is with himself. One of more than 43 courses Hillsdale offers on the Constitution, the Roman Republic, the American founding, Genesis, the Second World War, and more, all build the same way taught properly and not dumb down. I couldn't recommend Hillsdale courses more highly. Go to Hillsdale.edu/trigger to enroll for free. That's Hillsdale.edu/trigger. The most extraordinary thing happened in America after 9/11. And this is going to be very hard for the people who didn't live through it to believe but it's true. The best way to show this is to tell you a quick story. My father and mother were on the West Coast of the United States to do a book signing for my father and all flights were cancelled. All flights were grounded on 9/11. It didn't resume for a long time. My father had the idea to rent a car and drive back home to upstate New York. What is that about? Five and a half thousand kilometers, six retail miles, right? And it would take days because they thought all rental cars were going to get booked up. We should grab it when we can. And so they began this drive across the United States in the hours after September 11. On lonely roads in Wyoming, he saw these signs over and over again, hand made signs. I loved New York. They had been hastily put together and put up. Wyoming is a deeply red state. It does not surprise me when someone from Wyoming says I never want to visit Manhattan or City of New York, but yet we saw the lines. And in the highway overpasses in northern Virginia, there were bedsheets with signs written, you know, messages written on them hanging over the side where you could, as you went down the super highway, messages of support and love, an idea that politics should be put aside. The country really came together. Even though they were jet fighter, at least in New York and Washington, jet fighters roaring overhead, there was this idea that the country should unify political speech moderated. There was a real coming together. And everyone was afraid it wouldn't last and of course it couldn't and it didn't. But it lasted for a longer than you would think and a lot of Americans discovered that they had more in common with each other than they realized. And even families split aside by politics, and these were just anecdotal stories, I don't have any statistical data, but people reconnected and forgave each other. And it was as horrible as the loss of 3,000 people was. The cultural impact was not what commentators say today of fear and anger. That was part of it. It was a desire to write the wrongs. And when President Bush said in the crater that they were still digging out at 9/11, the World Trade Center crater, he grabbed a bull horn from a construction worker. And he says, "I hear you and the rest of the world is going to hear from you very soon." "I want you all to know that America today is on bend and knee in prayer for the people and the people of New York City and New Jersey, and Connecticut, as we mourn the loss of 1,000 of our citizens, I can hear you, I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people, and the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon." And what the president didn't disclose is that the CIA paramilitary were already on their way from Afghanistan, and they were reconnecting with the Northern Alliance, who they had funded in the 80s, remember, separate from the jihadis, the Arab pirates. And there were personal relationships. And they began setting up listening posts and forward advance areas and coordinating with horse soldiers and carrying out a time and within a few weeks carrying out attacks against the Taliban and against Al-Qaeda. So the desire to eliminate and al-Qaeda route and branch was definitely there. But and maybe there's other data that I'm not aware of, but I did not, there's not any evidence that I can see that there was a profound hatred of Muslims in the United States. At least after 9/11 the idea of America being a profoundly racist country just wasn't there. But people experienced the opposite, unity, reconnection and an incredible resolve to kill those who killed us. And do you think that reaction is exactly what Ben Laden wanted? No, if you read, I mean, I can't read his mind and his dead, but if you read his documents, the things he wrote and the things he said. He thought that America was addicted to Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and this week that he could humiliate it as soon as he managed to get U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan where they could fight them, that they would defeat them, humiliate them, and destroy America's superpower status and triumph over them. He thought he was pushing on a weak, decadent society, and he had many Western academics he could cite to support that mistaken view. But in fact, that is not Western society. It is not a society in decline. It is a society in which it's thinking elite and some of its leadership have lost confidence at it. But below the elite level, it is still a high functioning, confident society that invents new things, that adapts quickly to changes, and that is remarkably understanding for people with people different from themselves. I offered, when I was one of the times in which I was in Iraq, I offered to take my Kurdish translator and his family to dinner. It says, "Oh, let's have dinner at our home." And so after eating dinner at their home three or four times a day, no, let's pick the most expensive restaurant and let's go there, which turned out to be a Chinese place. And as we sit down, they are mystified by the menu, even though the place was a kilometer from their home, they had never been there. And he looks at me and says, "Why would you eat other people's food?" The Western society is the opposite, it's curiosity and openness to other people's food, words, ideas, perspectives. And I don't think the modern was expecting the dynamism to be resolved, the courage innovation that Western society, American society in particular, was still able to muster and deploy with such a wall. And Richard, when you look and you watch the footage from that day, it's so shocking. While I was researching for this interview, I was watching documentaries, and it was so horrific just watching what was happening. I didn't realize the emotional effect they would have on me 25 years on. It must have created such in many ways, such a deep psychological scar in the American psyche. This is as close as we can get to the base of the World Trade Center. 