Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) s01e03 Episode Script
The Dark Side
[reporter] Across Ground Zero,
mountains of debris
still scar the landscape.
Searching for remains is a priority,
but a harrowing task.
[Green] I don't know that I had ever
prepared myself to find a body.
It's not a comfortable feeling
when you're digging and you
you find signs of life,
and I mean signs of life You come
across somebody's family pictures,
you'll find shoes,
and when you find a shoe
you're like, "Oh crap, someone's
gonna be connected to this shoe."
And, again, it's not that
you don't want it, um
as much as, at this point,
you're thinking that they're not alive.
[wistful music plays]
[woman] I knew the biggest task
at hand for the police department
was going to be recovering, identifying,
and then notifying people's families
that you found their loved ones.
[dramatic music plays]
One of the hardest things was
were all the posters of the missing
and people not knowing
whether they're dead,
whether they're trapped.
They just wanted them to be found.
My son was Mark Zeppelin.
He worked on the 104th floor.
I'm just waiting to see if he'll appear.
That's it, and
[interviewer]
Do you know if he went to work yesterday?
Yes. He did. He called me
from there, nine o'clock exactly.
And he told me that he loved me,
and that was it.
[crying] If anybody sees him or knows
anything, his name is Andrew Stern.
So, if anybody knows anything, please,
his wife and his mother
and the rest of us
are all waiting to hear.
[man] Hey, guys. Could you step out
of the way and let these guys get by?
[woman]
Initially, there were many firefighters
who were listed as missing, including me.
[man] Yo!
And in the beginning, when we thought
people might still be alive,
of course,
people were taking tremendous risks
to try and find people
who might be rescued alive.
[man] Put yourself in that position.
It was your family.
Every one of these firefighters in here
are our brothers.
Every one of these police officers
in here are our brothers,
and the civilians in here
are people we're sworn to protect.
[Green] The rescue and recovery teams,
they were standing on mounds
that were sometimes four,
five, six stories tall.
And fires were continuing to burn
at at Ground Zero for months.
During the whole time that we're there,
there were always buildings
in danger of collapsing.
What you're told when you get there
is that if you hear the whistle blow
run, because there's a building
that might be coming down.
And the whistle blew several times.
But when the all-clear would be sounded,
everybody came back.
There'd be dogs,
the cadaver dogs would be there.
There'd be firefighters, police officers.
There were a couple guys
that went down with me every day.
[Melendez] I was one of the supervisors
for the Detective Bureau at the morgue.
And our job was recovery, identification,
and then notifications to the family.
Once they got brought up to the morgue
then we would go through
the identification process.
Most identifications
that were made back 20 years ago
were through fingerprints,
or dental records, tattoos, or scars
or any other identifying marks
that we could find.
DNA came weeks later
if it could be used, back then.
[wistful music plays]
[woman] My brother and I were not
officially told that he was missing.
It was just, I remember, a lot of waiting.
My father had a habit
of monitoring three radios.
He would monitor the precinct radio,
the FDNY radio and the SOD radio.
He heard the call
for September 11th come in,
and hauled it from Queens to Manhattan.
My father was assigned with part
of a rescue team to go into Tower Two.
He said, "See you later,"
runs into Tower Two,
and then we hear
that the second tower collapses,
and that's all we know.
[woman] Bruce was sent out
as soon as the first plane hit.
It was about midnight.
I heard a knock on my side kitchen door.
It was Bruce's lieutenant, Charlie,
who was also a friend,
and another firefighter.
And, um
Charlie just kind of made, like,
polite conversation,
and then finally I said to him,
"Just say it. Just say it."
And he said, um, they're unaccounted for.
On Easter, they called to say
that they'd found some tools
that said Squad 41 on them,
and what they believed to be Bruce's body.
And, um, did I want to come
and see him be carried out?
I was just like, "No."
It was an image
I knew I couldn't have in my head.
You know, because nothing was going
to change the fact he was gone.
[Langone] Our family decided,
relatively early on, to have a funeral.
The NYPD will fly helicopters in what
is called a "missing man formation"
during things like this.
And when the helicopters flew overhead,
it kind of hit me
that Dad was gone for good
that he was not coming back
that it was just all gone forever.
We never recovered my father or my uncle,
either of them.
[Hansson] On September 11,
343 firefighters were killed in total.
Thirty-seven Port Authority
police officers also died.
And 23 New York City police officers.
Giving a total of 403 first responders,
which is the greatest loss of life
of first responders in US history.
[military tattoo]
[Melendez] And unfortunately,
you know, to date,
there's 40% of people
who haven't been identified.
And they may never be.
[dramatic music plays]
[Maguire] The morning of 9/11,
we were there when the second plane hit.
[emergency sirens wailing]
And we were able to run into a building,
and we were in the lobby of the building
getting briefed by one of our supervisors.
Our squad sort of
got the ticket for this case,
and we're trying
to coordinate the leads coming in.
But of course,
every person in the New York office,
every person in the FBI
in those first days and weeks
were working on the case.
We wanted to find out
what happened that day,
who had committed those attacks,
who was behind it.
But even more important, we wanted
to make sure there wasn't a second wave,
that it wasn't going to happen again.
So we were following up
on every single lead.
[woman]
Me either. I just want to get out of D.C.
[Maguire] Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
I was assigned
to the Flight 77 team to investigate
the five hijackers on that flight
and everything about them.
Flight 77 took off
from Dulles Airport in northern Virginia.
And like all the other flights that day,
it was headed to the West Coast.
And on each flight,
there were pilot hijackers.
On Flight 77, that was Hani Hanjour.
There were also what we called
"non-pilot hijackers"
or "muscle hijackers."
And they were the ones
who were responsible
to really use force and power
to subdue the passengers
to allow the pilot hijackers
to get access to the cockpit
and assume control of the plane.
And on Flight 77,
those muscle hijackers, the non-pilots,
were Khalid al-Mihdhar, Salem al-Hazmi,
Nawaf al-Hazmi, they were brothers,
and Majed Moqed.
The team spent a lot of time
piecing together
a near-daily timeline
of the hijackers' activities.
We tried to track
nearly every step along the way.
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi
had gone to training camp,
an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan
and were selected by bin Laden
to participate in what was known then
among al-Qaeda as the "Planes Operation."
[ominous music plays]
And they did not have any experience
living in the United States.
They had never been to the United States.
They didn't have really
English-language skills.
But in late-1999, at the direction
of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
who was the architect of the 9/11 attacks,
they started their journey
towards the United States.
And transited to Kuala Lumpur.
[man] The CIA is increasingly
concerned about the al-Qaeda threat,
and learns about a meeting in Malaysia,
in Kuala Lumpur, in January of 2000.
Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi,
the hijackers, attend this meeting,
which is part of one of the last meetings
that they've been having a number of them
and training through the year
before they leave for the United States.
The CIA even learns
that they have US visas.
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi
end up being the first hijackers
who enter the United States.
[Hoffman] The CIA was tracking
these followers of bin Laden
as bin Laden declared war
on the United States
on multiple occasions.
This meeting in Malaysia
was a key jumping-off point,
where the actual people
who would be charged
with carrying out this attack
both received the green light,
and also had put in place
the various mechanisms,
or the various arms of the plot
that they believed were essential
to its success,
where they concluded
how they could best arrive
in the United States on visas
as students attending flight academies.
Information that those individuals,
shortly afterwards,
arrive in the United States
is not effectively communicated
to the FBI in a timely fashion.
[Rotella]
The way the system worked back then,
you know, the CIA, obviously,
does intelligence work overseas,
and the FBI does
counterterrorism work in the US.
And so, strangely,
the information does not necessarily flow.
There was even a memo
drafted at some point,
to communicate
from the CIA to the FBI about them.
And that ends up not happening.
- [interviewer] They don't send the memo?
- It ends up not sent.
If the US government functioned
at the time in the way you would think,
and the FBI systems
and CIA systems were integrated,
it would've popped up
that these were al-Qaeda people
who'd been followed
to meetings in Malaysia
and had come to the US and, you know,
could be in the US, up to no good.
