Historically High - 9/11: Part 2

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

In the conclusion of our two-part September 11 deep dive, we step straight into the chaos of the morning itself—and the global fallout that followed. We walk through the timeline as it unfolded in real time: how the planes were taken, the shock of the strikes, the collapse of the towers, the hit on the Pentagon, and the fierce resistance aboard Flight 93, where ordinary passengers mounted a revolt in the skies over Shanksville. Alongside the devastation, we highlight the staggering, improbable survival stories and the acts of raw courage from first responders and everyday civilians navigating zero visibility. Then, we unpack the immediate aftermath: how breadcrumb trails of intelligence pointed straight to bin Laden’s Afghan hideouts, kickstarting the Global War on Terror. We break down the domestic shift that followed almost overnight—from the creation of Homeland Security to the passage of the PATRIOT Act and the era of mass surveillance. Finally, we track how the national trauma was swiftly recalibrated, laying the rhetorical and geopolitical groundwork that turned America’s sights toward Baghdad. Thanks for listening and don't forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating, and write a review! You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh for bonus content and exclusive perks. Follow us on social media: @Historicallyhi on X/Twitter and @historicallyhighpod on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, everyone. Oh, this is, it's going to be a roller coaster of an episode. Got to panel ourselves into a corner with this one, huh? Well, welcome back. We've been away for a couple days. And, I mean, there's not much to say getting into this episode. We are kicking it off right with 9-11 the morning and just kind of going through all the events. and going to try to keep our shit together while we're talking about this.

Before we started recording this, we were talking about how the last episode was kind of more where we could just list off factual stuff. Clinical. It was very clinical where we could just, we hadn't been emotionally hit by this yet. Yeah, we talked about the embassy bombing and the coal and everything like that. But yeah, this is a completely different beast. So bear with us. Strap in.

Get some tissues, maybe. Yeah, it's, I mean, we've come to the moment. We've come to everything that you remember. We've come to every part of this that I think we all don't necessarily gloss over, but it's important to go back and see just what happened. And I know we have a pretty wide demographic, and some of you guys, I mean, 25, you know, less than 25 years old, you didn't get to see this happen.

And I'm not trying to wax poetic like a fucking old dude or anything like that. But I mean, yeah, rewatching some of this stuff as an adult and kind of having more of an emotional capacity and being able to try to, I guess, put yourself in the shoes of what those people must have been feeling so many people. It's very sobering. and it's a spectrum of emotion because you can

this is something that if there was no sound if this was just silence you see and you feel everything just based upon the reactions that are happening yeah and it's definitely something that is an adult you just kind of look at differently because you have different priorities in life and as a kid I was like wow that's that's awful

that's across the country this is very sad. I understand. I can take my social cues from the adults to understand just how big this was. And wow, everybody's so much nicer to each other for like a solid period of time after that before we all start trying to rip each other's heads off again. But yeah, you just want to get into it? Yeah.

All right, let's do it. All right, so we come to the morning of the attacks. We are at September 11th. And it's a day that sort of feels busy because we talked to, about in the last episode, you have Atta and one of the other hijackers that are taking a pre-dawn plane from Maine to get back to Logan Airport.

I had a realization about that when I was looking over that information because to me, like you said earlier in the previous episode, kind of seems like a weird additional step to take in the plan. I think the reason they did that is because there was also another group coming in through the actual airport

itself in Boston. So they were coming through Boston security. The other guys had to just through security at the smaller airport. It was, I think, let's see. Oh, fuck. I knew that here. Wasn't it in Portland?

Yes, it was in Portland. It was just a little commuter plane that came down. So when they got off that plane, they were already then just going to meet up with an international, or not international, but cross-national flight and didn't have to go through the heavier security where maybe they were trying to avoid seven, no, it would have been eight guys going through that same security

kind of in a similar period of time. Yeah, I guess that does make sense to, again, to just separate as much as possible to try to fly under the radar. So 533M, Ata, and Alomari check out of their hotel and drive to the Portland International Jetport. They go through 545, go through the security checkpoint screening. There was a computer-assisted passenger screening system that actually flagged. At his checked bag for like an extra explosive screening, but he was able to bypass further like physical. Like he didn't set off anything as far as like a pat down or and even if it did, he wasn't carrying anything on him that he fucking couldn't carry. Despite a fucking box cutter of a guy wearing a button up shirt.

So at it and Elamari land at Logan International Airport at 645 to catch their connecting transcontinental flight. 650 is when al-Shahi boards United Flight 175 at Boston Logan so he's already come through security and is boarding his flight I think it was al-Shahi's group that had a very weird interaction as they were pulling into the airport parking

where they got in an argument with somebody over a parking spot it was somebody that they'd interviewed after trying to figure out where they came from where their car was and all that kind of stuff and somebody had an interaction where they were arguing about a parking spot before they were about to board a plane and die. Just these very weird little kind of stories that come out beforehand that kind of make you wonder where their frame of mind was.

And I get it. You can't dive into a madman's frame of mind to do this, but they had left certain things behind in the car. They had sort of left not necessarily a trail. but Jara, the guy that we were talking about in the last episode that had the girlfriend had actually written like a goodbye love letter to his girlfriend and had sent it on September 10th. The only reason that we know about this is because German officials had picked it up and made a copy of it and it's come out in a couple books.

But it's just basically him proclaiming his love to her in the beginning and then going into kind of this weird explanation of how everybody wants. know what he's done and he will be living in a better place where she can't see or hear him, but he will be waiting for her until she can arrive there too. Yeah, fuck that, dude. And it's, I mean, I'm not saying that to humanize these people. No, I know. I'm just saying there's little pieces of the acknowledgement of what they're doing.

There's martyr videos that some of these guys have made that were back in Afghanistan before they left. Just basically, it's this culty feel. because it's you're basically filming like exit interviews before you're about to go blast off to the halibob comet like it's that vain it's like that ceremony that the kamikaze pilots would have when they would drink the sake and what did they put in there i forgot it was some like hallucin or the game speed or something like that it was it was speed

japanese pervertin yeah it was some type of myth um all right so 715 uh hongior and his four, the other, the muscle hijackers, end up passing through security checkpoints at DOLUS International, which is in Washington. Screeners had flagged three of the hijackers for extra metal detector sweeps, but again, they're carrying what they can fucking carry, and so they're permitted aboard. Seems weird that the three of them all are carrying either mace, a knife, box cutter, some combination of the two. I 739 flight 11 that team finishes boarding and they sit in the business and first class cabins where they had mapped out their spots 748 jara and the three because he's the one that has three they board united airlines flight 93 at newark international airport so two from boston one from newark one from dulles and at 759 the first plane to take off is a

American Airlines Flight 11 ends up taking off from Boston. 92 people aboard? I didn't have the numbers. Is that what it was? 814, so just 15 minutes later, flight 175 takes off from Boston as well. So both planes from Boston are in the air at this point. And this is kind of in the dominoes falling in quick succession. At that same time, right around 814, there's this last kind of routine radio communication

that gets acknowledged by the crew. This is the last time that the pilots are heard. The hijacking is going to begin pretty shortly after that. Pilots were most likely stabbed. Flight attendants were injured, and this is kind of, I don't know. The training that they had done wasn't only to fly, but it was also to kind of wipe themselves off the radar. and by 819, American Airlines Flight 11 has its transponder signal entirely lost.

It basically drops off the radar at that, well, it's still on the radar, but it drops off of some of the communications. And they're telling passengers, again, passengers at this point are terrified. It's a hijacking, but they have no idea what this hijacking is. again, they're thinking it's what hijackings have been before. What are we looking at? 819 to 820. 820 is when American Airlines Flight 77 from Dallas to L.A. It's a Boeing 757.

Ends up departing. It's said to have 64 people on it. So now you have three planes in the air. You have one plane that's already dropped off of its transponder. It's not being able to be followed. And these things are being monitored by the airports that are currently tracking them until another airport takes over. So when these drop off, this isn't something that's immediately raising in all flags, scramble the jets or anything. This is, hey, your transponders off.

We're trying to get in communication. They're kind of putting some bells out, but no more than what their standard procedure for a plane dropping off would do. It's not raising that instant alarm. There's a procedure that they're going through. Well, it's so shocking to me because if you listen to some of these calls that we're going to talk about, there was this flight attendant on Flight 11 named Betty Ong, who she ends up calling American Airlines reservations. I'm assuming just anybody that she can get a hold of.

And she has the most calm demeanor is she's talking about a flight attendant being stabbed, and she's thinking that they're trying to break into the cockpit. And Betty Ong had switched onto this flight to go meet her sister so they could plan a vacation. This wasn't even on her schedule. She had made that choice to get on this plane. The most unlucky choice it's ever been made. 824, Ada, who's in the cockpit at this point, attempts to address just the passengers back in the cabin over like the intercom, but accidentally transmits to air traffic control and says, we have some planes, just stay quiet and you'll be okay.

And as they hear this, because they hadn't been able to receive any communication prior to, they're like, hello? Is this the pilot? Who is this? And so this is starting to kind of set some bells off. 842, this is when the last plane, Flight 93 takes off from Newark following just, I guess, like a routine runway delay or something like that. 40 minutes.

