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

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Venice is private, unbiased AI.No conversation logs sitting on someone else’s server.No refusals dressed up as safety.Try it at https://venice.ai/lp/triggernometry and get 20% off your first month - Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. Click https://superpower.com - Take Hillsdale College’s online courses for free at https://hillsdale.edu/trigger Richard Miniter created Trump world which covers everything that Trump says in public or online within four minutes of him saying it, together with maps, charts and full context. -  https://trumpworld.zenger.news/trigger Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://shop.triggerpod.co.uk/ Advertise on Triggernometry: https://trigger-brands.com | or enquire at [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What were they trying to accomplish? They were trying to get the attention of the United States. They wanted a war. They didn't understand us and come to hate us. They have a very rudimentary idea of who we are. People say, oh, they were making a political statement, but the captured notebooks tell us they really didn't know that much about us. So they had studied our system, found a weak point, took advantage of it.

They looked at the FAA's website and found the airports with the largest number of security violations. They did go to these flight schools. Where chillingly, they said they didn't need to learn how to take off or land. They just needed to know how to operate an aircraft in the air. You suddenly realize that your country is crowded with heroes wearing ordinary faces. The British government wants to force YouTube to downrank independent content like ours and replace it with approved messaging from the mainstream media. The only way you can fight back and continue to to enjoy our content is to make sure you're subscribed. Like this video and comment below to have your say on what the government is doing. Richard Minneta, welcome back to Trigonometry. We have you here

on the 25th anniversary of 9-11, which for those of us who lived through it was a moment of great tragedy. It was a moment that changed the world. But more importantly, actually, there is now a whole generation, maybe two generations of people who don't even, remember it because they either weren't alive at all or they were too young to really understand the significance of what was going on. So on this day, what we thought would be fantastic is to have someone like you who's written a bunch of New York Times bestsellers about various aspects of this event to come back on the show and talk to us about actually the basics, the sort of cub reporter questions, the what, when, why. So welcome back again.

And let's talk about it. What happened on 9-11, 2001? On the day itself, 25 years ago today, four planes were hijacked. And unlike normal hijacking, they did not communicate with the outside world. They did not demand ransom. And instead, they purposely flew these planes into buildings on what everyone describes as a clear, perfect, Tuesday sky. They crashed into the towers within 15 minutes while I got each other two jumbo

jets collided with the World Trade Center towers. Another plane went into the Pentagon and we have horrifying voice recordings of people on the phone inside the plane as it slams into the Pentagon. And then there's the story of Flight 93, the fourth plane, which is hijacked somewhere over Cleveland after having left Maine and was believed headed toward the U.S. Capitol building itself. If they had reached that target, roughly 5,000 people would have died, including members of the House and the Senate and their key staffs, other dignitaries who were visiting on that day, and the death toll would have been much higher than in the World Trade Center itself. Three thousand, rough, almost three thousand people died from more than a hundred countries.

there are conspiracy theories saying that the Jews were warned in advance. In fact, for the Orthodox Jews, there was a religious holiday that they had been following for thousands of years, and they stayed home on that day due to a religious holiday, not due to any advance warning, but that is one of those malicious Internet rumors. But let's not forget about the heroism of the people on Flight 93, because it tells us something distinctive about that day and about Americans in general. When the plane was seized by four hijackers over Cleveland and redirected from its intended destination of San Francisco, south and east towards the U.S. Capitol, immediately one passenger was killed, apparently scuffling with the hijackers,

and the rest were hurted to the back of the plane. And these ordinary Americans who were encouraged to use their phones by the hijackers, it was part of the Al-Qaeda plan, Al-Qaeda being the terrorist group that had organized, and planned these attacks, rehearsing them for years, by the way, wanted them to use the phones to magnify the terror across the American population, to harness the social networks of people who love those people who are about to die, to spread the sense of terror and pain. But on those calls, people didn't just talk, they also listened,

and they learned that other planes had been hijacked. And because they were uniquely American, and these ordinary people said when they were herded to the back of the plane, we have to make a plan to retake this, or they will kill us and whoever we ram this plane into. So they began boiling water, which is used in the back of the plane to make coffee and tea. They began assembling whatever they could for weapons.

We know just fragmentary bits from the cockpit voice recorder and from the transcripts of the phone calls. And they attacked the hijackers. They did not launch their attack, until they could see out the window. They were over a rural area. They were aware of tons of aviation gas, which would explode and kill people on the ground.

They wanted to spare as many civilians on the ground as possible. Flight 93 is the only flight in which no one on the ground died. Now, it's a heartbreaking story. They did, apparently, according to the recordings, disabled two of the four hijackers and were ramming the cart into the cockpit door and may have gotten inside the cockpit itself. There is fragmentary last second recordings where they're demanding the,

they're fighting over the controls of the plane or from a flight of them, but from a height of roughly 8,000 feet, according to a small plane that was observing them at the time. They dived into the dirt, killing everyone aboard. And there's a monument for them now near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But that is an incredible example

of people in real time making decisions without any outside guidance going against 40 years of conventional wisdom they were always instructed by their betters just cooperate with the hijackers be peaceful that's the best chance of your survival is just to cooperate with them they fought them they ignored all the expert advice

they made weapons they made a plan they told the people that they love that they loved them but that they had to go. And we hear them on the cockpit voice recorder. Those messages are still classified, but they are more played for the families.

And I interviewed a number of the family members several years after those recordings. But it's an extraordinary story. One last detail of context here. When I was on the Cash Laputa River in Colorado, a boat ahead of me was composed entirely of Japanese people and the boat started to sink in the rapids. And all the Japanese people turned to the group leader and were waiting for him to make a

decision as the water climbed up to their necks and eventually over their heads before he dispersed them to swim for their lives. That might be how Japanese people react in a crisis. Flight 93 tells us how Americans act in a crisis. They ignore the experts. They make the plan. They consider all the ramifications. They take great risks.

And in the case of Flight 93, they came heartbreaking and close to retaking that plane. They are heroes. Richard, and there were many stories of heroism that day, of course. And we will talk about all of them, including in New York with the firefighters, with other first responders. Many of them gave their lives like the people aboard Flight 93. But I really think it's very, very important for us to try and, I'm. unpack the why because of the way the world changed. Why did this happen?

That's a big question. The short answer is 1979. In 1979, in the quarter years of the American presidency, through a series of missteps, there was a revolution in Iran, an interesting coalition of communists, Kurds, and radical Islamists, led by Ayatoll Khomeini, who was in exile, first in Iraq and then in Paris, flew back to Iran and was able to launch an Islamic revolution in that country. What that did, the revolution was a Shia Islamic revolution, but for Sunnis, outside Iran, it was a watershed. Suddenly, it seemed like radical Islamic

Kutopia was possible. We saw takeovers in Mecca in 1979, where the Great Mosque was taken, and for several months, Saudi forces were unable to retake it, and many radical Muslims believed that Allah was protecting the people holding the Grand Mosque hostage.

Ultimately, the Saudis, under Prince Turkey Alfaisal, were able to bring in French paratroopers, who they made all say the shahada converting to Islam before they went in, who cleared out the terrorists, but it took months. Those two effects, turbocharged, radical Islam from an idea that existed among intellectuals and schoolteachers and a handful of people inside the Aqan Muslimin, the Muslim Brotherhood, and brought it out into the realm of political possibility.

And then the third thing happens in 1979. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a traditional Muslim country invaded by an atheist communist superpower. And those three things acting together meant that jihad, the preaching of Abdullah Azam, who was in 1979 a mentor to Osama bin Laden, that jihad is the way. Jihad does not mean spiritual change

in the thinking of Dullah-A-A-Zam and in the various Salafis who follow him and his dogma and his doctrine. It means fighting on this earth and killing infidels in order to bring about the last days, the end of the world, so that Allah may reigns supreme

over all the world. and they were cycle. So to spare themselves revolutions, like what they saw in Iran across the Sunni Arab countries, they began encouraging these terrorists, even in fact, later in the 1980s, opening their prisons and sending these radicals to Afghanistan to fight Soviets.

