00:00:00
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00:02:15
Speaker 2: Because that's basically, you know, it's an entire generation.
00:02:35
Speaker 1: And, you know, I've you've heard me talk about this before, which is, you know, when is the perfect period to feel like you can get both an honest assessment of an historical event and at the same time, you know, still have firsthand accounts and at the same time be far enough away where people feel like they can say things that they couldn't say in the moment. And so we're at one of those periods with 9-11 and it's in that vein.
00:03:02
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:03:03
Speaker 1: That my next guest is here. It's Brian Knappenberger. He is the executive producer and director of a 9-11 documentary that is landing on Netflix in the month of September, Turning Point, Generation 9-11. This is part of the Turning Point franchise of historical events there. And Brian joins me now. So Brian, I believe there's something somewhere in that 20 to 30 year range is when I feel like Living sources finally tell the truth. And you're far enough away where you don't have to worry about personal feelings sometimes as much. Look, before we get into the specifics of this documentary, you do a lot of history. What's your sense? What's your experience when you're trying to recreate a moment or trying to understand what was happening in and around a life experience? during when one of these turning point events happen. What's your sense of when you feel like you're getting close to the truth?
00:04:07
Speaker 3: It's interesting. I thought a lot. That's a great question. I thought a lot about it when we were creating this, creating this film. When we first released, you mentioned the first series. So the turning point 9-11 and the war on terror was on the 20th year anniversary of 9-11.
00:04:23
Speaker 2: And, you know, a lot of people watched it on Netflix.
00:04:27
Speaker 3: And there was a lot of uh, chatter online, you know, I was kind of looking at how people were talking about it and thinking about the film. And one of the things that really struck me and that I think goes to your, uh, sort of speaks to your question is, is, um, how many people didn't know what.
00:04:42
Speaker 2: Nine 11 was, um, really didn't know either.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: They hadn't been born yet, or, um, they were just too young to remember the events of that day. So, um, you know, here we are, And so for me, that was just really eye-opening. 9-11, like so many people, changed my life. I mean, I can't imagine. It changed the course of how I saw the world. It changed my career.
00:05:09
Speaker 1: Ryan, my wife and I moved in with each other that day, that night. Did you really?
00:05:13
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:05:13
Speaker 1: I mean, we had just started dating. And she had a little dog, lived on Capitol Hill. And I lived in the suburbs of Arlington, suburbs of D.C. in Arlington. And we worked at the Watergate together. Um, and so, you know, I always have visions of my staff looking at the, looking like craning their neck to see if they could see the smoke from the Pentagon. And I remember I'm like, you're not staying near the Capitol. That's insanity. And her mom was a little bit conservative and probably would have frowned upon it except for the circumstances that we were in. We never left. And we get married a year later. I mean, but I was 28, 29 when this happened. So, yeah, I think you and I are about the same age. It's like it was a life changer, particularly if you lived in New York or D.C.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:06:04
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:06:05
Speaker 2: I mean, uh, exactly.
00:06:07
Speaker 3: And I'm not, you know, it's not that you and I are old, um, but, uh, but we're.
00:06:15
Speaker 1: Just not young. That's how I, I'm just not young anymore. Right. There you go.
00:06:20
Speaker 3: But, you know, on the first anniversary of 9-11, I was I was actually in Condor. I was making one of my first films. It was picked up by PBS Frontline. And it was so profound and for me. And, you know, here we are 25 years later and we're about to reach the point in the next couple of years where nearly half of all Americans were either born after 9-11 or were too young to remember the events of that day.
00:06:45
Speaker 2: So, you know, when we're making this, I'm really thinking about how how.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: This event is moving from a lived memory to to history. And and so this this this film is really about the experience of that of that younger generation. I don't assume people that know what 9-11 meant or what it felt like to go through it. I wanted to bring them into that day to understand that. Not just the terror and the uncertainty, but what happens next? Because some of the decisions we made after 9-11 and those uncertain days and weeks that followed really define our current modern world more than the event itself.
00:07:30
Speaker 1: Before I get into the film, I'm just curious, because I know I suddenly was curious after I was watching your film, is.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: Did you find any scholarship in 1966 about how we marked the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor? And did you look back at 1988 and how we marked the 25th anniversary of Kennedy being shot? I'm trying to look, I was 16 and 88. So I, I, I remember all the specials because man, I was an obsessive conspiracy theorist back then. I read it all right with Kennedy. So I have some memory of 88, but that is what, I was just curious. Did you go back to see how other sort of scarring events like that that was sort of captured the imagination of the country and how it was handled 25 years later?
00:08:19
Speaker 3: I did a little bit. And I like you, I remember I remember that because I was in high school. But, you know, one thing I did clock for sure is to do the math back 25 years from my own birth.
00:08:34
Speaker 2: And that would have been Hiroshima.
00:08:36
Speaker 3: So 25 years before I was born was Hiroshima. So that really puts it in perspective. This, this event that was so transformative to us that in which we will remember it was the day you moved in with your wife. It was, I spent every minute of that day watching television as my view of the world shifted.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: I could feel it.
00:08:57
Speaker 3: Politics was different. My, the way I saw our country was different. Uh, and, uh, And that is such an indelible moment for us. But you can't be upset with people who just weren't around and don't see it that way.
00:09:14
Speaker 1: Look, I remember I filled out an application to join the Navy Reserves. Never heard back from the Navy, by the way, on that. But I remember in that aftermath, that first week, it was sort of like, especially here in D.C., it was inevitable more was going to happen. And so then you started to think, okay, what am I going to do? You know, both in I need to contribute and at the same time, how am I going to escape when the next terrorist attack comes? And how am I going to live my life? And here's the thing. A lot of people were thinking this way back then. And I think the most, the biggest, you want to talk about the biggest prediction did not come true. It was that, right? This idea that we were going to become Tel Aviv. I mean, I think that was the that is what I thought. You know, we lost our terrorist virginity. Right. Our terrorism virginity and what the what life has been like for the average person in Tel Aviv for for our for the last 40 years, I thought was going to be life in Washington and New York. And I guess thankfully it's not been that way.
00:10:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
00:10:15
Speaker 3: And that's part of what I was hoping to capture in this film, just that that fear, the fear of that day, but just also that uncertainty in the days and the weeks and the months that followed. You know, all of those events were done in a few hours in the morning. But we didn't know what was coming next. We didn't know if there were more coming that next day, in the next week, in the next month. We were so sort of traumatized by this that we just didn't know what was coming next.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: And in hindsight, nothing came next, really.
00:10:48
Speaker 3: There was the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, both absurdly, sort of absurd attempts.
00:10:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of like bad copycats, right?
00:10:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
00:10:59
Speaker 3: But but since then, there's been virtually virtually nothing, certainly not connected to Al Qaeda.
00:11:06
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the concept. Generation 9-11 was the goal. Who's your audience?
00:11:16
Speaker 2: My audience is, well, everybody, I think, will get something out of this.
00:11:20
Speaker 3: But I really do want to focus on people that weren't around that day, who were too young to remember those events, who may know a little bit about it, but may not quite understand how much, how different it is, you know, how our country is. I mean, America after 9-11 is just a different country than the America that came before it. Um, you know, and I would, I would love to, to not, to go through, not just what it felt like that day for people, uh, not to, to communicate the fear and the uncertainty that came after. Um, and not to excuse the decisions that came later. I'm pretty critical of a lot. No, but you have to explain it.
00:12:03
Speaker 1: Like, you know, you had this, you know, I'm glad you kept it in. You clipped a news clip, but I think it was Wolf Blitzer saying, you know, 63% of Americans are willing to give up some freedom in exchange for, you know, for security, right? And, you know, that, you know, you wouldn't see that. I don't know if the number would be that high today. And that, of course, you know, with security that, you know, comes that comfort perhaps. But I thought that was important to include. Like you have to, you could sit here and say, I can't believe You guys went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it just makes no sense. Yeah, it absolutely makes little sense now. But in the moment, we'd never experienced anything like this. This wasn't a nation state that came after us. And more importantly, as much as we also just didn't believe a stateless actor could do this without the help of the state. And we were just our folks. And I understand that instinct that we weren't going to believe they didn't have help until we were, you know, and it was going to take years to convince us that that wasn't the case, right? So I think it's, and I probably to this day, I mean, I think you did your best to convey that. It's still very hard to convey the fear we were all living in, particularly, and again, this was a big divide. And I know this was harder to capture in, I think, 90 minutes. Well, you need, I was talking about this with my producer. To really do 9-11, you might need to do the O.J. Simpson Made in America five-part 15-hour expose because one of the things that I think we've never fully appreciated is how the rest of America, while certainly touched by this, not like D.C. and New York, and yet we drove so much of the feelings about it to the point of you weren't allowed to comment if you hadn't experienced it.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it is it drove us to make decisions. I mean, back to who this is for. I do think it would be I'd love the next generation to kind of understand the people that are, you know, sort of will begin to start to take the reins of power. and start to make some of these decisions and start to define who we are as a country. I mean, not to fall into the same fear and suspicion that ended up leading us down a pretty.
00:14:33
Speaker 2: Dark path as well.
00:14:35
Speaker 3: You know, we gave up personal liberties as a country, and it launched us into these endless, shifting, kind of forever wars. Yeah.
00:14:46
Speaker 2: And, you know, a.
00:14:49
Speaker 3: Lot of that fear and suspicion was directed at, you know, Muslim communities. And we built this enormous security and enforcement infrastructure in response. Mass dragnets, suspicionless surveillance expanded dramatically. Not a lot of the conversation about whether that was, you know, whether that flew in the face of the Fourth Amendment and whether we were willing to do that or not. But that whole kind of infrastructure that we built, it didn't disappear when that immediate threat receded.
00:15:21
Speaker 2: It remained and it found new targets. And when you look at this, you know, I.
00:15:26
Speaker 3: Think when you talk to the people nowadays, they don't realize like, you know, you and I lived in a world where.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: There wasn't a Department of Homeland Security. security, where there wasn't.
00:15:35
Speaker 3: ICE, you know, this, you know, 9-11 created that and created the departments that would eventually become ICE.
00:15:41
Speaker 2: We very much live in a world now that was created out of the decisions after 9-11.
00:15:48
Speaker 3: And those decisions were largely based on fear and suspicion.
00:15:52
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, one of the things I think it's one of the worst decisions government made was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. And I understand how it happened. And there had been certainly there was a plan on the shelf. There would have been people talking about should we have should should should really Treasury and Commerce, you know, back then Treasury and Commerce for some reason housed a few of these kind of semi security agencies. And we thought, you know, maybe there ought to be another cabinet agency. So there was, you know, like anything that there was a play. I always tell people you want to put a plan on the shelf because you never know. When a crisis emerges, people are desperate for a plan, hand them one, you know, sometimes. And Joe Lieberman handed them one, right? This was sort of him and a few others were sort of into this. But, you know, you can go back in history and any decision government makes quickly is usually a bad decision. It's hard to find one that when you made it quickly, that it goes well.
