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

33:18And 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 bin Laden and the associated Arab terrorist groups were attacks against these tribal people in what was called once kafiristan is now known as nuristan land of light because they did succeed in converting the majority of them right so that's the ideological and targeting focus of the arabs was on the afghans who are 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.

34:11They're hard to control, hard to manage, feel trained, 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 operationally makes no sense. But when I talk to Bearden, who is one of the CIA, I talk to every living CIA station chief for Afghanistan who served between 1980 and 1992, right? Now you can say, okay, these are self-interested, fine, but no one else would track them down and talk to them. And they laid out in very clear, non-ideological, non-defensive terms. We had no orders to fund these people. We had no money to fund these people.

34:51We had no desire to fund these people. And these people were trying to kill us. So we don't write checks to people who are trying to kill you.

34:59Francis Foster:That makes sense. Did the people that they funded then, were many of them part of the Taliban? No, the Taliban are created much later. The Taliban are born in 1994. So remember the Soviets... 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 the intelligence services, the ISI, and a bunch of local Islamic teachers. They're trying to get, the Taliban are trying to impose a severe version of the official version of Islam, according to Pakistan. And later, the so-called Mujahideen, the Arab foreign fighters, ally themselves with the Taliban because the Taliban are not on their own.

35:56But the U.S. backed forces become known as the Northern Alliance. And if you remember, two days before 9-11 on September 9th, 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 Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, is killed on September 9th. 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 ally with it, not in 94, but after. Remember, there's a whole group, a whole galaxy of these groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and people move between groups.

36:45We 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 they'll move to ISIS. Their martyrdom opportunity is further delayed there. So they shift to Al Qaeda. They're moving around, right? And they're looking to die and therefore change their status in their community.

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38:29Francis Foster: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 U.S. soil. They were attacking U.S. Navy. They were also attacking embassies. Why was there someone not in government raising the alarm, going, look, we need to do something here. This is 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 Klan administration, right, we can look back from our point in time and say it was obvious this was going to happen.

39:14But 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 Clinton years, says that he received his first briefing on Al-Qaeda sometime in 1994. this is years after the attacks have begun this is a year after the world trade center bombing at this point they hadn't linked uh the world trade center bombing to al-qaeda um and he said he wasn't sure if he mentioned it to the president or not uh maybe he thinks the first conversation with president clinton about al-qaeda was sometime in 1995, right?

40:04Why 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 the late 90s. But in the early 90s, remember when the World Trade Center explodes and the FBI has called in. They're trying to figure out what if this was a work of terrorism. In the beginning, they're not even sure. The first few hours, they're not even sure, right? They change 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?

40:50So that happens five, six hours into the investigation. But for days, they're like, is this a Yugoslav terrorist group? Is this far-right extremist from, you know, 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 that Muhammad Atta, the ringleader, has given him is not a real airline ticket. It's a child's ticket. and he has to upgrade it in order to get on a flight back to Pakistan.

41:33And, you know, it takes them months to put the pieces together about that bombing itself. Connecting it to a larger global narrative doesn't really cohere into anything until the middle of 1995 at the earliest. And that's also why when Sudan offered to arrest bin Laden and then turn him over to the United States, that wasn't seen as that high a priority either. Now, Francis, to your point, were there mid-level people who were 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 these specialists think their specialty is the most important thing.

42:24Francis Foster:Right. They're all with their hair off the wire. 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 talked to Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, just died recently. Woolsey 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'll mess up our case.

43:12The 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 of defense. So when you want these documents, you can have them when we present them at trial, which turned out to be in the middle of 1996. Woolsey also begged for translators. Less than 10 % of the phone intercepts coming out of the Middle East were being translated, and the CIA wanted more translators.

43:49And because Woolsey had committed a political offense unknowingly, right, he was told by Bruce Lindsey in the White House that they want to replace the general counsel of the CIA with a friend of Bill, someone who had supported the president in his election efforts. and wolsey said no we have a very capable general counsel now there's no reason to replace her uh or him i can't remember but uh 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 at a few handful of occasions to try to get the president's attention and he would go with the CIA daily briefer and sit outside the president's office, but he can't just walk in and was never asked inside.