The thinking of Saudi intelligence especially was that if they die in Afghanistan, They're a holy martyr and they're not our problem. And if they don't die, they will be busy for a long time and not causing problems here at home. This creates an opportunity for a young sion of a construction magnate named Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden is forged by two things in his life. In order to get his father's attention as a young boy, he did two things that stood out among all of the other children. Otherwise, most weeks of the year, he was all but ignored.

But on Friday, after Juma prayers, he, when his father would gather with other adult men, and seven, eight, nine-year-old Osama would be summoned to recite portions of the Quran from memory. So he memorized the Quran as a way to command attention and to get his father's approval. This is the very beginning before he gets introduced to the radical philosophy of Adela-Azahn. and of the Muslim Brotherhood and the other radical groups. And I don't want to get on too many rabbit holes, but al-Qaeda is not a direct descendant of one thing, but the fusion of many things.

The other way he got his father's attention, and this is important, is that for one, sometimes two weeks a year, depending on the year, the head of the family, would take all of the extended family, including Yung Osama, into the desert, to live in tents without human comforts. And in this harsh environment, Osama thrive. He loved the wild places.

He loved capturing and killing animals. And while everyone else complained about the lack of air conditioning of cold water and so on, everyone wanted to take a shower or bath, he thrived. And he got his father's approval there. From those two ingredients, once you add the radical thinking of O'Dul-Azom, bin Laden knew he had to get to Afghanistan and create an opportunity for himself because tens of thousands of radicals were leaving jails, leaving mosques, and going to Afghanistan. So he created something initially called Al-Qaeda Suba, the secure base. And it was just a place where you could, as a fighter, a jihadi fighter against the Soviets, store your things, your watch, your wallet, and so on.

And they began a paper database. So base can also mean database in this form, in this form of Arabic. And they made a database of all of the fighters that came through and whose belongings were stored. Often they kept passports. These passports would resurface, by the way, on 9-11. So some of the people believed to have died in the 1980s in Afghanistan, their passports reappear, held perhaps by other people, when they apply for visas to come to the United States and go to flight school and begin their more than year of operations inside the United States

before the 9-11 attacks. So bin Laden ends up as a well-known figure in 1980s, Afghanistan. He has the names and contact information for tens of thousands of radicals, Muslims, from the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Arab Gulf, and so on. It is an incredible advantage from which he starts to build a terror network. At first, he's just a financier. The very first mention of Osama bin Laden in U.S. government documents is a State Department report from 1995 that says that refers to dismissively, refers to bin Laden as a moving bank.

But by the 90s, but the State Department was wrong by the 90s, he was organizing and planning his own attacks. They spent more than a decade planning and carrying out attacks against Americans. Throughout the Clinton years, we saw attacks on a U.S. hotel in Yemen that was supposed to house U.S. servicemen.

We saw attacks against the two U.S. embassies in Africa. simultaneously with eight minutes of each other, and so on, right? So he's planning for 9-11. The catalyst was a fellow named College Sheikh Mohammed. He is like the independent producer who brings the studio head, bin Laden, the script. And together they began the plot and plan that leads to 9-11. What were they trying to accomplish? They were trying to get the attention of the United States.

They wanted a war. Bin Laden had held press conferences in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, and in other places for many years, openly declaring war against the United States, using those words. And the United States didn't respond. With 3,000 Americans dead on the morning of September 11th, America would have to respond. In the lead-up to 9-11, there were two key attacks, it seems to me. One of them was the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and the other was the attack on SS-cold. So let's talk talk about those very briefly and how they paved the way for the horrific offense on 2001?

Sure. So Al-Qaeda launches attacks or attempted attacks on the United States or its interests every year from 1992 to 2001. These attacks increase in sophistication and lethality. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing is carried out by a man. and we now call Ramsey Yusuf. Ramsey Yusuf is, grows up with Holly Sheikh Mohammed in a town outside of Kuwait city. Both are not Kuwaiti citizens. They are, in fact, because of their place of birth,

permanently ineligible to become Kuwaiti citizens. So they grew up, they and their families with second class status and the anger and frustration that that applies because they were both high IQ, people who did very well in school. The only place where they could, and to give you an idea of how low the status was, during much of his childhood, Pellichik Muhammad's mother, her only source of living after the father died suddenly was to wash the female bodies of the dead and be paid on a per bot fee. So this is a desperate, precarious existence with very low status despite their high abilities.

They do very well in school, but they are not given, places the university will not be set aside for them because those reserved primarily for the Kuwaitis and for their foreign visitors. The only place they can find social advancement is inside the various youth groups of the Muslim Brotherhood. And, but in addition to, so College of Muhammad Unran's use to become active in the theater and singing troops of the Muslim Brotherhood in near Kuwait City. College of Muhammad himself is a gifted performer and very popular. And when he goes to university in North Carolina, he's also popular for performing skits and songs there. So this creative talent remains. But they are frustrated and angry. And in the course of finding the social outlet, they imbibe the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology.

And so in 1993 World Trade Center attacks, the plan is very simple to take a truck loaded with, I forget how many pounds, hundreds of pounds of explosive, and to detonate it outside the wall of the South Tower parking garage. Iams Yusuf does not care. but on the other side of that small concrete black wall is a woman who's seven months pregnant named Monica Smith, seven months pregnant with a boy, and she's eating her lunch. Another person is behind another wall looking to get to do an inventory count

for a restaurant that exists hundreds of feet above them called Windows on the World. They set the bomb. They try desperate to leave the parking garage, but there's a truck in front of them that is very slow. they're glaring their horn, and they roar out onto West Street and make their getaway just seconds before the bomb explodes, killing Monica Smith and the workers on the world, in Victoria counter, a waiter, actually, and five other people.

At first, the U.S. is deeply confused by what happened. The bomb is massive. It opens a crater that is, the mouth of the crater is more than 60 feet of cross and goes down nearly 100 feet. It drops concrete blocks into the path train station below. It severs pipes. So you have water and sewage flowing into the crater. The building is evacuated. And one valuable thing happens that is going to be important on the morning of 9-11. The New York City Police and a separate commission impaneled by the legislators in Albany, which is the state capital of New York. study the evacuation plan, all of the problems that went wrong.

And so they change how Twin Towers are to be evacuated, how the lights, there were no lights in 1993 in the stairway. As soon as the power was cut, the stairways were dark, and therefore people moved down those staircases much more slowly. Thanks to the attack, on 9-11, most of those lights were battery powered. and so when the power went out, people could still evacuate close. And those lines moved much more quickly. There were many, many other changes made.

But as a result, 3,000 people died on 9-11. And Richard, sorry to interrupt, but what was their fascination with the World Trade Center? That's a really interesting question, Francis. When you go through, so at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, they have about 2.5 million pages worth of captured documents from al-Qaeda. And those have been translated into English,

mainly by the U.S. Army or by U.S. other government. And the FBI separately translated the notebooks left behind in the rental cars of the hijackers. They drove rental cars to the airports where they launched the hijackers. And so two things come from that. One is they thought that the World Trade Center was literally the center of world trade.

they thought if they blew it up, all global trade would come to a stop. It never occurred to them that property developers created a marketing name, World Trade Center. And in fact, there are other world trade centers in the United States, right? And it's kind of those things that's about as meaningful as the term international airport,

right? The small town airports to the U.S. that have one flight a week to Canada, but it's an international airport, right? And they also, another thing that comes with this, is people say, oh, they were making a political statement, but the captured notebooks tell us, they really didn't know that much about us.