00:16:58
Speaker 3: In the initial series, we talked about that vote for the AUMF, the authorization to use military force, which was really made in the days, maybe within a week of 9-11. There was this kind of bill that basically said that The president had the ability to go after terrorist groups in a very open-ended way, terrorist groups all over the world. Countryless, right?
00:17:22
Speaker 2: It was countryless, yeah.
00:17:24
Speaker 3: And that passed unanimously, except for one person, Barbara Lee. She's the only one who said, look, I'm as upset as everybody. I had to flee the Capitol. I was scared for my life. I think she had an assistant or somebody, a staffer that was killed. But she said, look, we can't let this fear just overtake us and make these decisions that we may regret later. Even in this moment where everybody is on board with some kind of vengeance, some kind of military action, we need to keep our heads about us. It's striking that there was one vote that said no to the AUMF. And yet that is the effort that has continued really to list down Including going after groups that were never even around on 9-11.
00:18:17
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00:19:59
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: The culture, which was still more monoculture than it is today. We hadn't, this is pre-iPhone, which means pre, you know, 2.0 fragmentation, right? Basically, pre-social media. Yes, there was internet. Yes, there was blogs. Yes, there was certainly conspiracy. There was plenty of places for conspiracy theory to foment, don't get me wrong. But it really was more on the outskirts, even the extreme edges of the internet. But the mainstream conversation was, you're either pro-America or you're with the terrorists.
00:20:35
Speaker 3: Yeah. People forget that stuff. I was trying to get a little more of that in there too. The freedom fries or, uh, you know, you can't call them French fries cause the.
00:20:42
Speaker 2: French shouldn't resist.
00:20:44
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: Um, but, um, You know, that was a weird moment.
00:20:52
Speaker 3: And it did seize the culture in a positive way. It was a moment of unity, too.
00:20:57
Speaker 2: People really... It was kind of an amazing thing.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: I mean, it's one of the most watched events in all of world history up until that point. It was, you know, people... You know, those first... You know, there's this feeling that we've experienced something together, something, you know, traumatic, but that we would respond to it together. Right. We all kind of felt like we were there for each other. People kind of forget that that was that was true in America is true worldwide.
00:21:22
Speaker 1: I mean, look, I mean, I mean, this is going to sound a little a little snarky, but, you know, people love New York City. And that was a that was remarkable.
00:21:33
Speaker 3: Right.
00:21:33
Speaker 1: New York City was a city that you loved if you were there, but you hated if you weren't. Right. Mindset a little bit. Right. There was always, you know, and, you know, the the the coming together, rallying around New York City, which is, again, you're not going to find that every day in some of the reddest parts of America. But in that moment, right, everybody was I mean, to this day. We treat firefighters better. as a collective, if you will, right. We local communities vote to give them raises and all this stuff. Those first responders in particular, we didn't, we never treated those folks as anything other than bureaucrats before nine 11 and our firefighters that are, you know, we now know we, we, we treat that. We, we treat it all differently because we realize, you know, they don't know what moment they're putting their life on the line. They just, They signed up to do this. They just jumped in. You're right. It's like we shouldn't just focus on the negative. We brought pride into being a firefighter. I think to this day, you have people wanting to be a firefighter. A little bit, it goes back to 9-11.
00:22:49
Speaker 3: I think that's totally true. It really gets you when you're going through footage. you know, of this day.
00:22:55
Speaker 1: This was a little triggering to watch this. I'll be honest, Brian.
00:22:58
Speaker 3: It is a little.
00:22:58
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have, you know, I'll make the, you know, I don't know how much 9-11, I struggle sometimes doing 9-11 retrospectives. You know, you feel like, well, I went through it. So I know. I had to cover it. I had to do all, I had to live it. But I'm glad I saw this because it's a, I realize, boy, we have a lot more work to do.
00:23:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:23:27
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:23:27
Speaker 2: That unity is right.
00:23:28
Speaker 3: I mean, it gets you that, you know, the, the, uh, you know, the bloodlines, the way that people kind of came to New York city, the, that, that sort of collective coming together. Um, that's, that's important part of the story. I'm, I'm pretty critical probably of the, uh, in this and other stuff I've done of the war of the wars and the decisions that were made and the way it changed our government, the way we, started changing what it kind of meant to be an american uh that sort of thing and some of that and the divisiveness that came later but there was a real moment of unity world.
00:24:02
Speaker 2: Of, you know, Trump talking about NATO.
00:24:04
Speaker 3: Why should we put the bill for NATO if they know we're not doing their fair shit and all this stuff?
00:24:09
Speaker 2: But the only time, you know, this kind of.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: Key Article 5, you know, was ever triggered with NATO ever in all of history, in the history of NATO, was in defense of the United States after 9-11. That's it. And the world came together and said, we're going to we're going to help you. We're going to protect you. We're going to be that was the show of unity that we've never, never seen any at any other point in history.
00:24:34
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting. I'm sure, you know, there's a lot of complicated feelings for a lot of people when it comes to the Bush, Bush's and the Cheney's in 9-11. And there's a lot of people who have rethought their belief, what they think of these two people and these families after the Trump era. right? Which is what made people. But I don't think people fully appreciate how... In hindsight, we were lucky to have an empathetic president at that moment. Whatever one thinks of the decisions Bush makes down the line on the war, that's one thing. And we're going to have a lot of policy disagreements there. But going to a mosque very quickly after 9-11... To say the things that he said after 9-11, the rhetoric that was used and was denounced if somebody else chose to do something different. I mean, we had some responsible leaders rhetorically in this country at a time when, can you imagine today's leadership with a similar situation? Yeah. I don't, you know, with the infusion of Christian nationalism in our Pentagon. With the way Islamophobia is sort of woven through so much of MAGA? You know, I mean, I think, you know, at the time, it was just he was behaving as we would assume any president would behave. Now you look back and realize, hey, not every president might have behaved the way Bush behaved.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: He made an effort.
00:26:09
Speaker 3: That's true for sure to say that Muslims are not terrorists, to reach out to the Muslim community. One of the things Trump did, I think, is he found that there was still.
00:26:21
Speaker 3: Political power somehow there was something to exploit yeah in in firing people up and and in regenerating some regenerating some of that fear and suspicion and and using it for his own political purposes i mean there's you know these speeches they're equally uh upsetting when you go back to 2016-17 where he's saying i think there should be more surveillance of certain mosques and Really calling for no Muslim ban.
00:26:50
Speaker 2: Stop until we understand what's happening. Think about that.
00:26:53
Speaker 3: That's 15 years after 9-11 and no terrorist attacks happened in that 15 years at all.
00:26:59
Speaker 2: So why are we.
00:27:02
Speaker 3: Banning Muslims until we understand what the problem is? There isn't a problem.
00:27:08
Speaker 1: This is the legacy of 9-11 that is a scourge. Which is Islamophobia. Obviously, the seeds were already there a little bit. Frankly, how Hollywood portrayed every Muslim, right, you know, back in the 90s and the early aughts was a certain way. You and I in the 80s grew up with hijackers, always happened to be from the Middle East.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: They would be- Or communists, I guess.
00:27:40
Speaker 3: Russians.
00:27:42
Speaker 1: Russian communists. Remember the terrorism, the hijackings of the 80s that was always one of the attempts to try to garner attention for various issues in the Middle East. Boy, I can't tell- Is it better or worse? On one hand, there are more Muslims in American political life today than there were 25 years ago. And I frankly think a lot of Muslim Americans decided, hey, you know, we need to get more involved in American politics and more involved in the American fabric. So we are not like seen as outcasts and isolated and all this stuff. And so on one hand, there's been a tremendous amount of progress. And yet it feels like Islamophobia only gets worse.
00:28:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, you felt like, yeah, I felt like pre-Trump, there was significant, you know, the country had sort of made some real progress to some degree. I think he discovered there was this hatred there, I guess.
00:28:46
Speaker 1: Well, it's like we Jews have discovered with anti-Semitism, none of it ever goes away. It just goes dormant for a little while.
00:28:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:28:56
Speaker 3: The... weird way in which it's kind of shown up to is, you know, when we did, um, the, uh, you know, the, we've talked to a lot of kids who were, uh, who's.
00:29:08
Speaker 2: Lost parents on nine 11. And one of them was this woman, uh, Laura Homer.
00:29:13
Speaker 3: And, um, she was, her father was the pilot on flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
00:29:19
Speaker 1: And she had, she, you know, she really rocked me with one of her comments, but go ahead. I don't want to give it away.
00:29:25
Speaker 3: No, it's just really powerful. And one of the things, first of all, it's just her story was powerful. But one of the things that really struck me was, you know, that she was trolled online, that she had, that she was, you know, while she was, you did these comments, these direct.
00:29:40
Speaker 2: Messages that were sort of, I don't know how you.
00:29:43
Speaker 3: Describe it, I guess, mocking her or trolling her. And it really made it clear to me that that a lot of a kind of younger generation is getting what they know about 9-11 from social media. And, you know, social media, the explosion of social media happens right after 9-11.
00:29:58
Speaker 2: I mean, we're talking about, I think Facebook is around 2004, maybe Twitter's.
00:30:03
Speaker 3: Maybe Reddit is something like 2005, Twitter is around 2006. So suddenly this is the wave of social media that kind of rushes into our system, just as we're still kind of trying to figure out the trauma of this event. And that goes in this very bizarre, dark way. You know, this very dark movement that people call the truth or movement. You know, I think it's pretty clear that that's a sort of– uh, past that you can kind of trace and you can kind of follow Alex Jones really starts to become famous in that truth or movement. Um, but this, uh, you know, this conspiracies that swirl around it, that 9-11 was the inside job. I mean, that anticipates this dark, that anticipates Trump and some of the, some of the, um, divisiveness online that we started to see that started to get sharper and sharper. Um, And it really gets into stark relief when you're hearing that from somebody who lost their father on 9-11. What does that person think of the truther movement or this divisiveness? And just sort of put in context that how far then where that movement has gone and where it's taken us.
00:31:18
Speaker 1: So, you know, I think about sort of the broader strokes of now looking back 25 years. Our post 9-11 response, was it a total failure in hindsight? And if it's not, what parts of it weren't a failure?
00:31:40
Speaker 3: It's a good question, and we struggle with that, and we try to figure that out in the film. Like so many people, I was in favor of initial military action. So many people felt they attacked us.
00:31:52
Speaker 1: Got to hold somebody accountable, damn it.
00:31:54
Speaker 2: We got to do it.
00:31:54
Speaker 1: I'm going to punch a wall through drywall. I'm going to punch my fist through drywall and feel really good. Proud of myself. And then I'm going to go to Home Depot and go figure out how to patch that.
