You're Wrong About - The Shoe Bomber with Miles Klee

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

This week, writer Miles Klee tells us why we have to take our shoes off at the airport.Read Miles Klee at Rolling Stone.Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:https://www.rollingstone.com/author/miles-klee/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodSupport the show

Alkai does not famous for being like, you know, what are your ideas? What if you've been any pet projects? There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Welcome to What You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are joined by Miles Clee to talk about why we all have to take our shoes off at the airport unless it's a day where they're like, no keep your shoes on you idiots. I was excited to do this topic first of all because it's great to have Miles on the show, he's a wonderful writer.

And second of all because I've long wanted to do episodes that talk more about America's alleged war on terror in the early 2000s, the time when millennials were growing up and Gen Z was being born. And our government was up to a lot of things that it really felt like they weren't telling the truth about. It's a big story, it's hard to find a finite point of entry, but the story of the quote-unquote shoe bomber and the state of heightened fear that seemingly everybody was in in the period immediately after September 11th is one of them. And it turns out that this is a true you're wrong about and that much of what we think we remember is wrong and what we don't remember is the best part of the story.

We have a bonus episode for you up right now where our January guest Megan Burbank talks with me about the new movie May December. And coming out soon we have a new bonus, the first of a multi-parter with our friend Eve Lindley talking about Britney Spears' memoir, The Woman and Me. And we're really exploring both Britney and all of our Britney feelings. Thank you so much for being here with us. We got a flight to catch. Welcome to Your Wrong About the podcast where you learn why you haven't been able to correctly go through airport security in 20 years, I think. And with me today is Miles

Clee. Hi, Sarah. How's it going? It's so good to have you here. And we're starting off the new year fresh and funky. I guess by the time this comes out, it'll be February. But this is one of the first year wrongs about that I'm recording in 2024. And I feel really excited that we're doing an episode that to me feels like it's about the height of the war on terror, which is something I've always wanted to show to me more about but don't have the intestinal fortitude to research myself Yeah, it gets pretty gnarly. This is sort of the beginning of the war on terror

In sort of a forgotten era, I would say so we're talking about a man named Richard Reed of a forgotten era, I would say. So we're talking about a man named Richard Reed, better known as the shoe bomber, currently spending the rest of his life in Colorado Supermax Prison for unsuccessfully trying to blow up a jetliner a couple months after 9-11, with, as the story goes, explosives packed in the heels of his shoes. Do you remember this? Well, I do, and I feel like this is one of the most remembered pieces of American history in a sense because we're all forced to remember it every time we fly anywhere. And my favorite thing about airport security is that each airport has their own special individual way of doing it that they change every three months.

So they'll be like, take your shoes off, you idiot. No, leave your shoes on. Take your laptop out. No, leave it in. Put your suitcase in a bin. No, don't. And you're just like, I just feel like I'm in a version of hell where I can never figure out what the social norm is. Yeah, the TSA really does. Even among like other kind of law enforcement agencies just feels like the most power tripping group of people that you can encounter, maybe because they kind of have so little power that it's just these very kind of niche, like inane sort of procedures that they care about. And they do it all day, every day for work.

So the idea that nobody else knows how to do it is insane to them. I think it just totally breaks their brains. Yeah, which is fascinating because it's like it's new people every day that they're seeing although I'll also say that like big city busy airport TSA the worst experience small town small airport TSA like I'm looking at you Green Bay Airport the best give me Sacramento Airport any day and when those TSA kids are all friends and you're like walking through a sitcom they're having, that's the best. Yeah, it could be better. It could be a lot better. Yeah, sometimes it's good. It's really all an implication of power. But

yeah, this feels like something that we think we intimately understand. But I was so excited to get the real story on this. Yeah, you know, it is funny you said, yes, we remember him like every time we go through airport security, but he's also really just a footnote. He's almost an afterthought, even though he had this huge ripple effect. You know, there's not like a book on the shoe bomber. We don't have a punk band named the shoe bombers or anything. Ah, there's no shoe bomber mini series going straight to Max.

Although as I'm saying that someone is getting the idea to write it. Yeah, they'll allow, they'll have to come to me as a consultant. Yeah, Ryan Murphy is going to have to come crawling to you. Yeah, so, and I'm sure a lot of people don't, younger people don't even realize, you know, that little miserable moment on the stupid bench after you get through the screening, that it's all because of this one guy. I think it's both very present in our day to day lives, but totally overlooked as a historical event, I think. So I think the question we have here is, how did we sort of forget what happened here? Right.

And I think it's because a lot of stuff happened really fast. Yeah. So 9-11, I think needs no introduction. Famously an event that really happened. I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I don't know why this is in debate. Yeah, I think the pod should take a stance. It's really time.

9-11 Commission is an accurate accounting of the events. So then a lot of like narratives of the war on terror kind of pick up in 2002, but there's a few more months left of 2001, right? So for one, the US invades Afghanistan, starts a 20-year war. That's a big deal. And at home, we're totally steeped in fear and paranoia. Islamophobic hate crimes skyrocketed. I always love when people remember this as a period of when we all came together. Oh my god. When it's actually the period that gave us the slogan,

if you see something, say something. God, yeah, that's so true. And I'm not joking when I tell you an advertising executive came up with that line on September 12th. Ah. And then he gave it to the New York MTA, got adopted by all these national agencies, but that was the day after some ad guy was just like, you know, I've got a plan to make us all spy on each other. They're like, let's not think this through even slightly.

First thought, best thought. So the first huge post 9-11 scare was anthrax. And when was that like right? Was that like October or something? Yes. Yeah. So actually just a week after the attacks. So, so September going through October, someone began mailing letters laced with the powder form of anthrax, potentially fatal bacteria. To a number of media outlets in like New York and Florida, the big TV channels, one gets sent to Tom Brocaw, which is just weird. I don't know why you're trying to kill Tom Brocaw. Later, a couple were mailed to two different senators, which makes more sense to me. This is one of those incidents that would need its own episode if you're wrong about,

if not a season long podcast or miniseries. Oh gosh, yeah, with some moody music. But what's important here is that the letters specifically mention the date, September 11th, 2001, along with some jihadist phrases like Death to America, Death to Israel. And the one to Broca in particular begins with the ominous phrase, quote, this is next. Yeah. And the thing that what's funny to me about September 11th, and we don't have to get too, you know, into reminiscing about where we were when, but I will just say that most of my memories of news of this period are densely intertwined with my memories of watching Farscape

on the sci-fi channel. Oh, wow. Because I was very into that show, and then I would walk out into the kitchen and hear the news on NPR and be like, what a drag, and go back in to watch the exciting conclusion to Farscape. And I was in eighth grade, and it is, I think one of the aspects of aging is that, you know,

I'm 35, which is a very big chill age. And you're like, I'm not young, I'm not old, I'm just sort of in the creamy middle, but I came of age in a time that people who are young adults today have no memory of, and that's really fascinating. And so, you know, the moment of 9-11 and the moment after, it feels exciting

to share in the stewardship of helping to explain what those moments felt like and why we behaved the way that we did or some of us. And I'm curious how you would describe it, but my memory of that fall is that September 11th occurred and it seems as if in retrospect we were going through this project of considering like is this going to be something that keeps happening on a continual basis to us? Right, right. I grew up in New Jersey pretty close to New York. At the end of the school day, my dad actually took me up to a place in New Jersey where you can see across the river.