So one of the notebooks left behind with the hijackers is a lengthy description on page one of the notebook of the difference between shampoo and conditioner. Right? So these were not, this was not a detailed political protest. They wanted to attract the attention of the great Satan in the United States and go to war with it and hopefully to triumph over it. This is a battle in their mind. It wasn't really about something the United States did. So they wanted to drag America

into a war, which they wanted to win. That was the purpose of all of this. Yes. The story in their head is we defeated the Soviets. Now, in reality, the jihadi forces from the Arab countries had very little impact on the Soviets, right? We can point to one or two battles in which they may have played an important role. Mostly, they didn't join the main war effort. They did random terror attacks. One fun aspect of this is they didn't just have car bombs. They had camel bombs where they put bombs on camels and had them explode in marketplaces. Most of the war fighting, which actually did drive the Soviets out, was carried out by Afghans themselves.

So an important detail here, which many people miss, is while the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs funded the jihadis, the U.S. did not. The U.S. never funded al-Qaeda. I talked to every living CIA station chief responsible for Afghanistan and many other officials. And the record on this is overwhelming. The U.S. never supported al-Qaeda or bin Laden himself or, for that matter, any Arab jihadis.

They supported Pushhtuns and other groups, which later became known as the Northern Alliance. And that's who they were, the people who are doing the Polk of the fighting. But nonetheless, in the mind of the jihadis, they defeated the one. superpower, the Soviets. With 9-11, they were expecting another battle, and they would defeat the other superpower, America. And that would make them the best in the world. And they hope bring about the end times and lead to the end of the world and a la triumphant. And that being the case, what about the SS coal? What was the impact of that and what was the significance of that particular attacked. So from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, there are a series of attacks. There's

an attempted assassination of Pope, there's planned assassinations of Bill Clinton, there's a foiled bot called Bojinka that was going to start out of Manila where they hijack 11 planes over the Pacific that were foiled by a very enterprising Filipino police chief who was pregnant and in flip-flops when she arrests Ramsey Yusuf's co-conspirator. That's a whole other wonderful story. And so these attacks escalate. There are attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998 in Dara Salam, Tanzania, and in Nairobi, and then the climax of the Clinton years from an al-Qaeda perspective is the attack on the USS Cole.

they had attempted an earlier attack on the USS, the Sullivan's. That ship was named after five brothers who died on the same ship in World War II and fighting the Japanese. And it is, but their attack fails because their boat sinks before it reaches the target. They adapt very quickly and they launch an attack on the USS Cole. And what we have is the first time a U.S. Navy ship is, in danger of sinking and total loss since World War II. They blow a hole that I think is 40 feet wide in the side of the hole and only through the heroic efforts of the captain and the crew.

By the way, dozens are killed and injured through pumping at three day, round the clock effort and they stand the ship to port and safely evacuate and the ship itself is still flowed today, I believe. Bin Laden does not hide his involvement. He writes a poem glorifying the attack, which is widely published. And there are phone calls linking the various people who carried out the attack, both in Yemen and to their paymasters in parts of Africa and calls to Afghanistan. So we have a complete chain of evidence.

Bin Laden to the attack on the U.S. skull, which is the largest attack on a U.S. warship since World War II. Richard, sorry, just going back a little bit. I was so shocked by what you said about, because you will be aware that in the wake of 9-11, and frankly, prior to that, the universal belief was that America had created the Al-Qaeda by funding it, the sting is, and all of that. So not that I don't trust you, you know how much we love you on the show, but I went on Venezuela and had a quick look, and it says that U.S. funds did not go directly to bin Laden,

but they did go to native Afghan Mujahideen commanders, who were part of the movement that then became al-Qaeda. Is that accurate? The first part of it is absolutely accurate. So there was an explicit deal, and this is not secret, this was reported on the front page of the Washington Post in 1986, right? an explicit deal, dollar-for-dollar matching, the Reagan administration would spend up to $1 billion,

and they did, funding Native Afghans, and the Saudis would spend up to $1 billion funding the Arab holy warriors, be well. These are separate groups of people. They speak different languages. They have different beliefs, and they have different aims for the future, of Afghanistan.

The idea that the CIA funded bin Laden is an attempt to conflate a very broad movement with very different groups in it as lump it all as one thing and say we funded that one thing, therefore

and bin Laden. That is just not the case. So just for clarity, just for clarity, what you're saying is the U.S. funded people who were fighting the Soviets, but not bin Laden and not the foreigners who came to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. That's what you said.

That's right. You're funded by the Saudis and by the Gulf Warrants. And in fact, the whole time of the 1980s, bin Laden is openly anti-American and says so. And there is a member, it's in my book, losing bin Laden. There was a member of Congress visiting Afghanistan. And he was told to stay away from these bin Laden camps that they were hiking around because if bin Laden captures him, he will torture and kill him.

So this is not somebody on the CIA payroll. Fascinating. There's much more evidence. If you want to talk about this in detail, there's much, much more evidence. But also think about it from the CIA's point of view, right? A bunch of ideologically driven, ill-trained foreigners are not an ideal indigenous force to fight the Soviets.

The people who are fighting for their native lands, who speak local languages, whose political goal is simply to drive the Soviets out not to create a religious utopia. Those people are much easier to work with, far more controllable, and far better trained. They'd been in combat for decades. Remember, Afghanistan has a civil war following the departure of the king in the 1970s, where Native Afghans were fighting communists, right? And then when it looked like they were going to succeed in driving the communists from power, the Soviet Union intervened to save their ideological allies, rolling tanks across the Oxus Bridge on Christmas Eve, 1979. So these people have been fighting Soviets and communists for decades. They had organized

training regimes, command structures. They were focused on the objective the CIA cared about. CIA did not care about trying to create a religious Muslim utopia in Afghanistan. Not only that, but al-Qaeda and the other Arab jihadis were very hard to control. Most of their attacks were on other Muslims, not on Soviets themselves. And for example, look at what is now called Nuristan, what used to be called Kifiristan, in a region in Afghanistan. Kfiristan means land of the unbelievers. And these people did not start to convert to Islam until the 1960s.

And by the time the radicals arrived in the 1980s, maybe 5%, maybe 10%, I mean, there's no good census data here or Muslim. But through war and conquest, they wanted to convert them to Islam. a lot of bin Laden and the associated Arab terrorist groups were attacks against these tribal people in what was called once, Kifuristan, as now known as Nuristan, Land of Light, because they did succeed in converting the majority of them, right? So that's the ideological and targeting focus of the Arabs was on the Afghans who were not following their form of Islam. the native Afghans, the CIA was funding, their goal was getting rid of the Soviets, which was the U.S. foreign policy goal.

So it would have been pointless to fund these groups. They're hard to control, hard to manage, build trained, and don't share your objectives. And on top of all that, they want to kill you if you're a CIA official, right? So it just operationally makes no sense. But when I talked to Beardenu is one of the CIA, I talked to every living. CIA station chief for Afghanistan who served between 1980 and 1992. Right. Now you could say, okay, these are self-interested.

Fine, but no one else had tracked them down and talked to them. And they laid out in a very clear, non-ideological, non-defensive terms. There's just, we had no orders to fund these people. We have no money to fund these people. We had no desire to fund these people. And these people were trying to kill us. So we don't write checks that people are trying to kill you. That makes sense. Did the people that they funded then with many of them part of the Taliban?

No, the Taliban are created much later. The Taliban are born in 1994. So remember the Soviet. What I mean is did they become the Taliban? Sorry to interrupt again. The Mujahideen did not become the Taliban. The Taliban is created mainly by the Pakistan. Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI, and a bunch of local Islamic teachers. They're trying to get the Taliban or trying to impose the severe version of the official version of Islam, according to Pakistan. And later, the so-called Mujahideen, the Arab foreign fighters, ally themselves with the Taliban,

because the Taliban are not on their own. but the U.S. backed forces become known as the Northern Alliance. And if you remember, two days before 9-11 on September 9th, the head of the Northern Alliance is murdered by an al-Qaeda cell posing as a Belgian camera crew. They have a bomb inside the camera, and it detonates.

That's how Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, is killed on September 9. So they saw the Northern Alliance as the enemy The Taliban is something that's created later. It's driven by different causes and different flows of money, but the Mujahideen do ally with it, not in 94, but after. Remember, there's a whole group, a whole galaxy of these groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and people move between groups.