00:32:04
Speaker 3: Right. And, you know, we drove the Taliban out pretty quickly and we drove almost completely out of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda as well. All that leadership fled into Balochistan and into Pakistan and they were gone. And as I mentioned, my one of my first films I ever made was I was in Kandahar on the one year anniversary of. And at that point, this was optimistic. I mean, there's no other way for me to describe it. This was a positive, interesting.
00:32:32
Speaker 1: They did want to say, I mean, you point this out. We were we were treated as liberators. And and, you know, there is a you want to talk about a what if what if we never go to Iraq and Afghanistan is our sole focus. I don't think Afghanistan ends the way it ends. I agree. At Abbey Gate.
00:32:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, we took we took our eye off the ball, no question, and created this war of choice in Iraq. So, yeah, it's it's a really stark for me, you know, to sort of be there and experience this kind of optimism that there's this new chapter. And then to talk to these Marines that, you know, nobody thought when I was there for sure that 20 years after 9-11, we would actually be engaging Marines, sending Marines in there. to assist the taliban in the takeover of of of kabul i mean and nothing quite says it like that we we are they we're sending our troops in to assist with this and so what was this whole effort of failure it kind of kind of seems like it at this point uh all that money that we put in uh to those what's the win.
00:33:43
Speaker 1: Like what is better today than it was on september 12th 2001.
00:33:52
Speaker 2: For security? For national security?
00:33:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:33:54
Speaker 3: Or.
00:33:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's go with national security.
00:33:57
Speaker 2: What is better today?
00:33:59
Speaker 3: You know, we probably smartened up about communications between intelligence agencies.
00:34:06
Speaker 2: You know, we probably did.
00:34:07
Speaker 3: You know, there was a real lack of communication.
00:34:11
Speaker 2: It wasn't even a lack of communication.
00:34:13
Speaker 3: It was territorialism between FBI and the CIA. And we were naive in that regard. I think we've smartened up about that. That's probably true. I think some of the, even though they're kind of annoying, but some of the stuff at the airports is, is probably smart. But the ways in which we have gone overboard and the ways in fear has really led us into a country that has changed us, and I don't think it's for the better.
00:34:46
Speaker 2: I think when you look at ICE, the violence on.
00:34:50
Speaker 3: The streets today that's perpetuated by ICE, I think that's a reverberation of 9-11. There's no question about it. That is a result of the choices that we made. Our immigration debate has been separable from all of this. And I think we rushed into a new technological world that expanded technology. surveillance and security and surveillance of american citizens in a way that is uh that was dangerous and could continue to be dangerous and more importantly flies in the face of basic kind of fourth amendment protections i mean you know there's a reason why founders said you can't be searched without a warrant there's a reason for that so this idea that we'd have this mass suspicionless dragnet surveillance of americans who aren't suspected of a crime, it just flies in the face of something that's pretty important and valuable and special about this country.
00:35:53
Speaker 1: How do you answer the question of why did he attack us?
00:35:58
Speaker 2: Why did he attack us? That's a good question.
00:36:01
Speaker 1: He is bin Laden. Yeah. Sorry, but I've got a few more of bin Laden, but I want to start with that. Do you think that's a question we've sufficiently answered for this generation that maybe was alive but wasn't aware?
00:36:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, officially, of course, the way he talks about it.
00:36:22
Speaker 1: It's interesting.
00:36:23
Speaker 2: After he died there, you know, after.
00:36:26
Speaker 3: Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, really close to this military base in Pakistan, they found six thousand documents of his. And so they're trying to piece together some. little bit more about him from that you know what do we know about him really actually he did a surprising number of television interviews in the 90s uh for somebody who was wanted back then um talk to cnn and talk to uh.
00:36:55
Speaker 1: Yet another uh kid of privilege who becomes a political extremist Yes. Yeah. Interesting pattern.
00:37:02
Speaker 2: But anyway, you know, he talked about.
00:37:04
Speaker 3: The military, American military next to holy sites and Saudi Arabia. He talked about just I think I think it's, you know, a lot has been made, I think, of and it's true that that. we, you know, we backed some, some dictators and, and people that, that were oppressive and, uh, that it was convenient for us. And, um, and so I think, I think he, uh, a lot of his point was around that. Um, and so that, that is, that is the, that's the reason.
00:37:35
Speaker 1: I mean, he's a story to tell like, cause look, we had a cold war mindset, right? Real polity where we, where our values, we, we, we look the other way. You know, if you were on, if you were on Team capitalism, we looked the other way as long as you weren't going to be on team communism. And it was like you were forgiven of anything else, no matter how you treated your people, whatever it was. And we were, you know, we embraced transactional politics. Basically, we bought allies when necessary. And when you're dealing in a binary world, which is the world that the Cold War was, I can explain it. but there were always going to be consequences. And, and the, and this is among the consequences. Look, we have an entire multiple generations of Latin America. I grew up in Miami. So I, I live with this multiple generations of Latin Americans who don't trust the Americans, which is why I like, I can't believe we're taking the oil of the Venezuelans. It's like, dude, we learned nothing from history. This is only going to end badly. I just don't know how it's bad, how badly. And here we go again. Um, But that's a tough thing to– we won the Cold War because of these decisions. But it did lead– there are unintended consequences and it's possible the rise of bin Laden was one of them.
00:39:02
Speaker 3: Yeah and no question about it to add a little irony to it you know osama bin laden was one of our solutions at one point to winning the cold war and so we were we.
00:39:14
Speaker 1: Were with the taliban before we were against them which which we were back with them remember.
00:39:18
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly yeah um but it's it's an interesting question i i take it that that's those are the those are the reasons for that and i think i think we learn a lot about that another question a very a of that that I kind of think about is what did he want to do after 9-11? And, you know, there's, you know, I think that they were, they seemed... As far as I know, the next video interview of his is something like 2004 or something. He comes forward. That's the next time we actually see him on camera. And they were a small group on 9-11. They weren't a large group. And he was focused mostly on killing more Americans, which led to the underwear bomber.
00:40:06
Speaker 1: He was more focused on tactics than he was... something larger right.
00:40:11
Speaker 3: Yes but i think he came to understand that that the real damage was was the divisiveness that it caused within us and i think it was the the way that it triggered us uh you know going to war all over the world and on this incredible um sort of you know this enormous enormous amount of money that it took us to go to war and the way that that would deteriorate our society i think he came to see that um uh later that that was actually the the success the divisive what we would do to ourselves in divisiveness and what and the kind of attrition and the the um uh the cost that it would take for to be engaged in all these wars over so many years.
00:40:55
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00:42:52
Speaker 2: I think that's true.
00:42:54
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, when you look at 9-11, Al-Qaeda, the group Al-Qaeda, I think we're talking about a few hundred people Maximum. That's it.
00:43:04
Speaker 2: And so, you know, there and and I mean, in the world.
00:43:07
Speaker 3: And so we're talking about this very small group of people that were able to exploit this kind of vulnerability in our system and our, you know, the openness of our.
00:43:16
Speaker 1: I mean, doesn't this get to why the Bush administration for so long just refused to believe they did this on their own? Right.
00:43:24
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think it does.
00:43:26
Speaker 2: I think it does.
00:43:26
Speaker 3: But really, it's pretty striking that there's so few members of al-Qaeda. And of course, there is no al-Qaeda in Iraq at all before we go to war in Iraq. That's it. And so there's this whole debathification process where we kick people out of, and then we put people in prisons. There's this kind of fomenting of extremism. They suddenly create this, they create AQI al-Qaeda in Iraq. It is born out of after this as a reaction to our going to war in Iraq. AQI becomes the Islamic State of Iraq and grows, has broader territorial ambitions, moves into Syria, adds the S, and suddenly we have ISIS, which is the biggest terrorist organization probably in the history of the world. I mean, it's just a huge um uh it was international um uh well funded because they're they're stealing art and and uh oil reserves and stuff so it's um it's this phenomenal kind of um domino effect that that increases as our military engagement increases.
00:44:39
Speaker 1: So in uh 2051 uh at the 50th um Do you think we'll be more comfortable describing basically that– I have this theory that essentially about 25 years from now, we're going to put all the Middle Eastern wars into one bucket and just say basically the West got the post-9-11 reaction wrong and it screwed up and it cost America its standing in the world and it really set back the United States– as far as their global legitimacy, it set them back a generation, if not two. It feels like that's, frankly, the general direction we're headed by 2051 without some sort of course correction.
00:45:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:45:30
Speaker 2: Well, when I do that series, you have me on your show, by the way, at that point.
00:45:34
Speaker 1: We'll both be. Won't it be like, you know, I mean, that's what I'm curious about is what will all this look like When the only people making these will be people that really didn't experience it. So it's just going to be seen as outcome focused.
00:45:48
Speaker 3: Right.
00:45:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. And boy, like to me, the Iran war and the Iraq war will probably get conflated the farther away we get. Every time we have done these war of choices, they don't work out. Vietnam, Iraq. It'll start being done that way because what's interesting about the first nine months of Afghanistan that your documentary captured so well is that wasn't a choice. We felt like, well, that's where we had to go. We had to go find them. We went into Iraq the first time because– We were kicking them out of Kuwait. We weren't really going into Iraq. We were justified. It's a reminder. When you truly are justified, you usually make good decisions. When you're trying to be preemptive, that's usually when you make bad decisions.
00:46:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, no question. You know, I.
00:46:41
Speaker 3: you mentioned Vietnam because we're at the, we were at the 50 year anniversary of the fall of Saigon last year.
00:46:47
Speaker 2: And we did a little, uh, we did a piece on that.
00:46:49
Speaker 3: Um, and, uh, you know, another, another person that we interviewed here is, uh, on the wind, uh, whose father was in Vietnam and fled Vietnam in 1975 with the fall with that fall. So, um, and when you look at those, um, images of South Vietnamese who'd worked with the Americans desperately trying to escape as Saigon fell, running towards planes, trying to board helicopters. I mean, these are some of the most famous images in all of photojournalism.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: And what do we do? We recreate it in 2021.
00:47:20
Speaker 3: Compare them with those images in the final days in Kabul airport. The echoes are just impossible to ignore. You get another sense of this with the responsibility on to help end this war, right? To take these final steps to get everybody out. And yeah, some of them weren't born yet. Some of them were three or four years old, way too young to remember the events of 9-11. And they're fighting and working with and at odds with occasionally Taliban soldiers who are the same, too.
00:48:02
Speaker 2: Young to remember the events.
00:48:04
Speaker 3: This is a new generation finishing off this war. war that started right after, in the days after 9-11. And so in 50 years, where will we be at the 50-year anniversary?
00:48:17
Speaker 1: Well, but it's interesting. But think about it, Brian. You know, 50 years after the fall of Saigon, we're comfortable saying we lost the Vietnam War.
00:48:24
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:48:25
Speaker 1: We were not comfortable saying that at the 25-year anniversary. We were still, there were too many Vietnam vets in our politics, too many Vietnam vets, you know, in leadership positions, who I think were never going to accept the premise that yeah that they were involved in a failure.