But that did not happen.
[Bearden] I'm not sure that,
had something been shared,
that everybody would've
connected all the dots.
There was this gap, this lapse,
this lack of sharing
that some people can point to
and say, "Had we known,
we could've put a stop to it."
Okay. Maybe.
[dramatic music plays]
It was a missed opportunity.
Had the CIA provided that information
to the FBI in a timely manner,
we could have started tracking
these two individuals.
[Maguire]
We talk about every lead being run down,
every investigative step exhausted
in terrorism investigations.
That would've been done
on any piece of information,
especially knowing
that al-Qaeda operatives
had arrived in the United States.
I believe it was
on September 12th, actually,
a car, a Toyota Corolla,
was recovered at Dulles Airport.
The car was registered to Nawaf al-Hazmi,
and it had an address in San Diego.
The FBI followed up
on that address in San Diego.
[ominous music plays]
[Rotella] What we know is they arrive
in Los Angeles on January 15th.
On February 1st, they pop up
at a restaurant in Los Angeles,
where they meet this Saudi
named Omar al-Bayoumi.
Omar al-Bayoumi is a mysterious
and strange character.
He's a graduate student, uh,
who doesn't appear to go to classes.
He is getting paid by the Saudi government
through a contractor,
but doesn't really appear to work.
He doesn't appear to need money.
Even people who didn't think
he was involved in the attacks
thought that he was some kind of spy
for the Saudi intelligence service.
Not a full-fledged intelligence officer,
but some kind of informant or monitor.
[Maguire] He encounters the hijackers,
tells them that he lives in San Diego.
If they ever find themselves there
that they should look him up.
And they do just that.
And he helps them get settled in.
He helps them open a bank account.
He helps them get an apartment
in the same complex
where he resides with his family.
He says it's all because,
just out of Islamic hospitality,
he was looking to help them out.
But the great suspicion was
that this was not an accidental meeting.
That this had to be something
that was arranged.
They also spent time
with another key figure,
who is Anwar al-Awlaki,
who's a Yemeni imam who was based
in San Diego at the time,
and went on to be, some years later,
an important leader of al-Qaeda.
Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar end up moving
to a boardinghouse in the summer of 2000,
which is run, ironically enough,
by an FBI informant.
The FBI informant was an elder gentleman,
a widower living alone in a house.
He had a series of young Muslim visitors
who stayed with him as boarders.
[Maguire] They weren't suspicious.
They wouldn't have done anything
that would have caused anyone
to reach out to law enforcement,
or to the authorities.
During the time in San Diego,
Nawaf al-Hazmi seemed
to live a pretty normal life.
He worked at a gas station
for a couple of weeks.
He played soccer with his friends.
[propellers whirring]
[Gore] They attempted to take flying
lessons while they're in San Diego.
And their English was really not good
enough to take the flight instruction.
Because of their language ability,
neither of them was able
to do well in flight training,
and they became muscle hijackers instead.
[Rotella] Zacarias Moussaoui's a Frenchman
who had spent time in the UK,
and had trained in Afghanistan.
He also goes to flight school in the US.
He's a very volatile, talkative guy,
and acted kind of crazy,
and it drew all kinds of suspicion.
Among other things,
it was said that he had said at some point
that he really wasn't interested
in learning how to land.
You know, just in sort of how to fly.
And wanted to go
to the big planes right away.
[plane engine roaring]
[Maguire]
He also had purchased flight deck videos.
And these videos
were the same exact videos
from the same vendor
that some of the hijackers had purchased.
Immigration Service picked him up
and took him into custody.
And it was believed
that he could have been a hijacker on 9/11
if he had not been arrested by INS
in August of that year.
[Rotella] It's another missed opportunity,
because there was information
connecting him to Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
who was one of the coordinators
of the 9/11 plot. A guy back in Germany.
If the FBI would've gotten access
to his computer,
he could have been a doorway
into possibly detecting
the plot ahead of time.
[Hoffman] Mohamed Atta,
sort of the operational commander,
met with Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
and with other logistical support elements
coming from al-Qaeda
to actually confirm
that everything was in place.
[ominous music plays]
All 19 of the hijackers,
there were 15 muscle and 4 pilots
they'd been very carefully selected.
They were people
that al-Qaeda had enormous confidence in,
that would not waiver from what seemed
like an impossible operation
to strike at the heart
of the United States.
[ominous music plays]
This entailed at least three years
of detailed plannings,
meetings throughout the world
handpicked selection
of 19 hijackers and pilots.
Orchestration of their movements.
[Maguire]
In the days prior to September 11th,
we see the hijacking teams
start to relocate
to be closer to their departure cities.
So we see the Flight 77 hijackers relocate
from New Jersey down to Maryland
to be closer to Dulles Airport.
We see the Flight 93 team move closer
to Newark Airport
where Flight 93 departed from.
And we see
the Flight 11 and Flight 175 hijackers
move to the Boston area.
On the morning of 9/11,
all of the hijacker teams
arrive at the airport.
They go through security
at their respective airports.
We believe that they're carrying
short-bladed knives,
which were allowed on board flights.
So they got through security,
uh, with no issue
and they boarded their flights.
[man] In the '80s and '90s,
there was no political will.
People get blown up by individuals,
planes are hijacked, it's all overseas.
Small amount of casualties. They're nasty,
they're bloody, it's a nuisance,
but it's not a national security issue.
Before 9/11, John Ashcroft,
he said these were our priorities.
This is what we're gonna focus on.
And the priorities were guns, drugs,
civil rights, prisoner protection.
So then you figure,
"Well, we're going to get attacked.
Where's the terrorism?"
And the terrorism slipped.
I've forgotten what number it was.
I think it was like 15.
And I couldn't believe it.
I could not believe this.
[dramatic music intensifies]
[music ends]
- [birds tweeting]
- [water lapping]
[Gonzales] The National Security team
is at Camp David talking about failures.
We had had people living in this country
planning this attack
for some period of time.
Our intelligence had to be better.
We needed to be better
at getting information.
How do we do that?
We talked about when we capture someone,
is there a way we can question them
to get better information,
the most reliable information?
[dramatic music plays]
[Cheney] It would be inappropriate for me
to talk about operation matters,
specific options,
or the kinds of activities
we might undertake going forward.
We do indeed, though, have, obviously,
the world's finest military.
They've got a broad range of capabilities.
Um
And they may well be given missions
in connection
with this overall task and strategy.
We also have to work,
sort of, the dark side, if you will.
We gotta spend time in the shadows,
in the intelligence world.
Um
A lot of what needs to be done here
will have to be done quietly
without any discussion,
using sources and methods
that are available
to our intelligence agencies,
if we're going to be successful.
[man] Going back to the Ford White House
when Cheney was Chief of Staff,
at least that far back,
Dick Cheney developed a very robust view
about the president's powers
under the Constitution,
especially as those powers related
to national security and war.
And his basic view is that when it comes
to war and national security,
the president is in charge.
And he can do what he thinks is necessary.
And Congress, basically,
can't get in the way.
And if Congress gets in the way,
the president can ignore it.
That was his legal view.
It was an absolutist view
of the president's powers in wartime.
[Cheney] So it's going to be vital
for us to use any means at our disposal,
basically, to achieve our objective.
[Fallon] That was frightening to me.
It was frightening to hear
the vice president of the United States
publicly on a television show,
where he should have been
calming the nation down,
where he should have been depressurizing,
he was upping the pressure,
upping the ante.
And so, I feared that we would do things
that would be to our detriment.
What I know is that when emotions
are high, rationality is low.
And poor decisions are being made.
[Cheney] We cannot deal with terror.
It will not end in a treaty.
There will be no peaceful co-existence.
No negotiations. No summit.
No joint communique with the terrorists.
[reporter] As American bombs blast away
again today at Taliban front lines,
Pentagon officials report
the number of US special forces
on the ground in northern Afghanistan
has more than doubled over the weekend.