44:50So 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 his information. And the FBI didn't translate things unless it had a direct, they thought, a direct bearing on the case. So, example, earlier, before the World Trade Center bombing, there had been a killing of a Jewish leader named Maher Khan. And those documents were not translated for 8, 10 years. When they were, they showed you that the very infrastructure used by the people and the places by Ramzi Yusuf were the same. But they didn't want to spend the money to translate the Arabic.

45:34So there were translation problems, there were bureaucratic infighting, there were silos, and then there were political gains. 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 Khalid 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?

46:29Oh, wow. Yeah, well, there's a famous case in 1995 where the FBI misses him by hours out of a safe house in, I think, Qatar because the Qatari minister, I think, of religious instruction. Anyway, one of the ministers warns Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that the U.S. is coming for him. um look let's go back to uh the schooling in north carolina of college shake muhammad the architect 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.

47:22And the school didn't cooperate very well on this, but there appears to have been a Muslim Brotherhood scholarship paid for his schooling in the United States. But the U.S., especially before 9-11, but even now, doesn't really do background checks of the foreign students' heads.

47:47So, and sometimes the foreign students it admits are less qualified than the U.S. 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 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would not have been admitted if he had to compete openly because his English at that stage was very poor and his knowledge of engineering, which he 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.

48:32So clearly additional regulations need to be applied on the admissions of foreign students and on what basis and so on, right? I think the U.S. should educate the highest IQ, the most capable porn student in the world. Without 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 avowedly Christian. He felt isolated. And so he gravitated toward other people whose language he was isolated by language. His English just was staged very poor. So he sought out other Arabic speakers who were far more radical than himself.

49:24And 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 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 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's family members say, you know, 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, many changes in his personal life. this was and they blame 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 uh and um they get in trouble for uh slaughtering a goat in a baseball dug out in the university so that they can eat in a certain ritualistic way and so on, right?

50:40But 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're setting up a dangerous situation where they will go to other people and you get an island of misfit toys. Now, most of the time, these are just, you know, sad train spotters. But in other cases, social dynamics there create a toxic environment that makes all of them, or many of them into radicals. I talked to an imam leader who was a student, now runs several mosques in Greensboro, North Carolina, who was a student with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

51:34And 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 and know Islam. 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.

52:10Francis Foster: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 Osama bin 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 sophistication? And for context, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nickname was KFC because of his predilection for it.

52:59And he was weighed over 200 pounds. So it's not like he was a physical specimen either. Well, he becomes fatter living in Pakistan. Yeah, right. In the 90s, he was known as the brain. His nickname KFC is after 9-11. So he's smart. Yes. And look, if there had been a path to citizenship for him and his family in Kuwait, we may never have heard of him, right? 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 their life. either meaning or isolation. They're trying to solve for social isolation or they're trying to solve for meaning, for purpose.

53:50Terrorism gives you a purpose. But to carry out that purpose, you need money because it's not easy to get people into... You've got to get visas to... You've got to recruit people. You have to get visas to get them to the United States. need to 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 um and college shik muhammad tried to sell many different plans to bin laden he gets to meet bin Laden by playing on his family connection to Ramzi Youssef, who bin Laden admired and who had carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bomb.

54:41So once he forges a connection with bin Laden and his inner 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 is 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 it's very much like i hate to keep going back to the hollywood comparison but it's very much like an independent and producer with a very promising script having to negotiate with a studio for financing and distribution, right?

55:32So he needed al-Qaeda's money. He needed al-Qaeda's ability to forge documents and to move people in secure ways. He needed 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. far 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.

56:21But in bin Laden's mind, they'd driven without the Soviets, they'd beaten one superpower. They wanted to beat the other. They thought if they could force the United States to come to the mountains of Afghanistan to meet them, that 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 times, how many minutes a firefight lasts. And those times got shorter and shorter because the U.S. got increasingly efficient at killing them. And there is a major battle in 2002 or 2003, Shemali Plains, it's called, in which they fielded hundreds, maybe close to a thousand fighters against a U.S.