00:48:40
Speaker 3: Right yeah i want yeah that's a really good point i wonder about the because you talk to some of these marines that were there at abbey gate and i i get a sense of that they're they're conflicted right i mean they really wanted to serve i mean i have so much respect for them first of all um but you know they they wanted to um, to help. They wanted, they thought they were doing something, you know, important. Um, they, you know, um, one of them got involved, not because of, um, Al Qaeda at 9-11 necessarily, but because of ISIS, some of the things that he saw online with ISIS.
00:49:18
Speaker 2: And so he was motivated to go kind of solve that.
00:49:21
Speaker 3: And I mean, I really kind of respect the instinct, um, in general, but what are we, you know, but you, but when you talk to them now, you wonder if they have, you know, they're, they're questioning some of not just why they were there, but what about Iraq? What happened? Um, I sense a real kind of deep thinking about, about what this was all about in them. And by the way, that gives me some hope. I mean, I think, you know, as we talk to young people, so often when people get older, not that you and I are old, but once you get older, so many people say, oh, you know, people don't get it nowadays.
00:49:57
Speaker 1: Sometimes they ask the simpler question that we're like ducking too often.
00:50:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. But I, man, I, I, I, and do understand it and do are starting to I'm going to ask.
00:50:11
Speaker 1: You a question that you don't have the answer for because neither do I but you know I've been thinking a lot about the fact that we're at the 25th anniversary of 9-11 and every year we've passed a defense budget that pretty much gave the Pentagon whatever they asked for and it hasn't mattered Democratic Congress Republican Congress sometimes it's always waving the bloody shirt right don't forget 9-11 right a little bit of that right and you're like And yet we're running out of munitions. We can barely fight a war against Iran and then also be prepared for a second. The United States of America is suddenly being humbled by Iran. And what have we done with 25 years of military, of Pentagon budgets? How is it that 25 years of some of the most sophisticated war planning supposedly, that had been done has left us in a position like this. I mean, it's a question, that's why I said, I'm asking you a question you can't answer, but it's a, I kind of think that this is a time to lift up and ask ourselves, we're at the 25th anniversary of 9-11, we're still mired in the Middle East, and we seem less prepared for another 9-11 than we were on 9-11.
00:51:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you.
00:51:33
Speaker 3: It is.
00:51:34
Speaker 2: It's and I think that, you know, just to sort of take that back to.
00:51:39
Speaker 3: The AUMF and to some to some degree, I mean, you know this was a huge this idea that the authorization to use military force this is a this is a shift in how it's supposed to work in the united states right the constitution is pretty clear congress has the power to declare.
00:51:55
Speaker 1: War right i keep wondering if the members of congress do any of them read the constitution before they come to the office i don't know i mean i kind of think that they have to read the they won't i understand that most people don't read the owner's manuals um to things but i i think my members of congress ought to.
00:52:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, if they did, it's unambiguous.
00:52:15
Speaker 3: There was a real reason why after the American Revolution, these founders made it clear, we don't want a king deciding that we're just going to go to war. The ability to go to war is in the hands of Congress. Also, the ability to fund the war is in the hands of Congress. Congress has a huge amount of power here. But put Post 9-11, and I think you can also probably argue Cold War stuff here, too. But in the modern era, especially post 9-11, Congress has relinquished that power.
00:52:49
Speaker 1: Been a blank check both in money to the Pentagon and in power to the presidency on this stuff. And are we better off for it?
00:52:59
Speaker 2: Definitely not.
00:53:00
Speaker 3: I think you see this in attacks on Venezuelan boats, in international waters.
00:53:08
Speaker 2: You see this in the Iran war.
00:53:10
Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting that you included that. Why did you include it?
00:53:14
Speaker 3: Just emphasizing this shift of power to the executive that we don't question. And you clearly see that in Iran.
00:53:26
Speaker 3: Trump doesn't feel like he even needs to explain why we're going. It's deteriorating so far. It's not just that there seems to be no congressional oversight of any kind or, you know, congressional, you know, no discussion with Congress.
00:53:41
Speaker 2: But but no, no discussion with the American people.
00:53:44
Speaker 1: Nothing.
00:53:44
Speaker 2: We're just they're just doing it.
00:53:47
Speaker 3: And so that that's we've slipped pretty far since 9-11 and certainly since the beginning of this country and the founding of this country, that basic idea that people themselves have to have some say who they go to war with.
00:54:02
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's land this plane, the series Turning Point. What's what are some you hinted to me that this is kind of a season two. So what's a few other projects coming?
00:54:14
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know. This is kind of the end of this one, I think, unless we return to it later. But, yeah, we're continuing to be just really fascinated with how things are shifting right now technologically, you know, what technology is doing to us.
00:54:35
Speaker 1: Taylor shared in one of his shows, I think it's Lioness, had a line that I thought was terrific about Ukraine. He said, it's as if World War I and Star Wars merged, that that's the Ukraine war, right? Because we're having this, you know, we're radically changing warfare, right? In real time watching this, it feels like we're only a few years from some drone swarm showing up on the coasts of one of our major cities. And we're going to be like, what the hell is that, right? Like it feels inevitable. Yeah, it is. Is the superpower mindset going to get punctured even more so in the next 10 years?
00:55:19
Speaker 3: Oh, I think it absolutely will. I mean, in all those sorts of ways, right? Technology is shifting, changing what it means to be vulnerable. You can't help, but if you're thinking about 9-11 and the decisions that we made after 9-11, you can't help but kind of fast forward.
00:55:33
Speaker 1: What would they do now? They wouldn't use airplanes. They'd use some drone swarm or something, right? Like, I don't know if they'd even bother with commercial aircraft.
00:55:41
Speaker 2: Totally. I mean, the world is weird.
00:55:44
Speaker 3: We're getting strange with things like AI and other sorts of things.
00:55:49
Speaker 2: It's just a different battlefield. And yet some of these, you know.
00:55:53
Speaker 3: What is also the war Ukraine is refighting the boundaries of World War II in some ways, right?
00:55:58
Speaker 2: This is Putin reclaiming what he thinks is an initial.
00:56:04
Speaker 3: kind of soviet era right this is where there are these these undercurrents uh these historical undercurrents are meeting this bizarre you know futuristic moment with ai and with all sorts of new tools and you know it's going to create all sorts of challenges it's going to create all sorts of new vulnerabilities for terrorists and i just hope that like I guess part of this effort really is, can we remind ourselves of this trauma.
00:56:34
Speaker 2: That we went through?
00:56:36
Speaker 3: These days in which we were just seized with this fear and this suspicion and the decisions that we made after that were driven in a lot of ways by that fear and suspicion that led to these kind of adverse outcomes so many years, decades later. Can this next generation understand um, not fall into that same fear and suspicion that led us such down such a dark place in the first place. Can we use our tools as media and as historians?
00:57:06
Speaker 1: This is the most important thing you're doing, Brian. This is the most important thing you're doing. Cause I, you know, I weirdly do believe that, you know, look, we've got a bunch of scar tissue from this 25 years, nine 11 going forward. And yes, um, we pretty much, you know, we rehab the wrong part of our knee and we, we got everything we've gotten wrong, but, but my God, when it hit, when something similar happens again, I I'd like to think now we have, Hey, here's one way not to handle it.
00:57:39
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:41
Speaker 1: In fairness to us, we hadn't experienced an attack on our homeland like that. That's true. Never experienced. And frankly, no offense to Pearl Harbor, but, But that was not on, that was like on an island, literally. That was different. It was the closest thing we had experienced as a country, but we still had to tell every, the president had to tell everybody this happened back then, right? Like this was, you know, we, none of us had ever, you know, Oklahoma, people in Oklahoma City had experienced something like this, but nothing like this, right? So that's the hope is that what you're doing constantly reminding people, frankly, what we got wrong, how much of this we got wrong, how really bad it looks now, 25 years later, I hope provides at least a blueprint of what not to do, right? I'm not saying it means we'll do it right the next time, but hopefully we make different mistakes.
00:58:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. I mean, look, this was brand new. This shocked us in all sorts of ways.
00:58:46
Speaker 3: It reoriented everybody's, just changed everybody's vision of who we are as a country and our place in the world and what was possible in this country. We didn't think we were vulnerable to this, and we are. And it was brand new. But there will be, as you mentioned, with technology and all the kind of stuff that's coming and the shifting ground beneath us and all that, there's going to be new brand brand new things, too. And you wonder, you know, what is that percentage of us that's able to to sort of step back and say, can we call more emotions and make smart decisions? On 9-11, it was one person in the entire Congress, Barbara Lee. Next time, see if we can get those numbers up a little bit.
00:59:30
Speaker 1: So how do you balance? Let me get you out of here on this. How do you balance trying to step back and look at things from 60,000 feet with our nonstop amount of information getting shoved at you all the time?
00:59:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's I think there's a real benefit. And I think honestly, I think there's some hunger for that with with people. I think, you know, we we are we are we are we've been hit with a tsunami of information and a social media environment that we just still don't understand.
01:00:00
Speaker 2: And we still don't know what's happening.
01:00:02
Speaker 1: Oh, I basically said we're social media has been a great experiment on the human brain and it's been a failure.
01:00:09
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:00:10
Speaker 1: Right. But we just stuck with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:00:14
Speaker 2: And that's just a failure.
01:00:16
Speaker 3: We don't, you know, we haven't even begun to solve it yet. And we're getting hit with this other thing, AI now, which is further shifting our perception of what is real and what isn't. So I actually think there's a real hunger for basic, longer form solutions. A deeper dive in which sources are clear and the perspective is clear. The process is more transparent. I think there's a kind of hunger for that.
01:00:46
Speaker 1: Well, Brian, I don't know how numb you become when you work on something like this. At what point did you compartmentalize it, where you stopped reacting emotionally?
01:01:00
Speaker 3: You can't look at 9-11 and not be still affected by it. You just can't. The more you look at it, the more it's still there. And those days after are still there, and then some of the anger and stuff that happened, some of the decisions later. not one of those people who says how young people today don't get it i don't.
01:01:29
Speaker 1: Oh no i don't agree i think they're asking better questions exactly.
01:01:34
Speaker 3: Exactly which is hopeful so you you dig into this this dark day and this dark and these dark this decades of engagement and all these wars and all all the pain that's caused and what it's cost us but but um i i think i mean I emerged somewhat hopeful from all this that, uh, you know, the right questions are being asked and that there's a, there's an instinct and a willingness to, to think about it.
01:02:02
Speaker 1: This debut on nine 11 itself or the, or the Monday.
01:02:05
Speaker 2: Before the second. So it's, um, this is Wednesday.
01:02:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. Coming up this week. All right.
01:02:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:02:12
Speaker 1: Brian, this was great. Appreciate the time. Congratulations.
01:02:15
Speaker 3: Great. Great to chat again.