And so I got kind of a firsthand look, which I'm reminded of only because I recently met someone at a poetry reading who asked where I was from. And said New Jersey. And her second question was, did you see 9-11? My dad was on his way to work in the city at the time. I was, you know, early in the day, I was very concerned for him. And I do remember in my high school, even though I think a couple of parents did die, you know, even by lunchtime that day, people were making their edgy jokes. Teens. So, you know, real shit head, teen hours. And I guess the thing felt like it could be ongoing, of course.

And then the way that manifested for me was somebody at my school figured out, you could always get out of a, you know, six period if you just called in a bomb threat every single day. So for the rest of that year, we were evacuating the school pretty regularly. Oh my god. We got to be very blasé about it, of course, because, you know, the first couple times you're like, you think, you know, it's only like two years after Columbine 2, so you don't know

if it's a shooter or what. But, you know, it got to the point where I wouldn't even change for gym class because I knew we were going to get evacuated and then we would just go like ditch and get pizza. Nice. Bomb threat pizza. There's here buildings Roman. And we had a bomb threats section of the yearbook that year actually because there are so many photos taken. Oh my God. My education suffered. There's no doubt. And it is. I think that probably there is a lot of correspondence to the Nostalgia

people have the funny kind of like twinging nostalgia for the first two weeks of the pandemic where you're like, this is great. Normal life has been disrupted. And then after that, you're like, normal life has been disrupted. Yeah. Yeah. I'm ready to go back.

Right. Well, and I don't know. I mean, something I think is funny about my response to this was that my family had lived in Honolulu for five years and we just moved back to Oregon that summer. So I actually did not have as good of a sense as I could have that this wasn't something that had happened before. Because I kind of had the sense of like, well, there's like a lot of war and like bombs and scary stuff in the world.

So like surely it happens in America. And there had been a lot of news about the Oklahoma City bombing throughout the late 90s because Timothy McVeigh was in what seemed like a never ending legal something and had a very highly, he had an execution that the news covered a lot. So I think I had the sense that, I don't know, that there was more of a history of terrorism than there was somehow. I just kind of didn't know what the context for history was really.

And the exceptionalness of kind of, you know, having this gigantic symbol of American power and excess destroyed in a way where so many, so many people could literally see it, and then people could feel like they had been there for it through technology to the point where I remember on the day of kids at my middle school in Oregon being like, I'm scared, what will happen to us? And I was like, nothing's gonna happen to us. Nothing ever happens to Oregon. Although that's not true. We did like get some weird kind of like bomb weather balloon thing carried over the Pacific during World War Two. But aside from that, nothing happens to Oregon. And so we had this like real sense of threat, I think,

for a lot of people, and then for a lot of other people, I think either consciously or not, it was to some degree fun to take part in a charade of acting like you were scared for your life. And part of it is just that I was like a really dumb 13 year old, but I was never scared. And I think a lot of other people like in Arkansas had no reason to be scared and knew it. Yeah, you can look at 9 11 and say, well, my small town is not a target for this kind of attack, which is all about spectacle and scale, right? Right. But anthrax, meanwhile, it's just envelopes. It can go anywhere. The FBI ends up investigating thousands of reports of suspicious letters because everyone is freaked out. And it concludes in the

end that almost all of them are false alarms or hoaxes and pranks. If you pulled an anthrax prank around this time, not cool. They don't catch a suspect until 2008. He was a scientist at a government biodefense lab who allegedly had access to this particular strain of anthrax. But he takes his own life before they're able to charge him for the authorities. It's case closed after that. Though the evidence is contested and there's a lot of questions about whether this guy was the perpetrator and if so whether he acted alone. So that's still kind of

mysterious. But the investigation is huge and sweeping. We didn't know that the last of those tainted letters had already been sent by early October of 2001. Five people die, including some postal employees. Only about 22 people are infected in total. But the scope seems so much bigger and ongoing because the letters go to various locations. There's false reports, The deaths are kind of random. They nobody with their name on an envelope got infected. You know, it's a couple of like NBC assistants instead of Broca who fall seriously ill. So it creates this impression that everybody is

vulnerable. The New York Times calls it a medical mystery. There's a run on a particular antibiotic even though doctors point out it can't cure anthrax. A bit of a COVID preview there. Oh yeah, God. So we're just getting no clarity on this. People are freaking out. They're asking Congress for billions of dollars. And we don't know whether it's Al Qaeda or a related terrorist group or Roke Madman. So you can choose your own worst case scenario. It's perfect for America. Yeah. And it is. It's so interesting that to me it's been born out at this point that what we were witnessing the escalation of and should have been more afraid of is actually

Was something that was helped along by the response we had been occupied with for the entire 90s was white domestic right-wing men who were extremists Timothy McVeigh or you know, Koresh or The militia movement was huge in the 90s and it's only basically toward the late 1990s when al-Qaeda starts pulling off, you know, the embassy bombings in Africa there's the USS Cole attack on the Navy and You know, the embassy bombings in Africa, there's the USS Cole attack on the Navy. And then 9-11 is the thing that comes right after that. So you totally re-orient, obviously, the FBI's focus. And then they got way too focused on Islamic extremism and completely forgot about the domestic guys.

And, you know, they came back with a vengeance under Trump, of course. It's almost like strains of bacteria, you know? It feels like when you zoom out enough, but I guess, I don't know, I wanna within this conversation, to talk about the dynamics that we can see in retrospect and the sense of like, right, like we over focused on Islamic terrorism for obvious reasons because it was foreign

because it was coming from the outside and not from the inside, because it reinforced our preexisting racism. You know, we allowed it to, in some instances, create a moral panic. But also, on the other hand, it feels important to be fair to the fact that something really scary did happen,

and we did have a lot of reasons to be terrified. It's just that it's on a global scale, not the most compelling defense to be like, well, we got really scared because this like never happens to us. So into this mess enters Richard Reid, so-called shoe bomber. Like I said at the moment, the big question is what's next? So from the fact that he became a failed terrorist and went to prison forever I'll just ask you do you think he had a nice childhood? Um, I bet he had a childhood that could provide enough random details to be described as nice I bet you could be like his father had a

Union job with cushy benefits and he got to go to an arboretum. So how could it be? But no, I bet it sucked. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no, it gets horrible across the board. Yeah, I don't think there's anything nice about it. So his journey to radicalization has everything to do with feeling alone and alienated and then drawn into the embrace of extremists. Yeah, that does seem to happen a lot. So he's born in 1973 in London to a white English mother, Leslie Hughes, and the father of Jamaican background named Robin Reed. So Robin is in and out of jail for basic street crimes, basically all of Richard's young life. He's locked up for burglary when Richard was born.