57:10unit, a much, much smaller U.S. unit and were utterly defeated and never tried a mass battle again. So this fantasy of bin Laden is that 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 before 9-11, of course, bin Laden had no way of knowing that. He thought, if anything, the Americans were softer and easier to beat.

57:36Francis Foster: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 Saudis? It 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.

58:18You didn't need a visa at all. You just say, here it is. See the passport? Let me in. and um And 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. um look there's the same reason why you know there are certain geographies that present geopolitical risk let's say that say france germany britain denmark don't right uh so to compromise with the saudis they created uh visa express which was a very quick system for getting a U.S. visa.

59:11So for the Saudis, it was a matter of prestige. They wanted to be treated, both the Europeans and Australians, and this was the compromise. As a result, the people who became the hijackers were able to get to take advantage of this program. If this program had been offered in Qatar instead of Saudi Arabia, 19 of the hijackers would have been from Qatar, not Saudi, right so they had studied our system found a weak point took advantage of it how did they select the airports where the planes were going to leave they looked at the faa's website um and found the airports with the largest number of security violations they knew that logan airport in boston for example was run by a political appointee who had previously been the chauffeur for the governor in Massachusetts.

1:00:00So they thought they picked airports. Dulles Airport in Washington, for example, was another where there were a long history of documented security lapses. So they used U.S. government data publicly available in a free 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 had weak security procedures.

1:00:41And the ringleader, Muhammad Ali, flew out of a small airport in Maine and then changed planes to join a flight, I believe out of Logan, and I'm in Mary Spahesiana, 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 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?

1:01:33Right. Not all of them went to 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. Their training wasn't that good. They didn't know what all of the controls did on the aircraft.

1:02:04Francis Foster:Is that American 11 trying to call? Buddy. Buddy. We have some planes, just stay quiet and you'll be okay. We are turning to the airport.

1:02:18And who's trying to call me here?

1:02:26American 11, are you trying to call? Nobody moves. Everything is okay. If you try to make any move, you'll injure yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.

1:02:37Francis Foster:That's good, I see your reference for the moon. Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves. United 1523, did you hear your company? Did you hear some interference when the brake was here a couple of minutes ago, screaming? Yes, I did, 797, and we couldn't tell what it was either. United 93, Cleveland, if you hear the sound of right then.

1:03:18But also 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 internal regulations that the keys for the cockpit door be kept in an unlockable cabinet right next to the cockpit door. So the stewardess could just, this cabinet, grab the keys and get into the cockpit to deliver coffee or whatever. 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, at this time period, pilots could smoke in the cockpit.

1:04:11And 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 loudsmoking 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.

1:04:52And 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 what have you. So it wasn't a hardened place. And so it was, even though there had been hijackings since the late 1960s in the United States and 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 airports and airport security to actually take over the planes once they were airborne?

1:05:48Oh, 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.

1:06:13But 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 and sitting in a metal tube literally for opening boxes were specifically permitted to be brought on the planes um and so the faa to shield itself said they used box cutters we don't actually know the box cutters that they use blades of some kind but given the laxness of airport security in the airports they chose and especially logan these could be much longer blades um and they were able to severely wound large angry adult american men uh so the blade would have to be bigger than a box cutter um we just the the answer is we just don't know but the box cutter thing was a bureaucratic way to safeguard and silo itself The bureaucracy immediately shifted into CYA from the afternoon of the attacks onward.

1:07:32Richard?

1:07:33Francis Foster:No, 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, since there had been hijackings in 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? uh so there is uh it's still classified uh but there is uh but i have a copy uh i probably should have brought it um so the fbi um 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 and to do that they put together large amounts of data um atm receipts restaurant receipts witnesses accounts uh security cameras it's it's an incredible document right frankly i almost thought about writing a book just about that um and in that uh they would um there was a number of they did scenario role playing where the guys 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 waist or if they grabbed you from behind?

1:09:04Here's how you would throw them over your head and so on and so on. Right.

1:09:10The reports that Mohammed Atta 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 into buildings goes back to a document out of Iran in 1987. So the idea had been floating around in jihadi circles for a while, but it does not appear that the 19 of the 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 we're true there's no evidence for that but they did rehearse in the United States in various hotel rooms and in gyms uh defending themselves um and they also practiced uh 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.