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, we better get out of the way. I'm going to get out of here. I don't have a radio enough to talk. In Washington, there is a large fire at the Pentagon, the Pentagon has been evacuated. And there's you can see perhaps the second tower, the front tower, the top portion of which is collapsing. Good Lord. There are no words. I was watching a documentary on the United 93 recently, and I was surprised. I was transported right back in time, I was immediately angry for these hijackers who, for their own political goals, hijacked the lives of perfectly decent, ordinary people and killed them for no reason. And it just, injustice of that, anger of that, it took me right back in time. And I understand why major media has been afraid, especially in the wake of 9/11, for five or 10 years. They didn't re-show those videos very often, and not for long, and they didn't do documentaries, the specials for five or 10 years. And they were afraid of arousing the great, angry dragon that is the US, an American sense of righteousness, and anger, for the sheer barbarity and how unnecessary it was. We all understand that as the firemen go into the burning building to save the children, some firemen may die, they understand that when troops, some may die. But the loss of life for a political drama in your head completely untethered from reality, everything from a completely alien intellectual ecosystem is just beyond understanding for most Americans. The number one question that came up in Google Surgeons, in the weeks after 9/11 is, why do they hate us? We don't even know who you are, why do you hate us? And it took Americans a long time, and many don't understand this yet. It was, they had an ideological vision in their head about what will create the final showdown between themselves and the Americans and the mounts of Afghanistan. And that was a moment they devoutly wanted to get to. And nothing else mattered toward achieving that bizarre goal. And I should probably say a word here about al-Qaeda's bin Laden's statement to Americans about Israel and Gaza and all this. That is pure propaganda. I took a look at every al-Qaeda's statement and every bin Laden before al-Qaeda existed. The references to Palestine, Gaza, Israel, West Bank, you can count on one, maybe two hands in a list of nations that's never singled out, it's never been a focus. Then that is one message to Americans in which he is so clearly reiterating left-wing academics in the Western Europe and the United States. And trying to use this message to divide, it's just enemy propaganda. It's never an animating purpose. In fact, some of the non-leather high-jectors had been Christian converts into most Islam, one that Al-Jara, I believe his name is, tried to leave the plot. He is Lebanese girlfriend, who was still Christian, wanted to get married and have him started a new life and wanted to get away from these crazy people. And so he left and Muhammad Ata had to go after him and threaten him to get him to rejoin the hijacking group, right? So the real reasons have nothing to do with bin Laden's statements about, and if you look at Zaid Al-Jara, he says nothing, positively nothing about Gaza or the West Bank or the Palestinians, not a single word. So the idea this was an animating principle, there's just not the case. There's a book by Dr. A. M. Al-Jarahiri, which is translated into English, he's the two person, Ata, and he's the book is called "Nights Under The Prophet's Panor." I think you can read it online and English for free, he's translated about the Library of Congress from Arabic. And it's very revealing as to what gets what they get into their animating principles. But again, nothing about Gaza, they're arguing against the United States in "Nights Under The Prophet's Panor" and in several other texts, it's very simple. They think the United States is supporting the Arab dictatorships that they suffer under now. And so they blame the United States for supporting dictators or ruling class in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and other places. It's not a detailed critique of American society. This is not your democratic socialists, right, or the Christian socialists in Western Europe, right. This is not a detailed critique of the market economy for US foreign policy or anything like that. It is a desire to create a new civilization in the Arabic-speaking world, organized along certain eccentric religious ideas, which you can find, and they've written them down, in the shade of the Quran as one, milestones, both by Syed Hutib. You can find it under "Nights Under The Prophet's Panor." Go read their literature if you want to understand what drives them. It's not even Islam. I mean, Islam is at the surface where you dig into their ideology. It's deeply influenced by Karl Marx and by Vladimir Lenin. This is a fusion of Leninism and Islamism, right, or Islam. And if you read their works, it becomes immediately clear. That is the basis of their thinking. It's not a particular aspect of US or Western foreign policy. And one of the things that really impacted me when I was watching these documentaries is the recordings from the people on board the planes to their families saying goodbye to them for the last time. And just the way that a lot of these people just held it together and were just very calm and were just telling their family members how much they loved them. There's no words to describe it, really. I mean, you can try, but it's ultimately futile. Hi, baby. I'm a baby. You have to listen to me carefully. I'm on a plane. I've been high back. I'm on the