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00:02:15
Speaker 2: Because that's basically, you know, it's an entire generation.
00:02:35
Speaker 1: And, you know, I've you've heard me talk about this before, which is, you know, when is the perfect period to feel like you can get both an honest assessment of an historical event and at the same time, you know, still have firsthand accounts and at the same time be far enough away where people feel like they can say things that they couldn't say in the moment. And so we're at one of those periods with 9-11 and it's in that vein.
00:03:02
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:03:03
Speaker 1: That my next guest is here. It's Brian Knappenberger. He is the executive producer and director of a 9-11 documentary that is landing on Netflix in the month of September, Turning Point, Generation 9-11. This is part of the Turning Point franchise of historical events there. And Brian joins me now. So Brian, I believe there's something somewhere in that 20 to 30 year range is when I feel like Living sources finally tell the truth. And you're far enough away where you don't have to worry about personal feelings sometimes as much. Look, before we get into the specifics of this documentary, you do a lot of history. What's your sense? What's your experience when you're trying to recreate a moment or trying to understand what was happening in and around a life experience? during when one of these turning point events happen. What's your sense of when you feel like you're getting close to the truth?
00:04:07
Speaker 3: It's interesting. I thought a lot. That's a great question. I thought a lot about it when we were creating this, creating this film. When we first released, you mentioned the first series. So the turning point 9-11 and the war on terror was on the 20th year anniversary of 9-11.
00:04:23
Speaker 2: And, you know, a lot of people watched it on Netflix.
00:04:27
Speaker 3: And there was a lot of uh, chatter online, you know, I was kind of looking at how people were talking about it and thinking about the film. And one of the things that really struck me and that I think goes to your, uh, sort of speaks to your question is, is, um, how many people didn't know what.
00:04:42
Speaker 2: Nine 11 was, um, really didn't know either.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: They hadn't been born yet, or, um, they were just too young to remember the events of that day. So, um, you know, here we are, And so for me, that was just really eye-opening. 9-11, like so many people, changed my life. I mean, I can't imagine. It changed the course of how I saw the world. It changed my career.
00:05:09
Speaker 1: Ryan, my wife and I moved in with each other that day, that night. Did you really?
00:05:13
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:05:13
Speaker 1: I mean, we had just started dating. And she had a little dog, lived on Capitol Hill. And I lived in the suburbs of Arlington, suburbs of D.C. in Arlington. And we worked at the Watergate together. Um, and so, you know, I always have visions of my staff looking at the, looking like craning their neck to see if they could see the smoke from the Pentagon. And I remember I'm like, you're not staying near the Capitol. That's insanity. And her mom was a little bit conservative and probably would have frowned upon it except for the circumstances that we were in. We never left. And we get married a year later. I mean, but I was 28, 29 when this happened. So, yeah, I think you and I are about the same age. It's like it was a life changer, particularly if you lived in New York or D.C.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:06:04
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:06:05
Speaker 2: I mean, uh, exactly.
00:06:07
Speaker 3: And I'm not, you know, it's not that you and I are old, um, but, uh, but we're.
00:06:15
Speaker 1: Just not young. That's how I, I'm just not young anymore. Right. There you go.
00:06:20
Speaker 3: But, you know, on the first anniversary of 9-11, I was I was actually in Condor. I was making one of my first films. It was picked up by PBS Frontline. And it was so profound and for me. And, you know, here we are 25 years later and we're about to reach the point in the next couple of years where nearly half of all Americans were either born after 9-11 or were too young to remember the events of that day.
00:06:45
Speaker 2: So, you know, when we're making this, I'm really thinking about how how.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: This event is moving from a lived memory to to history. And and so this this this film is really about the experience of that of that younger generation. I don't assume people that know what 9-11 meant or what it felt like to go through it. I wanted to bring them into that day to understand that. Not just the terror and the uncertainty, but what happens next? Because some of the decisions we made after 9-11 and those uncertain days and weeks that followed really define our current modern world more than the event itself.
00:07:30
Speaker 1: Before I get into the film, I'm just curious, because I know I suddenly was curious after I was watching your film, is.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: Did you find any scholarship in 1966 about how we marked the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor? And did you look back at 1988 and how we marked the 25th anniversary of Kennedy being shot? I'm trying to look, I was 16 and 88. So I, I, I remember all the specials because man, I was an obsessive conspiracy theorist back then. I read it all right with Kennedy. So I have some memory of 88, but that is what, I was just curious. Did you go back to see how other sort of scarring events like that that was sort of captured the imagination of the country and how it was handled 25 years later?
00:08:19
Speaker 3: I did a little bit. And I like you, I remember I remember that because I was in high school. But, you know, one thing I did clock for sure is to do the math back 25 years from my own birth.
00:08:34
Speaker 2: And that would have been Hiroshima.
00:08:36
Speaker 3: So 25 years before I was born was Hiroshima. So that really puts it in perspective. This, this event that was so transformative to us that in which we will remember it was the day you moved in with your wife. It was, I spent every minute of that day watching television as my view of the world shifted.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: I could feel it.
00:08:57
Speaker 3: Politics was different. My, the way I saw our country was different. Uh, and, uh, And that is such an indelible moment for us. But you can't be upset with people who just weren't around and don't see it that way.
00:09:14
Speaker 1: Look, I remember I filled out an application to join the Navy Reserves. Never heard back from the Navy, by the way, on that. But I remember in that aftermath, that first week, it was sort of like, especially here in D.C., it was inevitable more was going to happen. And so then you started to think, okay, what am I going to do? You know, both in I need to contribute and at the same time, how am I going to escape when the next terrorist attack comes? And how am I going to live my life? And here's the thing. A lot of people were thinking this way back then. And I think the most, the biggest, you want to talk about the biggest prediction did not come true. It was that, right? This idea that we were going to become Tel Aviv. I mean, I think that was the that is what I thought. You know, we lost our terrorist virginity. Right. Our terrorism virginity and what the what life has been like for the average person in Tel Aviv for for our for the last 40 years, I thought was going to be life in Washington and New York. And I guess thankfully it's not been that way.
00:10:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
00:10:15
Speaker 3: And that's part of what I was hoping to capture in this film, just that that fear, the fear of that day, but just also that uncertainty in the days and the weeks and the months that followed. You know, all of those events were done in a few hours in the morning. But we didn't know what was coming next. We didn't know if there were more coming that next day, in the next week, in the next month. We were so sort of traumatized by this that we just didn't know what was coming next.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: And in hindsight, nothing came next, really.
00:10:48
Speaker 3: There was the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, both absurdly, sort of absurd attempts.
00:10:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of like bad copycats, right?
00:10:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
00:10:59
Speaker 3: But but since then, there's been virtually virtually nothing, certainly not connected to Al Qaeda.
00:11:06
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the concept. Generation 9-11 was the goal. Who's your audience?
00:11:16
Speaker 2: My audience is, well, everybody, I think, will get something out of this.
00:11:20
Speaker 3: But I really do want to focus on people that weren't around that day, who were too young to remember those events, who may know a little bit about it, but may not quite understand how much, how different it is, you know, how our country is. I mean, America after 9-11 is just a different country than the America that came before it. Um, you know, and I would, I would love to, to not, to go through, not just what it felt like that day for people, uh, not to, to communicate the fear and the uncertainty that came after. Um, and not to excuse the decisions that came later. I'm pretty critical of a lot. No, but you have to explain it.
00:12:03
Speaker 1: Like, you know, you had this, you know, I'm glad you kept it in. You clipped a news clip, but I think it was Wolf Blitzer saying, you know, 63% of Americans are willing to give up some freedom in exchange for, you know, for security, right? And, you know, that, you know, you wouldn't see that. I don't know if the number would be that high today. And that, of course, you know, with security that, you know, comes that comfort perhaps. But I thought that was important to include. Like you have to, you could sit here and say, I can't believe You guys went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it just makes no sense. Yeah, it absolutely makes little sense now. But in the moment, we'd never experienced anything like this. This wasn't a nation state that came after us. And more importantly, as much as we also just didn't believe a stateless actor could do this without the help of the state. And we were just our folks. And I understand that instinct that we weren't going to believe they didn't have help until we were, you know, and it was going to take years to convince us that that wasn't the case, right? So I think it's, and I probably to this day, I mean, I think you did your best to convey that. It's still very hard to convey the fear we were all living in, particularly, and again, this was a big divide. And I know this was harder to capture in, I think, 90 minutes. Well, you need, I was talking about this with my producer. To really do 9-11, you might need to do the O.J. Simpson Made in America five-part 15-hour expose because one of the things that I think we've never fully appreciated is how the rest of America, while certainly touched by this, not like D.C. and New York, and yet we drove so much of the feelings about it to the point of you weren't allowed to comment if you hadn't experienced it.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:14:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it is it drove us to make decisions. I mean, back to who this is for. I do think it would be I'd love the next generation to kind of understand the people that are, you know, sort of will begin to start to take the reins of power. and start to make some of these decisions and start to define who we are as a country. I mean, not to fall into the same fear and suspicion that ended up leading us down a pretty.
00:14:33
Speaker 2: Dark path as well.
00:14:35
Speaker 3: You know, we gave up personal liberties as a country, and it launched us into these endless, shifting, kind of forever wars. Yeah.
00:14:46
Speaker 2: And, you know, a.
00:14:49
Speaker 3: Lot of that fear and suspicion was directed at, you know, Muslim communities. And we built this enormous security and enforcement infrastructure in response. Mass dragnets, suspicionless surveillance expanded dramatically. Not a lot of the conversation about whether that was, you know, whether that flew in the face of the Fourth Amendment and whether we were willing to do that or not. But that whole kind of infrastructure that we built, it didn't disappear when that immediate threat receded.
00:15:21
Speaker 2: It remained and it found new targets. And when you look at this, you know, I.
00:15:26
Speaker 3: Think when you talk to the people nowadays, they don't realize like, you know, you and I lived in a world where.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: There wasn't a Department of Homeland Security. security, where there wasn't.
00:15:35
Speaker 3: ICE, you know, this, you know, 9-11 created that and created the departments that would eventually become ICE.
00:15:41
Speaker 2: We very much live in a world now that was created out of the decisions after 9-11.
00:15:48
Speaker 3: And those decisions were largely based on fear and suspicion.
00:15:52
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, one of the things I think it's one of the worst decisions government made was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. And I understand how it happened. And there had been certainly there was a plan on the shelf. There would have been people talking about should we have should should should really Treasury and Commerce, you know, back then Treasury and Commerce for some reason housed a few of these kind of semi security agencies. And we thought, you know, maybe there ought to be another cabinet agency. So there was, you know, like anything that there was a play. I always tell people you want to put a plan on the shelf because you never know. When a crisis emerges, people are desperate for a plan, hand them one, you know, sometimes. And Joe Lieberman handed them one, right? This was sort of him and a few others were sort of into this. But, you know, you can go back in history and any decision government makes quickly is usually a bad decision. It's hard to find one that when you made it quickly, that it goes well.