More than 1,000 US Marines
based 60 miles outside Kandahar
are waiting to join the battle.
[gunfire]
[indistinct chatter]
In 2001, a lot of prisoners
started getting captured in Afghanistan.
[man] English.
I am report,
TV reporter from Al Jazeera Report.
Listen to me. Talk to the commander.
I am from Al Jazeera Report,
I come from Kandahar to here,
and I have camera and I lose it in Kunduz.
I am not a mujahid. See?
[woman] The US was offering
large rewards of money,
bounties for people to the Pakistanis
and to the Afghans
to basically turn over people
who sort of fit a certain profile.
[Fallon] We dropped leaflets
over Afghanistan saying
"Riches will be upon you
if you turn in these people."
[man speaking Arabic]
[Fallon] "Enough money
to feed your village,
your family, your tribe
for a year should you identify people."
And so we got people.
We got hundreds and hundreds of people.
[Gonzales]
Once you started capturing people,
you have limited options,
and you can't kill them.
You don't want to release them,
because they're gonna come back
and fight against you again.
So, uh, we had to make
some decisions about,
what are we gonna do
with people we capture?
General Tommy Franks was of the view
that we ought to have a limited footprint
as much as possible in Afghanistan
to reassure the Afghan people
that we weren't gonna be there long-term.
The notion of establishing
a large footprint with prisons,
or one large prison,
just didn't make sense.
So we discarded that idea.
We had discussions with other countries.
They weren't interested in receiving back
these terrorists, so that was out.
Then we turned towards the United States.
We actually had some discussions,
very limited,
but we looked at Leavenworth, Alcatraz
- [interviewer] Alcatraz? As a place?
- We looked Very, very limited.
[laughs]
Someone may have thrown it out as an idea.
Uh, looked at, of course,
supermax in Florence, Colorado.
But we felt that in the end, it was,
again, just weeks after 9/11, politically.
We didn't know whether the American people
would understand that.
We also had concerns about the rights
that would attach to anyone
we brought into the United States.
[woman] Some people in the military
called me up and said,
"We're getting into the prison business.
Would you like to come along?"
We really didn't know what was gonna
happen and what it was gonna be.
[ominous music plays]
The Pentagon decided they were gonna
set up a detention center in Guantanamo.
[Paradis]
Guantanamo is part of Cuban territory.
It's the southeast corner of Cuba.
The treaty ending the Spanish-American War
in 1898 gave Cuba independence.
But the part of the deal was
we got to keep Guantanamo.
The legal formality of it was
under a perpetual lease.
So we technically leased the land
in Guantanamo,
but only we can cancel the lease.
The State Department said they were told
to look for the legal equivalent
of outer space.
That's what Guantanamo was meant to be.
A place where no law applied.
It was this legal "No Man's Land."
This "Devil's Island."
[ominous music playing]
[Rosenberg] We flew into Guantanamo
for what was gonna be, like,
a one- or two-day show tour.
And while we were there,
they put some prisoners in the air.
And what happened was,
some very gritty video came out
of detainees,
maybe those detainees
being put on a flight.
And they were chained up and hooded
and shackled to each other
and being sort of marched along,
and it looked anything but humane.
In the hangar, somebody asked,
"Who are they sending?"
And he said, "They're sending us
the worst of the worst."
And they were talking
about those first 20 men.
[Lehnert] These are not nice people.
Several have publicly stated here
their intent to kill an American
before they leave Guantanamo Bay.
We will not give them that satisfaction.
There was a lot of people who thought
they were bringing Hannibal Lecter types
off of these planes who, you know,
were like suicidal, fanatical terrorists.
These are people that would gnaw
through hydraulic lines
in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.
[Paradis] They were strapped, essentially,
to the floor, required to sit upright,
put hooded and subjected
to various sensory deprivation techniques
like goggles, earmuffs, oven mitts,
and then shackled in multiple places.
And then they were just flown,
essentially like cargo, to Guantanamo.
[Rosenberg] The world would go on to see
those 20 men 10 days later, approximately,
when the Pentagon released
combat camera images
of those 20 men inside a cell.
That's them. That's the day one.
- [interviewer] They're kneeling down.
- [Rosenberg] They're on their knees.
You can find 20 human beings
in that picture.
You can find all 20.
The Pentagon released that photo
for a variety of reasons
and Europe was repulsed by it
and thought it said "torture."
[Fallon] When the first planeload arrived
and more planeloads arrived,
we realized it wasn't
the worst of the worst.
This wasn't the al-Qaeda suspects
that we had been tracking.
This was what I refer to as dirt farmers.
They were not battlefield captures.
These were bounty babies.
[woman] From the beginning of Guantanamo,
the word that came down from the Pentagon:
"No matter what you do,
do not call them prisoners."
Because if they're called prisoners,
then we have to treat them
under the Geneva Conventions
that protects prisoners of war.
So that's why we have detainees
and not prisoners.
You were sent here because you are
suspected of being high-ranking Taliban,
or members of al-Qaeda.
Some of you have said you are innocent,
and that you are not Taliban or al-Qaeda.
To you I would say
that America is a nation of laws.
Your case will be heard
and you will be judged fairly.
We are being guided
by the Geneva Conventions.
- [interviewer] What does that mean?
- [Lehnert] It means the guidance
we're receiving from Washington, D.C.,
we're following it.
And I think that you'll find that we're
treating them in a humane fashion.
[interviewer] In a leaked memo you wrote
you used the word "quaint" to talk about
some of the provisions
in the Geneva Convention.
Why'd you write that?
What'd you mean by that?
I used the word "quaint"
to reflect the fact
that the Geneva Convention
was drafted at a time
when wars were between nations,
and not between non-nation states,
like terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda.
We made a determination, the lawyers,
primarily based upon a memo
from the Attorney General John Ashcroft,
that it should not apply,
because al-Qaeda was not a nation-state
that had signed the Geneva Conventions
and that the Taliban
had forfeited their rights
for prisoner-of-war protection,
because in order
to receive those protections
you have to wear a uniform when fighting,
you have to carry arms openly,
you have to fight
under a hierarchical structure
and you can't go around
killing civilians indiscriminately
and expect to receive the benefits
of being a prisoner of war
under the Geneva Conventions.
[Paradis] The Bush administration's
decision back in 2002
that detainees in the war on terrorism
have no rights under international law,
they're essentially non-persons
under international law, is not correct.
In fact, they are protected
by the Geneva Conventions,
a specific part of the Geneva Conventions
called "Common Article Three."
They're being denied basic human rights,
access to lawyers,
access to habeas corpus.
The detainees were exposed to the heat,
the sun, the wind, the bugs.
[Fallon] There were two buckets.
One bucket was for your drinking water,
one was for your excrement.
They had a hard top
and fenced around on three sides
with a gate to get in and out.
It was the equivalent
of a military dog kennel.
[Paradis] There was a simultaneous effort
that was primarily driven
out of the White House
and the Vice President's Office,
specifically, to embrace torture.
I don't think that's an overstatement or
oversimplification of what was going on.
Starting in 2002,
the first high-value detainees
were captured, a guy named Abu Zubaydah,
who ran essentially a guesthouse
that was often a way station
for people who were going
to try and join al-Qaeda,
join the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And so he obviously had the incredible
intelligence of value for that reason.
You know, he knew a lot of people
who were coming and going.
And the FBI starts questioning him
and gets a lot of intelligence out of him.
And the FBI agent, Ali Soufan,
is actually tending to his wounds
and developing rapport-based methods
of interrogation. You get to know them,
the person begins to trust you,
at least to the extent you can.
[Soufan] When we start arresting
these people and talking to them,
it's not a rocket science
to interrogate them.
There are so many different ways
to interrogate individuals
and, you know, in the US government,
we are trained to do something like this.
We are trained
to obtain intelligence information
from human sources.
And law enforcements
in the United States do it every time.