Robin and Leslie divorced when Richard is very young. And he grows up as a mixed race kid from a fractured home who really struggles to fit in at school and even at home because Leslie remarries to a white man. And Richard is the only non white person in this family. A friend in this period recalls Robin always hoped to quote sort out where he was from his roots. He wanted to find out an identity but he's got two white parents. I think it's also relevant that this is a time of real anxiety about immigration in the UK. That also might be status quo for the UK as much as

in the US. But it's noteworthy, I think that the late 80s saw Muslims burning copies of Salman Rushdie's Satanic verses in England after the Fatwa was issued against him. And there was this growing tide of Islamophobic narratives among British whites about like invasion a lot of demographic friction that Led to increasingly extreme views on either side. There's a shanaida o'connor lyric from this era that perhaps is helpful, which is England's not the mythical land of madam George and her roses. It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds I absolutely love that song. I was also listening to that in 2001 and just being like, oh, shanaid.

Yeah, after she passed away, I was listening to that all the time and having big feels. You know, the UK under thature, nothing good is happening, really, for anyone except the upper crust, as far as I can tell. It's bleak. It is bleak. Yeah, Richard's old classmates in a school in South London recall him as sort of helpless, confused, a social outcast.

He submits easily to peer pressure and he kind of tags along with a delinquent sort of crowd. But again, he doesn't fit in with the white kids, the black kids. One of his teachers says he just never showed any sign of organization. Like he'd show up without any books or pencils or paper, just nothing. Just drifting through this like adolescence. And the trouble he gets into is pretty mild.

He sprays graffitis, smokes weed, normal teenager stuff. Creativity, some might say. But yeah, it feels like we're always looking in these stories, well, not even necessarily this story, but in any kind of crime or terrorism story for the exemplary, you know, someone who's so destructive or so dangerous from birth, but really, you know, being a follower is dangerous, which is hard to hear in a nation of followers. Yeah, he just has no support system and the way he starts to graduate to

more serious crime is really heartbreaking and kind of unbelievable, but he drops out of school at about 16 years old. And at the same time, his mother and his stepfather move out to the West country of England with his younger brother and basically abandon him. Oh, God. He ends up in a hostel. Again, no support system, no money. He's an easy target for gangs, but since he doesn't really have anything and he needs to support himself,

he ends up coerced into taking part in the street muggings and home robberies. Guys can just pull a knife on him and say, do this, do that. It seems he may have had regrets about these stick up jobs. There's a story from an old classmate about, you know, another person they knew getting stuck up by Richard and he mouths like, I'm sorry as they run away, you know, something like that.

There's regret, but there's a way of finally belonging to something as well, right? Even if it was bad, you know, even though he was a victim of these gangs, he tried to project the kind of street toughness or street savvy. I feel like it's only natural to want to impose a sense of control over a situation where you have none. I mean, he's forced to take part in this stuff, so he has to play the part, right? Right. And I mean, I also feel like one of the most powerful drives within humans is a desire to be part of something or to belong. And when we have extremely limited options, we'll just take what's available to us. It really seems. So he's 17 when he first goes to jail for mugging. And like his father, Robin, Richard is in and out from then on. Robin turns out to be an influence in another important way.

He had converted to Islam while incarcerated in the 80s. And in one of the not so many encounters he had when he and his young son were both free, he recommended Richard do the same if he was jailed again. But interestingly, it's for kind of practical rather than over religious reasons. It's a quality of life thing. So you get specially prepared halal meals that are better than the normal food. You get time in mosque away from the other prisoners. Perks like that. Robin also says that Muslims treat you like, quote, a human being. So that's attractive if you're

in jail. Having your brothers. So in the mid 90s or his early 20s, Richard is once more behind bars and he converts as well. Soon it's about far more than attaining some comfort. I mean, Richard finally has a real community. He becomes more devout. This was certainly something bigger to belong to, but I would speculate that he is also drawn to radical Islam and finally Jihad because it gave him absolute identity and the kind of purpose and self description he'd always lacked. You know, you don't really have to doubt yourself or your purpose ever again, if you really lean into this extremist and like absolute sort of ideology. So that's the way he started to drift.

Yeah, which makes just as much sense for, you know, domestic terrorism. And, you know, it comes to mind to me for that is, you know, someone who goes out to assassinate abortion doctors or bomb clinics that there's a complicated moral calculus going on if you think about it. But the point is that you don't have to think about it anymore. Right, right. I think he enjoys not having to be plagued by that doubt or those decisions anymore. Yeah. When he's out of Brixton prison in the mid 90s, Richard starts attending London mosques and Islamic cultural centers. So first, it's the Brixton mosque, which is generally thought of as more moderate.

He's actually doing okay at this time. He takes the name Abdel Rahim. And everyone who knows him from this time says he really seemed to be getting his feet under him. He was stabilized. He loved the Quran and he loved God. And he loved mosque. And that that was his whole life. But he'd already spent some time during his incarceration, sharpening his critique of Western imperialism, doing a lot of his own reading and research, he seemed totally distraught, and fairly so, by what the US did in Africa and the Middle East over decades and decades. Abdul Haq Baker, the Imam at the Brixton Mosque, found Richard a nice addition to the community,

and quote, exuberant in his pursuit of knowledge. But Baker also saw that Richard is very impressionable. In his account, this promising young convert was led astray by extremists at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. So just to set the scene here, during the late 90s, Finsbury saw a lot of sermons from fundamentalist clerics who preached the necessity of jihad and stirred up hate against the unbelievers, that kind of thing. One of them, Abdullah El-Faisal, is actually also Jamaican who in 2003 will be convicted of inciting racial hatred and is deported after serving time. would have heard at this time was the Imam Abu Hamza, an Egyptian who later wound up extradited to the US and convicted on terrorist and charges related to his support for al-Qaeda. Another figure Richard allegedly looked up to was Zacharias Musawi, the one person

ever convicted in US court on charges connected to 9-11. Even though he claims he was in the country planning an attack of his own, this is a guy who was also taking flight school classes. So either was going to be perhaps the 20th hijacker or doing his own thing. The whole Finnsbury area had become sort of notorious among Western intelligence services. French authorities had kind of a racist nickname for it because they were annoyed that the UK wasn't clamping down on this ideology. The French racist? May no.

I know. I don't want to just say that the UK are racist. The French are also racist. Oh, yeah. I mean, where there's white people, you'll find it. They called it London, a stan. Come on, you guys. So that gives you an idea what the environment Richard was swimming in. Yeah. Well and to speak to like the actuality of 9-11 for a minute, because I feel like I almost I want to just

ask you to it without getting into it because it feels like it really, you know, it's hard to touch on it briefly, but I Don't know. It's for me. It's hard to grasp suicide missions. Why is this something that it seems especially young men are able to be talked into? Yeah, I think what we see with the disaffection and alienation is that ultimately they don't really value their own lives or they only value their lives as can be fit this purpose.