We have captured documents that show that people get frustrated, that their martyrdom opportunity is delayed. It's like Lakshitaiba, for example, which is one of these groups. and they'll move to ISIS. Their martyrdom opportunity is further delayed there. So they shift to Al-Qaeda. Like, they're moving around, right? And they're looking for, they're looking to die

and therefore change their status in their community. Like most people, I want more energy, better focus, and to still be sharp and strong years from now. But every time I've gone in for my annual checkup, It's the same thing. Wait weeks to get an appointment, sit in a waiting room, and then you're in and out in 10 minutes. Everything looks fine, they say.

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And after you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about superpower. Tell them trigonometry sent you to support the show. And Richard, we can see, looking back at the events over the 90s, there's a clear trajectory happening here. The attacks were escalating. They were not only escalating,

but they were becoming more frequent. They were attacking U.S. soil. They were attacking U.S. Navy. they were also attacking embassies. Why was there someone not in government raising the alarm going, look, we need to do something here? This is serious and it's going to be inevitable that there's going to be another Islamist terrorist attack

on our soil. Well, the danger, to be fair, to the Clinton administration, right, we can look back from our point in time and say it was obvious this was going to happen. But for people who are living in the moment, it isn't clear. So I talked to both of Clinton's national security advisors and Tony Lake, who was the national security advisor in the early Clinton years, says that he received his first briefing on al-Qaeda

sometime in 1994. This is years after the attacks have begun. This is year after the World Trade Center bombing. At this point, they hadn't linked the World Trade Center. Center bombing to al-Qaeda. And he said he wasn't sure if he mentioned it to the president or not. Maybe he thinks the first conversation with President Clinton about al-Qaeda was sometime in 1995, right? Why is he hazy about this?

He's not being defensive. A lot's going on. And at the time, this didn't seem among all the various threats they're facing the most important. right the timeline becomes a lot clearer and a lot more definite we see a lot more reports in late 90s but in the early 90s remember when the world trade center explodes and the FBI is called in they're trying to figure out what if this was a work of terrorism in the beginning they're not in the first few hours they're not even sure right they changed the name of the investigation to trade bomb only when they get enough bomb residue out of the crater to say, okay, this was definitely a bomb,

right? So that happens five, six hours into the investigation. But for days, they're like, is this a Yugoslav terrorist group? Is this far right extremists from, you know, white nationalists from the United States? Is this? Nobody knows, right? And even after the initial arrests and that's a whole interesting story or they unwind the plot where the guy has returned to get the rental car so he can get the deposit back and use the money to buy a flight to escape because the ticket that Muhammad Atta, the ringleader, has given him is not a real airline ticket, it's a child's ticket, he has to upgrade it or to get on a flight back to Pakistan. And, you know, this, it takes them months to put the pieces together.

about that bombing itself, connecting it to a larger global narrative, doesn't really cohere into anything until the middle of 1995 at the earliest. And that's also why when Sudan offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to the United States, that wasn't seen as that high a priority either. Now, Francis, to your point, were there mid-level people who are specialists saying, this is a major problem. This is very important you need to do something.

Absolutely. But again, in fairness to the Clinton administration, these people, all these specialists think their specialties the most important thing. Right.

They're all with their hair off the fire. Right. So how do you, as the politically elected or politically appointed decision maker, say, I should listen to expert 132 and ignore all the others? Right.

It's difficult, right? Another problem here is the government is very siloed. This is something the 9-11 Commission report pointed out in great detail. So when I talked to then the Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, just died recently. Woolsey wanted information that the FBI was gathering because it has obvious implications for CIA investigations. And the FBI refused to share because he says, well, you'll mess up our case, right? The FBI was completely focused on launching a criminal case. And so if we share any evidence with you, we have to share it with the defense,

and we'll have to give up all our sources and methods to defense. So when you want these documents, you can have them when we present them at trial, which turned out to be in the middle of 1996. Woolsey also begged for translators, less than 10% of the phone intercepts coming out of the Middle East were being translated. And the CIA wanted more translators. And because Woolsey had committed a political offense unknowingly, right?

He was told by Bruce Lindsay in the White House that they want to replace the general counsel of the CIA with a friend of Bill, a president, someone who had supported the president in his election efforts. And Wolsey said, no, we have a very capable general counsel now. There's no reason to replace her or him. I can't remember. And as soon as he did that, he was shut out of all meetings with the president.

So he never got to meet with the president one-on-one. He was in the room with crowds of other people. at a few handful of occasions, to try to get the president's attention, he would go with the CIA daily briefer and sit outside the president's office, but he can't just walk in and was never asked inside. So he never got to present his case to the president about al-Qaeda. He was never able to get the president to force the FBI to share its information. And the FBI didn't translate things unless they had a direct,

they thought a direct bearing on the case. So, example, earlier before the World Trade Center bombing, there had been a killing of the Jewish leader named Meyer Kahan, and those documents were not translated for eight, ten years. When they were, they showed you that the very infrastructure used by the people and the places by Rams Eusev were the same, but they didn't want to spend the money to translate the Arabic. So there were translation problems, they were bureaucratic infighting, there were silos, and then there were political games.

And if al-Qaeda was seen as a real existential threat, all of those things would have been pushed aside by the force of the executive. But because it wasn't seen that way, those things weren't pushed aside. And also we had people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was in college during the 9th, 90s in the United States, there was a literal enemy on home soil. And when you look at that, you think to yourself, I guess the question is, could it have been prevented? Could we have caught KSM earlier? And how many times was he able to slip through the net? Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, there's a famous case in 1995 where the FBI I misses him by hours out of a safe house in, and I think Qatar, because the Qatari minister,

I think, of religious instruction. Anyway, one of the ministers warns, you know, college Sheikh Mohammed that the U.S. is coming for. Well, let's go back to the schooling in North Carolina of College of Sheikh Mohammed, the architect. So when you talk to this family in Kuwait and other places, and his school teachers, they will tell you that he was a normal kid who got radicalized in the United States. And there actually is pretty good evidence for this. Yes, he was coming out of the youth groups of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait, and the school didn't operate very well on this, but there appears to have been a Muslim Brotherhood scholarship paid for his schooling in the United States.

But the U.S., especially before 9-11, but even now, doesn't really do background checks of the foreign students. So, and sometimes the foreign students it admits are less qualified than the U.S. students they could have admitted in their place because they're trying to meet at this time period certain racial or ethnic quotas, right? So, college Sheikh Mohammed would not have been admitted if he had to compete openly because his English, that stage was very poor. And his knowledge of engineering, which he said he was going to study, wasn't very good either. So he would not have been a normal candidate except they were trying to tick certain boxes and he came with scholarship money from abroad, which is high margin for the university. So it's clearly the did.

additional regulations need to be applied on the admissions of foreign students and on what basis and so on. I think the U.S. should educate the highest IQ, the most capable foreign students in the world. But our question we should attract them and train them and teach them. But the second thing we need to think about is the social dynamics. So he went to two different universities in the United States. One of them was a validly Christian. He felt isolated. And so he gravitated toward other people whose language, he was isolated by language, right? His English just was at stage very poor. So he sought out other Arabic speakers who were far more radical than himself. And he fell into a group of them where in order to maintain

his friendships, he had to share their ideological commitments. So it's a lot like a guy joining a group because there's a hot guy or hot girl in it and he will just conform his beliefs in order to be this person. In his case, he desperately needed a social outlet and not to feel isolated. And so when Hala-Shik Muhammad's family members say, you know, hey, he was going to discos and picking up girls in Kuwait and he comes back and he's a Salafi, he's very strict. He doesn't, you know, many changes in his personal life. This is, and they blame the United States.