The CIA, the military, the FBI,
we were involved in interrogations
in the East African embassy bombings
and the USS Cole bombings,
and a lot of the different plots
that took place around the world,
and the disruption.
Soufan actually has a lot of success,
including identifying for the first time
who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is.
It's easy to forget now,
because he's so widely publicized
as a mastermind of September 11.
But even as late as the spring of 2002,
we don't know who organized
September 11th.
And so the first person to give
that information up was Abu Zubaydah.
The FBI's success is noticed
in getting intelligence out of him,
and so they take Abu Zubaydah
and begin subjecting him
to, what were then called,
"enhanced interrogation techniques."
This simultaneous effort
that had been really started, you know,
within the first few months
after September 11th
to create a torture program,
seized the opportunity
for their first guinea pig.
[Card]
When we knew we could get Abu Zubaydah,
that was a very big deal for us.
When we thought
we could get Khalid Sheikh Mohamed,
that was a very big deal for us.
I mean, so these high-value targets
were very important.
[Gonzales] A decision was made
by the National Security Council
to look at enhanced
interrogation techniques.
George Tenet and the CIA were charged
with, "All right. What do you recommend?"
And so it was important
to get clear guidance
about, "All right. Where is the box?"
And so the Department of Justice
drafted legal opinions
to give guidance to the CIA.
[dramatic music plays]
[Card] I was in the meeting when
the president was given a briefing on it.
But he ended up authorizing
enhanced interrogation techniques
to be used under appropriate supervision
with the expectation that we would be able
to prevent the next attack
in the United States.
[Paradis]
Those enhanced interrogation techniques
are things like forced
24-hour-a-day nudity,
24-hour-a-day light, 24-hour-a-day cold,
24-hour-a-day darkness.
Waterboarding is one of the most infamous
or publicly-known methods that were used.
[Gonzales] I'm not in any way suggesting
that they're not unpleasant or terrible,
but, like, walling.
Walling was a technique
where you put a hood around their neck
to make sure they don't suffer
any neck injuries.
You hold them against a wall
that's not secure,
it will collapse,
and you push them against that wall.
With respect to the facial slap,
the palm had to be open.
You could only hold the hand
so many inches away from the face,
and it could only strike the face
on the cheek.
The abdominal slap, again, open palm,
you could only be so many inches
from from from the belly.
You could only strike between,
I think, the navel and the nipples.
So very detailed instructions
about what could be done.
We went back and looked
at the convention against torture,
which was the genesis
of the Anti-Torture statute.
The head of the Criminal Division
of the Department of Justice
wrote that torture is that activity
which the very mention
sends shiver up one's spine,
such as needles under the fingernails,
such as piercing of an eye
of your eyeball,
such as electric shocks to your genitals.
We weren't anywhere close to that.
[man] I spent
25 and a half years in the FBI.
At the time of 9/11,
I was the first Assistant Director
in charge of Counterterrorism.
Director Mueller, after a briefing
at the White House that He was there,
he called me to his office and said,
"We need to send two agents
to this country."
And I said, "Okay. Right.
We'll get right on that. What is it?"
And he said,
"Well, they picked up Zubaydah."
And I said, "That's great." Because I knew
we wanted him to come back here.
"We'll interview him. That's super.
We need more than two agents."
"We'll put together a packet."
"No, no, no. Send two agents."
I said, "We're bringing him back. Right?"
He said, "No.
The agency doesn't want to keep him."
And I said, "Hmm, that's interesting."
[laughs]
"We have no business
assisting the agency around trying"
"That somebody's not going
to be rendered back here."
I said, "I understand what they can do
and probably will do."
"We don't need any part of that."
And he says, "Yes. We do.
We need to be there to help them."
I said,
"They can't be in the room with this."
And he says,
"No. I told the president we'd help."
And I said,
"You really need to call the president
and tell him we're not gonna do this,
because think about this."
"Our image and the American public.
We're not a bunch of thugs."
"And we can destroy our reputation
by doing something like that."
[dramatic music plays]
[Soufan] They didn't believe
that these guys will talk.
So they wanted to develop a program
that's gonna be
like a cookie-cutter approach.
One, two, three, four,
and the guy's gonna give you everything.
That's not how the world works.
That's not how human nature works.
[Paradis] It was kind of a politics
of fear had set in.
To see that fear,
that I certainly had and everyone had,
just become a poison in the society
that you would just abandon the things
that make the United States unique.
[Soufan]
The CIA Inspector General, in 2004
came with the conclusion
that they cannot prove
one imminent threat was disrupted
because of enhanced
interrogation techniques.
- [interviewer] There's no evidence?
- There's no evidence.
And this is the CIA themselves
saying that, not me.
This is a huge thing about torture.
Torture will give you compliance.
It does not give you cooperation.
The difference between compliance
and cooperation is with compliance
the person will tell you whatever
you wanna hear for the torture to stop.
He won't tell you the truth.
In cooperation, you get the truth.
[ominous music plays]
It produced little useful intelligence
to help us track down
the perpetrators of 9/11,
or prevent new attacks and atrocities.
[Rumsfeld] Anyone who suggests
that the enhanced techniques,
let's be blunt, waterboarding,
did not produce an enormous amount
of valuable intelligence
just isn't facing the truth.
[McCain] I'm deeply concerned
about who we are as a country
and what we stand for and believe in.
America has always been an example
and an inspiration
to other countries throughout the world,
and if we practice, uh, torture
and do things that, uh, diminish
and even harm
the image of the United States
and motivate our enemies,
then it could have profound consequences
in the future.
And think of what would happen if,
in another conflict, an enemy,
not a terrorist organization,
takes Americans prisoners,
then obviously they will feel that they
can do the same thing we have practiced.
[Rosenberg]
It took me a long time to understand.
Guantanamo Bay,
and the prison there, particularly
was the first no-exit strategy
military enterprise since the Vietnam War.
[reporter] Hundreds of Taliban
and al-Qaeda suspects
are already in US custody,
including 30 more from Afghanistan,
delivered today to the US Naval Base
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
That brings the total there now to 110,
with many more to come.
[Rosenberg] Nobody would know
how this story would end.
[reporter]
How did they sneak up on us like this?
[indistinct shouting]
[agent] It definitely is a failure
of US intelligence.
[airplane flying]
[reporter 1] Today, just the sight
of a jetliner overhead
[emergency sirens blaring]
the sound of a siren
even the morning mail brings suspicion.
[reporter 2] For New York, it was another
day on the front line of fear
in the trenches of terrorist hysteria.
In Rockefeller Center,
an anthrax case at NBC.
You just feel so vulnerable now,
because you don't know
what's gonna happen,
where it's gonna happen.
[Gonzales]
That weekend after 9/11 at Camp David,
it was about informing the president
where we lack authorities,
where we lack capabilities,
and what was necessary
to prevent this from happening again,
to punish those responsible
for what happened on 9/11.
And it set in motion
certain things like the Patriot Act.
[applause]
The Patriot Act is one piece
of a massive surveillance effort
that starts to grow in the 9/11 aftermath.
[Bush] These acts of violence
against innocents violate
the fundamental tenets
of the Islamic faith.
And it's important for my fellow Americans
to understand that.
America counts millions of Muslims
amongst our citizens.
And Muslims make an incredibly valuable
contribution to our country.
Muslims are doctors,
lawyers, law professors,
members of the military,
entrepreneurs, shopkeepers,
moms and dads,
and they need to be treated with respect.
[woman] Even as President Bush was saying,
"We don't blame an entire religion
for the acts of a few,"
the government started doing exactly that.
[reporter] President Bush
signed the so-called Patriot Act
into law on Friday
in the East Room of the White House.
Following 9/11, we started
to see and hear conversations
about how our country's
intelligence had failed.
Agencies weren't talking to each other.
How did all of these hijackers get in,
get trained,
get on planes and nobody noticed?
As of today, we're changing
the laws governing information-sharing.
And as importantly,
we're changing the culture
of our various agencies
that fight terrorism.