40 minutes puts this off. So this would have been, in theory, the first plane in the air. because if that takes off at 842 and it had a 40 minute delay. Yeah, technically. So I want to kind of pivot for just a second, just to kind of talk about like the actual twin towers because it's very important in understanding kind of what happens here. So the towers in the World Trade Center complex is this massive like 16 acre

commercial complex in Lower Manhattan. And it has seven different buildings, has this huge underground shopping mall. then also throughout the complex, like contains a major transit hub for places going out into Manhattan and the rest of the island. So the guy that designed this, this building was designed different than kind of other buildings in that the structural load was shared between a central column or like the stairwells and the elevators were. And then instead of having, you know, like if you've been in any office building, there's like support pillars. all over the cubicles have to work the way around them, you know, all that shit.

This didn't have any of those. Instead, all the support pillars were actually moved to the outside of the building. And so the outside structure you see that has just, it looks like the windows, I think, are like 18 inches wide or something like that, but it has all those metal slats that run up. Kind of like an exoskeleton almost. Yes, all of those are actually part of the support structure of the building itself. So the...

Sorry. So at the time of their completion, in 1973, they were the tallest buildings in the world. So the North Tower stands at, or sorry, stood at 1,368, that was excluding that big-ass TV antenna on top of it, and the South Tower, not sure why they were different, was 1,362 feet. Both of them had a hundred and ten stories above ground. So many, in fact, that the elevators only went up to a certain floor. You then had to get off. off and go take another bank of elevators to reach upper floors. They had express elevators. I believe they went up to the 78th floor. And then they had a sky lobby to where you could get up to the others. So each of them had 99 elevators divided into local and express zones. The guy was looking for it. His name was Minoru Yamasaki.

And the system that he used was an innovative tube structural system. So the shell that would you know the reason he did that shell is because they were so tall They had to bear the brunt of a lot of wind and everything like that So those shells helped to kind of like share the weight throughout the entire building somehow Well is the wind's blowing instead of it being rigid from the inside it's able to flex and move with the wind Now here's another key difference so between that centralized like central steel core that house the elevator shafts and the stairwells and all the utility lines, the floor still had to be supported between that internal column and the shell on the outside to connect to it. So these lightweight steel trusses connected the outer shell to the

central core, and that's what supported the concrete floor slabs. Now, these things were sprayed with this, sprayed on like fireproofing insulation. So that's what was supposed to protect against heat and everything. Now, the big benefit of like the structure that they were building like this, especially with huge office buildings like that, all of it was just completely open. So that's why those buildings filled up so quickly. They could sell it. It was more real estate that they could sell as office space

as opposed to structural integrity. And I mean, if we're being honest, I don't see any fault or anything like that in the architecture because who's going to plan for this? No, exactly. 100%. It was brilliant in the way that it was built, but it just nothing was built to withstand.

the brunt of being hit by a jet that high up in the air. Yeah, exactly. So the whole center itself pretty much was its own little self-contained city. Approximately like 50,000 people worked inside the complex just on a typical weekday. And then an additional 140,000 tourists or like business clients would pass through the complex or like commuters, even because there's that big transfer hub that's actually underneath it. They had over 430 companies from 28 countries because, it was that financial center. It was heavily concentrated in finance, banking, insurance, and international trade. And then the other buildings, World Trade Center, one, number two.

Number three was the Marriott World Trade Center. It was a 22-story luxury hotel that was directly beneath and between the two towers. Four, five, and six were these low-rise office and federal buildings, usually like eight to nine stories, I think, either one of those, and those surrounded kind of the central outdoor plaza. And number six actually housed the U.S. Customs House. One of these days when we can make it to New York for a video, I feel like

you're going to be shocked. It just how small the footprint was of these two just massive buildings. I know. I might suspect that too. It's just the size of the buildings around the area makes that 16 acres or whatever it was.

It wasn't 16 acres that 1 and 2 sat on, but just the footprints of these were fitted in such an area that it just sort of defies logic that two buildings that big could just be that small footprints. Yeah. Number seven was a 47-story office building that was across, like across the street from it, just kind of north of the main complex.

And that's what actually housed the mayor's office of emergency management command center. So on the morning of September 11th, they say between 16 and 18,000 people were already inside the towers when the first plane. hits. And it's one of the only saving graces. They said the low number was unusual, basically due to the early, early hour, but also because there was primary election voting that day. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

September. As it hits, there are, I guess, in an effort to try to intercept, they had scrambled two F-15s from Otis Air Force Base in Cape Cod to try to respond to Flight 11. They end up launching at 853, which unfortunately was like six minutes after Flight 11. It already hit the first tower. That response is, I mean, it's fast, but you don't know where it's going to try to pick it up. It's unprecedented. And here's the thing, too.

I think there's two videos that actually capture the first plane actually hitting the towers. One was by a camera crew that I think was shooting something about the World Trade Center, and they were just getting some exterior shots. The camera was sitting on the ground. You hear the fucking jet come in low and loud, and they pick it up at the last moment to basically catch a two-second shot of it hitting. And when it hits it 846, it hits the north tower between floors 93, 99. So it hits relatively high up on the tower itself.

Yeah, you're talking, what is it, 104 floors? 110. 110? The sheer confusion of just like everybody that was on that documentary and interviews throughout our lifetime that we've heard from people and stuff like that have seen people give when it's talking about that was, you know, they don't know that it's planes. They think at the very beginning that it was like a twin engine Cessna that like, crashed into it like a pilot had a heart attack or some shit like that they have no idea what's

going on and people are confused and people are freaked the fuck out because one of these towers is now on fire but watching that documentary it's almost in listening to some of the the interviews with people it's almost eerie how people in the south tower were initially pretty concerned and they were beginning to leave the building but at the same time there's a building right next to them that's on fire 99 stories up in the air and it's not a mass panic yeah like there was a very calm demeanor as the people start to try to exit the south tower is that a fucking new york thing like could be nothing fucking shocks us it very well could be um part of the kind of plan i guess you would say in this scenario was

if a building was struck, that building would be evacuated. But because of what happened in 1993 and the panic that happened with the World Trade Center bombing then, they realized that getting everybody out of both of these buildings was just going to cause such confusion down on the streets, that they actually were making announcements inside of the South Tower saying that the North Tower was, on fire, there seems to be an explosion over there, everything is being handled, please return to work. There was never

a second thought that this was going to be anything more than just an accident that happened. It's so hard to put yourself in that mindset of like, what else did you think it was? Because it's 25 years that that happened, and so it's just like, and we've seen a lot of shit since then.

But at the same time, it's like, no, that's possibly like a fucking plane, a jetliner just hit this, like, no, that's insane. How would that ever come to fruition? Yeah. Jumping over to Flight 175, just four minutes before Flight 11 hits the first tower, hijackers breached the cockpit after stabbing both pilots, a passenger and a flight attendant, they spray a bunch of mace in the front cabin to force people back to the rear of the aircraft. and this is when a flight attendant named Robert Fangman

and then a passenger named Pete Hansen make emergency calls to report the casualties. The hijackers had said that they had a bomb and that's why everyone should comply and then started making comment about like the erratic flight pattern. Like the plane wasn't continuing to go straight or anything like that. And just wanted to kind of, fuck, read this part.

There's a guy that was on the plane called Brian Sweeney and this is kind of a famous voicemail. I don't know if anyone else has heard it. Probably some have. but he calls and leaves his final voicemail for his wife and basically reported to his mother that passengers are actively discussing storming the cockpit before the call ends up cutting out

but this is the voicemail to his wife he goes Jules, this is Brian, listen I'm on an airplane that's been hijacked if things don't go well and it's not looking good I just want you to know that I absolutely love you go have a good time same to my parents and everybody and I just totally love you and I'll see you when you get there

It's such a genuine call in such a just unimaginable mental state to be able to make that call and to be able to understand what's going on, especially without the knowledge of where this is going to end. You don't know what Flight 11 did already. You are trapped up in this airplane with everything outside of the world, not in. involving you anymore and that is only your world while everybody outside of that plane is aware of what just happened but is not expecting what's going to happen to you so in that 17 minute period between the impact of the first plane and then the impact of the second so there's only two known pieces of footage of that first one but as soon as that happened every news camera in the city had eyes on this thing. News choppers were in the air and everything. And so when this second plane

comes in and there's, they could see it coming from a little bit of distance. I mean, people aren't like focused on that, but as soon as they hear some noise, this thing banks in and hits kind of hits the side it's trying to hit, but kind of hits to the side and just explodes out in this fireball. And you just see debris that looks small from the, distance but you realize that those are hundreds of pounds of things flying off this and exploding and at this time everybody is watching when this second one happens and as that happens that removes any shadow of a doubt for most people that that first one was an accident one's an accident the fucking exclamation point is that second one and i was looking kind of to see like during that first

impacted anything i i'm not trying to be morbid but it's like curiosity talking to stuff, if anything had breached the other tower and flew across into the other one. Because if that happened and something... Like a through and through almost? Yeah. And I was like, if that happened, why wouldn't you evacuate? And they were like, stuff went through and impacted on the other tower and hit the other tower. And when the other one came through, some of the more solid pieces of the plane that weren't

like the engines that were made of like steel and titanium and things like that, they found stuff that was ejected like blocks and blocks away on other. roofs that had caused damage and everything. There was a piece of the landing gear that they didn't find, I want to say, until 2008 that had wedged itself in an 18-inch alley that was heavily restricted between two buildings. When we're talking about a matter of time from 846, when flight 11 hits, 2903, when flight 175 hits, and as you were talking about it, banks in, it ends up striking the south tower between floor 77 and 85. maybe the most crucial part about this was it wasn't a direct hit it hit one of the corners

and that structural integrity that you were talking about with those four solid posts now it's sitting on three they also said it hit the first one hit at like 450 miles per hour this one hit at like 500 plus so it was able to go through more but like you just said one of them went in and like when you saw it and it shows footage of it there's smoke pouring out of it but i mean it went in and just disintegrated this one took out like you said half a side and then came out and took out the other half side and you can visibly do you see everything on fire and you see papers flying out into the air all of what's inside this building is now kind of floating around outside and these people that are panicking, these people that are trying to figure out how to

get down past this, there's fire that's creeping up, there were actually areas where the burning jet fuel was running down like the elevator shafts onto other floors and starting fires below. Also onto people. Yeah. It was just, it's so tough to try to understand what kind of panic that is. And you have still going on before 903 at 854, I guess at 851, American Airlines Flight 77's hijacking begins. By 854, the flight is deviated south from the assigned route.