Well, really, the culprit here is the social network at the university of other foreign students. And in order to survive in that very small ecosystem of 2025 Arabic speakers, he had to conform. And ultimately, he becomes a kind of leader among them because he over conforms. and they get in trouble for slaughtering a goat in a baseball dug out in the university so that they can eat in a certain ritualistic way and so on. But he becomes increasingly militant because this binds the group to him and makes him feel less alone. So when we admit people into our universities who lack the language and social skills to connect, we're setting up a dangerous situation where they will go to other people and you get an island of

misfit toys. Now most of the time these are just, you know, sad train spotters. But in other cases, social dynamics there create a toxic environment that makes all of them or many of them into radicals. I talked to an e-mom leader who was a student. he now runs several mosques in Greensboro, North Carolina. He was a student with College of Muhammad, and he openly said he loved him. But he thought that this political activity was a distraction, right? That they were constantly focused on trying to have a political outcome

rather than getting people to really understand it, no, slump. Now, that's his reflection, five, ten years after 9-11. But I thought it was fascinating. What I was going to ask you, Richard, is, we've talked about the ideology, these people want to start a war with the United States,

but you're describing the mastermind KSM. And it sounds like a bit of a loser. You've got Sama bin Laden over there in Afghanistan. How do these people, I mean, you're not, when I think about an organization that's capable of hijacking four planes, flying them into buildings, which is, as I understand, not particularly easy thing to do if you haven't been a pilot for many, many years,

how do you get this bunch of misfit toys committing probably the greatest terrorist atrocity in human history? with a high level of sophistication. And for context, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nickname was KFC because of his predilection for it, and he was overweight over 200 pounds. So it's not like he was a physical specimen either.

Well, he becomes fatter living in Pakistan. Yeah, right. At the 90s, he was known as the brain. His nickname KFC is after 10-11. So he's smart. Yes. And look, if he had there had been a path to citizenship for him and his family in Kuwait,

we may never have heard of it, right? He may have become an engineer in the oil fields or done something else. We will never know. However, to get to your question, people become terrorists because it solves an important problem in their life. Either meaning or isolation.

They're trying to solve for social isolation or they're trying to solve for meaning for purpose. Terrorism gives you a purpose. But to carry out that purpose, you need money. Because it's not easy to get people into, you've got to get visas to those. You've got to recruit people. You have to get visas to get them the United States. You get them in the pilot school. They need to live somewhere. They need something. They need clothes, et cetera. So you need venture capital, right? Bin Laden had a lot of that. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried to sell many different plans to Bin Laden.

He gets to meet bin Laden by playing on his family connection to Ramsey Yusuf, who bin Laden admired and who had carried out the 1993 World Trade Center ball. So once he forges a connection with bin Laden and his inner circle, he is pitching various plans. And the plans are refined repeatedly. So the earlier plans were simultaneously hijacking eight aircraft, four on the West Coast and four on the East Coast, with targets in San Francisco and Los Angeles, so on.

They prune that out of the plan is just too operationally difficult. Four is when they think the largest number of planes they can hijack without a U.S. response. but it's it's very much like i hate to keep going back to the hollywood comparison but it's very much like an independent producer with a very promising script having to negotiate with a studio for financing and distribution right so he needed um al-qaeda's money he needed al-qaeda's ability to forge documents and to move people in secure ways you needed secure communication He needed a lot of resources beyond money. And to do that, he had to compromise with them.

And they unfortunately made the plan far more practical. But bin Laden was just desperate for his war. In his mind, and this is in his writings, this is not a theory of mine. They had defeated the Soviets, even though in reality the jihadis had virtually no impact on the Soviets. except for you can maybe give them two battles. They're pivotal roles in two battles, maybe. But in Bin Laden's mind, they'd driven out the Soviets, they'd beaten one superpower, they wanted to beat the other.

They thought if they could force the United States to come to the Mounts Afghanistan to meet them, that they would crush them. And that didn't happen. When the U.S. did deploy to Afghanistan, the military studies, of course, they look at the number of time, how many minutes of firefight lasts. And those times got shorter and shorter because the U.S. got increasingly efficient at killing them.

And there is a major battle in 2002 or 2003, Shemali Plains, it's called, in which they fielded hundreds, maybe close to 1,000 fighters against a U.S. unit, a much, much smaller U.S. unit and were utterly defeated and never tried a mass battle again. So this fantasy of bin Laden said if we can force them to come and fight

in Afghanistan, we can beat them like we beat the Soviets. It's just probably false. But before 9-11, of course, bin Laden had no way of knowing that. He thought, if anything, the Americans were softer and easier to beat. And what was the logistics of the operation, Richard? Tell us how

how do these just random guys from the Middle East get to the point where they know how to fly a plane, they know how to hijack a plane, how do they hijack a plane, or tell us the mechanics? Okay, so why are so many of the 19 hijackers Saudis? It doesn't mean the Saudis hate us. It means that there was a special program that the State Department had launched due to political pressure to speed up the visas for Saudi's citizens. citizens. So for example, if you are Britain or France in this time period, you had visa waiver access into the United States. You didn't need a visa at all, right? You just say, here it is.

See the passport, let me in. And the Saudis wanted that, but of course, that was never going to happen because in the 90s, the risk of people from Saudi was well known. and from that region in general it wasn't an anti-saudi bias it's just an awareness look there's the same reason why you know there's certain geographies that present geopolitical rest let's say that say France Germany Britain Denmark don't right so to compromise with the Saudis they created Visa Express which was a very quick system for getting a US visa. So for the Saudis, it was a matter of prestige. They wanted to be treated, both the Europeans

and Australians, and this was the compromise. As a result, the people who became the hijackers were able to get to take advantage of this program. If this program had been offered in Qatar instead of Saudi Arabia, 19 of the hijackers would have been from Qatar, not Saudi, right? So they had studied our system found a weak point, took advantage of it. How did they select the airports where the planes were going to leave? They looked at the FAA's website and found the airports with the largest number of security violations. They knew that Logan Airport in Boston, for example, was run by a political appointee who had previously been the chauffeur for the governor of Massachusetts. So they thought they picked airports, Dulles Airport in Washington, for example, was an

another where there were a long history of documented security lapses. So they used U.S. government data publicly available in a free society. It's how we work to plot where to hijack, which planes to hijack. They needed planes that were going to travel the full length of the continent of the United States because they would have the most tons of fuel on board and therefore have the greatest explosive capacity. So you wanted aircraft that were fully low. that were coming from airports that were at weak security procedures.

And the ring leader, Muhammad, would flow out of a small airport in Maine and then changed planes to join a flight, I believe that of Logan, I remember his behavior, but he's on that, because they also thought that that flight would be easier for them to get into the system. And the woman who gave him his ticket testified that later that she said, thought he was a terrorist, but didn't want to discriminate against him or be unwelcoming. So they knew this factor as well. They took advantage of existing American weaknesses to exploit a system that they wanted to destroy. And didn't they also classify the terrorists into which ones were going to be the ones flying and which ones were going to be the muscle?

Right. Not all of the ones of pilots, well, very few didn't. So there was at least two muscle on the plane. They were meant to control the passengers. And then there was a pilot and a co-pilot who they received some pilot training. The reason why we have so much transponder data is it took them a long time to figure out how to turn off the transponder. Their training wasn't that good to know what all of the controls did on the aircraft. Is that American 11 trying to call?

Buddy, we have some planes. Let's stay quiet and you'll be okay. We're turning to the report. And who's trying to call me here? American 11 are you trying to call? Nobody moves. Everything is okay. If you try to make any move, with injure yourself and be a train. Let's stay quiet. That's good. I think you're reference to the move. Nobody moves, please. going back today, have to watch. Don't try to make any stupid news.

United 1523. Did you hear your company, did you hear some interference on a break on here a couple minutes ago, screaming? Yes, I did, 7.97, and we couldn't tell what it was either. It added 93, Cleveland, if you hear the sound right down. All right here. I got the peace to death. You remain sitting. We had a ball board.