In the case of someone like Richard, his own life just seems to be sort of an afterthought. And if God can use him in this way, and that's basically what all his higher ups will end up telling him, that becomes your ultimate goal. And I think there has to be a kernel of self loathing. Yeah. Oh, is at the beginning of that. And that's often what is exploited in the radicalization process is someone comes to you and they say they're feeling worthless and you give them a sense of worth

first through religion and then through God and then you start kind of interpreting You know the word of God for them and say well actually, you know The Quran says not only can you do this not only is it permissible, but you should do it right? I mean it's really it feels like such a very recognizable pattern and that also doesn't mean that we all don't, I think, in our own way, fall into it. But I would even compare it, you know, to something like Girl Defined, where you have the kind of purity culture with an American fundamentalist Christianity that's like, listen girls, you're worthless, everyone hates you. But Jesus loves you. But only if you don't get kissed until your wedding day or whatever. Engaging in purity culture is not as extreme as terrorism. I'm not saying that it is, but I think it's not that far away either.

It's doing something that is incredibly counter to what feels good to you because you've engaged in an ideology where you are at war with your own health and enjoyment of life and service of a higher power that is ultimately fixated on your death in some way. Oh yeah, I mean, Richard is definitely practicing a kind of purity culture. I mean, an associate from this period remembers how he had nothing in his room but a bed, a table, and the karate an associate from this period remembers how he had nothing in his room But a bed a table and the carot. It'd be really funny if he had like a Garfield book as well And that was the third thing he had. That's just in the bathroom. Yeah. Yeah You know, he will always maintain a geo political justification for his actions alongside the religious ones

This is from a letter Richard wrote to his mother before the attempted bombing Quote I didn't do this act out of ignorance nor did I do it just because I want to die. But rather I see it as a duty upon me to help remove the oppressive American forces from the Muslim lands. We do not have other means to fight them. We are ready to die defending the true Islam, rather than to just sit back and allow the American government to dictate to us what we should believe and how we should behave. This is a war between Islam and democracy. And like, I really do think he's making some good points, right?

When you look at American imperialism and the things that we do as a country, we need to be stopped. I guess to me the issue, I feel like I'm in like a meeting where someone has proposed terrorism. I'm like, Barb, you know, not to rain on your parade. But to me, the issue with the terrorism ideas that how are we supposed to stop the powers that be in America by killing a plane full of civilians, including, you know, Jackie, who's on her way to her first vacation in three years or whatever. Blowing up a random plane doesn't really have the symbolic impact of, you know, attacking a symbol, an actual symbol of American Empire and economic hegemony.

You're kind of admitting that it's too hard for you to kill the president, right? Because that's what you should really be thinking about doing. But you're like, it's too hard. We're just going to do a symbol. And it's like, you're killing a symbol? Yeah. We're at a point where stuff gets really murky, because now there's a lot of international travel. A lot of this remains mysterious. We know Richard traveled abroad from 98 through 2001. No doubt helped by his Vince Berry contacts who are seemingly grooming him to become a Jihadi soldier. No super definitive narrative of his travels.

We know he went to Pakistan for further study. He probably crossed from there into Afghanistan where it's believed he receives some paramilitary training. But his father is also receiving Richard's letters from Iran, Iraq, a passport show that he made it to Egypt, Israel, Turkey, a few countries in Europe, probably while casing potential targets

for bombing. He was really looking at a lot of buildings at that time. So embassies because al Qaeda was already known for bombing embassies. The most commonly repeated claim in any version of these travels is that he trained in an Afghan camp named Calden, though what he did there is it's all a matter of speculation. It's also said that he studied with a man described as Al-Qaeda's master bomb maker, though this is sourced to interrogations of terror suspects at Guantanamo, which makes it super unreliable to me. I think the idea of there being a theantanamo, which makes it super unreliable to me.

I think the idea of there being a the master bomb maker is what makes it sound like a bit much. Yeah, they really want you to believe that he was the protégé of their top bomb guy and given how the plot unfolded, it would appear he only had the most rudimentary instructions on the handling explosives and probably didn't know how they worked generally. Yeah, you know what, look, I get the temptation once he've arrested someone to be like, hey, he's more important than he is. But you know, it's embarrassing in the long run. That is exactly what they do. But it might suffice to say that at this time Richard is crossing paths with people who'd later be sought for their alleged roles in 9-11,

people who end up in Guantanamo eventually connected to attempted embassy bombings. When all is said and done, it won't even be clear how the so-called shoe bomb was obtained or where in the world it was assembled, though basically no one believes he could have made it himself. And there are still a lot of questions about how the plot took shape. And how old is he when the plot goes to like 28? Yes. Okay. He is 28 when he tries to carry out the plot.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, somebody with their life together at that age could have maybe made a nice shoe bomb, but I don't know. It seems pretty complicated. It seems like he's more of a drifter. Yeah. I mean, we are talking about someone who dropped out of school at 16 and the education is not there. The entire thing, when you zoom out, it just looks remarkably amateurish or haphazard.

I mean, compared again to 9-11, obviously it's hard to live up to 9-11 if you're a terrorist two months later. You gotta just do something different. This only came out in the investigation afterward, but did you know there was supposed to be a second shoe bomber? No.

So this guy was also traveling around Pakistan, Afghanistan, basically back and forth between the Middle East and Europe, getting some training. This was another young man in the same circles as Richard named Saajid Badat. Unlike Richard, Badat, who was tasked with taking down a second plane,

backed out of the suicide mission days before he meant to carry it out. So he wound up receiving a lengthy prison sentence anyway and turned government informant. He actually would eventually testify against one of the Finnsbury clerics who Richard heard. He also testified about meeting Osama bin Laden, who encouraged

him to die for the sake of Jihad. And he said that along with Richard, he received advice on bombing an airliner from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is commonly referred to as the chief architect of the 9-11 attacks. So again, these guys are linked to pretty top al-Qaeda guys, but their level of instruction is vague. The planning just seems kind of disastrous. And again, like how much credence do you give to that? Cause if I were caught and became an informant, I would be like, yeah, of course I met Osama bin Laden. I talked to the guy.

I would absolutely say that. I would even like make up something about, I don't know, like beating Osama bin Laden at Scrabble or something. Like that you could just, you could say anything. I would be like the thing about Osama, he only likes a runny fried egg. So if you meet up with them, don't hard cook them. He'll hate it.

And then you'll lose your eggs. It feels like there's a lot of gray area here, but it's also clear that we're looking at a time when, you know, like not to zoom out too much, but so much of what the public saw in the in the years following this period, you know, the just the few years following it was learning so much about how our government interrogated people and how people will kind of say anything if you torkster them. Yeah, I think it's important to say that the intelligence here is just so bad. I mean, between coerced confessions from like black sites

and just FBI and CIA kind of making up things that they assume to be true, a lot of it is like an educated guess and a lot of the guesses are wrong, I would say. There's room for debate over the origin of the shoes as well. So like Richard will later claim that the idea was his and that he came up with it after noticing that, Hey, airport security doesn't examine your footwear. Maybe he just wanted credit for the concept. I kind of doubt that this was his idea.

It's Muhammad who's thought to have selected airplanes as targets after a lot of reconnaissance of buildings. Richard considered for attack. So Richard wasn't even looking at planes. He was looking a lot of buildings. So eventually, you know, top Al-Qaeda guy comes along and says, no, you're going to blow up a plane instead. It's reasonable to imagine that the shoes were likewise a top down. You know, this is a pretty hierarchical organization. Right.