Transponder's still on so they can kind of see where they're going. By 856, the transponder gets flipped off. The Indianapolis Center loses contact with them. they aren't aware yet of the other hijackings. So they're kind of in the dark of what's going on. They're suspecting it's a mechanical issue, some sort of failure. Between 9 and 905, the Indianapolis Center searches for the aircraft. They don't understand that they've turned really sharp to the east,

and they are headed back down. 9-12, there is a flight attendant named Arimé that calls her mother and reports, it's the hijacking. And it's another one of those phone calls where you just hear almost a calm, almost an unsettling calm as she's talking about what's going on on the plane. By 916, American Airlines is aware that flight 77 has been hijacked too. There's a woman named Barbara Olson that's on that, plane whose husband is the solicitor general Ted Olson.

So the government is being informed by the solicitor general from his wife that this is going on beyond just the calls that are being made. She's talking about hijackers having knives and box cutters as you were talking about slitting throats, breaching the flight cockpit. It just slowly you see kind of Reagan National Tower is alerting secret service of what's going on. By 937, Flight 77 crashes into the west side of the Pentagon. And the Pentagon is, again, just like the Twin Towers, one of the largest commercial office spaces, I guess not commercial, but one of the largest office spaces in the world. Yeah, the Pentagon five-sided, five stories, five rings.

And so it strikes, and there is footage of that, but it's security camera footage, and the plane is moving so fast, you see a frame of the plane, and then you see the explosion. He basically brings the plane in extremely low. I almost want to say it's on the ground as it slides into the side of the Pentagon, hits the ground floor at 530 miles an hour, and the impact and immediate, you know, fire. end up, of course, claim the lives of everyone on the plane and 125 military and civilian personnel

that were inside the building. Now, the strike itself had occurred in a recently, like, reinforced section of the structure, which actually delayed a lot of the collapse and everything for 30 minutes that they said allowed hundreds of nearby workers to get out. It's... The Pentagon is so big that the entrance of the jet just looks so minuscule.

Yeah. But it's just in relative size to the Pentagon. Yeah, it's still massive, the amount of damage to the cause. And that too just, fuck. Like, thinking about it from the, like, that's supposed to be the center of, like, the military. Like, to have it be just look so, like, vulnerable. Yeah.

That's, and again, this is part of the stuff that comes after 9-11 is just, that feeling of relative, you know, not being safe that the country feels for a long time. But jumping back a little bit to 905. So we're going to take a little trip down to Florida and the elementary school that George Bush is at at that point. He's down there and he's getting ready for story time with the kids. And I'm not saying anything bad about that. It's just this is a crazy time to receive news like this. No, no, no. Just I'm trying to like, you watch the video and you see the staff member come over and he first his chief of staff uh andrew card basically first tells him after the first impact we think that a small twin engine plane hit it and they're like oh that's horrible

now as he's sitting there getting ready to read to these kids Andrew comes back over and whispers in his ear a second plane hit the second tower America's under attack and you just watch bush's face and he is just trying to process what's going on here and I don't know if he's trying to to figure out what to tell these kids if he should go along with story time or what's going on but i do not envy having to try to like process that in front of a group of kids just staring at you well and i think his paternal side kicked in because i think i'm pretty sure he ends up reading the book to the children and finishes the book and i think in that moment you at least bush i can't get inside of Bush's head. I wish I could.

I'd like to be able to figure out a couple different things. You know that I think HW, I think he'd sit down and burn one. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. For sure. Guy almost died choking on a pretzel. He had the munchies.

But I do think that... Oh shit! Cheney's coming! Hot this shit! That was the whole plot of the second Harold and Kumar escaped from... That's exactly yes. Maybe that gives me false. him and him in the little hard candy situation like that just but i do think just again thinking about where i would

be reading that book to those children is going to be the last probably like bit of peace that you're going to have i don't know how you're even reading those words man it's you're just in the moment i'd have fucking blacked out for a second you know after that everything i mean your world's going to change the world does change after that happens. Now, while this is happening in New York, of course, the first responders are in there. They're doing everything that they possibly can. The guys inside the North Tower facing, you know, falling debris, fucking jumping casualties. Unfortunately, there's images of that kind of stuff.

It's not a choice of your moment. My brain doesn't really process it, which I'm kind of happy about. But at the same time, it does just enough to be like, what would you have to be? to feel that that's the option. That there were no other options. That's kind of 925, the FAA ends up ordering a nationwide ground stop banning all civilian aircraft.

Well, in previous to that at 908, they had banned takeoffs and flights that were bound to or through New York's airspace. So they wanted to shut New York City down. They knew that airspace around there wasn't going to be a good thing. Right after that at 921, the Port Authority goes around

and orders that the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and all of these other New York crossings are closed. So we are sealing off the island, basically. I would assume in a belief that they're not going to let any other potential terrorists out, because you have to think that there's... You're trying to control the people coming in

to prevent them from coming in to cause more... You've got to worry about the people. You do. And you're trying to minimize the amount of people you have to look out for, I think. You got to think there's a fair amount of people trying to escape, too. Correct. There are. And I have a point about that that's really fucking cool. One thing, too, just to mention, so when this FAA shutdown happens, so there's a guy, an American astronaut, up in the International Space Station. And when they go over New York, he's able to see the smoke cloud coming out and trailing off.

to the Atlantic. Now what he also notices, he's like, and I've never seen again. I've never seen that before. And he's like, but I've never seen this before. He's like, I saw no contrails over the entire United States the next time we came around 90 minutes later. He's like, and then I saw one contrail and he was Air Force One. You can see the contrels from, he's like, it normally looks like a freaking crosshatch pattern across the United States. He's like, but to see that, he's like, I don't know if anyone's ever seen that. Thousands of flights were grounded. Yeah.

And that was just single flights. That doesn't account for everything else it would be going on that day. This is where we come to the timeline. Things just kind of start getting tough because you have the full-blown panic of both of these towers being hit. and by 1003 or by 959 the South Tower or the World Trade Center collapses and it is due to so much of the heat from the fires that are burning

not only the 10,000 gallons of jet fuel that have already burned but it's lit everything else inside of this office space on fire and this continued fire is just eating away at that sprayed on fire retardant they put on the steel thing it's not eating away at it so when the south tower collapses it does it in 10 seconds and watching it is an insanely surreal thing to to watch that happen and it was the second one to get hit yeah but it was hit on that corner correct the reason that it was you know so much more damaging again the speed very

It hit lower down, which means any structural weakness is supporting more weight above it, which means more weight pushing down. The jet fuel fires had weakened the floor trusses, and the reason they did that is because with sprayed on foam, the impact of the plane and the concussive force blew all that fucking foam off of those steel trusses and exposed just the bare steel underneath. So Jeff Fuel burns roughly. They said about 1,500 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 815 Celsius to 1,093 Celsius. Celsius is weird. And it burns like that in... I beg to differ because I think more people, definitely more people use Celsius. I understand that.

I'm just saying it's an odd number. That's what it burns in like office fire conditions. And structural steel melts around 2,750. So you're probably asking yourself, well, if it only can get up to 2,000, thousand it can't melt it 100% that is completely accurate it does not melt still however structural steel loses 50% of its structural strength at 1,100 degrees it loses roughly 900 of its strength at 1800 degrees so that jet fuel are easily that jet fuel is easily hot enough to remove 50 to 90% of the structural integrity and all it has to do at that point in that trust system is if it weakens the trusses,

what that starts to do is as they sag down, it then pulls in the outside of the building in toward that center point and just crushes it like a pop can to where as it loses all the structural support pulling from the middle point, all that weight up top, then just comes straight down. Well, and just to make it even easier than that, there's a reason why a blacksmith uses a forge and it's to superheat that steel and make it malleable underneath the hammer.