00:16:58
Speaker 3: In the initial series, we talked about that vote for the AUMF, the authorization to use military force, which was really made in the days, maybe within a week of 9-11. There was this kind of bill that basically said that The president had the ability to go after terrorist groups in a very open-ended way, terrorist groups all over the world. Countryless, right?
00:17:22
Speaker 2: It was countryless, yeah.
00:17:24
Speaker 3: And that passed unanimously, except for one person, Barbara Lee. She's the only one who said, look, I'm as upset as everybody. I had to flee the Capitol. I was scared for my life. I think she had an assistant or somebody, a staffer that was killed. But she said, look, we can't let this fear just overtake us and make these decisions that we may regret later. Even in this moment where everybody is on board with some kind of vengeance, some kind of military action, we need to keep our heads about us. It's striking that there was one vote that said no to the AUMF. And yet that is the effort that has continued really to list down Including going after groups that were never even around on 9-11.
00:18:17
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00:19:59
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: The culture, which was still more monoculture than it is today. We hadn't, this is pre-iPhone, which means pre, you know, 2.0 fragmentation, right? Basically, pre-social media. Yes, there was internet. Yes, there was blogs. Yes, there was certainly conspiracy. There was plenty of places for conspiracy theory to foment, don't get me wrong. But it really was more on the outskirts, even the extreme edges of the internet. But the mainstream conversation was, you're either pro-America or you're with the terrorists.
00:20:35
Speaker 3: Yeah. People forget that stuff. I was trying to get a little more of that in there too. The freedom fries or, uh, you know, you can't call them French fries cause the.
00:20:42
Speaker 2: French shouldn't resist.
00:20:44
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: Um, but, um, You know, that was a weird moment.
00:20:52
Speaker 3: And it did seize the culture in a positive way. It was a moment of unity, too.
00:20:57
Speaker 2: People really... It was kind of an amazing thing.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: I mean, it's one of the most watched events in all of world history up until that point. It was, you know, people... You know, those first... You know, there's this feeling that we've experienced something together, something, you know, traumatic, but that we would respond to it together. Right. We all kind of felt like we were there for each other. People kind of forget that that was that was true in America is true worldwide.
00:21:22
Speaker 1: I mean, look, I mean, I mean, this is going to sound a little a little snarky, but, you know, people love New York City. And that was a that was remarkable.
00:21:33
Speaker 3: Right.
00:21:33
Speaker 1: New York City was a city that you loved if you were there, but you hated if you weren't. Right. Mindset a little bit. Right. There was always, you know, and, you know, the the the coming together, rallying around New York City, which is, again, you're not going to find that every day in some of the reddest parts of America. But in that moment, right, everybody was I mean, to this day. We treat firefighters better. as a collective, if you will, right. We local communities vote to give them raises and all this stuff. Those first responders in particular, we didn't, we never treated those folks as anything other than bureaucrats before nine 11 and our firefighters that are, you know, we now know we, we, we treat that. We, we treat it all differently because we realize, you know, they don't know what moment they're putting their life on the line. They just, They signed up to do this. They just jumped in. You're right. It's like we shouldn't just focus on the negative. We brought pride into being a firefighter. I think to this day, you have people wanting to be a firefighter. A little bit, it goes back to 9-11.
00:22:49
Speaker 3: I think that's totally true. It really gets you when you're going through footage. you know, of this day.
00:22:55
Speaker 1: This was a little triggering to watch this. I'll be honest, Brian.
00:22:58
Speaker 3: It is a little.
00:22:58
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have, you know, I'll make the, you know, I don't know how much 9-11, I struggle sometimes doing 9-11 retrospectives. You know, you feel like, well, I went through it. So I know. I had to cover it. I had to do all, I had to live it. But I'm glad I saw this because it's a, I realize, boy, we have a lot more work to do.
00:23:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:23:27
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:23:27
Speaker 2: That unity is right.
00:23:28
Speaker 3: I mean, it gets you that, you know, the, the, uh, you know, the bloodlines, the way that people kind of came to New York city, the, that, that sort of collective coming together. Um, that's, that's important part of the story. I'm, I'm pretty critical probably of the, uh, in this and other stuff I've done of the war of the wars and the decisions that were made and the way it changed our government, the way we, started changing what it kind of meant to be an american uh that sort of thing and some of that and the divisiveness that came later but there was a real moment of unity world.
00:24:02
Speaker 2: Of, you know, Trump talking about NATO.
00:24:04
Speaker 3: Why should we put the bill for NATO if they know we're not doing their fair shit and all this stuff?
00:24:09
Speaker 2: But the only time, you know, this kind of.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: Key Article 5, you know, was ever triggered with NATO ever in all of history, in the history of NATO, was in defense of the United States after 9-11. That's it. And the world came together and said, we're going to we're going to help you. We're going to protect you. We're going to be that was the show of unity that we've never, never seen any at any other point in history.
00:24:34
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting. I'm sure, you know, there's a lot of complicated feelings for a lot of people when it comes to the Bush, Bush's and the Cheney's in 9-11. And there's a lot of people who have rethought their belief, what they think of these two people and these families after the Trump era. right? Which is what made people. But I don't think people fully appreciate how... In hindsight, we were lucky to have an empathetic president at that moment. Whatever one thinks of the decisions Bush makes down the line on the war, that's one thing. And we're going to have a lot of policy disagreements there. But going to a mosque very quickly after 9-11... To say the things that he said after 9-11, the rhetoric that was used and was denounced if somebody else chose to do something different. I mean, we had some responsible leaders rhetorically in this country at a time when, can you imagine today's leadership with a similar situation? Yeah. I don't, you know, with the infusion of Christian nationalism in our Pentagon. With the way Islamophobia is sort of woven through so much of MAGA? You know, I mean, I think, you know, at the time, it was just he was behaving as we would assume any president would behave. Now you look back and realize, hey, not every president might have behaved the way Bush behaved.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: He made an effort.
00:26:09
Speaker 3: That's true for sure to say that Muslims are not terrorists, to reach out to the Muslim community. One of the things Trump did, I think, is he found that there was still.
00:26:21
Speaker 3: Political power somehow there was something to exploit yeah in in firing people up and and in regenerating some regenerating some of that fear and suspicion and and using it for his own political purposes i mean there's you know these speeches they're equally uh upsetting when you go back to 2016-17 where he's saying i think there should be more surveillance of certain mosques and Really calling for no Muslim ban.
00:26:50
Speaker 2: Stop until we understand what's happening. Think about that.
00:26:53
Speaker 3: That's 15 years after 9-11 and no terrorist attacks happened in that 15 years at all.
00:26:59
Speaker 2: So why are we.
00:27:02
Speaker 3: Banning Muslims until we understand what the problem is? There isn't a problem.
00:27:08
Speaker 1: This is the legacy of 9-11 that is a scourge. Which is Islamophobia. Obviously, the seeds were already there a little bit. Frankly, how Hollywood portrayed every Muslim, right, you know, back in the 90s and the early aughts was a certain way. You and I in the 80s grew up with hijackers, always happened to be from the Middle East.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: They would be- Or communists, I guess.
00:27:40
Speaker 3: Russians.
00:27:42
Speaker 1: Russian communists. Remember the terrorism, the hijackings of the 80s that was always one of the attempts to try to garner attention for various issues in the Middle East. Boy, I can't tell- Is it better or worse? On one hand, there are more Muslims in American political life today than there were 25 years ago. And I frankly think a lot of Muslim Americans decided, hey, you know, we need to get more involved in American politics and more involved in the American fabric. So we are not like seen as outcasts and isolated and all this stuff. And so on one hand, there's been a tremendous amount of progress. And yet it feels like Islamophobia only gets worse.
00:28:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, you felt like, yeah, I felt like pre-Trump, there was significant, you know, the country had sort of made some real progress to some degree. I think he discovered there was this hatred there, I guess.
00:28:46
Speaker 1: Well, it's like we Jews have discovered with anti-Semitism, none of it ever goes away. It just goes dormant for a little while.
00:28:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:28:56
Speaker 3: The... weird way in which it's kind of shown up to is, you know, when we did, um, the, uh, you know, the, we've talked to a lot of kids who were, uh, who's.
00:29:08
Speaker 2: Lost parents on nine 11. And one of them was this woman, uh, Laura Homer.
00:29:13
Speaker 3: And, um, she was, her father was the pilot on flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
00:29:19
Speaker 1: And she had, she, you know, she really rocked me with one of her comments, but go ahead. I don't want to give it away.
00:29:25
Speaker 3: No, it's just really powerful. And one of the things, first of all, it's just her story was powerful. But one of the things that really struck me was, you know, that she was trolled online, that she had, that she was, you know, while she was, you did these comments, these direct.
00:29:40
Speaker 2: Messages that were sort of, I don't know how you.
00:29:43
Speaker 3: Describe it, I guess, mocking her or trolling her. And it really made it clear to me that that a lot of a kind of younger generation is getting what they know about 9-11 from social media. And, you know, social media, the explosion of social media happens right after 9-11.
00:29:58
Speaker 2: I mean, we're talking about, I think Facebook is around 2004, maybe Twitter's.
00:30:03
Speaker 3: Maybe Reddit is something like 2005, Twitter is around 2006. So suddenly this is the wave of social media that kind of rushes into our system, just as we're still kind of trying to figure out the trauma of this event. And that goes in this very bizarre, dark way. You know, this very dark movement that people call the truth or movement. You know, I think it's pretty clear that that's a sort of– uh, past that you can kind of trace and you can kind of follow Alex Jones really starts to become famous in that truth or movement. Um, but this, uh, you know, this conspiracies that swirl around it, that 9-11 was the inside job. I mean, that anticipates this dark, that anticipates Trump and some of the, some of the, um, divisiveness online that we started to see that started to get sharper and sharper. Um, And it really gets into stark relief when you're hearing that from somebody who lost their father on 9-11. What does that person think of the truther movement or this divisiveness? And just sort of put in context that how far then where that movement has gone and where it's taken us.
00:31:18
Speaker 1: So, you know, I think about sort of the broader strokes of now looking back 25 years. Our post 9-11 response, was it a total failure in hindsight? And if it's not, what parts of it weren't a failure?
00:31:40
Speaker 3: It's a good question, and we struggle with that, and we try to figure that out in the film. Like so many people, I was in favor of initial military action. So many people felt they attacked us.
00:31:52
Speaker 1: Got to hold somebody accountable, damn it.
00:31:54
Speaker 2: We got to do it.
00:31:54
Speaker 1: I'm going to punch a wall through drywall. I'm going to punch my fist through drywall and feel really good. Proud of myself. And then I'm going to go to Home Depot and go figure out how to patch that.