[Billoo] And so what starts to happen
really fast and really frighteningly,
is we're increasing our investments
in law enforcement and surveillance.
The library provision,
so you could access our library records,
see everything we're reading.
And another provision
is the sneak and peek warrants.
The Patriot Act permitted law enforcement
to go into our homes
and leave without telling us.
So come in, look around quietly,
leave behind whatever I want,
take whatever I want,
and there's no documentation I can access.
[reporter] Federal agents swept
through Islamic homes and businesses
in suburban Washington, looking
for ties to terrorist organizations.
[Billoo] It's beyond
personally offensive as a Muslim.
It's offensive as an American.
It goes against the very core
of what we understood
as privacy rights that were
enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
[man] The National Security Agency
is part of the Pentagon,
part of the Defense Department.
And it is the agency
in charge of electronic surveillance
of all kinds of foreign adversaries
of the United States.
It was created in 1952
by President Truman in an Executive Order.
And it was an outgrowth
of the wartime code-breaking
that the US had conducted
during World War II.
And it has grown over the decades
into a massive modern cyber-security,
cyber-offensive, code-breaking,
electronic-eavesdropping organization
of unprecedented scale.
It's the largest such agency in the world.
[man] There's before 9/11
and there's after 9/11.
I was part of an agency that was supposed
to keep people out of harm's way.
And my first day on the job, and
Every time I say this, I get goose bumps.
I'm feeling them right now,
because that day is literally frozen.
9/11 was actually my first day reporting
to my new duty station.
And I can play back
that day second by second,
minute by minute, hour by hour.
But what I didn't know in that morning
is the secret decisions that were made
at the highest levels of the government
and what the government was willing to do
under the blanket of national security.
What they were willing to do
in going way outside the law.
[man] Jack Goldsmith,
Assistant Attorney General,
office of legal counsel.
I went to the White House to be read into
what was basically
the Stellar Wind program.
I went to David Addington's office.
He was the person who read me in.
Now, this was unusual
that the vice president's counsel
was reading me into a highly classified
intelligence program.
Addington actually had
the original authorities for the program
in his safe in his office.
And he said,
“Prepare for your mind to be blown.”
He basically said, "You're gonna learn
about something you won't believe."
[Drake]
Immediately, I mean within days and weeks,
verbal authorization was being granted
for a program called Stellar Wind
in which they're turning
the extraordinary power of NSA
and pointing it,
not just foreign, but also domestic.
[rapid electronic beeping]
[interviewer] What was Stellar Wind?
I have to be careful here.
Parts of it are still classified.
I'll just call it
a warrantless wiretapping program
that involved large metadata collection
and also collection of content,
much of it happening in the homeland.
[phone line ringing]
[reporter] Imagine you have a computer
that's tracking every time a call is made,
when it's received,
where it was made and received,
and how long it lasted.
That is metadata.
[Gonzales] The Stellar Wind program
had three baskets,
if I could describe it that way.
The first basket is
the collection of the contents
of telephone communications
where a senior operative at the CIA
believes one person on that call
is a member of al-Qaeda
or some way affiliated with al-Qaeda.
The other two baskets did not
have to do with content collection.
It had to do with metadata,
the second basket
being telephone metadata.
You don't see on there
the contents of the call,
but you see the number you called
and perhaps the length of the call.
Basket three is a collection
of email metadata.
It's who you sent the email to and from.
[Goldsmith] The basic idea was that
through massive collection
of this metadata,
even of people who weren't suspected
that you could have a network
that would allow you
to put the pieces together
with little pieces of evidence
that you have about terrorists.
You would have a pool
of information that, it was hoped,
would prevent the next 9/11.
That was always the theory.
[Drake] It's the digital age.
We're drowning in data.
So the NSA said, "Why don't we just take
as much as we can?"
"Wow. Look how easy it is.
We'll just take it all."
The government entered into
these extended special arrangements,
which were super secret,
with certain companies
like the Verizons of the world,
like AT&T and others, for data.
So they're just sweeping it all in,
claiming,
"Well, hey. Until we look at it,
we're not in violation."
This is turning the Fourth Amendment
inside out and upside down.
[Risen] In the Bill of Rights,
the Fourth Amendment grants us the right
to privacy in our own homes,
the ability to avoid
having government agents
barge into our homes without any approvals
or without any authorization,
and take whatever they want from us.
And this was the electronic version
of an unauthorized
government raid on your house.
[Watson] Director Mueller came back
from a briefing one morning.
He called me and he said, "Dale,
there's a special program going on."
"I want you to No one knows about it."
"Probably there's only four or five
or six of us in the US government."
I said, "Yeah? What's that about?"
And he said, "I can't tell you. Go."
So I went over
to the Pentagon the next morning,
in a secure space over there,
and had a meeting and was briefed on it.
And so I went back and told the director,
I said, "I'm not sure this is gonna work."
And I didn't feel comfortable about it.
I said, "This is not going to last."
He said, "Well, you're not authorized
to tell anybody."
I saw the product of it.
I saw the results of it.
I'm here to tell you, I saw
nothing productive that came of that.
[dramatic music plays]
[Goldsmith]
My office, I didn't realize at the time,
but it was charged
with approving its legality
every six or seven weeks.
The main problem with the program
was it seemed to fly in the face
of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act.
And it's a very complicated statute,
but basically on its face, it didn't seem
to allow what was going on.
Rather than go to Congress
and get those laws changed
the Bush administration
blew through some of them
and interpreted some of them in a way
that they just were able to sidestep them.
[ominous music plays]
[Gonzales]
In March of 2004, Jack Goldsmith,
who was the new head of OLC,
expressed concerns
about aspects of Stellar Wind.
He says, "I cannot find legal support
for this aspect of Stellar Wind,
and we may have to discontinue this."
- [interviewer] Discontinue the program?
- Discontinue something.
[Goldsmith] I basically had decided that
approximately half of it could continue
and approximately half of it
I thought couldn't continue.
That I couldn't find
any legal justification for.
When I informed the White House
that I couldn't approve a large chunk
of the surveillance program,
that's when David Addington
got angriest at me he ever got, and said
“If you roll that way,
you'll have the blood of 100,000 people
who die in the next attack on your hands.”
I think that he thought, A: I was wrong,
and B: that's what would happen.
And by the way,
he didn't have to tell me that.
I had the same feeling,
and it weighed on me a lot, obviously.
[Gonzales] I remember calling Andy Card.
Andy came back from vacation early.
We met with the vice president.
I think George Tenet
and Michael Hayden were there.
And we talked about this.
This was a very important,
very significant program.
Probably one of the most important
and effective programs
that our government had
in collecting information.
And so, the notion that
we would discontinue something,
that was serious.
[Goldsmith] Attorney General Ashcroft
approved my decision,
which was an amazing thing
since Ashcroft had been approving
the broader program
on advice of the Office of Legal Counsel.
It was a brave thing for him to do,
because it was a back-down for him.
And he wasn't happy about it,
but he went along and was persuaded.
[distant emergency sirens]
[Goldsmith] Within hours after Ashcroft
signed off and said he agreed with it,
he went into the hospital
with acute pancreatitis.
And he had to have
his gallbladder removed,
he had to have surgery.
And he was very sick, and it wasn't clear
if he was gonna survive.
[Gonzales] We were running up against
I think March 11th was the time
that the existing authorization
was gonna expire.
And any time there's a hole in collection,
you don't know what you might miss.
And so I talked to the president.
He was concerned,
because we were starting to hear chatter
that perhaps something big
is about to happen.
And if we don't have
the Department of Justice signature
on that authorization,
the telecom carriers
are probably not gonna cooperate with us.
We should call John Ashcroft.
- [interviewer] Gonna go to the hospital.
- We're gonna go to the hospital.
The president asked me and Alberto
to go to the hospital
and tell him what was going on,
and bring a document he had signed before,
wondered if he'd be willing to sign it.