But instead of the hammer, that steel annealing and getting weaker and weaker has tens of thousands of pounds, tons, sitting on top of it that are now putting that pressure on there. And when you have three sides to this kind of exterior holding pattern and you have those floors sagging, you can almost see in the collapse video where it's almost like it viz in at those floors and just gives way. I know that at that corner point where all of a sudden you just see it buckle inward

and then at that point it just and as it buckles inward it falls down at that point and everything looks to be falling relatively straight down at least but the top of it you can see it tilt to the side because it's falling at a kind of like a cockyed angle. And the collapse of the South Tower a hundred. So this building

on each square side, each length of it. I think they said it's 250 feet. I can believe that. Okay. 110 stories. That's what makes it

look so small because it was so tall. And as it comes down, all of that concrete, that pulverized concrete, the steel dust, the toxic stuff

that's being burned and everything like that just creates, and you talked about this kind of early in the week during research that just cloud. It's like when we were watching

fucking visit or researching pompeii like that pyroclastic cloud just spreads just down the funnels of these streets and just everything is hemmed in because of the buildings and it's just like i was watching footage of like people running from it and then a guy inside a building was like opening having people come in and he shut at the last minute and then it just went dark so there was so much soot in dirt and everything in the air that it actually baffled the sound So just directly after you hear this ungodly noise of this building collapsing and you have this cloud that's visible coming towards you, as soon as that cloud reaches you, there were all of these accounts of saying that it was the quietest that they had ever heard. Like a building had just collapsed. They're in the middle of downtown New York City.

You think you were dead. Yeah, it's just complete silence. Yeah, I've been like, I'm, I have to be, I can't see. I feel like I'm breathing in point. I'm fucking dead, right? Well, and it's, it's, as you see these people starting to get up after they've run from this.

I mean, it's, it's something out of a horror movie watching these people just running from this tidal wave of debris and dust and everything. But they're covered head to toe in ash and just everything else that it looks like a post-apocalyptic world in the middle of downtown New York City.

and that's just the first one. Yeah. So let's jump chronologically and jump back to Flight 93. Yeah. So again, Flight 93 was delayed on the runway, took off a little late, and because of that, when it was hijacked at 928, passengers making their, like, phone calls and everything that were able to get out actually started learning from people they were talking to what had happened. So they're basically being told these Hydract aircraft.

after being used as suicide bombs against the World Training Center in the Pentagon. And after realizing they're basically sitting on a missile, these four guys, Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, and Jeremy Glick end up organizing like a fight to basically take the plane back. And the final audible words from Todd Beamer over like the open phone lines that they got were, are you ready? Okay, let's roll. and at 9.57, I think, from what they could tell, the passengers started using like a heavy food cart trying to battering ram down and smash through the cockpit door. And at 1003 inside the cockpit,

the hijacker starts to try to rock the plane back and forth, like pitching the nose up and down side to side to try to throw the passengers off balance. rather than lose control the aircraft to the passengers, he fucking rolls the fucking 757 upside down. He inverts the bird. Inverts it and just drives it into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They said that right after kind of this revolt happened, Jara can be heard on the open mic telling passengers that there's a bomb on board and they need to remain seated.

So at that point in time, he's aware that whatever was going on with the hijackers in the back is now ended. And they're coming straight for him. And Jara at this point in time, like you're saying, he's switching or he's swaying back and forth and he's dipping. He's doing everything that he can. But regardless of them breaching that door, unfortunately, there's just only one way that it's going to end. and for him to invert the plane and drive it straight down into the ground I mean it was

he knew he wasn't going to reach his target he knew that there was nothing that was going to be around I believe they were in the middle of Shanksville Pennsylvania which doesn't sound like a thriving metropolis of people but it was his last opportunity to create this jihad this he I think he was trying to put the plane

here's the thing too he probably wasn't a good pilot but he was trying to put the plane in an unrecoverable position. The plane ends up crashing at 10, 103, and ends up killing all 40 passengers. Fucking ballers, man. Like, that was the plane that was intended to either target the U.S. Capitol or the White House. Well, they had the benefit, and that's maybe the craziest thing to say. they had the benefit of that 40-minute delay for everybody that they're going to get in contact with after their plane gets hijacked to find out what's going on.

Because as we were talking about, they were the first plane in the air. So in theory, they could have been the first plane to strike. But since they were given that 40 minutes of grace to where the information could be collected and then passed on to them, they knew that they had to act. Yeah. And it's just that little bit of luck mixed with just an immeasurable amount of bravery for them to be able to step up and do what they didn't. I can't blame anybody on the other three planes. They didn't know what was going on. They were in a much different situation because they were already in the air and they had...

It's the most terrifying situation anybody could imagine themselves being in. I don't care how much of a Marky Mark fan you are. Yeah. Marky Mark wasn't going to fight through all the terrorists and then he wasn't going to lay the plane safe. Neither was that guy from the league. Oh, Steve Randizzi. Kevin. Yeah. It was in the world. He said he was in the world trade center and his bit and he wasn't.

Fuck. Yeah, bad deal, man. So just from a series of events, so literally a minute before that plane goes down and crashes in Pennsylvania at 1002 back in New York, police helicopters that are like hovering over the complex start to notice like the structural differences on the north tower and they're looking at the outer shell and they're like holy shit it's like glowing red they're starting to see a buckle and they radio to the north tower they said it's buckling evacuate immediately so first responders outside the building hear this on their radios they're guiding as many fucking people out as they possibly can getting them as far away from the building now with like the subway lines completely inoperable and the streets being completely like choked with not only debris that was blown off of

these buildings and that was spread out by the first collapse you have like tens of thousands of people trying to flee they end up retreating south to the water's edge of battery park but they're completely trapped by water on three sides of that point so the u.s coast guard issues this like super urgent radio broadcast little ships of dunkirk style where they're basically like like anybody on any commercial boats, ferries, tug, if it floats, fucking get it up here. And within minutes, this huge fleet begins pulling up to the docks to load passengers. They had people just pulling the front of their boats up and bumping them up against like the curb to load people on it. They eventually rescued over 500,000 people from the island.

It stands as the largest maritime evacuation in history. It was larger than Dunkirk. It's pretty incredible. And it's it's that fast that you get the community of New York out there to help their fellow New Yorkers. In an instant, it went from disbelief and shock to action. Yeah. They were out there helping. And they have from the time that that warning is given out about like the buckling and everything, it's not long.

18 minutes, it seems like that might seem like a lot. But when you're trying to just get everybody out as you can, it's never going to be enough time. the structure on the tower on the north tower ends up giving out it'd been burning for 94 minutes at that time and although it didn't have as much weight on top of it supporting it doesn't take much because when that comes down everything's weakened and it's going to keep coming down so the south face of it began to bow inward by several feet kind of doing the same thing that it brought down the south tower and crazily enough there was a small group of people that were caught like mid evacuation that were in uh stairwell B that were between the first and fourth floors. And as this thing comes down 500,000 tons comes crashing down, the center of columns of that building and the heavy reinforcement of it ended up kind of like sharing away and directing away a lot of this stuff to where certain sections of this stairwell actually held together.

16 people actually survived inside that little footprint of the fucking collapsing tower. 12 firefighters 1 NYPD officer and 3 civilians There will be man That's the luck you're sitting there And a 110 story building Is literally coming down on top of you It's divine intervention

I don't even really know Over so and it wasn't just Again this isn't confined to just those two buildings Because again you have the Marriott that sits right in the middle that's now been completely crushed. World Trade Center 7 at 1028, falling debris from the North Tower caused a ton.

It basically just gouged the entire front of the building. It ends up, and it's a 47-story office building. Not tiny. Not small, I mean, but looking next to 110 story buildings, it's enormous. But as it came down, it ends up rupturing like the internal water mains

that completely makes the sprinkler system I'm inactive. And this thing is just because they're responding to everything else is just basically left to burn until the fire reaches, the diesel tanks, and then just continues to burn unchecked for like seven hours. Diesel tanks for a generator? Yep. Yep. And fortunately because the building had been safely evacuated earlier in the morning while they were getting everybody out of the entire complex, they basically just pulled everybody back after they noticed it's starting to come down. and it took until 520 that evening for the columns to give way

and it just completely collapsed in on its own footprint as well. Zero casualties, though. It's... Eventually, all of the buildings were demolished because they all took structural damage in one way, shape, or form. Well, maybe one of the... I don't know if I would say the most impressive, but probably one of the most shocking things is,

there was a fire within the depths of this. This fire burned for 99 straight days. This is the longest structure fire in the history of the United States. So I can't remember how many floors down it was. Do you remember? I believe they said it was six. Okay. So let's say it's six.

That means all of that weight and all those materials that came down of those 110 floors above ground. just compacted all of that stuff down there to burn. They said when you look at pictures of like ground zero when you're seeing the cleanup efforts and like the structure of sticking up and the American flag and all that kind of stuff, it looks like it's pretty flat. Yeah.

Which is fucking scary. But they were talking about how, no, it's just because everything around that area, even without those buildings is so big. Like those guys were standing up on like the fifth floor of a normal building while they were trying to get through the debris to look for a surveillance.

survivors. Well, and that's truly why they couldn't put out the fire because this debris field was so unstable that the firefighters couldn't climb on top of it to get water or foam down into where the fire was. And I mean, it's it's so tough to try to deal with that fire. And they couldn't do that either because they realized that if they dislodge anything by, you know, disturbing, it could crush survivors. So their first priority in the entire thing is trying to pull people alive out of there. That's, I mean, it's, you. this is where you hear the stories of all the firemen. I'm not trying to diminish any role of this that we didn't talk about just how wired you have to be so differently from every other human being to rush in there. The jaws of death, quite literally. Yeah, there was a couple interviews that I listened to of people that were passing firefighters on the stairwells as they were evacuating before the collapse. and they were talking about seeing the looks on these firemen's faces,

or firefighters' faces, they just, they knew that there was a good chance that them rushing into this building was going to be the last thing that they did. And firefighters from New York trained to go in, because that's what it is, majority of like high rises and things like that. But again, this is so unprecedented. Like, nothing like this has ever occurred before. Yeah, there's no, I mean, there's training for it. There's everything that you can do while at the same time understanding that you are going into a highly unstable building that's on fire hundreds of feet, I guess a thousand feet in some points above the ground.