I don't think Richard was pitching his idea for a bombing. Al-Qaeda is not famous for being like, you know, what are your ideas? What have you been any pet projects? Yeah, brainstorming sessions. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Official accounts really agree that he and Badat received financial and technical assistance from Al-Qaeda operatives. Richard simply didn't have the money to buy explosives, let alone the skills or resources to construct an IED out of his sneakers with them. It's he says he bought the plastic explosives for like, you know, 1500 bucks. Where'd you get the money, Richard? Like, you don't have that money. But Dot would tell the authorities that he

got his shoes in Afghanistan. The French police argue that Richard's shoes were put together by a terror cell in Paris, which is where he disembarked on the plane he tried to destroy. But the matching chemical composition and detonator cords suggest that the two pairs were made together somewhere by someone. So at this point, both Reed and Badat obtained duplicate passports in late 2001. They visited Pakistan and likely Afghanistan again following the 9-11 attacks. They separately returned to the UK and Badat was meant to fly from Manchester to Amsterdam and take a flight to the US that he would blow up. But the way he pulls out of this is very interesting. When Badat came home, his father sat him down and warned him about taking part in a terror plot.

His father sat him down and warned him about taking part in a terror plot. So when he testifies later in court, he recalled, quote, My father knew I had traveled to Afghanistan. My father sat me down and said, I've heard about sleepers. If I find out you are one of those sleepers, I will kill you. There's something incredible about being threatened out of a suicide attack this way. But it works. It works. When your dad says, I'll kill you if you kill yourself.

You're like, all right. That's I don't know. It's just because this is such a horrible sad topic. I really needed that laugh. God, that's so beautiful. You know? He's still getting encouragement from his handlers. No, you got to go through with it, but he never boards the flight out of Manchester. Dad has spoken. And it's instructive to

compare this moment for Badat, who was raised in a relatively stable environment by his Malawi immigrant parents in the UK. He had no trouble integrating into British society as a youth and compare that with a comment from Richard's father Robin who would say if his son's bombing plot quote I blame myself for not being there when he was growing up Oh man Richard just had nothing to lose and no one to stop him right. Yeah, that's the thing about being a dumb young person you need Someone who loves you to sit you down and be like, if you take part

in a suicide mission, I will fucking kill you. Yeah, I will follow you to hell and whatever. And then I will spank you in hell. So his attack is just a failure on every level to any reasonable observer. It looks totally care-brained. While it's true that a violent terrorist group has to view someone like Richard as expendable, I can't shake the sense that this event is just a total stab in the dark. They're trying to approach they knew had very little chance of success, very little in the way of logical finesse, like on the off chance it actually works. And you know, worst case scenario, this guy goes to prison forever, and we don't really care about him that much anyway. So to give you a sense of like, how badly planned

and plotted this was Richard can't even manage to get on the plane the first time. Oh, boy. Oh, it's just like the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, the worst planning ever. Yep. Yep. Just have thought through basically none of the details. So this is again, this is just two months after 9-11. Reed shows up at the Paris airport on December 21st, aiming to catch an American Airlines flight to Miami. He pays in cash, has no baggage, is otherwise so disheveled and dirty and oddly behaved that he's pulled aside for

questioning for long enough to miss the plane. And you know 9-11 just happened so you need to be a little bit more sneaky. Gotta be a little on the ball. He apparently just kind of is also unfazed by being pulled out of the line and questioned and you know at this time if you're getting grilled at the airport like you should sweat a little bit, but he's just kind of like, oh yeah, of course, of course they got me. This to me just recalls the teacher's story

about not bringing a pencil or notebook to class. He has this mission, but zero idea what it will take to execute. Yeah. The police and security people are totally unnerved by how he's indifferent to this examination. The incident document calls him emotionless. You could say if there's a universal red flag in air travel, it's betraying no emotion when you're going to miss your international flight.

Yeah. Everything about this original run-in just leads me to wonder how much training he actually got from Al-Qaeda, because he shows no sign of what we consider the bare essentials of avoiding detection. There's no effort. It's also, it's so strange for Al Qaeda to have had, you know, this terrorist event that they really shocked the world with.

And then they're like, and now for our next move, something incredibly low effort that probably won't work. Like, what's that about? I guess it's partly you wanna keep the momentum going, but you're going to have to try something else because there are new measures in place already. Yeah, they let him go because he has committed a crime and he calls one of his handlers who says, oh, you got to try again. So the next day, December 22nd, rather than having a change of heart, he returns to board the same American Airlines flight to Miami. No problems this time, only when they are out over the Atlantic does everything go sideways. This is our see something, say

something moment. The flight attendants who are the hero of this piece, as ever, are of course on edge because 9-11 was a few weeks ago, they take notice of Richard pretty soon. He's a big guy, six foot four, two hundred pounds. He's behaving weirdly. He won't take food. He won't even take water. And this is a long transatlantic flight.

One attendant tries to feel him out just with small talk, and the vibes are just off. She feels like he's lying about where he's from, that kind of thing. They go about their work. After meal service, passengers start complaining that they smell smoke. And attendant walks by Richard's seat. He's alone by a window. And she sees him trying to strike a match, which is not a lot. She thinks he's trying to smoke and tells him off for it. I guess if you're flying from Paris, maybe people think you can smoke on the plane. You probably do run into that, huh? He promises he'll stop and he takes the odd step of using the charred match to like pick at his teeth. Like that's what he was going to use the match for instead. I don't know. Not convincing. Doesn't exactly put her at ease. This attendant comes back in a few minutes and

he's bent over in his seat, but she still thinks he's trying to smoke and she's really pissed about it this time as only a flight attendant can be. She tries to get his attention again. This time he ignores her so she starts pulling at him and that's when she realizes that he's got a shoe off in his lap. There's a fuse of some kind coming out of it. A few media reports will claim that he's trying to light his shoelaces, or that the fuse is coming out of the tongue of the shoe. This is one of those things where there's just a ton of weird disagreement about whether the fuse is running through the shoelace. Again, all this just suggests to me that this is like a piece of shit bomb that was never going to work. Just seems extremely janky, right?

And there's sort of an indifference to how the device is theoretically supposed to work. It's just this cartoonish image, right? You just picture like an ACME shoe with a big bomb fuse coming out of it. And you know about, you know, those ACME products, they never work. No, no, no, that's always going to blow up in your face, you know, even if not literally. It's just this image that tries to make the shoe seem really scary when I guess we should be scared of terrorists, but all of a sudden, all this focus is on the shoe, right? The shoe has this like novelty factor, like we've never seen this before. Okay, so the flight attendant is grabbing Richard, she grabs

him a couple of times and he throws her off very hard. She's injured. She goes running for help from another attendant who instinctively realizes Richard is trying to do something wrong. She grabs him and then Richard just bites down on her thumb and won't let go. So he's got her thumb in his mouth,

just biting down as hard as he can. She screams, this will give her a scar that I think she probably still has. She did a couple of years after. I would be worried about losing motion as well. Oh my god. I mean, you just feel bad for someone who had no idea that that was going to be happening when

they got up that morning. She screams. Now the other passengers are getting involved. They start to restrain Richard. He finally lets go for thumb. By now, the first attendant, I love this detail, has distributed bottles of Evian water so that everyone nearby can douse Richard

in case anything has been ignited. So they're pouring really nice, probably my favorite bottled water all over this guy. Aw, that's so great. Again, the resourcefulness and the action of everyone else aboard is wild. The passengers collect a bunch of stuff like belts and headphone cords and seat belt extensions to tie Richard to the seat. No.