So it's dead. But also there was a culture of casualness among security. Most cockpits were not locked. And on the case of late 93, the airline, United Airlines, actually required in its internal regulations, that the keys for the cockpit door be kept in an unlockable cabinet right next to the cockpit door. So the stewardess could just this cabinet, grab the keys and get into the cockpit to deliver coffee or whatever. you. One thing most people may not understand at this time period, right? The flight attendants

would be going in and out of the cockpit pretty routinely, not just bringing meals and coffee, but depending on the rules set by the captain, in this time period, pilots could smoke in the cockpit. And so one or more of the flight attendants might pop into the cockpit on a long flight, to catch a smoke. If the captain allowed smoking in the cockpit, in that time period, union rules and aviation rules allowed them to do that. So they were constantly moving in and out of the cockpit.

Earlier, cockpits used to be wide open, and in fact, children rounded up once the plane had leveled off and brought into the cockpit to meet the pilot and say hi and look out the pilot's window, right? So it was a, now I'm describing the 70s and 80s earlier time.

And some airlines give out little children's wings where after they visited the cockpit, they would pin it on their shirt. And it was marketing, but it was, you know, a great life experience for certain kids at a certain time period. So it was still fairly casual like that. And the captain would come out of the cockpit from time to time in the 90s and sometimes talk to the passengers in first class or get something out of his bag or what have you. So it wasn't a hardened.

place. And so it was, even though there had been hijacking since the late 1960s in the United States and in the Middle East and in Europe, they really hadn't changed the system from this much more casual trusting system that emerged in the 50s and 60s. And Richard, didn't they use small blades which were allowed by airports and airport security to actually take over the planes once they were airborne? Oh, so this is very tricky, right? So if you look at the transcripts of the phone calls from the passengers, they describe a range of weapons.

They're very unclear. We don't know how long the blades were. A chemical weapon is described by one of them. But that may have been a bluff. They apparently showed a fake device that was a bomb or a chemical weapon on one of the flights. The reason why the news coverage repeatedly said box cutters is because box cutters, which have a blade about this size, sitting in a metal tube literally for opening boxes,

were specifically permitted to be brought on the planes. And so the FAA to shield itself said they used box cutters. We don't actually know the box cutters, that they use blades of some kind. But given the laxness of airport security and the airports they chose, especially Logan, these could be much longer blades. And they were able to severely wound large, angry, adult American men. So the blade would have to be bigger than a box cutter.

We just The answer is we just don't know But the box better thing Was a bureaucratic way to Safeguard and silo itself The bureaucracy immediately shifted into CYA From the afternoon of the attacks onward No go ahead

I was going to say and obviously Probably doesn't need to be said But they also had the element of surprise Once they were on the applying. Yes. There had been a long period, decades, in fact, before there was, since there had been hijacking to the United States. So no one was expecting it. Before we move on, you also mentioned they'd rehearsed and practiced this whole thing. What do we know about that?

So there is, it's still classified, but there is, but I have a copy. I probably should have brought it. So the FBI put together a complete timeline based on all of the movements of the hijackers from the moment they arrived in the United States to the moment they died. Right. And to do that, they put together large amounts of data, ATM receipts, restaurant receipts, witnesses accounts, security cameras. It's an incredible document, right?

frankly almost thought about writing a book just about that and in that they would there was a number of they did scenario role playing where the guys who would be the muscle practiced against the other guys if they were unruly passengers how would you fight if they tackled you at the waist or if they grabbed you from behind and here's how you would throw them over your head and so on and so on right the reports that Muhammad Atta had planned, the plan of rehearsed in Iraq are, I think largely an internet rumor. It is the case that the Iraqis had a Boeing 707 that they used to train other terrorist groups before 9-11. The idea of flying planes in the buildings goes back to a document out of Iran in 1987 to the idea had been floating around in jihadi circles for a while but it does not appear that the 19 of the September 11th, the 19 hijackers on September 11th rehearsed in Iraq. So any internet rumor to the side, there's no evidence for that. Be fascinating if we're true.

There's no evidence for that. But they did rehearse in the United States in various hotel rooms and in gyms defending themselves and they also practiced what they would do, how they would take, once they had the cockpit, what they would do with the aircraft, how they would level it off and so on. And they also had quizzes, written quizzes for each other as well. And how did they practice the actual flying element? Did these flight simulators or training with actual planes? Absolutely. And they did go to these flight schools. Where chillingly, they said they didn't know how to,

they didn't need to learn how to take off or land. They just needed to know how to operate the aircraft in the air. It's just some of the stuff. I think particularly for our younger audience, when you talk about airport security or being able to smoke in the cockpit or all of this stuff, it must be very hard to believe. And the reason is, and coming on to the consequences

in the aftermath, is that, Francis and I often talk about this, where we are both in our early 40s. And we have a lot of guys in their 20s that work for us. And we always talk about the fact that we think that nobody that generation has any idea how different the world was in the late 1990s. And I think 9-11 and then the financial crash are the two reasons for that. What was the impact and the response and the aftermath? We also don't understand the world that the people in their 20s see. Because when we see the same reality they see,

we're seeing it through the lens of 20 years of experience. And we may be putting things into the wrong intellectual categories, right? And they're able to see it much more originally, right? So this is always the generational problem. When you talk to people in their 70s and 80s and these World War II comparisons, because they're the children of World War II survivors come up in their conversation as a live thing

the way 9-11 is for us, right? So the years of experience are a tool for insight, but they're also a tool for missing things, right? And so even when someone who's 20, someone who's 40, someone is looking at the exact same object, they may see very different things. and it's not because the young people are dumb or the old people. Oh, no, not at all.

Not at all. I certainly wasn't saying that they're dumb. This is human nature. We're better for one. Yeah, of course. What I was getting at is the fact that the world changed very profoundly, and it seems to me permanently and irreversibly, after 9-11. What was the immediate reaction and the immediate aftermath of this terrorist attack?

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And this is going to be very hard for the people who didn't live through it to believe, but it's true. The best way to show this is to tell you a quick story. My father and mother were on the west coast of the United States to do a book signing for my father. were canceled all flights were grounded on 9-11 it didn't reserve for a long time my father had the idea to rent a car and drive back home to upstate New York what is that about five and a half thousand kilometers six three thousand miles right uh and it would take days because they thought all the rental cars are going to get booked up we should grab it while we can and so they began this drive across the united states in the hours after

after September 11. And on lonely roads in Wyoming, he saw these signs over and over again, handmade signs. I love New York that had been hastily put together and put up. Wyoming is a deeply red state. It does not surprise me when someone from Wyoming says, I never want to visit Manhattan or the city of New York.

But yet we saw these lines. And in the highway, way overpasses in northern Virginia, there were bed sheets with signs written, you know, messages written on them, hanging over the side where you could, as you went down the Super Highway, read them. Messages of support and love, an idea that politics should be put aside. The country really came together, even though there were jet for the jet fighter ground, at least in New York and Washington, jet fighters roaring over. head. There was this idea that the country should unify. Political speech moderated. There was a real

coming together. And everyone was afraid it wouldn't last. And of course, it couldn't and it didn't. But it lasted far longer than you would think. And a lot of Americans discovered that they had more in common with each other than they realized. And even families split side by politics. These are just anecdotal stories. I don't have any statistical data. But people reconnected and forgave each other. And it was as horrible as the loss of 3,000 people was. The cultural impact was not what commentators say today of fear and anger. That was part of it. It was a desire to to right the wrongs. And when Bush, President Bush,

W. Bush, said in the crater that they were still digging out at 9-11, the World Trade Center crater, he grabbed a bullhorn from a construction worker. And he says, I hear you, and the rest of the world is going to hear from you very soon. You all to know.

You're going to work here. people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the laws of thousands of our citizens. I can hear you. And what the president didn't disclose is the CIA paramilitary were already on their way to Afghanistan. And they were reconnecting with the Northern Alliance, who they had funded in the 80s. I remember separate from the jihadis, the Arab requires. and, you know, there were personal relationships. And they began setting up listing posts and forward advanced areas

and coordinating with horse soldiers and carrying out attack and within a few weeks carrying out attacks against the Taliban and against al-Qaeda. So the desire to eliminate al-Qaeda root and branch was death. definitely there. But, and maybe there's other data that I'm not aware of, but I did not, there's not any evidence that I can see that there was a profound hatred of Muslims in the United States. At least after 9-11, the idea of America being a profoundly racist country just wasn't there. In fact, people experienced the opposite. Unity, reconnection, and an incredible resolve to kill those who killed us.