00:32:04
Speaker 3: Right. And, you know, we drove the Taliban out pretty quickly and we drove almost completely out of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda as well. All that leadership fled into Balochistan and into Pakistan and they were gone. And as I mentioned, my one of my first films I ever made was I was in Kandahar on the one year anniversary of. And at that point, this was optimistic. I mean, there's no other way for me to describe it. This was a positive, interesting.
00:32:32
Speaker 1: They did want to say, I mean, you point this out. We were we were treated as liberators. And and, you know, there is a you want to talk about a what if what if we never go to Iraq and Afghanistan is our sole focus. I don't think Afghanistan ends the way it ends. I agree. At Abbey Gate.
00:32:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, we took we took our eye off the ball, no question, and created this war of choice in Iraq. So, yeah, it's it's a really stark for me, you know, to sort of be there and experience this kind of optimism that there's this new chapter. And then to talk to these Marines that, you know, nobody thought when I was there for sure that 20 years after 9-11, we would actually be engaging Marines, sending Marines in there. to assist the taliban in the takeover of of of kabul i mean and nothing quite says it like that we we are they we're sending our troops in to assist with this and so what was this whole effort of failure it kind of kind of seems like it at this point uh all that money that we put in uh to those what's the win.
00:33:43
Speaker 1: Like what is better today than it was on september 12th 2001.
00:33:52
Speaker 2: For security? For national security?
00:33:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:33:54
Speaker 3: Or.
00:33:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's go with national security.
00:33:57
Speaker 2: What is better today?
00:33:59
Speaker 3: You know, we probably smartened up about communications between intelligence agencies.
00:34:06
Speaker 2: You know, we probably did.
00:34:07
Speaker 3: You know, there was a real lack of communication.
00:34:11
Speaker 2: It wasn't even a lack of communication.
00:34:13
Speaker 3: It was territorialism between FBI and the CIA. And we were naive in that regard. I think we've smartened up about that. That's probably true. I think some of the, even though they're kind of annoying, but some of the stuff at the airports is, is probably smart. But the ways in which we have gone overboard and the ways in fear has really led us into a country that has changed us, and I don't think it's for the better.
00:34:46
Speaker 2: I think when you look at ICE, the violence on.
00:34:50
Speaker 3: The streets today that's perpetuated by ICE, I think that's a reverberation of 9-11. There's no question about it. That is a result of the choices that we made. Our immigration debate has been separable from all of this. And I think we rushed into a new technological world that expanded technology. surveillance and security and surveillance of american citizens in a way that is uh that was dangerous and could continue to be dangerous and more importantly flies in the face of basic kind of fourth amendment protections i mean you know there's a reason why founders said you can't be searched without a warrant there's a reason for that so this idea that we'd have this mass suspicionless dragnet surveillance of americans who aren't suspected of a crime, it just flies in the face of something that's pretty important and valuable and special about this country.
00:35:53
Speaker 1: How do you answer the question of why did he attack us?
00:35:58
Speaker 2: Why did he attack us? That's a good question.
00:36:01
Speaker 1: He is bin Laden. Yeah. Sorry, but I've got a few more of bin Laden, but I want to start with that. Do you think that's a question we've sufficiently answered for this generation that maybe was alive but wasn't aware?
00:36:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, officially, of course, the way he talks about it.
00:36:22
Speaker 1: It's interesting.
00:36:23
Speaker 2: After he died there, you know, after.
00:36:26
Speaker 3: Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, really close to this military base in Pakistan, they found six thousand documents of his. And so they're trying to piece together some. little bit more about him from that you know what do we know about him really actually he did a surprising number of television interviews in the 90s uh for somebody who was wanted back then um talk to cnn and talk to uh.
00:36:55
Speaker 1: Yet another uh kid of privilege who becomes a political extremist Yes. Yeah. Interesting pattern.
00:37:02
Speaker 2: But anyway, you know, he talked about.
00:37:04
Speaker 3: The military, American military next to holy sites and Saudi Arabia. He talked about just I think I think it's, you know, a lot has been made, I think, of and it's true that that. we, you know, we backed some, some dictators and, and people that, that were oppressive and, uh, that it was convenient for us. And, um, and so I think, I think he, uh, a lot of his point was around that. Um, and so that, that is, that is the, that's the reason.
00:37:35
Speaker 1: I mean, he's a story to tell like, cause look, we had a cold war mindset, right? Real polity where we, where our values, we, we, we look the other way. You know, if you were on, if you were on Team capitalism, we looked the other way as long as you weren't going to be on team communism. And it was like you were forgiven of anything else, no matter how you treated your people, whatever it was. And we were, you know, we embraced transactional politics. Basically, we bought allies when necessary. And when you're dealing in a binary world, which is the world that the Cold War was, I can explain it. but there were always going to be consequences. And, and the, and this is among the consequences. Look, we have an entire multiple generations of Latin America. I grew up in Miami. So I, I live with this multiple generations of Latin Americans who don't trust the Americans, which is why I like, I can't believe we're taking the oil of the Venezuelans. It's like, dude, we learned nothing from history. This is only going to end badly. I just don't know how it's bad, how badly. And here we go again. Um, But that's a tough thing to– we won the Cold War because of these decisions. But it did lead– there are unintended consequences and it's possible the rise of bin Laden was one of them.
00:39:02
Speaker 3: Yeah and no question about it to add a little irony to it you know osama bin laden was one of our solutions at one point to winning the cold war and so we were we.
00:39:14
Speaker 1: Were with the taliban before we were against them which which we were back with them remember.
00:39:18
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly yeah um but it's it's an interesting question i i take it that that's those are the those are the reasons for that and i think i think we learn a lot about that another question a very a of that that I kind of think about is what did he want to do after 9-11? And, you know, there's, you know, I think that they were, they seemed... As far as I know, the next video interview of his is something like 2004 or something. He comes forward. That's the next time we actually see him on camera. And they were a small group on 9-11. They weren't a large group. And he was focused mostly on killing more Americans, which led to the underwear bomber.
00:40:06
Speaker 1: He was more focused on tactics than he was... something larger right.
00:40:11
Speaker 3: Yes but i think he came to understand that that the real damage was was the divisiveness that it caused within us and i think it was the the way that it triggered us uh you know going to war all over the world and on this incredible um sort of you know this enormous enormous amount of money that it took us to go to war and the way that that would deteriorate our society i think he came to see that um uh later that that was actually the the success the divisive what we would do to ourselves in divisiveness and what and the kind of attrition and the the um uh the cost that it would take for to be engaged in all these wars over so many years.
00:40:55
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00:42:52
Speaker 2: I think that's true.
00:42:54
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, when you look at 9-11, Al-Qaeda, the group Al-Qaeda, I think we're talking about a few hundred people Maximum. That's it.
00:43:04
Speaker 2: And so, you know, there and and I mean, in the world.
00:43:07
Speaker 3: And so we're talking about this very small group of people that were able to exploit this kind of vulnerability in our system and our, you know, the openness of our.
00:43:16
Speaker 1: I mean, doesn't this get to why the Bush administration for so long just refused to believe they did this on their own? Right.
00:43:24
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think it does.
00:43:26
Speaker 2: I think it does.
00:43:26
Speaker 3: But really, it's pretty striking that there's so few members of al-Qaeda. And of course, there is no al-Qaeda in Iraq at all before we go to war in Iraq. That's it. And so there's this whole debathification process where we kick people out of, and then we put people in prisons. There's this kind of fomenting of extremism. They suddenly create this, they create AQI al-Qaeda in Iraq. It is born out of after this as a reaction to our going to war in Iraq. AQI becomes the Islamic State of Iraq and grows, has broader territorial ambitions, moves into Syria, adds the S, and suddenly we have ISIS, which is the biggest terrorist organization probably in the history of the world. I mean, it's just a huge um uh it was international um uh well funded because they're they're stealing art and and uh oil reserves and stuff so it's um it's this phenomenal kind of um domino effect that that increases as our military engagement increases.
00:44:39
Speaker 1: So in uh 2051 uh at the 50th um Do you think we'll be more comfortable describing basically that– I have this theory that essentially about 25 years from now, we're going to put all the Middle Eastern wars into one bucket and just say basically the West got the post-9-11 reaction wrong and it screwed up and it cost America its standing in the world and it really set back the United States– as far as their global legitimacy, it set them back a generation, if not two. It feels like that's, frankly, the general direction we're headed by 2051 without some sort of course correction.
00:45:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:45:30
Speaker 2: Well, when I do that series, you have me on your show, by the way, at that point.
00:45:34
Speaker 1: We'll both be. Won't it be like, you know, I mean, that's what I'm curious about is what will all this look like When the only people making these will be people that really didn't experience it. So it's just going to be seen as outcome focused.
00:45:48
Speaker 3: Right.
00:45:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. And boy, like to me, the Iran war and the Iraq war will probably get conflated the farther away we get. Every time we have done these war of choices, they don't work out. Vietnam, Iraq. It'll start being done that way because what's interesting about the first nine months of Afghanistan that your documentary captured so well is that wasn't a choice. We felt like, well, that's where we had to go. We had to go find them. We went into Iraq the first time because– We were kicking them out of Kuwait. We weren't really going into Iraq. We were justified. It's a reminder. When you truly are justified, you usually make good decisions. When you're trying to be preemptive, that's usually when you make bad decisions.
00:46:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, no question. You know, I.
00:46:41
Speaker 3: you mentioned Vietnam because we're at the, we were at the 50 year anniversary of the fall of Saigon last year.
00:46:47
Speaker 2: And we did a little, uh, we did a piece on that.
00:46:49
Speaker 3: Um, and, uh, you know, another, another person that we interviewed here is, uh, on the wind, uh, whose father was in Vietnam and fled Vietnam in 1975 with the fall with that fall. So, um, and when you look at those, um, images of South Vietnamese who'd worked with the Americans desperately trying to escape as Saigon fell, running towards planes, trying to board helicopters. I mean, these are some of the most famous images in all of photojournalism.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: And what do we do? We recreate it in 2021.
00:47:20
Speaker 3: Compare them with those images in the final days in Kabul airport. The echoes are just impossible to ignore. You get another sense of this with the responsibility on to help end this war, right? To take these final steps to get everybody out. And yeah, some of them weren't born yet. Some of them were three or four years old, way too young to remember the events of 9-11. And they're fighting and working with and at odds with occasionally Taliban soldiers who are the same, too.
00:48:02
Speaker 2: Young to remember the events.
00:48:04
Speaker 3: This is a new generation finishing off this war. war that started right after, in the days after 9-11. And so in 50 years, where will we be at the 50-year anniversary?
00:48:17
Speaker 1: Well, but it's interesting. But think about it, Brian. You know, 50 years after the fall of Saigon, we're comfortable saying we lost the Vietnam War.
00:48:24
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:48:25
Speaker 1: We were not comfortable saying that at the 25-year anniversary. We were still, there were too many Vietnam vets in our politics, too many Vietnam vets, you know, in leadership positions, who I think were never going to accept the premise that yeah that they were involved in a failure.