And when the plane eventually makes an emergency landing in Boston, he's bound so tight that FBI agents have to cut him out of the chair. So, I mean, it was a zealous response from the passengers. I hope that the passengers on that plane have reunions. Oh my god, I hope so too. A doctor is on board. He gives Richard some volume to sedate him, but he's still wriggling and kind of taunting the crew. Now,

at this point, there's also the thought that he could have an accomplice aboard. One passenger thinks they saw Richard at the airport with another person the day prior, so they get taken through the cabin to try to look at everybody. Again, there's no protocol for this, so it's pretty amazing that the flight crew kind of figured all this stuff out. But they say, talk to your seatmates, everyone get to know each other so we can identify anyone else who might be suspicious. In all this confusion, the crew don't immediately suspect the shoes of being explosive. It's kind of strange. Again, this goes to the seeming jankiness of the bomb is that nobody thinks that's a bomb per se.

They know he's trying to light something on fire. In fact, Richard is restrained for about half an hour before they even think to confiscate the shoes. That's so great. It's like, you just like, when history is happening to you, you just never notice the salient details I kind of feel like. They're like, oh, we better take their shoes.

An officer takes them to the cockpit. Now, you could probably guess that's not a procedure for an object you believe could be a bomb, is to take it to the front of the plane. Doesn't seem great. The thought is that he might have had a knife in there. That's what they think at first, except then they see the wire and a scorch mark and go, well, shit, let's not have that in the cockpit. They stat this is a really confusing thing. They stashed the shoes in what a time article profiling the flight attendants called quote, a safe place reserved on all planes for bomb disposal. Oh, I could find zero information on what that space is or how it works. So I just imagine them locking the shoes in the beverage cart or something. Yeah. This is one of those things that were,

you know, the hacky old comedian routine is, why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box? Yes. Why don't you make the whole plane, the bomb proof chamber you have? I don't know. This just seems like nonsense. Do you think this pilot was talking to a Newsweek reporter

and just completely bullshitted them? It was just like, and then we placed it in the safe place on all planes for bomb disposal. Yeah, the bomb drawer. Okay, now imagine this. The flight continues for three more hours as it's diverted to Boston. So, you know, you put on sex in the city too. Oh, it's better.

It's better. It's better. Nobody can stand up from their seat without permission. Again, the attendants are all coming up with all this stuff on the fly. They have no procedure for this. They search anyone who needs to use the bathroom. Another stands guard at the cockpit. The crew puts on a movie so that everyone can relax.

Do you want to guess what it was? Oh my God. Zoolander. You are kind of close in vibe. It's legally blonde. It would be. Oh my God, Zoolander. You are kind of close in vibe. It's legally blonde. It would be, oh my God, just a bag. I want this to be a TikTok POV trend. Like POV, you just took down a terrorist

and now you're settling into our legally blonde. Time to unwind with Reese Witherspoon. Because it just feels so human, right? Like it feels so great to hear about these people who lived and had this like terrifying and also very funny experience. So while they're en route to Boston, enjoying Legally Blonde, the FBI is alerted to the incident. They're waiting to take Richard into custody when the plane lands.

They're ready to interview witnesses, etc. The next afternoon, one of the FBI special agents who responded to the call submits a very short criminal complaint against Richard that doesn't mention the bombs at all. It describes him trying to ignite his shoes with a match and his recently acquired passport, but the affidavit is very straightforwardly just charging him with assaulting and intimidating flight attendants on an aircraft and interfering with the performance of their duties, which he did. It's certainly true. You know, it's pretty serious. It's punishable by up to 20 years in prison, but it's not terrorism. And according to this part of the US code, the intent of the suspect is actually moot. So whatever your reason for biting the flight attendant, it doesn't matter.

You are disrupting the flight and could have killed everyone. Richard won't be indicted on terrorism charges until a few weeks later on January 16th. I think that the FBI's initial complaint was much less serious, just the assault charge and filed so quickly as possibly due to a quirk of the Patriot Act. Oh boy, the Patriot Act. The sweeping national security law that had just been signed in October. So the U.S. could now indefinitely detain aliens, but they had to be charged with a crime within seven days or be released. So this seems to me the sort of thing where they know they're going to hit

him with everything they've got. But for the time being, we'll just hold him on biting the attendant, essentially. It feels like something Lenny Briscoe would explain. biting the attendant, essentially. Feels like something Lenny Brisco would explain. So I think one effect this has is that until the really heavy charges come down, the media has complete control of the bomb side of the story. And things got really confusing.

Everyone has their different sources. He acted alone. He had help. He bought exposes online. He got them somewhere else. There's an op ed columnist who's mad that we were calling him the shoe bomber because he thinks it's too cutesy, basically. Quickly you get a kind of pair of competing narratives.

On the one hand, there's the sense that Richard is the ultimate loser, incompetent, walking punchline was never going to pull this off. On the other hand, the Bush Department of Justice was always going to make a big example of this guy. You know, he was foiled, caught alive, he could be tried. Only two days afterward, the FBI is saying he had enough explosive material to blow a hole in the plain fuselage and bring it down. We'll get into sort of the nuance of that. But by early January, we have a Wall Street Journal article quoting experts who say, quote, the device is reminiscent of one commonly used by Palestinian suicide bombers,

but more sophisticated. Oh, okay. So neither of us is a bomb expert, I assume. That's true. But the FBI has a picture of Richard's shoes on their site, and I'm going to send it to you. I'm excited. Tell me if you think this looks like a really sophisticated device. OK, these are kind of like computer guy trying to be outdoorsy kind of a hiking sneaker, I would say. Yeah, IT guy going for a hike. Yep. I yeah, totally with his elf girlfriend.

And so is the bomb in the heel of the one on the right? Yeah. So the soles of the shoe had the material in them. What was in the shoes was PETN, which stands for a chemical compound. I won't try to pronounce. But it's similar to nitroglycerin. This was meant to be the main explosive and the trigger or accelerant was something called TATP, which is the ingredient that investigators recognize from lots of other suicide bonds. The arrangement is really unusual here. PETN is very stable and typically used as the detonator ingredient. TATP by comparison is super vile tile and has been known to kill people working with it.