And do you think that reaction is exactly what bin Laden wanted? No. If you read what, I mean, I can't read his mind and he's dead, but if you read his documents, the things he wrote and the things he said, he thought that America was addicted to Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and it was weak, that he could humiliate it as soon as he managed to get U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan where they could fight them,

that they would defeat them, humiliate them, and destroy America's superpower status and triumph over them. He thought he was pushing on a weak, decadent society. And he had many Western academics he could cite to support that mistaken view. But in fact, that is not Western society. It is not a society in decline. It is a society in which it's thinking elite and some of its leadership have lost confidence in it. But below the elite level,

it is still a high-functioning, confident society that invents new things, that adapts quickly to changes, and that is remarkably understanding for people, with people different from themselves. I offered to when I was one of the times in which I was in Iraq, I offered to take my Kurdish translator and his family to dinner. He says, oh, let's have dinner at our home.

And so after eating dinner in their home three or four times, I said, no, let's pick the most expensive restaurant and let's go there, which turned out to be a Chinese place. And as we sit down, they are mystified by the menu, even though the place was a kilometer from their home. they had never been there. And he looks at me and says, why would you eat other people's food? Western society is the opposite. It's curiosity and openness to other people's food, words, ideas, perspectives. And I don't think bin Laden was expecting the dynamism, the resolve,

the courage, innovation that Western society, American society in particular, was still able to muster and deploy with such a wallet. And Richard, when you look and you watch the footage from that day, it's so shocking. It is. Whilst I was researching for this interview, I was watching documentaries, and it was so horrific just watching what was happening. I didn't realize the emotional effect they would have on me 25 years on. It must have created such in many ways, such a deep psychological scar in the American psyche.

Take two. Take two and two, one. This is as close as we can get to the base of the World Trade Center. You can see the firemen assembled here, the police officers, FBI agents, and you can see the two towers. A huge explosion now, raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the bank. They sell them.

Oh, my God. In Washington, there has, there is. There's a large fire at the Pentagon. The Pentagon has been evacuated. And there's, you can see, perhaps the second tower, the front tower, the top portion of which is collapsing. Good Lord. Yeah, I was watching a documentary on the United 93 recently, and I was surprised.

I was transported right back in time. I was immediately angry for these hijackers who, for their own political goals. hijacked the lives of perfectly decent, ordinary people and killed them for no reason. And it just injustice of that, anger of that. It took me right back in time. And I understand why major media has been afraid, especially in the wake of 9-11,

the first five or 10 years, they didn't re-show those videos very often. And not for long. And they didn't do documentaries and specials for five or 10 years. And they were afraid of arousing the great, angry dragon that is a U.S., an American sense of righteousness and anger for the sheer barbarity and how unnecessary it was. You know, we all understand that as the firemen go into the burning building to save the children, some firemen may die. We understand that when troops are deployed, some may die. But the loss of life for a political drama in your head,

completely untethered from reality, coming from a completely alien intellectual ecosystem. It's just beyond understanding for most Americans. The number one question that came up in Google searches, in the weeks after 9-11, is why do they hate us? Like, we don't even know who you are. Why do you hate us? And it took Americans a long time, and many don't understand this yet.

They didn't understand us and come to hate us. They have a very rudimentary idea of who we are. It was they had an ideological vision in their head about what will create the final showdown between themselves and the Americans in the mountains of Afghanistan. And that was a moment they devoutly wanted to get to. And nothing else mattered toward achieving that bizarre goal. And I should probably say a word here about Al-Qaeda's bin Laden's statement to Americans about Israel and Gaza and all this. That is pure propaganda. I took a look at every al-Qaeda statement and every bin Laden before al-Qaeda existed the references to

Palestine Gaza Israel West Bank you can count on one maybe two hands in a list of nations it's never singled out it's never been a focus then that is one message to Americans in which he is so clearly reiterating left-wing academics in Western Europe and the United States. And trying to use this message to divide. It's just enemy propaganda, right? It's never inanimateing purpose. You know, fun fact, some of the 9-11 hijackers had been Christian converts into Muslim Islam.

One, Zaid Al-Jara, I believe his name is, tried to leave the plot. his Lebanese girlfriend, who was still Christian, wanted to get married and have him start a new life. And why don't you get away from these crazy people? And so he left. And Muhammad Atta had to go after him and threaten him to get him to rejoin the hijacking group. Right. So the real reasons have nothing to do with bin Laden's statements about And if you look at Zayat-Aljara, he says nothing,

positively nothing about Gaza or West Bank or the Palestinians, not a single word. So the idea of this was an animating principle there is just not the case. There's a book by Dr. Eamon Al-Zarhuri, which has been translated into English. He went to the number two person in Fidelbergh. And the book is called Knights Under the Prophet's Banner. I think you can read it online in English for free. It's translated by the Library of Congress from Arabic.

And it's very revealing as to what they get into their animating principles. But again, nothing about Gaza. Their argument against the United States is in Knights under the Prophet's banner and in several other texts is very simple. They think the United States is supporting the Arab dictatorships that they suffer under now. And so they blame the United States for supporting dictators in or a ruling class in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and other places. That's it.

It's not a detailed critique of American society. This is not the democratic socialists, right, or the Christian socialists in Western Europe, right? This is not a detailed critique of the market economy or U.S. foreign policy or anything like that. It is a desire to create a new civilization in the Arabic-speaking world, organized along certain eccentric religious ideas, which you can find, and they've written them down, in the shade of the Quran as one, milestones both by Sayyah, Hutu,

you can find it under Knights of the Prophet's banner. Go read their literature if you want to understand what drives them. It's not even Islam. I mean, Islam's at the surface, but you dig into their ideology. It's deeply influenced by Karl Marx and by Vladimir Lenin. This is a fusion of Leninism and Islamism, right, or an Islam. And if you read their works, it becomes immediately clear. That is the basis of their thinking.

It's not a particular aspect of U.S. or Western foreign. policy. And one of the things that really impacted me when I was watching these documentaries is the recordings from the people on board the planes to their families saying goodbye to them for the last time. And just the way that a lot of these people just held it together and were just very calm and were just telling their family members. how much they loved them. Yeah. There's no words to describe it, really.

I mean, you can try, but it's utterly, it's ultimately futile. You have to listen to me carefully. I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. I'm on the plane. I'm calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much. And I'm so sorry they, I don't know what to say. There's three guys they've had that the plane.

I'm trying to be calm. We're turned around and I heard that there's planes that been thrown into the World Trade Center. I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Bye. Elsa, it's Lynn. I only have a minute. I'm on United 93 and it's been hijacked by terrorists who say they have a bomb.

Apparently they have flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already and it looks like they're going to take this one down as well. Mostly I just wanted to say I love you. love you and I'm going to miss you and and please give my love to love that and mostly I just love you and I don't know if I'm going to get an chance to tell you that um my school and all my stuff is in the safe the uh the safe is in my closet in my bedroom a combination is you push deeper clear and then 0913 and then and then it should, and maybe pound and then it should unlock. I love you and I hope I can talk to you soon.

Bye. Jules, this is Ryan. Listen on an airplane that's been hijacked. And things will go well and it's not looking good. I just want you to know. I absolutely love you. I want you to be good. So happy to your time.

Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you. And I'll see you away to get there. Hi, Dave. I call you. Yeah, one of the passengers on the United 93 is talking to his wife, and he says he has to go because he's part of the plan to retake the plane. She says, do you want to talk to the children?