[Goldsmith]
I sped to the hospital, ran up the steps,
and I walked into the hospital room.
Ashcroft was in intensive care.
He had all these tubes in him.
His eyes were almost closed,
and he was very gray.
And he didn't look well at all.
I wasn't in there five or ten minutes
before Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card,
the White House Chief of Staff, walk in.
And they had the Stellar Wind approval,
and they were basically
asking Ashcroft to sign off on it.
Andy and I went up to John Ashcroft's
room, and John was laying in the bed.
Now, clearly,
he looked weak and he was pale-looking.
It wasn't obvious to me that he understood
what we were talking about.
[interviewer] He's not coherent?
[Goldsmith] He didn't say much,
and he looked terrible.
And I just wasn't sure
what was gonna happen.
So, they come in and make this request,
and the most extraordinary thing happened.
Ashcroft, to my surprise,
kind of lifted himself up
just a little bit off the back of the bed
and he said
"I agree with the decision that was made
by the Justice Department."
He made it clear he didn't appreciate them
coming to his Intensive Care room
and bothering him.
And then he collapsed back into his bed.
And I was sure
he was gonna expire right then.
[monitors beep]
The considered view
of the Justice Department
was that this thing
this program
had not been operating lawfully.
And this was an effort by the White House
to get him to change his mind.
[Gonzales]
We just thanked him and we left.
When we get back into the Suburban,
we tell Addington it didn't go well.
We don't have a signature.
[Goldsmith] President Bush
reapproves the entire program.
He defies our advice,
which is his prerogative to do.
He's the president of the United States.
[distant siren wailing]
The whole Executive Branch
was about to melt down.
There was gonna be massive resignations
in the Justice Department.
The program would've come out then.
Everything would've been worse
for the White House and president,
including on the national security front.
And I think that's why they backed down.
Nothing like that, as best I can tell,
has ever happened in American history,
on so many levels.
And I basically was just immensely furious
with the excessive secrecy
and control of the White House.
I felt like they really
didn't want us to do a thorough
and real vetting of the program.
They got the answer they wanted early on,
and they didn't want it vetted after that.
I didn't feel like
the White House was candid with me.
[Drake] I started blowing the whistle
internally, through multiple channels.
I confronted the lead attorney
who had the access to the program.
I reported it
to the Inspector General of NSA.
In February 2006, I went to the press
with unclassified information
regarding the mass
domestic surveillance regime.
They decided
to make life very difficult for me.
But we all have moral agency.
We all have the ability
to make our choices.
We also can choose in how we respond
to things that do happen.
You know, I witnessed a history.
It was an extraordinary period.
And I just I came out of the dark.
I wasn't gonna just sit by
and watch it all happen.
I would've regretted it
for the rest of my life.
[Goldsmith] The Stellar Wind program
was controversial,
but the law didn't change. And, in fact,
Congress ended up
renewing the surveillance law
and, in some respects,
expanding surveillance powers.
The Obama administration
changes some policies and stuff,
but the essential law didn't change.
Basically, the massive surveillance powers
of the government have continued,
and have been reapproved largely
even after the revelations.
It's quite clear that they acted
super aggressively after 9/11,
and that they were really fearful.
They felt blind
about what the enemy was up to.
And they, in a panic, did everything
they could to collect information.
And they did so in ways
that pretty clearly broke laws.
[dramatic music plays]
Any power without constraint
always leads to abuse.
[Paradis] 9/11 certainly just
made people want to not be soft.
And probably more, you know, prosaically,
they just wanted
to beat the shit out of people.
It was anger. Right? Wouldn't you want
to beat the shit out of someone who,
you know, murdered 3,000 people?
Who wasn't angry?
But that's why we elect leaders:
to be the cooler heads,
to have the longer vision
to protect the values
that we claim to treat as the organizing
principle of our society.
To actually protect those things,
so that the world we're living in
after the current crisis passes
is not so radically different
than the one that we came from.
- [man] All right.
- [woman] Give Dad hugs.
[baby coos]
[reporter]
Thousands more in America's military
heading now to distant points.
[helicopter blades thumping]
[man] Ten days after I graduated
high school, I got into the Marine Corps.
[artillery fire]
What have I gotten myself into
would not become clear
until my first day in combat.
[explosion]
[dramatic music plays]
Subtitle translation by:
mountains of debris
still scar the landscape.
Searching for remains is a priority,
but a harrowing task.
[Green] I don't know that I had ever
prepared myself to find a body.
It's not a comfortable feeling
when you're digging and you
you find signs of life,
and I mean signs of life You come
across somebody's family pictures,
you'll find shoes,
and when you find a shoe
you're like, "Oh crap, someone's
gonna be connected to this shoe."
And, again, it's not that
you don't want it, um
as much as, at this point,
you're thinking that they're not alive.
[wistful music plays]
[woman] I knew the biggest task
at hand for the police department
was going to be recovering, identifying,
and then notifying people's families
that you found their loved ones.
[dramatic music plays]
One of the hardest things was
were all the posters of the missing
and people not knowing
whether they're dead,
whether they're trapped.
They just wanted them to be found.
My son was Mark Zeppelin.
He worked on the 104th floor.
I'm just waiting to see if he'll appear.
That's it, and
[interviewer]
Do you know if he went to work yesterday?
Yes. He did. He called me
from there, nine o'clock exactly.
And he told me that he loved me,
and that was it.
[crying] If anybody sees him or knows
anything, his name is Andrew Stern.
So, if anybody knows anything, please,
his wife and his mother
and the rest of us
are all waiting to hear.
[man] Hey, guys. Could you step out
of the way and let these guys get by?
[woman]
Initially, there were many firefighters
who were listed as missing, including me.
[man] Yo!
And in the beginning, when we thought
people might still be alive,
of course,
people were taking tremendous risks
to try and find people
who might be rescued alive.
[man] Put yourself in that position.
It was your family.
Every one of these firefighters in here
are our brothers.
Every one of these police officers
in here are our brothers,
and the civilians in here
are people we're sworn to protect.
[Green] The rescue and recovery teams,
they were standing on mounds
that were sometimes four,
five, six stories tall.
And fires were continuing to burn
at at Ground Zero for months.
During the whole time that we're there,
there were always buildings
in danger of collapsing.
What you're told when you get there
is that if you hear the whistle blow
run, because there's a building
that might be coming down.
And the whistle blew several times.
But when the all-clear would be sounded,
everybody came back.
There'd be dogs,
the cadaver dogs would be there.
There'd be firefighters, police officers.
There were a couple guys
that went down with me every day.
[Melendez] I was one of the supervisors
for the Detective Bureau at the morgue.
And our job was recovery, identification,
and then notifications to the family.
Once they got brought up to the morgue
then we would go through
the identification process.
Most identifications
that were made back 20 years ago
were through fingerprints,
or dental records, tattoos, or scars
or any other identifying marks
that we could find.
DNA came weeks later
if it could be used, back then.
[wistful music plays]
[woman] My brother and I were not
officially told that he was missing.
It was just, I remember, a lot of waiting.
My father had a habit
of monitoring three radios.
He would monitor the precinct radio,
the FDNY radio and the SOD radio.
He heard the call
for September 11th come in,
and hauled it from Queens to Manhattan.
My father was assigned with part
of a rescue team to go into Tower Two.
He said, "See you later,"
runs into Tower Two,
and then we hear
that the second tower collapses,
and that's all we know.
[woman] Bruce was sent out
as soon as the first plane hit.
It was about midnight.
I heard a knock on my side kitchen door.
It was Bruce's lieutenant, Charlie,
who was also a friend,
and another firefighter.
And, um
Charlie just kind of made, like,
polite conversation,
and then finally I said to him,
"Just say it. Just say it."
And he said, um, they're unaccounted for.
On Easter, they called to say
that they'd found some tools
that said Squad 41 on them,
and what they believed to be Bruce's body.
And, um, did I want to come
and see him be carried out?
I was just like, "No."
It was an image
I knew I couldn't have in my head.