There's an expert who says, I'd be careful, you know, even stamping my feet in anger if I had that in my shoes. Richard will claim that he has been walking around on these shoes for like a month. That's probably not true. Probably might have combusted anyway. Although also classic Richard, I might add. He was lying a lot. So this is where you get some debate over whether the shoe bomb ever could have worked the way it was intended PETN is actually so stable that it's difficult to detonate without a metal part like a blasting cap

Something that would have been detected by airport security because you walk through a metal detector So years later a Nigerian terrorist nicknamed the underwear bomber Oh would try to bring down a plane by igniting a packet of PETN bomber would try to bring down a plane by igniting a packet of PETN sewn into his underwear. And all he managed to do was give himself first and second degree burns before flight attendants turned a fire extinguisher on him. He also had more of the stuff on him. And you know, it didn't combust, it caught fire, he caught fire. After this incident, explosives experts did a test detonation on a decommission 747 and

found that even if the underwear bomber's device had worked as planned it wouldn't have broken the plane's fuselage. I'm most likely it would have only killed the bomber and the passenger next to him. Even in a worst-case scenario a plane can land with a chunk of the fuselage missing as we just saw with that scary Alaska Airlines story. Yeah! Which flew out of the Portland airport, by the way, and back into it 20 minutes later after a chunk of the cabin flew off. That doesn't stress me out at all.

Yeah, is the problem here in a very basic dumb-down way that the difficulty level of building a bomb powerful enough to take down a plane is raised by having to do it in a way that won't be detected by airport security. That's exactly it. The parts you would need for this to be an effective suicide bomb, as you would see, you know, like a suicide vest or something on something that happens on a ground attack. Yeah, there's a lot of metal parts.

Well that's comforting, actually. Yeah. And, you know, even with the specific explosive, there's an incident where someone tried to use the same stuff, PETN, had twice as much of it on him, was trying to assassinate someone and he only killed himself and, you know, mildly injured his target, who was a few feet away from him. So the explosive just isn't that effective in these various circumstances that you didn't. I mean, given that nobody to my knowledge has ever carried out a successful shoe bombing while the Middle East has seen countless suicide bombings with

countless fatalities, I just find the words sophisticated, really suspect. To say nothing of the Palestinian comparison and they're like, what do we have to do with it? Right. Come on. To me, it doesn't really hurt your case to call this a crude bomb. Yeah. If there's a chance it could have gone off,

it's intended, it could have hurt someone, yes. It could have killed him, it could have killed everybody, sure. And that's worth being scared of. We're seeing this simultaneous urge to write Richard off and claim he's a mastermind with a uniquely dangerous weapon. Humiliate him, but raise the fear

of the next chewbomber pulling this off. This is so typical of post-911 era. America can vanquish any enemy with ease, but they're always out there lurking, plotting, figuring out a way to kill you with their shoot. Yeah, right. And this need to envision the enemy as hyper-competent, hyper-sophisticated, always one step ahead, because I feel like that really allows us to justify any use of force which you know famously in this period we we did yeah all you need is the FBI saying it could have brought down the plane and killed everyone yeah So yeah, like I said January. He's getting all the big charges our good buddy attorney general John Ashcroft gives a big press conference About Richard's main indictment. His main indictment includes a charge for attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction,

which is pretty grandiose, homicide charges, and, quote, attempted wrecking of a mass transportation vehicle. That is a new anti-terrorism offense at the time, also thanks to the Patriot Act. I have no doubt they could have sent Richard to prison for life if this happened in the 90s, but Ashcroft goes out of his way to act like the Patriot Act really did something here. Quote, I wanna take this opportunity once again

to thank the Congress for providing us with the necessary tools that we need to protect the safety and security of American citizens. He really leans into the heroic passengers and crew angle, quote, on Flight 63 for a very few minutes at least. Every passenger was vigilant and alert. Every passenger an air marshal. Every passenger watching Legally Blonde. I imagine everyone getting the little pilot wings. This feels like this is kind of seeing into the future of the next 20 years,

because something that changed as a norm really surprisingly quickly is that now it's very normal for people to have, you know, home security cameras, ring cameras, like cameras in the doorbell, cameras inside the house. And I feel like, you know, not long ago you would be considered paranoid or weird to be doing that. But I think this era of American history really helps solidify this feeling that we would all be safe if we could all just continuously surveil each other. Yeah, I should be able to get on next door and ask my neighbors, do you think this Amazon delivery driver is stalking me because I keep seeing him in the neighborhood? Yeah. Just whatever you see out your front door is reason to be fearful and suspect. And yeah, you're the main character in

some kind of awful thriller. So this takes us to Richard Reid's true legacy. The pain in the ass of taking your shoes off every time you fly. So I am a couple years older than you, but I'm wondering, do you have any memories of what airport security was like before 9-11? I do, yeah, because I remember, you know, I was 13 when 9-11 happened and we, you know, my family flew a decent amount in this game of things. And so I remember so well that it was just a normal thing that you would, I guess, go through like a very cursory amount of security and you didn't need a ticket to go through it and then you could bring someone to the gate.

And this is like, I think in the first or a very early episode of Seinfeld as a relationship test, like if you're picking up a woman you're seeing, where do you pick her up? Or no, this was on, this is on Friends. It could have been on both, but it was the sort of 90s comedy of manners thing that if you wanna be a good partner to somebody, you pick them up at the gate because you used to be able to do that and it was incredible.

Yeah, I feel like an entire generation of rom-coms just make no sense now because you'd never be able to get that far. Like how did Tom Hanks get in there? It was designed to be unintrusive, you know, kind of a metal detector. And that's it. You walk to the gates without a boarding pass without an ID. It was like taking a bus.

The Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, is created in November 2001 and becomes an agency of the Department of Homeland Security tasked with federal oversight of security procedures at all airports. Now, since then, as you know, the TSA has come up with all kinds of fun hoops to jump through, challenges. I like to think of them as, it would be fair to describe most of them as security theater.

You have the full body skinners, which are invasive and have led to the harassment of transgender travelers. You know, we have dealt with a lot of racial profiling in TSA lines. There's the rule about only bringing fluids and containers smaller than 3.4 ounces, which we know isn't based on anything because they made a COVID exception for hand sanitizer, which is actually flammable. Yeah, and they're like, I'm sure you've read those like nightmare stories of like people having to like throw out breast milk that they just pumped because it violated the rule.

Yep. And in fact, that rule, the fluid rule is probably to help the airport sell you overpriced concessions because they want you to get that $7 bottle of disani, which just tastes like sweat. because they want you to get that $7 bottle of disani, which just tastes like sweat. And you have to put your shoes through the X-ray machine to check for bombs, obviously. Which is, you know, great for people who want to look at each other's feet, but terrible for the rest of us. Foot fetishes are winning.

Yeah, Quentin Tarantino has come out on top yet again. Now, interestingly, this doesn't become mandatory right away. For a few years, the TSA keeps people in a weird limbo like they like to do. Like you're encouraged to take your shoes off, but it's still technically your choice. They just make it more annoying if you don't voluntarily take them off in the form of extra searches and patdowns or whatever. And in 2006, it seems the TSA decides to standardize shoe removal and maximize the misery for everyone. Now, nobody got blown up by a shoe bomb in those five years,

of course. And ever since, it's been a top complaint about air travel across the board, unless you're shelling out for precheck privilege. So this 2006 decision to make it standard, the agency said this choice is quote based on intelligence Point to a continuing threat from shoe bombs. Oh really a continuing It's ongoing. They've issued a few similar warnings in the year since always very vague always just this oh well intelligence points to there might be a shoe bomb at some point They are you know asking their agents to be vigilant. That's all the justification you're ever going to hear for this policy.