And that's going to come down. You just, you know that the law of averages. That was something that I was kind of surprised by was in all of the first episode study that we had done, they were so. transfixed on making a statement by putting the planes into the buildings that they just didn't expect them to fall. Their main goal wasn't to collapse the buildings. It was just to hit the buildings. And I don't want to downplay how serious it was with them hitting the buildings and just the chaos that that caused. But both of those buildings falling was so... I think they had an idea it would. I'm basing that off the fact of the first bombing

that if they had larger, they were aware of that. Yeah. But here's the other thing too. The extensive damage even on those buildings, how do you fix that, even if they hadn't have collapsed? Yeah. Because there's so much damage of the jet fuel flying down the elevator chat. Like all of that stuff.

Like there's no way to guarantee that that building is structurally sound again. You would have had to have taken them down afterwards if they not fall. As you were talking about kind of survivors, there were 20 different survivors that were pulled from the rubble of both World Trade Center collapses just in this immediate aftermath. 27 hours after the collapse, so on September 12th, the last known survivor pulled from the rubble was a Port Authority employee named Janelle Guzman McMillan. She'd survived in the rubble for 27 hours. Absolutely incredible. They continued these operations and these recovery operations on Ground Zero for nine months. They didn't officially end their operations to recover until May 30, 2002.

Yep. Took eight months and 19 days. This might be one of the, I guess, the more downsides of this episode is to this day, there's still roughly about 40% of the victims that haven't been identified. Yeah. As far as casualties go, the numbers are so staggering. It's like Chris was talking about this is the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States and the single deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement in the history of the country.

2,977 people died, and we're going to exclude the hijackers because fuck them. That doesn't matter. They were pumped about this. Just in the World Trade Center alone, there was 27573. the Pentagon saw 184 deaths, which again did talking about the Pentagon's a lot of people. There were 125 that were already in the building and then the 59 that were aboard the flight. Flight 93, thankfully this number isn't as great. It was 40 deaths, but it was the entirety of the passengers and the crew.

Flood 11, all 92 aboard, died. 175, all 65, a board died. Oh, roughly 25,000 people were injured. And this, I mean, you're talking smoke inhalation, just physical trauma during evacuation, being pushed, falling downstairs. Burns, cut, like any, yeah. And then you have the first responders that are down there taking care of people as there's falling debris that's hitting them.

And you have to think with that many just immediate, injuries. It's not just the people that were in the buildings. It was everybody that responded. It was all the triage units that were set up down there. All of the different places where they had taken in patients to try to treat them on the street before they could get them out further away to hospitals to be taken care of. It's not just the people that were ground zero. It's the hospitals that accepted all of the injured people just trying to save lives. As far as the first responders deaths go, the FDNY lost 343 firefighters and paramedics. The New York City Police Department had 23 officers killed.

Port Authority Police Department had 37 officers killed. And this is mainly because they had the jurisdiction of the World Trade Center complex. They were the first to be able to respond. They were there. There was a number of EMS personnel. that were like private ambulance services that were also killed at the time. It's just the numbers are staggering. And the Pentagon obviously is going to be lower because I believe they said the fire was put out within like 32 hours.

Yeah. So very quickly to get all that out. And the damage was contained. There was no collapse to, no secondary. There was still probably watered that they could get access to and everything to be able to try to fight. Yeah. Yeah. The recovery effort managed roughly 1.8 million tons of debris over 3.1 million hours around the clock labor.

The New York City Department of Design and Construction, they divided like the 16-acre ground zero site into four different quadrants of different companies that would be working so they could all be doing something at the same time. And again, during the first few weeks, the focus was entirely on finding the survivors, trying to avoid any heavy collapse. this is when they were just doing rubble out hand by hand doing bucket brigades, you know, digging with their bare fingers to try to protect, you know, little air pockets and everything. They said that because, you know, when they were doing the cleanup and everything like that, the engineers had to go very carefully on one of the sides of the towers because there was this subterranean wall. There was the retaining wall blocking the Hudson River from flooding lower Manhattan. And it had been buckling under the pressure.

so they had to truck in over 100,000 cubic yards of, like, material to brace the wall while they had to continue digging out debris. Yeah, like you said earlier, the fire's finally being extinguished on December 20th of 2001. It's just, well, how does a fire burn for that long? And it's not only that, think of all of, like, the additional services that are being done by this. So, like, debris isn't just, like thrown away. So, like, the girders, pulverized concrete, personal effects are loaded onto, like, barges and flatbed trucks. They were shipped to this landfill on Staten Island, and forensic investigators, NYPD personnel,

and then canine units have to pass the debris over this giant mechanical shaker and sort stuff by hand to extract fucking DNA evidence, human remains, and personal belongings to try to identify people. I think that was another one of the more shocking things that I hadn't thought about that was shown during the documentary. was all of the people, all the family members that were showing up to give DNA samples just in hopes that there would be a match. And knowing that that's not an instant process and how long it's going to take to try to get those results to see just the sheer amount of people at Ground Zero that were down there with pictures of their loved ones asking them if they had seen them, if there was anybody that knew where their family was. The impact of this is so longstanding in so many different ways because even the dust that was actually like kicked up and blanketed the city for so long was like really caustic. I mean it was pulverized glass. It was abestis.

It was lead. And it caused this chronic respiratory illness. I think they called it like 9-11 lung or something like that. And cancers in over 132,000 responders and survivors. 9-11 is still taking people's lives today because of it And because so many of those materials had carcinogens and everything like that They said over 70 different types of cancers have been officially linked with ground zero exposure 70 All just doing their job

All just showing up when they needed to show up I need some fun I need some good stuff Are you ready for some fun survival stories Yes. All right. This man named Pasquele Buzelli. He was a Port Authority employee. He was on the 22nd floor of the North Tower when it collapsed. This dude rode the collapse down. He said that he was conscious the entire way. And he was found alive sitting on a slab of rubble within hours. The only injury that he sustained was a broken foot. How many floors up? He was on the 22nd floor. Which tower? The North Tower when it collapsed.

The second one that collapsed, right? He rode that down 22 stories. It was just found on a slab. The only thing that happened was a broken foot. Road that bitch down like a cowboy in the Wild West. I mean, that's... There's no way that's just being in the right place at the right time. I guess you can't control that.

No. You just got to go. No, you're fucking a long... for the ride in the most literal sense. Yeah. There was a guy named Brian Clark and another man named Stanley Permaneth.

Clark was descending from the 84th floor of the South Tower. So again, way the hell up there. And he hears somebody screaming for help. He turns around and starts trying to swim back upstream as everybody's coming down the stairs. He ends up finding

Stanley trapped under the debris on the 81st, floor. He digs him out. The two of them escaped together. Minutes later, the tower collapses. So he heard somebody screaming for help as he was trying to get himself out, decides to turn around. He goes back up. He digs him out of the debris. And then they end up getting out just minutes before it collapses. It's absolutely incredible. This is a story. I think the man with the red bandana, everybody is probably heard. His name was Wells Crowther. He was a 24-year-old.

He was an equities trader that was on the 104th floor of the South Tower. And he'd been a volunteer firefighter before. Plain hits, and he goes into all of these smoke-filled floors below. He's carrying a red bandana over his face. He's guiding people. He's carrying injured people to safety down the stairs. And he ends up ultimately giving his life as the tower collapses. but there are multiple survivors that described this man with the red bandana that saved their lives.

He wrote it out. He was a volunteer firefighter, a guy that was off shift, didn't have to do anything about it, but that training kicked in and he knew that he had to get those people out. There's just so many stories to be able to go through and look at some of these. There was an FDNY chaplain named Michael Judge, father, Michael Judge. who ended up being killed by falling debris while he was administering last rights to fallen firefighters in the North Tower. He was down there again doing his calling. Yeah.

And he knew. Everybody knew. And it didn't matter. It didn't stop him. He continued to help these people administer the last rights. The animal rescue was absolutely insane. There were just weeks worth of search and rescue dog teams that were going, around and looking for them.

It was... They had to have every search and rescue dog from every available, like... Yeah, are you calling... You're calling in private people at that point. You're calling everybody. Any place in the United States that has something like that is like, yeah, we're sending them. There was a woman named the Dusty Lady.

Her name was Marcy Borders. She was photographed covered head to toe and ashes. She was fleeing the collapse. and this is one of the most reproduced images of today, of the day. She spent a lot of years kind of dealing with the PTSD and just substance abuse and struggles. But she continued to tell her story what she was able to pull out of it and just explain kind of what she saw as far as the heroics that were going on around her while she was kind of stuck in her own world. And unfortunately, again, she ends up dying from stomach cancer in 2015 that was linked to this toxic dust exposure.

So we talk about all of these firefighters that are still going through these troubles today. There were so many civilians that were down there that were... Shout out to John Stewart for his continued fight on that. Absolutely. I still... I mean, the stairwell bee survivors, that it still just absolutely blows my mind to think that it was just, just that section that somehow stayed stable.