You know, because nothing was going
to change the fact he was gone.
[Langone] Our family decided,
relatively early on, to have a funeral.
The NYPD will fly helicopters in what
is called a "missing man formation"
during things like this.
And when the helicopters flew overhead,
it kind of hit me
that Dad was gone for good
that he was not coming back
that it was just all gone forever.
We never recovered my father or my uncle,
either of them.
[Hansson] On September 11,
343 firefighters were killed in total.
Thirty-seven Port Authority
police officers also died.
And 23 New York City police officers.
Giving a total of 403 first responders,
which is the greatest loss of life
of first responders in US history.
[military tattoo]
[Melendez] And unfortunately,
you know, to date,
there's 40% of people
who haven't been identified.
And they may never be.
[dramatic music plays]
[Maguire] The morning of 9/11,
we were there when the second plane hit.
[emergency sirens wailing]
And we were able to run into a building,
and we were in the lobby of the building
getting briefed by one of our supervisors.
Our squad sort of
got the ticket for this case,
and we're trying
to coordinate the leads coming in.
But of course,
every person in the New York office,
every person in the FBI
in those first days and weeks
were working on the case.
We wanted to find out
what happened that day,
who had committed those attacks,
who was behind it.
But even more important, we wanted
to make sure there wasn't a second wave,
that it wasn't going to happen again.
So we were following up
on every single lead.
[woman]
Me either. I just want to get out of D.C.
[Maguire] Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
I was assigned
to the Flight 77 team to investigate
the five hijackers on that flight
and everything about them.
Flight 77 took off
from Dulles Airport in northern Virginia.
And like all the other flights that day,
it was headed to the West Coast.
And on each flight,
there were pilot hijackers.
On Flight 77, that was Hani Hanjour.
There were also what we called
"non-pilot hijackers"
or "muscle hijackers."
And they were the ones
who were responsible
to really use force and power
to subdue the passengers
to allow the pilot hijackers
to get access to the cockpit
and assume control of the plane.
And on Flight 77,
those muscle hijackers, the non-pilots,
were Khalid al-Mihdhar, Salem al-Hazmi,
Nawaf al-Hazmi, they were brothers,
and Majed Moqed.
The team spent a lot of time
piecing together
a near-daily timeline
of the hijackers' activities.
We tried to track
nearly every step along the way.
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi
had gone to training camp,
an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan
and were selected by bin Laden
to participate in what was known then
among al-Qaeda as the "Planes Operation."
[ominous music plays]
And they did not have any experience
living in the United States.
They had never been to the United States.
They didn't have really
English-language skills.
But in late-1999, at the direction
of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
who was the architect of the 9/11 attacks,
they started their journey
towards the United States.
And transited to Kuala Lumpur.
[man] The CIA is increasingly
concerned about the al-Qaeda threat,
and learns about a meeting in Malaysia,
in Kuala Lumpur, in January of 2000.
Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi,
the hijackers, attend this meeting,
which is part of one of the last meetings
that they've been having a number of them
and training through the year
before they leave for the United States.
The CIA even learns
that they have US visas.
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi
end up being the first hijackers
who enter the United States.
[Hoffman] The CIA was tracking
these followers of bin Laden
as bin Laden declared war
on the United States
on multiple occasions.
This meeting in Malaysia
was a key jumping-off point,
where the actual people
who would be charged
with carrying out this attack
both received the green light,
and also had put in place
the various mechanisms,
or the various arms of the plot
that they believed were essential
to its success,
where they concluded
how they could best arrive
in the United States on visas
as students attending flight academies.
Information that those individuals,
shortly afterwards,
arrive in the United States
is not effectively communicated
to the FBI in a timely fashion.
[Rotella]
The way the system worked back then,
you know, the CIA, obviously,
does intelligence work overseas,
and the FBI does
counterterrorism work in the US.
And so, strangely,
the information does not necessarily flow.
There was even a memo
drafted at some point,
to communicate
from the CIA to the FBI about them.
And that ends up not happening.
- [interviewer] They don't send the memo?
- It ends up not sent.
If the US government functioned
at the time in the way you would think,
and the FBI systems
and CIA systems were integrated,
it would've popped up
that these were al-Qaeda people
who'd been followed
to meetings in Malaysia
and had come to the US and, you know,
could be in the US, up to no good.
But that did not happen.
[Bearden] I'm not sure that,
had something been shared,
that everybody would've
connected all the dots.
There was this gap, this lapse,
this lack of sharing
that some people can point to
and say, "Had we known,
we could've put a stop to it."
Okay. Maybe.
[dramatic music plays]
It was a missed opportunity.
Had the CIA provided that information
to the FBI in a timely manner,
we could have started tracking
these two individuals.
[Maguire]
We talk about every lead being run down,
every investigative step exhausted
in terrorism investigations.
That would've been done
on any piece of information,
especially knowing
that al-Qaeda operatives
had arrived in the United States.
I believe it was
on September 12th, actually,
a car, a Toyota Corolla,
was recovered at Dulles Airport.
The car was registered to Nawaf al-Hazmi,
and it had an address in San Diego.
The FBI followed up
on that address in San Diego.
[ominous music plays]
[Rotella] What we know is they arrive
in Los Angeles on January 15th.
On February 1st, they pop up
at a restaurant in Los Angeles,
where they meet this Saudi
named Omar al-Bayoumi.
Omar al-Bayoumi is a mysterious
and strange character.
He's a graduate student, uh,
who doesn't appear to go to classes.
He is getting paid by the Saudi government
through a contractor,
but doesn't really appear to work.
He doesn't appear to need money.
Even people who didn't think
he was involved in the attacks
thought that he was some kind of spy
for the Saudi intelligence service.
Not a full-fledged intelligence officer,
but some kind of informant or monitor.
[Maguire] He encounters the hijackers,
tells them that he lives in San Diego.
If they ever find themselves there
that they should look him up.
And they do just that.
And he helps them get settled in.
He helps them open a bank account.
He helps them get an apartment
in the same complex
where he resides with his family.
He says it's all because,
just out of Islamic hospitality,
he was looking to help them out.
But the great suspicion was
that this was not an accidental meeting.
That this had to be something
that was arranged.
They also spent time
with another key figure,
who is Anwar al-Awlaki,
who's a Yemeni imam who was based
in San Diego at the time,
and went on to be, some years later,
an important leader of al-Qaeda.
Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar end up moving
to a boardinghouse in the summer of 2000,
which is run, ironically enough,
by an FBI informant.
The FBI informant was an elder gentleman,
a widower living alone in a house.
He had a series of young Muslim visitors
who stayed with him as boarders.
[Maguire] They weren't suspicious.
They wouldn't have done anything
that would have caused anyone
to reach out to law enforcement,
or to the authorities.
During the time in San Diego,
Nawaf al-Hazmi seemed
to live a pretty normal life.
He worked at a gas station
for a couple of weeks.
He played soccer with his friends.
[propellers whirring]
[Gore] They attempted to take flying
lessons while they're in San Diego.
And their English was really not good
enough to take the flight instruction.
Because of their language ability,
neither of them was able
to do well in flight training,
and they became muscle hijackers instead.
[Rotella] Zacarias Moussaoui's a Frenchman
who had spent time in the UK,
and had trained in Afghanistan.
He also goes to flight school in the US.
He's a very volatile, talkative guy,
and acted kind of crazy,
and it drew all kinds of suspicion.
Among other things,
it was said that he had said at some point
that he really wasn't interested
in learning how to land.
You know, just in sort of how to fly.
And wanted to go
to the big planes right away.
[plane engine roaring]
[Maguire]
He also had purchased flight deck videos.
And these videos
were the same exact videos
from the same vendor
that some of the hijackers had purchased.
Immigration Service picked him up
and took him into custody.
And it was believed
that he could have been a hijacker on 9/11
if he had not been arrested by INS
in August of that year.
[Rotella] It's another missed opportunity,
because there was information
connecting him to Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
who was one of the coordinators
of the 9/11 plot. A guy back in Germany.