00:48:40
Speaker 3: Right yeah i want yeah that's a really good point i wonder about the because you talk to some of these marines that were there at abbey gate and i i get a sense of that they're they're conflicted right i mean they really wanted to serve i mean i have so much respect for them first of all um but you know they they wanted to um, to help. They wanted, they thought they were doing something, you know, important. Um, they, you know, um, one of them got involved, not because of, um, Al Qaeda at 9-11 necessarily, but because of ISIS, some of the things that he saw online with ISIS.
00:49:18
Speaker 2: And so he was motivated to go kind of solve that.
00:49:21
Speaker 3: And I mean, I really kind of respect the instinct, um, in general, but what are we, you know, but you, but when you talk to them now, you wonder if they have, you know, they're, they're questioning some of not just why they were there, but what about Iraq? What happened? Um, I sense a real kind of deep thinking about, about what this was all about in them. And by the way, that gives me some hope. I mean, I think, you know, as we talk to young people, so often when people get older, not that you and I are old, but once you get older, so many people say, oh, you know, people don't get it nowadays.
00:49:57
Speaker 1: Sometimes they ask the simpler question that we're like ducking too often.
00:50:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. But I, man, I, I, I, and do understand it and do are starting to I'm going to ask.
00:50:11
Speaker 1: You a question that you don't have the answer for because neither do I but you know I've been thinking a lot about the fact that we're at the 25th anniversary of 9-11 and every year we've passed a defense budget that pretty much gave the Pentagon whatever they asked for and it hasn't mattered Democratic Congress Republican Congress sometimes it's always waving the bloody shirt right don't forget 9-11 right a little bit of that right and you're like And yet we're running out of munitions. We can barely fight a war against Iran and then also be prepared for a second. The United States of America is suddenly being humbled by Iran. And what have we done with 25 years of military, of Pentagon budgets? How is it that 25 years of some of the most sophisticated war planning supposedly, that had been done has left us in a position like this. I mean, it's a question, that's why I said, I'm asking you a question you can't answer, but it's a, I kind of think that this is a time to lift up and ask ourselves, we're at the 25th anniversary of 9-11, we're still mired in the Middle East, and we seem less prepared for another 9-11 than we were on 9-11.
00:51:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you.
00:51:33
Speaker 3: It is.
00:51:34
Speaker 2: It's and I think that, you know, just to sort of take that back to.
00:51:39
Speaker 3: The AUMF and to some to some degree, I mean, you know this was a huge this idea that the authorization to use military force this is a this is a shift in how it's supposed to work in the united states right the constitution is pretty clear congress has the power to declare.
00:51:55
Speaker 1: War right i keep wondering if the members of congress do any of them read the constitution before they come to the office i don't know i mean i kind of think that they have to read the they won't i understand that most people don't read the owner's manuals um to things but i i think my members of congress ought to.
00:52:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, if they did, it's unambiguous.
00:52:15
Speaker 3: There was a real reason why after the American Revolution, these founders made it clear, we don't want a king deciding that we're just going to go to war. The ability to go to war is in the hands of Congress. Also, the ability to fund the war is in the hands of Congress. Congress has a huge amount of power here. But put Post 9-11, and I think you can also probably argue Cold War stuff here, too. But in the modern era, especially post 9-11, Congress has relinquished that power.
00:52:49
Speaker 1: Been a blank check both in money to the Pentagon and in power to the presidency on this stuff. And are we better off for it?
00:52:59
Speaker 2: Definitely not.
00:53:00
Speaker 3: I think you see this in attacks on Venezuelan boats, in international waters.
00:53:08
Speaker 2: You see this in the Iran war.
00:53:10
Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting that you included that. Why did you include it?
00:53:14
Speaker 3: Just emphasizing this shift of power to the executive that we don't question. And you clearly see that in Iran.
00:53:26
Speaker 3: Trump doesn't feel like he even needs to explain why we're going. It's deteriorating so far. It's not just that there seems to be no congressional oversight of any kind or, you know, congressional, you know, no discussion with Congress.
00:53:41
Speaker 2: But but no, no discussion with the American people.
00:53:44
Speaker 1: Nothing.
00:53:44
Speaker 2: We're just they're just doing it.
00:53:47
Speaker 3: And so that that's we've slipped pretty far since 9-11 and certainly since the beginning of this country and the founding of this country, that basic idea that people themselves have to have some say who they go to war with.
00:54:02
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's land this plane, the series Turning Point. What's what are some you hinted to me that this is kind of a season two. So what's a few other projects coming?
00:54:14
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know. This is kind of the end of this one, I think, unless we return to it later. But, yeah, we're continuing to be just really fascinated with how things are shifting right now technologically, you know, what technology is doing to us.
00:54:35
Speaker 1: Taylor shared in one of his shows, I think it's Lioness, had a line that I thought was terrific about Ukraine. He said, it's as if World War I and Star Wars merged, that that's the Ukraine war, right? Because we're having this, you know, we're radically changing warfare, right? In real time watching this, it feels like we're only a few years from some drone swarm showing up on the coasts of one of our major cities. And we're going to be like, what the hell is that, right? Like it feels inevitable. Yeah, it is. Is the superpower mindset going to get punctured even more so in the next 10 years?
00:55:19
Speaker 3: Oh, I think it absolutely will. I mean, in all those sorts of ways, right? Technology is shifting, changing what it means to be vulnerable. You can't help, but if you're thinking about 9-11 and the decisions that we made after 9-11, you can't help but kind of fast forward.
00:55:33
Speaker 1: What would they do now? They wouldn't use airplanes. They'd use some drone swarm or something, right? Like, I don't know if they'd even bother with commercial aircraft.
00:55:41
Speaker 2: Totally. I mean, the world is weird.
00:55:44
Speaker 3: We're getting strange with things like AI and other sorts of things.
00:55:49
Speaker 2: It's just a different battlefield. And yet some of these, you know.
00:55:53
Speaker 3: What is also the war Ukraine is refighting the boundaries of World War II in some ways, right?
00:55:58
Speaker 2: This is Putin reclaiming what he thinks is an initial.
00:56:04
Speaker 3: kind of soviet era right this is where there are these these undercurrents uh these historical undercurrents are meeting this bizarre you know futuristic moment with ai and with all sorts of new tools and you know it's going to create all sorts of challenges it's going to create all sorts of new vulnerabilities for terrorists and i just hope that like I guess part of this effort really is, can we remind ourselves of this trauma.
00:56:34
Speaker 2: That we went through?
00:56:36
Speaker 3: These days in which we were just seized with this fear and this suspicion and the decisions that we made after that were driven in a lot of ways by that fear and suspicion that led to these kind of adverse outcomes so many years, decades later. Can this next generation understand um, not fall into that same fear and suspicion that led us such down such a dark place in the first place. Can we use our tools as media and as historians?
00:57:06
Speaker 1: This is the most important thing you're doing, Brian. This is the most important thing you're doing. Cause I, you know, I weirdly do believe that, you know, look, we've got a bunch of scar tissue from this 25 years, nine 11 going forward. And yes, um, we pretty much, you know, we rehab the wrong part of our knee and we, we got everything we've gotten wrong, but, but my God, when it hit, when something similar happens again, I I'd like to think now we have, Hey, here's one way not to handle it.
00:57:39
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:41
Speaker 1: In fairness to us, we hadn't experienced an attack on our homeland like that. That's true. Never experienced. And frankly, no offense to Pearl Harbor, but, But that was not on, that was like on an island, literally. That was different. It was the closest thing we had experienced as a country, but we still had to tell every, the president had to tell everybody this happened back then, right? Like this was, you know, we, none of us had ever, you know, Oklahoma, people in Oklahoma City had experienced something like this, but nothing like this, right? So that's the hope is that what you're doing constantly reminding people, frankly, what we got wrong, how much of this we got wrong, how really bad it looks now, 25 years later, I hope provides at least a blueprint of what not to do, right? I'm not saying it means we'll do it right the next time, but hopefully we make different mistakes.
00:58:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. I mean, look, this was brand new. This shocked us in all sorts of ways.
00:58:46
Speaker 3: It reoriented everybody's, just changed everybody's vision of who we are as a country and our place in the world and what was possible in this country. We didn't think we were vulnerable to this, and we are. And it was brand new. But there will be, as you mentioned, with technology and all the kind of stuff that's coming and the shifting ground beneath us and all that, there's going to be new brand brand new things, too. And you wonder, you know, what is that percentage of us that's able to to sort of step back and say, can we call more emotions and make smart decisions? On 9-11, it was one person in the entire Congress, Barbara Lee. Next time, see if we can get those numbers up a little bit.
00:59:30
Speaker 1: So how do you balance? Let me get you out of here on this. How do you balance trying to step back and look at things from 60,000 feet with our nonstop amount of information getting shoved at you all the time?
00:59:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's I think there's a real benefit. And I think honestly, I think there's some hunger for that with with people. I think, you know, we we are we are we are we've been hit with a tsunami of information and a social media environment that we just still don't understand.
01:00:00
Speaker 2: And we still don't know what's happening.
01:00:02
Speaker 1: Oh, I basically said we're social media has been a great experiment on the human brain and it's been a failure.
01:00:09
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:00:10
Speaker 1: Right. But we just stuck with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:00:14
Speaker 2: And that's just a failure.
01:00:16
Speaker 3: We don't, you know, we haven't even begun to solve it yet. And we're getting hit with this other thing, AI now, which is further shifting our perception of what is real and what isn't. So I actually think there's a real hunger for basic, longer form solutions. A deeper dive in which sources are clear and the perspective is clear. The process is more transparent. I think there's a kind of hunger for that.
01:00:46
Speaker 1: Well, Brian, I don't know how numb you become when you work on something like this. At what point did you compartmentalize it, where you stopped reacting emotionally?
01:01:00
Speaker 3: You can't look at 9-11 and not be still affected by it. You just can't. The more you look at it, the more it's still there. And those days after are still there, and then some of the anger and stuff that happened, some of the decisions later. not one of those people who says how young people today don't get it i don't.
01:01:29
Speaker 1: Oh no i don't agree i think they're asking better questions exactly.
01:01:34
Speaker 3: Exactly which is hopeful so you you dig into this this dark day and this dark and these dark this decades of engagement and all these wars and all all the pain that's caused and what it's cost us but but um i i think i mean I emerged somewhat hopeful from all this that, uh, you know, the right questions are being asked and that there's a, there's an instinct and a willingness to, to think about it.
01:02:02
Speaker 1: This debut on nine 11 itself or the, or the Monday.
01:02:05
Speaker 2: Before the second. So it's, um, this is Wednesday.
01:02:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. Coming up this week. All right.
01:02:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.
01:02:12
Speaker 1: Brian, this was great. Appreciate the time. Congratulations.
01:02:15
Speaker 3: Great. Great to chat again.