The TSA has never publicly announced that they caught another shoe bomber with their screening process. But if they had, I bet we would have heard about it because the person would have been prosecuted as a terrorist. Right. We tend to really like publicizing the terrorists that we catch in this country. Plus this is an intensely hated federal agency. They would take any PR win they could.

I just know they would love to say, see Shubham, we kept you safe, we got it. It's also worth pointing out that like TSA for all of the rigmarole makes a lot of mistakes and lots a lot through and it's famously surprisingly easy to get a gun through airport security to this day Not that I've done it, but I've read about it notably too if you've flown out of any airport outside the US You most likely didn't take your shoes off. This is a distinctly American thing

Not even in Israel which has some of the tightest airport security in the world They pay about ten times more per passenger on security costs than we do. They don't make you take your shoes off. That feels like it illustrates really well that like this is something that we're doing because it for whatever reason, we wanted to give people another thing to do that would allow them to, I don't know, as you know, as you said, to make the theater feel complete because there's just, there's nothing in those things.

Just some foot funk. That's it. I mean, in the more than two decades since Richard Reed, nobody has been injured or killed because of a shoe bomb anywhere, no matter the security protocol at the point of their departure. But Americans normalize this inconvenience as the cost of safety and we automatically take our shoes off now even when we're abroad and we don't have to. You know, there are stories of people, you know, doing this at the airport in Germany or so and a German person has to say, you know, we don't even do that here. What are you doing? It's so strange that while failing in his mission, Richard should leave this lasting imprint on our society. He pleads guilty to eight federal terrorism charges in 2002. He gets three life sentences plus another 110 years. He's been in the Colorado Supermax Prison ever since. That's the same place that housed Ted Kaczynski, Tyn Dynick-Vay, a lot of notorious people who are isolated from general prison

populations. He's never shown any remorse and by all accounts remains a religious zealot. Here and there over the years he's gone on hunger strikes, you know, saying he's not being allowed to practice his faith or study Arabic, and over time he gets a few more freedoms. His mother passes away only a few years after the attack. Her friends will say that it was a broken heart. He keeps writing letters to his estranged father, sometimes upgrading him for not being a devout Muslim. He's kind of giving him shit for not praying five times a day. Over the years he becomes an interesting point of comparison because he's living in way better conditions than detainees at Guantanamo, which is something he's keenly aware of. Early on he tells a lawyer that quote, Guantanamo, which is something he's keenly aware of. Early on, he tells a lawyer that, quote, Guantanamo Bay will provide us with thousands of recruits

the longer it is maintained, meaning recruits for al-Qaeda. As for the attempted bombing itself, Reed tells a researcher that he writes letters to, that he has, quote, tactical regrets. Fair enough. Understatement of the century, yeah. But believes everything that happened the way it did is what Allah wanted for whatever reason quote

I am not crazy as they suggest, but I knew exactly what I was doing Of course, I would have been sad to have those people die, but I knew that my cause was just and righteous It was the will of Allah that I did not succeed. I mean years later He argues in a letter to this extremism researcher He argues in a letter to this extremism researcher Dr. Kimberly Melment Orozco That what he tried to do is permitted by Islamic law But quote at the same time I also believe that it wasn't supposed to happen Not because it was displeasing to God rather because it was not either my time to die

Nor that of those on the plane with me and he had had other plans for me me, which include my staying prison and other matters, which I may not be aware of as yet. So, Melman Orozco cites this as an example of how, you know, once radicalized, a terrorist sticks to their worldview, even after being locked up in isolation. And it makes perfect sense this identity as a soldier of jihad was everything to him and Islam was part of how he survived Jail as a younger man. He has to keep believing he was following divine orders He even at one point writes a letter saying that he's gotten favorable signs from God But he does continue to see sort of optimistic Signs like in his in his religion, which is fascinating. He's 28 when he got on that plane. Now he's 50, almost half of his life in the super max. God. Yeah.

And this, I don't know, that this feels partly connected to how dangerous man's search for meaning can be, you know, and that engaging in terrorism can help with your search for meaning and belonging. And then, you know, starting a war to allegedly counter that terrorism can do the same thing. And it's hard to look back and identify solutions, at least for me. But I mean, what is looking at this story in particular help show you about this moment that we shared as a country? It's pretty clear from his correspondence and some of his requests in prison for magazines and the like that Richard continues to follow current events.

I'm sure he kept up with the war on terror. And, you know, from his comments about Guantanamo getting al-Qaeda more recruits, you know, he clearly thinks that American empire will continue to sort of self destruct in this way. I'm inclined to think he does know that Americans take their shoes off at the airport now. How could he not know? But not having seen it or experienced it, I wonder if he can really grasp

what that shift in behavior means. I mean, billions of minutes of discomfort, the loss of dignity that comes with shedding your footwear for government inspection in this heavily trafficked public space. I would never say this ritual humiliation is worse than the loss of human life. But in the broader context of air travel, which has become an exercise in inflicting minor pains that you can then pay your way out of,

it's definitely an insult. And I think Richard would take some satisfaction in that. I mean, every day, these godless infidels made to suffer a tiny bit for no good reason. And of course, he'd say we deserve it. I think I'm okay with having a moral where if you really want to have a legacy by doing something terrible, then you actually have a better chance of being remembered by inconveniencing hundreds of millions of people than by killing a comparatively small number. So if you must do something along those lines, do the inconveniencing thing.

It'll work out better anyway. Yeah, unleash like a computer virus that makes it so, you know, your smart chip card tap system doesn't work anymore or just fucks up half the time. Or just become an engineer at Apple. Don't time. Or just become an engineer at Apple. Don't be a terrorist. Become an engineer at Apple. Get rid of a feature that people weren't done using yet. Decide that we can't have AirPods anymore and have to be music directly into our brains.

Buy a social media app and ruin it. Yeah, don't be a terrorist. Go into tech. Go into business. Get an MBA. That's really how you make people suffer. Miles, this was a delight, which is a weird word to use for a program of this nature, but I feel like this story is kind of somewhere

within the very large story of this period in history in a way that makes it feel less overwhelming, and I really appreciate that. Oh, thank you for having me. This was, yeah, a story I've always wanted to look into and always felt there's just kind of got totally lost between the cracks as we kind of hurtled toward a much bigger geopolitical moment. Where else can people find your work?

What have you been up to lately? Yeah, so I'm a staff writer at Rolling Stone. You can find my byline there. Other than that, I'm still against my better judgment, tweeting on my third account after a couple of bans. Don't have to get into that. The handle is you wouldn't post sort of play on that. You wouldn't steal a car, music piracy ad.

Yep, you wouldn't download a purse. Yes, I would. And I have a couple of books that are somewhat harder to find, but if you really want them, you'll find them. If you really want to get these mysterious books, you must paddle to an island. I think that's a really good approach to getting people interested in your books. Yeah. A little mystery.

Good luck finding them. And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you to Miles Klee for being an amazing guest. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for being a wonderful editor. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for being the producer extraordinaire. Join us in Brittany Land if you can. We would love to see you there. And until next time, thank you for being here. We'll see you in two weeks.