plane. I'm calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much. And I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say. There's three guys. I've had that plane. I'm trying to be calm. We're turned around. And I've heard that there's planes that have been drawn into the World Trade Center. I hope to see your face again, baby. I love you. Bye. I also have a twin. I only have a minute. I'm on United 93. And it's been hijacked by terrorists who say to have a bomb. Apparently they have flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already. It looks like they're going to take this one down as well. Hopefully I just want you to say I love you. And I'm going to miss you. And please give my love to one of them. And I'll see why I just love you and I just want you to tell you that. I don't know if I'm going to be able to just tell you what I'm telling you now. But all my stuff is in the safe. The safe is in my closet, my bedroom. My combination is you push the key for clear and then 0913 and then it should and maybe pound and then it should unlock. I love you. I hope I can talk to you soon. Bye. Yeah, one of the passengers on the United 93 is talking to his wife. And he says he has to go because he's part of the plan to retake the plane. She says, do you want to talk to the children? He says, I'll talk to them tonight after we land the plane. Absolute confidence their plan was going to succeed. But he had to project that confidence because those are the last words by which she was going to know him. That was going to define who he was in the mind of his wife and more importantly in the minds of his children for the rest of their days. And you know, you knew his chance of living was slim, but he had to project that confidence. He had not to be, he had to be a pillar of strength and not lose inner turmoil because he had to steal himself to take action, but he also had to define himself in the minds of those he loved. And there are so many calls like that. Your absolute reference is it's heartbreaking. And if you read those transcripts, you have to be admiring those so-called people. The bravery they could summon to be calm and collected or appear to calm and collected in the face of the most extreme circumstances, it's astonishing. And as well, it's obviously those people, but it's also the emergency services. The ambulance men, the police officers, the fire officers, just the fact that these people ran into a burning building, whether it was the towers, whether it was the pentagon, when everybody else was running away, I mean, it's terrorism of the highest order. I talked to Donald Roomsfeld a few weeks after 9/11, he was the Secretary of Defense. And he mentioned that he had safely gotten out of his office and how many people had died on the Pentagon. And as he's talking, he's moving his hands around. And finally, I said, you know, he's throwing your hands and he holds them up like this. And I could see burns. And he said, oh, yeah, I was helping remove the rubble before the security dragged me away. And I burned my hands. Think about that. Cabinet officers in the United States joined everyone else at the Pentagon in trying to dig out the rubble, to save people fighting to their lives, buried alive, in hot, burning break, twisted metal. And the firemen who not only went in to try to put out the fire in the World Trade Center came back out to exchange their oxygen tubes and returned around and went back in. That little moment of screwing in the refresh air, readjusting your mask, wiping some sweat off the brow, and turning around and going back in. That's bravery, turning around to go back into danger, to help others. It's these little moments, these little snapshots that define this day for me. I think you suddenly realize that your country is crowded with heroes wearing ordinary faces. And that's such a profound point because, in particular, nowadays in our culture, the people who we celebrate, I mean, it's pretty much tried to say, but really shouldn't be celebrated. The people whose words we listen to, you think do you have anything of value to say, but you look at the people who are actual, actual heroes, it's the people who will ordinary men and women, the firefighters of fire offices, but even the office workers, some of the stories of the office workers on that day are just remarkable. Just the people turning around, going to make sure that every single person is out from their particular office, making sure that the corridors are cleared. And sometimes these people just, they simply didn't make it out. Yeah, I mean, on 9/11, I was working for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels. And my brother, Brendan, was working for the Wall Street Journal in New York. And my brother and I would talk multiple times a day. And like everybody else, all the phone lines were jammed. Everyone was trying to reassure themselves that their family members were alive. And the Journal was in the World Financial Center, I believe at that time, right beside the Twin Tower. And Brendan was in his phone. And we couldn't reach him, but we had, at the Journal, we have these internal communications. And then they begin evacuating the building. And they're reassembling the team. I'm moving it by ferry to ultimately, I think they went to Princeton, to Jersey. But we were going to have to put out the Wall Street Journal that day from overseas. New York was shut down. And their counting heads, thousands of heads. And the list of missing Wall Street Journal people gets smaller and smaller. It's first, it's hundreds and it's dozens. And finally, it's down to eight missing people and my brother is still in my list. And as I'm working with my colleagues in Europe and Asia to put out the paper that day, because New York was shut down, we had to take over everything. I was thinking to myself, is this, have I already had the last conversation with my brother? And I wish I could have said so many things that I hadn't said because I was botless or just not thinking about the gravity of the