1:10:20And they also had quizzes, written quizzes for each other as well.

1:10:25Francis Foster:And how did they practice the actual flying element? Did they use flight simulators or training with actual planes? They were flight simulators, 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.

1:10:50Francis Foster:I mean, 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. And the reason is, and coming on to the consequences in the aftermath, is that Francis and I often talk about this, where we are 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.

1:11:34Francis Foster: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 the same 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, right? And they're able to see it much more originally, right? 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, come up in their conversation as a live thing, the way 9-11 is for us, right?

1:12:16So the years of experience are a tool for insight, but they're also a tool for missing things, right? and um so even when someone who's 20 someone who's 40 someone is 60 is looking at the exact same object they may see very different things and it's not because the young people are dumb

1:12:38Francis Foster:or the old people oh no not at all not at all that's not i was certainly wasn't saying that they're dumb this is this is human nature on better for yeah of course well 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 Iliad, the one about pride, Rage and Leadership, which is just as essential, now has a free course from Hillsdale too.

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1:13:56Francis Foster:Go to hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll for free. That's hillsdale.edu slash 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 remember to to believe but it's true uh the best way to to show this is uh to tell you a quick story um my father and mother were on the west coast of the united states um to do a book signing for my father and all flights were canceled 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 three thousand miles right uh and it would take days because they thought all rental cars are going to get booked up we should grab it while we can and so they began this drive across the united states in the hours after September 11th.

1:15:04And on lonely roads in Wyoming, he saw these signs over and over again, handmade signs, I love New York, that 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 the city of New York. But yet, we saw the signs. 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 superhighway, read them. Messages of support and love. An idea that politics should be put aside.

1:15:56The country really came together. even though there were jet for the jet fighter graph at least in new york and washington jet fighters roaring overhead um there was this idea that the country should unify um political speech moderated there was a real coming together and it everyone was afraid it wouldn't last and of course it couldn't and it didn't but it lasted far 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 these are 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.

1:16:54The cultural impact was not what commentators say today of fear and anger. That was part of it. It was a desire to right the wrongs. And when Bush, President Bush, W. Bush said in the crater that they were still digging out at 9-11. The World Trade Center crater, he grabbed a bullhorn from a construction worker. And he says, I hear you and the rest of the world is going to hear from you very soon. Thank you all.

1:17:35Francis Foster:I want you all to know.

1:17:42I want you all to know that America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn.

1:18:01Francis Foster:This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens. I can hear you!

1:18:22Francis Foster:I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people...

1:18:31And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

1:18:43USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! And what the president didn't disclose is the CIA paramilitary were already on their way to Afghanistan. and they were reconnecting with the Northern Alliance who they had funded in the 80s, remember, separate from the jihadis, the Arab buyers. And, you know, there were personal relationships and they began setting up listing posts and forward advance areas and coordinating with horse soldiers and carrying out, and within a few weeks carrying out attacks against the Taliban and against al-Qaeda. So the desire to eliminate al-Qaeda root and branch was definitely there.

1:19:40And maybe there's other data that I'm not aware of, but 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. In fact, people experienced the opposite. Unity, reconnection, and an incredible resolve to kill those who killed us.

1:20:12Francis Foster:And do you think that reaction is exactly what bin Laden wanted? No. If you read what, I mean, I can't read his mind and he's 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 and McDonald's and was weak, 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.

1:21:06But 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 in 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 um i offered when i was one of the times in which i was in iraq i offered to take uh my kurdish translator and his family to dinner he says oh let's have dinner at our home And so after eating dinner in their home three or four times, I said, no, let's pick the most expensive restaurant and let's go there, which turned out to be a Chinese place.

1:21:58And 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? Western society is the opposite. It's curiosity and openness to other people's food, words, ideas, perspectives. 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 deploy with such a wallet. And Richard, when you look and you watch the footage from that day, it's so shocking.

1:22:49It is. Whilst 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. Take two. Take two and two.

1:23:14Francis Foster:One. 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!

1:23:47Oh my god!

1:24:22I'm tired.

1:24:28I don't have a radio enough to talk. Hey Pete, the North Tower is waiting. Oh my god, there it goes! Get out of here!