There were some of the last people to escape the building alive before it collapses. And you just run into all of these stories of near misses. And it's not necessarily that they were all near misses. It was just that this was an encapsulation of what? It was like 120 minutes from first impact to second collapse. So like 846 to... Yeah, let's see. I mean, so fast.

So 846 to 10.20. So not even 120 minutes. So it'd be closer to like 100. Yeah. And it was in a very... Pure chaos. Yeah. Pure chaos.

It's such a densely packed area. Before we continue, you want to take a bathroom break? Sure. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourself? head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it.

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And with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right, back to non-happy stuff, I guess. Well, it's... Or as happy as can be during this episode. I guess it kind of comes down to how the next 25 years of what we know of, the United States has changed and kind of the steps that we took. And one of the things that we were texting back and forth about this week while we were studying was where does this fit into really any sort of next or most previous historic tragedy?

Because as you were pointing out, we have to go all the way back to Pearl Harbor to even get close to talking about a loss of life. And obviously the response to Japan doing Pearl Harbor eventually is us dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan. And then us kind of being cool once we figure out the pecking order. Yeah. But at the same time, that's a hostile nation that attacked a military installation. Yeah, the comparisons don't work other than the loss of life situation. Again, it's like we try to find a comparative.

situation for it and it's like scale-wise pearl harbor but the world was at war at that point so just getting into another war you just declared war on those who were already at war like it's a different circumstance it's still the same that you were surprised and that there was a huge loss of life but then you mentioned like the oklahoma city bobbing it's such an unexpected like at least with like japan there was like a sense of temperature we didn't think that the water was boiling yet but we knew it was getting hot. With this, it's just like, bam, like it's instant. Really underplayed what we thought, okay, it was capable of. And to tie it to Timothy McVey and the Oklahoma City bombings, you can't take that approach because we can't go to war with

ourselves. And Timothy McVeigh was a lone guy. Also, he was a homegrown terrorist, so we're going to have to take a real long look in the mirror. But I feel like the playbook if it's not so if it didn't come from inside if the call wasn't coming from inside the house our natural reaction is that the enemy especially for something like this i don't think it ever entered into our minds that just a very small like radicalized and i mean not very small i mean in the grand scheme of things small in relation to the population of a country that even had any hand in this or anything like that. But at the same time,

that's not like, it's obviously got to be, because it was so big, do you get what I'm saying? Like it was so grandiose and so large that it had to be the backing of an entire country because how could we get hit like this by just a fucking small group of people?

By a bunch of guys swinging on monkey bars out in the desert. Yeah. It, not only that, We'll talk about the response and a little bit into, we're going to tread lightly around the war on terrorism because obviously it's going to be its own episode. But the thought process, in the grand scheme of things, we're going to talk about what happens at home,

but abroad, you're now trying to figure out a way to invade a landlocked country that is surrounded by other countries that aren't exactly fond of us. and that's just to get into the country that's then run by a government of the Taliban, who's also not a real big fan of us, in hopes that you can find a terror cell, I guess not a cell, but a terrorist organization that's tucked away in this terrain that's just like, if we find you, we find you.

Well, here's the thing at that point, too, with the Taliban being in control, that's why it was, that's why the war was on. When you say Afghanistan, that's what it was. It was the current ruling regime of Afghanistan.

It wasn't the fucking people going day to day, just wanted to fucking live their lives. It wasn't 95% of the population because previous to this, like 3 million of the 14 million people got killed during the civil wars or got driven out of the country and everything like that. And then these people just want to live in their country,

but then you do have the people in control of the country that are harboring and at that point, like, or providing support to the people who just did this. So it's not just al-Qaeda at this point. It's also the parent fucking company. You have to take a look at the country as a whole and understand that the Taliban didn't necessarily, didn't play a part in it, but they're also harboring a fugitive.

And they're harboring a fugitive and not willing to give him up. They're not willing to serve him up on a platform. They had their chance to do that. Just like we were talking about with the homegrown Oklahoma City, I do think that this kind of comes at this weird cross-in time where, hypothetically, say, World Trade Center bombing in 1993 is effective. Say that it works. Say there's 20,000 people that end up dying.

you're going back, you're trying to figure out how you could have surveilled somebody that was inside of your own country. I don't know where technology was in 1993, but I don't think they're collecting a whole lot of metadata. And enough to be able to, the juice is worth the squeeze to try to take everybody's information. So alternate history, let's say it does happen in 93. The war on terror just starts in 93. Yeah. Yeah. Also, the war on terror starts in 1993. Is there a chance that the Taliban doesn't end up taking over in Afghanistan? I very much think so. So, I mean, it's, it's weird to look at it, but as far as at home...

That a failure eventually led to their success? Yeah. Kind of. And then if it does work, what happens to... I know this is like, it's just small shit, but like, what happens to air travel? There's no change in it, right? so does something eventually happen with air travel just later down the road I guess it depends on if we're rolling over and showing our belly it depends on if it would be there another larger scale or that that plan then goes into to play maybe I mean or does it happen in another country or is it the 10 planes that get blown up over the ocean or yeah we could also say maybe the FBI and the CIA

wouldn't be so chirpy back and forth and would have shared some information that might have helped too But as far as the cost at home when this happens in 2001, you have not only the direct economic damage of basically $55 billion in property damage, but you also have this situation where you begin to try to, as a government, look at it and be like, okay, well, these guys were inside the country.

We needed to try to find them somehow. had we been able to get a hold of emails, any sort of metadata, call logs, anything like that? NSA's still a thing, or it's already a thing. NSA's already been there. It's kind of pointed outward, though, CIA style, right? A little bit, yeah. Can we use an NSA type surveillance inside of the country because we want to just catch the terrorists? But in order to catch terrorists, we need to cast a wide net.

Here's the other thing, too. there were so many opportunities to catch them outside for operations outside of it. And I know that we're literally just two guys stoned talking back and forth and do a couple microphones. But again, this is the gift of 25 years later when all the information is sitting in front of us. But that's one of the things. And again, the surveillance state takes a huge jump in the aftermath of 9-11. But at the same time, you're basically saying like, oh, so we have to wait until they're in the country to, like, what about all the shit that got dropped when they were outside the country that you guys have? Why don't we just try to stop it at that point and not have to turn the fucking microphones and cameras onto your own people?

What do we get more people in Kuala Lumpur? Why don't we kind of try to occupy that? instead of waiting a solid six weeks after the 9-11 attacks to pass the Patriot Act. They passed that in October of 2001. And again, if you're unfamiliar with the Patriot Act, should be shocked if you were. This just dramatically expands government surveillance, roving wiretaps, the ability to monitor financial transactions. You get these things called sneak and peek search warrants where they can literally just

pop in, kind of take a look, see what's going on inside your pad. You get all of this expanded access to business, library, medical records, hilarious that the library is thrown in there. But also at the same time, if that's where you're doing your research, maybe that's not a bad thing. And all of this stuff is passed in a panic. I'm not saying that some good has not come out of this. Yeah.

But this is in a situation where fear is really clouding, the long-term. rational thought of what this could eventually lead to. I think during the passing of this, there was one Congresswoman in the entirety of the Senate that voted against this. I think that might have been in the entirety of Congress that voted against this. And she's like, this is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. But reading through this bill, there are repercussions that are going to come of this that this is going to be impossible to turn back. like my goal is to keep everybody safe as well but there are things within here that I don't feel are specific enough toward what we're going after and that's why I'm voting no and this woman got

so many fucking death threats and everything it's insane and that just shows you the temperature of the country at that point was if you're not with us you're against it there was no room for trying to have like a like what am I saying like civil discourse or any type of counter-argument to just say, hey, I agree with you, but like, have you looked at this part? It was like, well, no, all of it's got to be good. I see it from both sides. I know, right? Yeah.

I don't know. I definitely see it from one side more than the other, but I can see the merits of... But you have to try to look at it in the moment of what the, you know, the temperature of the pulse is in, you know, America's boiling at this point. Exactly. NSA's warrantless wiretapping program that doesn't get revealed. until 2005. This can kind of be,

you can see that it traces its roots back to this post-9-11 expansion. Does that include Xbox party chat, surveillance? Because stuff gets set on there. Warrantless wiretapping Xbox Live. A lot of stuff gets set on there. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,

so FISA, takes on this much larger role approving just expanded surveillance requests on pretty much anybody that they want. We also get a lot more of these alphabet organizations. Department of Homeland Security gets created in 2002. It's operational by 2003. I want to say that gets like 30 something different like different departments like merged into it. Largest federal government reorganization since 1947 when they created the Department of Defense. And then it becomes the third largest.

from like a cabinet standpoint, I guess. Consolidated 22 existing agencies from the Coast Guard all the way to FEMA under one cabinet. Just an absolute incredible reorganization. You think you'd lose track of stuff at that point. Yeah. You were just kind of shoving everybody together. They've had time to work together and get it figured out. But that's a lot of different agencies.

See, now you're all working under the same name. Now fucking share your information. We get TSA that was created within weeks. I feel bad for TSA people. They get such a bad rap. I think it's one of those things where you're cool with them until something happens. And then you're mad about it for a little while, and then you kind of got to make your peace with it. What do you mean?