situation. And we end up working until three or four in the morning, Brussels time. And we're editing the official view of the paper, the editorial. And I'm about to go home and go to bed. That being spring's through. And it's marked with my brother's name. And I'm like, oh my gosh, Brendan, is that you? And he did not follow the evacuation with the other Wall Street Journal staff. He had, usually he would take the 830 subway into Lower Manhattan. And so he would have been inside the World Trade Center looking to go up the bridge and across the World Financial Center. But as he was about to get on the train of the platform in Brooklyn, he looked down and saw three spots of blood on his shirt. And he went home to change his shirt and he got on the 845 subway. It turned out to be one of the last in the Lower Manhattan that day. And he saw it all. He saw the second plane get. He saw people jumping or falling from the towers. He was covered in the white dust as the buildings collapsed. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge covered in sweat and dust. Looking a bit like a ghost when he runs into a journal colleague who has also covered. And he said to him, come with me, Brendan, we're going to Bob's house. We're going to put out the paper from there. And so you've never made any official counts. He wasn't showing up in the internal system. Because Bob's house wasn't popular. Bob would go partly. The editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and the editor of the editor-of-the-the-at-a-12-age. He in response, yeah, of course it's me. And then I'm desperate to know how we survived and what happened. Whether he's talked to any family members, no one knew whether he was alive or not. And many, many people had that same experience that day. Some didn't and his happily is. I'd mind it. But this sudden erasure of lives for a political cause is so morally wrong. Why do people think politics in their head justify harmed other people? Always amazed me. Yes, Richard, that is a very worthwhile observation that applies, I think, more broadly to than just this particular incident. We're going to continue the conversation with our supporters on Substake. But before we do, what do you think is the one thing that people don't talk enough about in relation to 9/11 that they really should? Wow, so many things I could say to that. One is to realize that one terrorism is not an Islamic creation. Therese was invented in the 1830s by a group of Russian radicals called the Novemberists and the anarchists around them. This had been throughout the 19th century a technique that the Germans learned from the Russians in 1848. We see a lot of what we would describe today as terrorist attacks. So the idea that this is some defect in Islam, no, no, it's something that Muslim world learned from the Russians and the Germans. Terrorism is not a natural feature. In Islam. That's one thing. Second thing is people joining terrorist groups can be radicalized by campus life, like college in Muhammad. And we need to pay a much more attention to how college life structures the souls of the students who pass through it in order to reduce this conversion to radicalism. We can never eliminate it, but we can sure reduce it, and we're not really doing anything serious about that. Third, how social isolation makes a lot of terrorism possible by offering it an endless supply of recruits. Muhammadata, who was the operational commander of the 1911 attacks, was brought to to to Hamburg, Germany, who studied the Harbor of Technical School. And he had a host family of social democrats who were convicted, you know, just have deep convictions of aggressive mind you. They thought they were building a stronger relationship between the West, Germany, in particular, and Egypt by hosting him in their home. And they had no skills to identify that because he had gone through all boys schooling, he found it very hard to deal with German teenagers, girls of his age, because he had no social skills to deal with it. And that as he started to, and they would take him to these Arab events, so he could feel more at home. And he's eventually identified by a recruiter. And his behavior begins to change. She stops eating with the family. And his son cooking his own food. He wouldn't, when he would watch television with them, he would cover his eyes whenever there would be an ad showing a woman in a bikini, you know, advertising some Tunisian vacation, or what happened. They were not able to identify any of the signs of increasing radicalization. And this sort of thoughtless dualism really needs to come with some training. How is it the person you brought into your home? Is gradually being radicalized? By the difference of himself and the new society you thrust him into. Sometimes pushing people before they're ready into Western society can be far more radicalizing than leaving them at home and giving them good books to read in Egypt or someplace. And it is not the case to know us, to love us. New Westerners are deeply strange people that are not like the other people in the world. And that's, you can go on about what the differences are. But when you're asking someone to join that, don't think the answer is going to be combayah. 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 join in ideology that will kill and name you to punish you for the way I feel now. That is a very human response. People become terrorists for human reasons, not ideological ones. Ideology is the cover, the excuse, the rationalization inside is a human being and if you don't change the mechanics to shape those human beings, you will have another September 11th. Richard, thank you so much for coming back on and talking to us about such a tremendously important event on its 25th anniversary. Thank you all for watching and listening. Please head over to Trigapod.co.uk where Richard is going to answer some of your questions. What is your take on the fact that we now have people with Islamic backgrounds running from office for office in the US who say America had it coming.