1:25:02Help me! Help me!

1:25:18Get in, here comes the cloud. The cloud is coming. Keep going! Go, go, go!

1:25:25Francis Foster:Get inside! It's gonna jump right over this building! It's gonna jump over the building! In Washington, there is a large fire at the Pentagon. The Pentagon has been evacuated. And there, as you can see, perhaps the second tower, the front tower, the top portion of which is collapsing. Good Lord.

1:25:51There are no words. yeah 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 um 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 that it put it took me right back in time and i understand why major media has been afraid especially in the wake of 9 11 the first five or ten years they didn't reshow those videos very often and only and not for long and they didn't do documentaries and specials for five or ten years and they were afraid of arousing the great angry dragon that is a u.s an american sense of righteousness and anger um for the sheer barbarity and how unnecessary it was um you know we all understand that as the firemen go into the burning building to save the children, some firemen may die.

1:27:12They understand that when troops are played, some may die. But the loss of life for a political drama in your head, completely untethered from reality, coming from a completely alien intellectual ecosystem, is just beyond understanding for most Americans. The number one question that came up in Google searches in the weeks after 9-11 is, Why do they hate us? Like, 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. They didn't understand us and come to hate us. They have a very rudimentary idea of who we are. it it was they had an ideological vision in their head about what will create um the final showdown between themselves and the americans in the mountains afghanistan and that was a moment they devoutly wanted to get to and nothing else mattered toward achieving that bizarre goal.

1:28:26And 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 statement and every Bin Laden statement 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. It'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 Western Europe and the United States. and trying to use this message to divide. It's just enemy propaganda, right?

1:29:22It's never an animating purpose. You know, fun fact, some of the 9-11 hijackers had been Christian converts into Muslim Islam. One, Zayed Al-Jara, I believe his name is, tried to leave the plot. His Lebanese girlfriend, who was still Christian, wanted to get married and have them start a new life. And why don't you get away from these crazy people? And so he left, and Muhammad Atta 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 Zayel Jara, he says nothing. positively nothing about gaza or west bank or the palestinians not a single word so the idea this was an animating principle there's just not the case uh there's a book by dr amin al-zara hiri which has been translated into english uh he's the two person and he's the book is called Knights Under the Prophet's Banner.

1:30:40I think you can read it online in English for free. It's translated by the Library of Congress from Arabic. And it's very revealing as to what they get into their animating principles. But again, nothing about Gaza. Their argument against the United States in Knights Under the Prophet's Banner and in several other texts is 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 in uh or a ruling class in saudi arabia and egypt and other places that's it it's not a detailed critique of american society this is not the democratic socialists uh right or the christian socialists in western europe right This is not a detailed critique of the market economy or U.S.

1:31:36foreign 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 is one, milestones both by Sayyid Huttab. You can find it under Knights of the Prophet's Banner. go read their literature if you want to understand what drives them. It's not even Islam. I mean, Islam's at the surface, but 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 an Islam.

1:32:24And if you read their works, it becomes immediately clear. That is the basis of their thinking. It's not a particular aspect of U.S. 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 the 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 yeah and there's no words to describe it really i mean you can try but it's utterly it's ultimately

1:33:18Francis Foster:futile hi baby i'm baby you have to listen to me carefully i'm on a plane it's in high deck i'm on 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, babe. I don't know what to say. There's three guys that have had that plane. I'm trying to be calm. We're turned around, and I've heard that there's planes that have been blown into the World Trade Center. I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Bye.

1:33:53Elsa, it's Lynn. I only have a minute. I'm on United 93 and it's been hijacked by terrorists who say they have a bomb.

1:34:03Francis Foster:Apparently they have flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already and it looks like they're going to take this one down as well. Mostly I just wanted to say I love you and I'm going to miss you. and please give my love to love that.

1:34:24Francis Foster:Mostly I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that. I don't know if I'm going to be interested to tell you that again or not. My stuff is in the safe. The safe is in my closet in my bedroom. The combination is you push T for clear and then 0913 and then it should, and maybe pound, and then it should unlock. I love you, and I hope I can talk to you soon. Bye. Jules, this is Ryan. Listen, on an airplane that's been hijacked, and things don't go well, and I'm looking good. I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to be good. I'm so happy this time. Same to my parents and everybody.