And he says, I'll talk to them tonight after we land the plane. Absolute confidence that their plan was going to succeed. But he had to project that confidence. because those are the last words by which she was going to know him. And it was going to define who he was in the mind of his wife and more importantly in the minds of his children for the rest of their days. He knew his chance of living was slender. But he had to project that confidence. He had not to be, he had to be a pillar of strength and not,

rebut his inner turmoil because he had to steal himself to take action, but he also had to define himself in the minds of those he loved. And there are so many calls like that. You're absolutely right, Francis. It's heartbreaking. And you, if you read those transcripts, you have to admiring those so-called people, the bravery they could summon to be calm and collected or pure. this or appear to common collective in the face of the most extreme circumstances. It's astonishing. And as well, it's obviously those people, but it's also the emergency services, the ambulance men, the police officers, the fire officers, just the fat of these people ran

into a burning building, whether it was the towers, whether it was the Pentagon, when everybody else was running away. I mean, it's terrorism of the highest order. I talked to Donald Rumsfeld a few weeks after 9-11. He was the Secretary of Defense. And he mentioned that he had safely gotten out of his office and how many people had died on the Pentagon. And as he's talking, he's moving his hands around.

And finally, I said, I show me your hands and he holds them up like this. And I could see Burns. And he said, oh, yeah, I was helping. remove the rubble before security dragged me away, and I've burned my hands. Think about that. Cabinet officers of the United States joined everyone else at the Pentagon

in trying to dig out the rubble to save people, fighting to their lives, buried alive, in hot, burning brick, twisted metal. And the firemen who not only, went in to try to put out the fire in the World Trade Center, came back out to exchange their oxygen tubes, and then turned around and went back in. That little moment of screwing in the fresh air, readjusting your mask, wiping some sweat off the brow, and turning around and going back in. That's bravery. Turning around to go back in. That's bravery. Turning around to go back in.

danger to help others. It's these little moments, these little snapshots that define this day for me. I think you suddenly realize that your country is crowded with heroes wearing ordinary faces. And that's such a profound point because, particularly nowadays in our culture, the people who we celebrate, I mean, it's pretty much tried to say, but really shouldn't be celebrated. the people whose words we listen to, you think, do you have anything of value to say? But you look at the people who are actual heroes. It's the people who are ordinary men and women, the firefighters, the fire officers, but even the office workers, some of the stories of the office workers on that day are just remarkable.

Just the people turning around, going to make sure that every single person is out from their particular office, making sure that the corridors are clear. And sometimes these people just, they simply didn't make it out. Yes. Yeah, I mean, on 9-11, I was working for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels. And my brother, Brendan, was working for the Wall Street Journal in New York. And my brother and I would talk multiple times a day. And you're just a lot. You're just a lot. And like everybody else, all the phone lines were jammed. Everyone was trying to reassure themselves that their family members were alive. And the journal was in the World Financial Center, I believe, at that time, right beside the Twin Towers.

And Brendan wasn't his phone. And we couldn't reach him. But we had the journal, we have these internal. communications. And then they begin evacuating the building and they're reassembling the team moving it by ferry to, well, ultimately I think they went to Princeton, New Jersey, but we were going to have to put out the Wall Street Journal that day from overseas. New York was shut down. And they're counting heads, thousands of heads. And the list of missing Wall Street Journal people gets smaller and smaller.

First, it's hundreds, then it's dozens. And finally, it's down to eight missing people, and my brother is still in that list. And as I'm working with my colleagues in Europe and Asia to put out the paper that day, because New York was shut down, we had to take over everything. I was thinking to myself,

is this, have I already had the last conversation with my brother? And I wish I could have said so many things that I hadn't said because I was spotless or just not thinking about the gravity of the situation. And we end up working until three or four in the morning, Brussels time. And we're editing the official view of the paper in the editorial. And I'm about to go home and go to bed. that means comes through and it's marked with my brother's name and I'm like oh my gosh Brendan is that you and he did not follow the evacuation um with the other Wall Street Journal staff he had usually he would take the 830 subway into lower Manhattan and so

He would have been inside the World Trade Center looking to go up the bridge and across the World Financial Center. But as he was about to get on the train of the platform in Brooklyn, he looked down and saw three spots of blood on his shirt. And he went home to change his shirt and he got on the 845 subway, which turned out to be one of the last into lower Manhattan that day. And he saw it all. He saw the second plane hit.

He saw people jumping or falling from the towers. He was covered in the white dust as the buildings collapsed. He walked across the Brooklyn Bridge covered in sweat and dust, looking a bit like a ghost. When he runs into a journal colleague who has also covered, and you said to him, come with me, Brendan, we're going to Bob's house. We're going to put out the paper from there. And so you've never made any official. counts. He wasn't showing up in the internal system because Bob's house wasn't part of it.

Robert L. Hartley, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and the editor of the editorial page. And he responds, yeah, of course it's me. And then I'm desperate to know how he survived and what happened. Whether he's talked to any family members, no one knew whether he was alive or not. And many, many people had that. same experience that day some didn't end as happily as and mind it and uh but this sudden erasure of lives for a political cause is so morally wrong why people think politics in their head justify harmed other people always amazes me yes richard uh that is a very worthwhile observation that applies, I think, more broadly to than just this particular incident.

We're going to continue the conversation with our supporters on Substack, but before we do, what do you think is the one thing that people don't talk enough about in relation to 9-11, that they really should? Wow, so many things I could say to that. One is to realize that, one, terrorism is not an Islamic creation. terrorism is invented in the 1830s by a group of Russian radicals called the Novemberists and the anarchists around them this is all had been throughout the 19th century a technique that the Germans learned from the Russians in 1848 we

see a lot of what we would describe today as terrorist attacks so the idea that this is some defect in Islam no no it's something the Muslim world learned from the Russians and the Germans. Terrorism is not a natural feature in Islam. That's one thing. Second thing is people join terrorist groups can be radicalized by campus life, like College of Muhammad.

And we need to pay much more attention to how college life structures the souls of the students who pass through it in order to reduce this conflict. version to radicalism. We can never eliminate it, but we can sure reduce it, and we're not really doing anything serious about that. Third, how social isolation makes a lot of terrorism possible by offering it an endless supply of recruits. Muhammad Atta, who was the operational commander of the 9-11 attacks, was brought to Hamburg, Germany.

who studied the Harbour technical school. And he had a host family of social Democrats who were convicted, you know, just had deep convictions of aggressive mind view. They thought they were building a stronger relationship between the West, Germany in particular, and Egypt by hosting him in their home. And they had no skills to identify that because he had gone through all, boy schooling. He found it very hard to deal with German teenagers, girls of his age, because he had no social skills to deal with it. And that as he started to, and they would take him to these

Arab events so you could feel more at home, and he's eventually identified by a recruiter. And his behavior begins to change. She stops eating with the family, insists on cooking his own food. He wouldn't, when he would watch television with them, he would cover his eyes whenever there would be an ad showing a woman in a bikini, you know, advertising some Tunisian vacation or what have you. They were not able to identify any of the signs of increasing radicalization. And this sort of thoughtless do-goodism really needs to come with some training. How is it the person you brought into your home is gradually being radicalized by the difference of himself and the new society you thrust them into. Sometimes pushing people before they're ready into Western society

can be far more radicalizing than leaving them at home and giving them good books to read in Egypt or someplace. And it is not the case to know us, to love us. We Westerners are deeply strange people that are not like the other people in the world. And that's, if you go on about what the differences are. But when you're asking someone to join that, don't think the answer is going to be kumbaya. It could be, I don't fit in here and I hate you because I don't fit in here. and I'm willing to join an ideology that will kill and name you to punish you for the way I feel now. That is a very human response. People become terrorists for human reasons, not ideological ones.

Ideology is to cover, the excuse, the rationalization. Inside is a human being. And if you don't change the mechanics that shape those human beings, you will have another September 11. Richard, thank you so much for coming back on and talking to us about such a tremendously important event on its 25th anniversary. Thank you all for watching and listening. Please head over to Triggerpod.com.uk. Where Richard is going to answer some of your questions. What is your take on the fact that we now have people with Islamic backgrounds running from office for office in the US who say America had it coming?