Well, like, for the longest time, I didn't have a problem with it. I'm always nice to TSA agents. I understand that they have to see a thousand assholes out of the 10,000 people that they might see in a shift. You want to be the prettiest asshole they see. Yeah, except for the one time that we were coming back from, I believe it was, yeah, we were coming back from Mexico. We'd stopped in Arizona to switch planes. We got held up. We had five minutes to get to our gate going through TSA.

And there was an opened bag of trail mix that the guy had to swab and bomb test. It's an open bag of trail mix that was completely clear. you could see everything inside. No bomb. No bomb residue or anything like that. This guy held us for four minutes in doing this test, and we ended up having to spend a whole ass night in Phoenix, Arizona, at this Roach Motel,

all because this guy had to test our trail mix to see if it was a bomb. And it took me a little while and some travel after that to get back to smiling and being nice to these. people. I can understand that. I'm not going to say anything. I even ask the guy, go, hey, you know what, you know your truth. Keep the trail mix. And he goes, but if it's a bomb, you can't escape or you can't leave. It's like, it's not a bomb. Just keep it. Throw it away. I don't care. We got to make our plane. You can't say that word, man. It was a wild experience. But for the most part, I mean, it's a job like everybody else's. You got to understand that they're just there

to do what they have to do. Um, And it just basically is federalizing airport security screening that had already been contracted out by all of these individual airlines into just a private company. So it was just basically an agglomeration of all of these former private securities. And then, of course, you get steps that get at it on later because of other people that are trying to light their shoes on fire. I don't want to see my dong every time I go through security. My digital dong when I have to do the human scanner. I've made my piece with the fact that there's definitely, they keep those. When you have to, when I have to put my edible in my mouth and act like I'm chewing gun to get through security and then spit it back out into my hand and parse part of it off from my flight.

I got a system. Just hope that you don't have to swallow the whole thing in a panic. Eh. You get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, DNI, that's created in 2004 following all of the 9-11, commissions, recommendations. It's meant to unify and oversee 17 or 18 separate intelligence agencies like the CIA, NSA, FBI. So now that you guys wouldn't work together, we're just going to put you under an umbrella

that's going to force you to get all this intelligence. It's like making a superintendent for two high school principals. Because they couldn't do their job. Yeah, this was vice principals with Danny McGride and Walt and Goggins. Yeah. We had to put a principal over the. Fuck you. You see kind of these other, like we're talking about, not only the airport security change,

but there's a rush to, I guess, start trying to figure out who's inside the country. And there becomes a time when we get crazy racial profiling. So it's a much more physical version of the Red So. scare. It's the khaki scare. Pretty much. It's a time of where stop and frisk is already put in in New York City, except for if it's

Brown, you're definitely getting stopped and frisk. You're getting asked questions. We also see further abroad indefinite detention. We see Guantanamo Bay suddenly being a shift

for all of these people that are captured in Afghanistan to be processed. And that is something that I feel like we, I don't know, I know it was a big deal. Perfect segue. Let's just, yeah, let's get into that. I know it was a deal back then. Kind of this movement as far as getting into Afghanistan for a response is you need

an authorization for the use of military force. And in order to get that authorization, you have to explain why the military is necessary to go in and take care of the enemy. So the global hunt for the perpetrators of 9-11 is the primary catalyst for the war on terror. And in addition to the massive intelligence overhauls that you just listed out, comes the invasion of Afghanistan and this decade-long manhunt for the leadership of al-Qaeda. Now, within 72 hours of 9-11, the FBI identified all 19 hijackers using the flight manifest. luggage contents that had, you know, failed to transfer. And then also passports recovered from the debris field,

which is insane that they were able to recover some of those from the debris field. They did say that there was some luggage that didn't get loaded onto the planes that they were able to find fully intact. So that was also good to be able to dig through and kind of find what they had. So the investigators were able to trace the operational, like, origin of the entire plot to Germany. and then also discovered that, you know, two of the pilots at a, and I can't remember who else, also operated out of that cell in Hamburg. Hamburg cell, yeah. Yep.

So as the FBI is mapping out this funding trail, the tracking wire transfers from al-Qaeda facilitators in the Emirates and Pakistan that paid for the hijackers flight school and, you know, all their living expenses while they were here. And as they're doing this, they're starting. starting to piece together information for like actual names, not just bin Laden, but other people who were very high up within the planning of this. Your KSMs, your other Al-Qaeda officials, that basically, excuse me, the middleman in Germany. Yeah. You're looking for whatever you can.

There's the September 20th, 2001 joint address to Congress where Bush is just basically talking straight to the Taliban demanding that they hand over bin Laden, all of these other leaders, close all terrorist training camps, give the U.S. full access to investigate, and they're declaring every nation in the region, or every nation in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists.

That's taken out of a broader speech that definitely sounds a lot better than just either you're with us or you're against us. And watch his drive. Yeah. And the Taliban's response is kind of, I mean, it's, I don't know, it's definitely unreasonable. But Omar's government offers to Tribe bin Laden or in an Afghan or Islamic court. They're going to hand him over to a neutral third country. and if the U.S. can provide evidence, they will go ahead and extradite him.

The U.S. is like, nah, we're not playing that game. You're not in the driver's seat here. You're not in a position to negotiate. You're going to find that out pretty quickly. By October 7, 2001, the Taliban, this is their final refusal. Bush says you have 48 hours. If you don't respond, there's going to be action that happens.

then yeah that October 7th the U.S., the U.K. launch Operation Enduring Freedom and just opened the war. They, that's, that was how fast it happened. From September 11th talked, October 7th, we are hit and we're there. Yep. The amount of speed is just shocking. And it is partially, I think, out of, And again, this is where we're in a conspiracy theories.

Was this an inside job in order to get us into Afghanistan? Wouldn't we have a couple other of those opportunities with the embassy bombings or with the bombing of the USS Cole? Is that really necessary? I mean, there's a million other things to go into it. I'm not one to give Bush credit besides him being kind of a, just a funny, weird, warmonger kind of a guy. And look who was sitting behind him. Yeah, Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney was fucking sitting behind him.

And here's the thing. His hands were raw from rubbing them together. Fuck, what was I just going to say? God damn, I lost my train of thought. Hey, it only took into the second episode before that happened to me. Oh, I can't remember what I was talking about. It's, I mean, it's, I can see the reasons there. I can see, you know, the failures in the FBI and the CA working together to be like,

hey, there's something weird here. But as far as an ultimate plot, we didn't really need a whole lot to get into Afghanistan. That's what I was sorry. So the whole conspiracy about it being like a government set up job and stuff like that to try to boost Bush's approval. I don't know what it would be. That's how far removed I am from believing in that conspiracy.

Yeah. What would you have to possibly gain in trying to do this where, like, you have to hope everything falls in, like, are you involved in the planning? Do you know this is happening? You're just letting it fall through? Are there demolitions placed on buildings? No, there's not fucking demolitions. Here's the thing. It's like the fucking moon landing. Do you know how many people would have to keep their goddamn mouth shut about the moon landing for it to be fake? And no one has ever said anything about that. In order for this to be pulled off, you would have to have to have hundreds of people. And so many witnesses, you'd have to go into that building and build a plant like, come on. What the fuck?

it's a tough operation to pull off. But also, what's the, what's, what's your hope? What does that reveal to you? What is that like, that the government is willing to kill? Listen, the government, especially the stuff we've discussed on this podcast, has done some very, very shady shit. Yep, not arguing that. But at the point where you say that the entirety of the government are at the highest levels are able to orchestrate a plot to bring. bring down the Twin Towers and kill countless American citizens in order to go over and take

a temporary regime in Afghanistan so then you can segue into your war in Iraq? No, you didn't need to do that. Here's the thing. Pretty weird turn. Here's the thing. Had the Taliban launched any attack, had they set up a truck bomb, had they done any of that stuff, it would have been the same thing. We would have gone into Afghanistan, and then we would have been like, while we're here. Yeah, we're going to check some stuff out. Yeah. We're going to look around a little bit. Maybe, I mean, if you want to dig real hard into that, you get this authorization for use of military force like we were talking about.

This gets past September 18, 2001. It grants the president this broad authority to use force against those responsible for 9-11 and those who harbored them. So there's your entry into that. There's your entry into Afghanistan. Since it got passed in 2001, it's been used as legal justification for military operations in over 20 countries. So if you're trying to... So this opened the door for presidential overreach in order to just simply take unilateral action. Am I using that correctly?

Yeah. That feels far more plausible if you want to talk about a conspiracy thing. theory than just trying to get it into Afghanistan. Do you want that broad authority? Are you opening the door to get into Iraq that way? Is that how you use it? And again, this is just beyond the original scope of what this first authorization was, but it still remains in effect today.

Like there's still, we still have this ability. And it all comes from just this terrorist attack on 9-11 that's now been used in 20 separate countries. So, yeah, if you want to do that. talk conspiracy about maybe trying to consolidate power within the executive branch. Hey, I'm here for that. I'll listen to that. But again, you have to explain to me why it would be necessary to blow up buildings because we wouldn't have tried to go into a country just because they hit us with airplanes. I think this is a situation where it's much more a opportunistic enterprise than it is

from them planning an operation like this. Yeah. They saw something happen. They knew it they could do, they did it. And that's, I'm fully on board with that. They gave them an inch and And no one was going to say no. No, the government took them off. Because here's the thing. If you said

no, you might as well be a terrorist. Yeah, either you're with us or you're against us. Yeah. Again, it's red scare shit. It's a common refrain. This sort of I don't even really know what to do with this number

because it's kind of one of those things. It's just like, goddamn, it's that much. There was a, I believe it was conducted by Brown University, and it was kind of an accounting of where we are as far as in the war on terror. And just in comparison, yeah, it was Brown University. It was called The Cost of War Project. Now, this includes Iraq, right?