1:35:08and I just totally love you and I'll see you later. Hi, babe. What if I call you? 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? And he says, I'll talk to them tonight after we land the plane. Absolute confidence that their plan was going to succeed.

1:35:42But he had to project that confidence because those are the last words by which she was going to know him. And it 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. He knew his chance of living was slender. but he had to project that confidence he had not to be he had to be a pillar of strength and not rebuild his inner turmoil because he 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 you're absolutely right francis it's it's heartbreaking and you if you read those transcripts you end up admiring those so-called people the bravery they could summon to be calm and collected or appear this 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 rumsfeld 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 mark show me 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 security dragged me away and i burned my hands think about that cabinet officers the united states joined everyone else at the pentagon in trying to dig out the rubble to save people fighting for their lives buried alive in hot burning brick 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 then turned around and went back in.

1:38:33That little moment of screwing in the fresh 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.

1:39:09and that's such a profound point because in particularly nowadays in our culture the people who we celebrate i mean it's 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 are ordinary men and women the firefighters, the fire officers, 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 clear.

1:39:57And sometimes these people just, they simply didn't make it out. Yes. 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.

1:40:30And 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 Towers. And Brendan wasn't on his phone. And we couldn't reach him, but we had, with the journal, we have these internal communications. And then they begin evacuating the building and they're reassembling the team, moving it by ferry to, well, ultimately, I think they went to Princeton, New Jersey, but we were going to have to put out the Wall Street Journal that day from overseas.

1:41:17New York was shut down. And they're counting heads, thousands of heads. And the list of missing Wall Street Journal people gets smaller and smaller. First, it's hundreds, then it's dozens. And finally, it's down to eight missing people. And my brother is still on that 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 thoughtless or just not thinking about the gravity of the situation and we end up working until three or four in the morning Brussels time

1:42:28and we're editing the official view of the paper, the editorial. And I'm about to go home and go to bed. That speech comes 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.

1:43:23And he went home to change his shirt, and he got on the 845 subway, which turned out to be one of the last into lower Manhattan that day. And he saw it all. He saw the second plane. He saw people jumping or falling from the towers. he was covered in the white dust as the buildings collapsed he walked across the brooklyn bridge covered in sweat dust looking a bit like a ghost when he runs into a journal colleague who has also covered and who 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 part of it like Bob, Robert L.

1:44:14Hartley the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and the editor of the editorial page and

1:44:24he

1:44:32he responds yeah, of course it's me and then I'm desperate to know how he survived and what happened whether he's talked to any family members no one knew whether he was alive or not and um many many people had that same experience that day some didn't end as happily as i'd mind it and uh but this sudden erasure of lives for a political cause is so morally wrong why people think politics in their head justify harm other people always amazes me yes richard uh that is a very worthwhile observation um that applies i think more broadly to than just this particular incident um we'll we're going to uh continue the conversation

1:45:30Francis Foster:with our supporters on Substack, 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. Terrorism 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 the Muslim world learned from the Russians and the Germans.

1:46:26Terrorism is not a natural feature. in Islam. That's one thing. Second thing is people joined terrorist groups can be radicalized by campus life like College Fik Muhammad. And we need to pay 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. Muhammad Atta, who was the operational commander of the 9-11 attacks, was brought to Hamburg, Germany, to study the Harburg Technical School.

1:47:25and he had a host family of social democrats uh or convicted you know just have deep convictions or progressive mind view 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.

1:48:13And his behavior begins to change. He stops eating with the family, insists on cooking his own food. 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 have you. They were not able to identify any of the signs of increasing radicalization. And this sort of thoughtless do-goodism 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.

1:49:12and it is not the case to know us to love us we westerners are deeply strange people that are not like the other people in the world and that's we could 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 kumbaya 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 an ideology that will kill and maim 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.

1:49:58Inside is a human being. And if you don't change the mechanics that shape those human beings, you will have another September 11th.

1:50:10Francis Foster: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 triggerpod.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.