Yep, the war on terror in general. Okay, I'm just making sure because there are some things that are the actual war on terror and there are some things that are a fucking side quest that nobody proved of. So just in comparison, the 9-11 attacks on the Al-Qaeda side

ring in right at about a half a million dollars. On our side of the coin, the war on terror has cost us somewhere around $7 trillion. I think the comparison I saw was for every $1,000,

that al-Qaeda spent on this, we have spent $16 million. The amount of money that al-Qaeda spent doing this is a rounding error on the amount of money that we spent on the government spreadsheet. Yeah, it's incredible to know

that it's gone that far. And here's the thing, don't mistake us and say that there are not aspects of that that we are not 100% in support of fucking getting KSM which surprise surprise that's going to be a bonus episode that you guys can get is going to be the hunt for KSM but to get everybody involved in the fucking 9-11 you know terrorist attacks 100% behind that it's when the focus goes off of that and this leads in and we're going to do an episode on the Iraq

conflict and everything like that But what ends up happening, and I don't know when you wanted to talk about Iraq on this. Was this after? Yeah, we can get there. So with Iraq, during this time that we're in Afghanistan, that's when Saddam Hussein decides to invade Kuwait again, correct? Is that what kicks it off? I thought it was. Oh, no, no, no.

Sorry. That was a previous instance. Yeah. That was like Desert Storm. That was like that. First Gulf War. Yeah, sorry. What ends up happening is, as we're doing things in Afghanistan,

we look over and at one point I think it was I think Cheney had met with like a general or something like that and was like I need to get you down to Wixham or Wixler or wherever it was that Bush was down at his ranch in Texas he's like I need you to brief him on what our options are for Iraq and so they go down there and they're spitball on ideas and the option that comes out is hey what if one of the terrorists just happened to say that Saddam Hussein was actually in league with al-Qaeda and he was providing support and harboring and yada yada yada. So they end up getting a confession from one of the prisoners with a capture. And we'll probably, do we want to save the enhanced interrogation techniques for KSEMs episode? Probably.

Okay, let's do that. I'd like to put that behind a paywall. Yeah, okay. So through advanced interrogation techniques, they get confession from one of the guys that have in Guantanamo that Saddam is in on this whole thing. So using the information from that one person, they decide to launch an invasion of Iraq. And that's where we get, what was that one called? Or was that still enduring freedom or something like that?

Or was that Desert Sword? Or was that? Operation Iraqi Freedom, I believe, is what that was. You get these weapons of mass destruction claims, and I mean, that's going to be a phrase that we use a lot during that episode. But Secretary of State, Colin Powell at the time in February 2003 gives this UN presentation where he's citing all of this intelligence about Iraq buying aluminum tubes that are allegedly used for centrifuges and mobile bioweapon labs. Of course, that's later proved, or prove that it's kind of fabricated. And Colin Powell himself called it

a blot on his record that he lied in front of the UN council about these aluminum tubes and these centrifuges that they're building. And the Bush administration is pushing this weapon of mass destruction link with the lessons learned from 9-11 that we can't wait because that's when bad things happen is when there's too much inaction. There's this idea from all of these other inspectors from around the world, all of these UN inspectors that just keep telling the world, hey, Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. And the United States just keeps saying, no, they do.

Yeah, they do. There's yellow cake uranium. We have a guy that said he does. And ultimately, I mean, again, if you know the 9-11 story, you probably know how the Iraq war ends. We make it into Iraq. There's no weapons of mass destruction. There are a bunch of biological and chemical weapons. and we already kind of knew that

because they used them against the Iranians. They're grilling Donald's Rumfeld. They're like a hearing or something like that. And they're like, so there are no weapons of mass destruction. He's like, I never said they're weapons of mass destruction. He's like, all you guys have been saying is WMDs. And he's like, I never, he said,

I thought there were weapons of mass destruction. He's like, no, you told us where the mass or where the weapons of mass destruction where you gave us locations to where they were going to be. And he just sits there and kind of freezes for a second like he's fucking short-circuiting. Well, that's the rhetoric that's coming out of this. And they're using this post-9-11 climate to be able to do it.

You have Bush coming out in his, I believe it was the state of the union in 2002, where he's labeling Iraq along with Iran and North Korea is part of this axis of evil. He's just kind of recycling. Because that instantly draws the comparison. Yeah. It's just him pointing to, we need to get there before. they attack us. And again, Congress passes the Iraq War authorization in October 2002, bipartisan support. So this is both sides that are in on this. Going off the information of

there are WMDs there, right? Yeah. Okay. And that's, they're explicitly arguing that the U.S. couldn't act preemptively against emerging threats rather than waiting to be attacked. if you're saying that you can preemptively attack, you're just giving them basically a pass to get in. There's no, without an attack, hey guys, it's okay. You can invade their... It's what's that called? What's Minority Report True Crime or what,

where they're arresting people before they're committing crimes? And here is the deal. Saddam Hussein was an evil motherfucker. That's the other thing too. Exactly. I have no problem with them going in and knocking on Saddam. The other things that were going on in Iraq, sure.

I got a lot of problems with them. those. Saddam needed to be dealt with. Is there an argument to be made that Bush Sr. didn't get Saddam taken care of during the Gulf War? So Jr. wanted to impress Daddy to go ahead and get Saddam. 100% that had to be part of it. And here's the thing. The world is better off without him in it. But at the same time, if you're going to try to be that presence in the world, that police force in the world that we think we are, you know, all the time, then you need to be the pillar of morality. You have to fucking have stuff done to where

You can't be looked upon as basically doing shit that the people going against you would be doing Yeah, it's kind of hard to be the beacon of light when you're down in the dark Yeah, everybody else You got anything else fun? Do you want to end it with the Piazza story? Yeah, yeah, I got to say Most of my emotions are usually tied to sports Yeah, I mean rightfully so there's moments that like

And this is, when we were talking about the miracle on ice, there's certain definitive the Red Sox won in the World Series, the miracle on ice, all that stuff that's going on. Maybe one of the greatest games ever played in the last century, I would put it up in the top, probably top five is September 21st, 2001. This was the first sporting event that's held in New York City, or in, I guess, all of New York since the September 11th attacks. You have 10 days after the attacks. It's played at Shea Stadium that has this right next to the tragedy feel to it.

The ballpark had actually served as a staging and relief area for rescue workers. So this was a part of the rescue efforts that was there. As far as that goes, there was 41,235 fans that attended everybody dressed in red, white, blue we were all on the same side um players were wearing NYPD hats FD NY hats instead of just these normal team hats you get Mark Anthony out there to belt out the national anthem uh Diana Ross comes out and performs you see Mark Antony or Anthony Anthony Anthony Anthony Anthony I thought there is an H in there pretty sure like as in like unless I typed it wrong like spicy like spicy Latin sensation, Mark Antony?

You follow that up with Diana Ross performing God Bless America as all of these fans are waving American flags. As New York as it gets during the seventh inning stretch, Liza Minnelli comes out and performs New York, New York. There's a kickline down on the field of police officers and firefighters. This is the first time in the last 10 days, these people are getting to smile. And basically inside the stadium, they have the, in the outfield, there's a replica of the Manhattan skyline. And for that day, I guess going forward, the Twin Towers had been blacked out, but they had put an American flag in their place.

So it was always shining over the top. And maybe, I mean, this is a situation where the Mets have to win, right? Yeah. That's the only way that this story can end. Going into the eighth inning, the Mets are down two to one to the Braves. You have the rivalry between the Braves and the Mets that's as old as baseball time with these two teams. And Mike Piazza, who's living in an area where his apartment directly overlooked where the Twin Towers were. A New York legend.

Yeah, New York legend. Mike Piazza. Took one of the craziest. Piazza had been playing shit lately. Took one of the craziest fastballs to the head that I've ever seen. I believe ended up marrying a playboy, playmate. I want to be like Mike. Hell of a career.

He said before the game, he didn't know if they should play it because it was still too soon, but the only reason he went out there is because he knew that New York needed a win. Steps to the plate with one on in the bottom of the eighth, ends up smacking a two-run, home run. Is there circling the bases, you hear just 41,000 people on their feet, screaming their heads off, finally so excited for something. thartic release. Yeah.

And this is a situation where Chipper Jones, Braves legend playing on the other side, said that it was the best game that he's ever played in. He said this was the one game in his career that he's ever been happy to lose to the Mets. And Piazza crosses that plate. And you just, the cheering doesn't stop. Yeah.

It carries throughout the entire game. Just a beautiful win to come out three, two on top. and you get to see New York come back alive. Like, you didn't beat us. We're still there. I think that's a good place to end it, actually. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, we can't lose. If you stay together, you can't lose.

Yeah. It'd be nice to get back to that point. Yeah. I'm ready. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, hope you enjoyed this little, it was technically a bonus episode, but everyone gets to enjoy it. Yeah, true.

All right. Hopefully you made it through the whole thing. If you have some tissues, no judgment here. But we'll catch on the next one. Peace.