If the FBI would've gotten access
to his computer,
he could have been a doorway
into possibly detecting
the plot ahead of time.
[Hoffman] Mohamed Atta,
sort of the operational commander,
met with Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
and with other logistical support elements
coming from al-Qaeda
to actually confirm
that everything was in place.
[ominous music plays]
All 19 of the hijackers,
there were 15 muscle and 4 pilots
they'd been very carefully selected.
They were people
that al-Qaeda had enormous confidence in,
that would not waiver from what seemed
like an impossible operation
to strike at the heart
of the United States.
[ominous music plays]
This entailed at least three years
of detailed plannings,
meetings throughout the world
handpicked selection
of 19 hijackers and pilots.
Orchestration of their movements.
[Maguire]
In the days prior to September 11th,
we see the hijacking teams
start to relocate
to be closer to their departure cities.
So we see the Flight 77 hijackers relocate
from New Jersey down to Maryland
to be closer to Dulles Airport.
We see the Flight 93 team move closer
to Newark Airport
where Flight 93 departed from.
And we see
the Flight 11 and Flight 175 hijackers
move to the Boston area.
On the morning of 9/11,
all of the hijacker teams
arrive at the airport.
They go through security
at their respective airports.
We believe that they're carrying
short-bladed knives,
which were allowed on board flights.
So they got through security,
uh, with no issue
and they boarded their flights.
[man] In the '80s and '90s,
there was no political will.
People get blown up by individuals,
planes are hijacked, it's all overseas.
Small amount of casualties. They're nasty,
they're bloody, it's a nuisance,
but it's not a national security issue.
Before 9/11, John Ashcroft,
he said these were our priorities.
This is what we're gonna focus on.
And the priorities were guns, drugs,
civil rights, prisoner protection.
So then you figure,
"Well, we're going to get attacked.
Where's the terrorism?"
And the terrorism slipped.
I've forgotten what number it was.
I think it was like 15.
And I couldn't believe it.
I could not believe this.
[dramatic music intensifies]
[music ends]
- [birds tweeting]
- [water lapping]
[Gonzales] The National Security team
is at Camp David talking about failures.
We had had people living in this country
planning this attack
for some period of time.
Our intelligence had to be better.
We needed to be better
at getting information.
How do we do that?
We talked about when we capture someone,
is there a way we can question them
to get better information,
the most reliable information?
[dramatic music plays]
[Cheney] It would be inappropriate for me
to talk about operation matters,
specific options,
or the kinds of activities
we might undertake going forward.
We do indeed, though, have, obviously,
the world's finest military.
They've got a broad range of capabilities.
Um
And they may well be given missions
in connection
with this overall task and strategy.
We also have to work,
sort of, the dark side, if you will.
We gotta spend time in the shadows,
in the intelligence world.
Um
A lot of what needs to be done here
will have to be done quietly
without any discussion,
using sources and methods
that are available
to our intelligence agencies,
if we're going to be successful.
[man] Going back to the Ford White House
when Cheney was Chief of Staff,
at least that far back,
Dick Cheney developed a very robust view
about the president's powers
under the Constitution,
especially as those powers related
to national security and war.
And his basic view is that when it comes
to war and national security,
the president is in charge.
And he can do what he thinks is necessary.
And Congress, basically,
can't get in the way.
And if Congress gets in the way,
the president can ignore it.
That was his legal view.
It was an absolutist view
of the president's powers in wartime.
[Cheney] So it's going to be vital
for us to use any means at our disposal,
basically, to achieve our objective.
[Fallon] That was frightening to me.
It was frightening to hear
the vice president of the United States
publicly on a television show,
where he should have been
calming the nation down,
where he should have been depressurizing,
he was upping the pressure,
upping the ante.
And so, I feared that we would do things
that would be to our detriment.
What I know is that when emotions
are high, rationality is low.
And poor decisions are being made.
[Cheney] We cannot deal with terror.
It will not end in a treaty.
There will be no peaceful co-existence.
No negotiations. No summit.
No joint communique with the terrorists.
[reporter] As American bombs blast away
again today at Taliban front lines,
Pentagon officials report
the number of US special forces
on the ground in northern Afghanistan
has more than doubled over the weekend.
More than 1,000 US Marines
based 60 miles outside Kandahar
are waiting to join the battle.
[gunfire]
[indistinct chatter]
In 2001, a lot of prisoners
started getting captured in Afghanistan.
[man] English.
I am report,
TV reporter from Al Jazeera Report.
Listen to me. Talk to the commander.
I am from Al Jazeera Report,
I come from Kandahar to here,
and I have camera and I lose it in Kunduz.
I am not a mujahid. See?
[woman] The US was offering
large rewards of money,
bounties for people to the Pakistanis
and to the Afghans
to basically turn over people
who sort of fit a certain profile.
[Fallon] We dropped leaflets
over Afghanistan saying
"Riches will be upon you
if you turn in these people."
[man speaking Arabic]
[Fallon] "Enough money
to feed your village,
your family, your tribe
for a year should you identify people."
And so we got people.
We got hundreds and hundreds of people.
[Gonzales]
Once you started capturing people,
you have limited options,
and you can't kill them.
You don't want to release them,
because they're gonna come back
and fight against you again.
So, uh, we had to make
some decisions about,
what are we gonna do
with people we capture?
General Tommy Franks was of the view
that we ought to have a limited footprint
as much as possible in Afghanistan
to reassure the Afghan people
that we weren't gonna be there long-term.
The notion of establishing
a large footprint with prisons,
or one large prison,
just didn't make sense.
So we discarded that idea.
We had discussions with other countries.
They weren't interested in receiving back
these terrorists, so that was out.
Then we turned towards the United States.
We actually had some discussions,
very limited,
but we looked at Leavenworth, Alcatraz
- [interviewer] Alcatraz? As a place?
- We looked Very, very limited.
[laughs]
Someone may have thrown it out as an idea.
Uh, looked at, of course,
supermax in Florence, Colorado.
But we felt that in the end, it was,
again, just weeks after 9/11, politically.
We didn't know whether the American people
would understand that.
We also had concerns about the rights
that would attach to anyone
we brought into the United States.
[woman] Some people in the military
called me up and said,
"We're getting into the prison business.
Would you like to come along?"
We really didn't know what was gonna
happen and what it was gonna be.
[ominous music plays]
The Pentagon decided they were gonna
set up a detention center in Guantanamo.
[Paradis]
Guantanamo is part of Cuban territory.
It's the southeast corner of Cuba.
The treaty ending the Spanish-American War
in 1898 gave Cuba independence.
But the part of the deal was
we got to keep Guantanamo.
The legal formality of it was
under a perpetual lease.
So we technically leased the land
in Guantanamo,
but only we can cancel the lease.
The State Department said they were told
to look for the legal equivalent
of outer space.
That's what Guantanamo was meant to be.
A place where no law applied.
It was this legal "No Man's Land."
This "Devil's Island."
[ominous music playing]
[Rosenberg] We flew into Guantanamo
for what was gonna be, like,
a one- or two-day show tour.
And while we were there,
they put some prisoners in the air.
And what happened was,
some very gritty video came out
of detainees,
maybe those detainees
being put on a flight.
And they were chained up and hooded
and shackled to each other
and being sort of marched along,
and it looked anything but humane.
In the hangar, somebody asked,
"Who are they sending?"
And he said, "They're sending us
the worst of the worst."
And they were talking
about those first 20 men.
[Lehnert] These are not nice people.
Several have publicly stated here
their intent to kill an American
before they leave Guantanamo Bay.
We will not give them that satisfaction.
There was a lot of people who thought
they were bringing Hannibal Lecter types
off of these planes who, you know,
were like suicidal, fanatical terrorists.
These are people that would gnaw
through hydraulic lines
in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.
[Paradis] They were strapped, essentially,
to the floor, required to sit upright,
put hooded and subjected
to various sensory deprivation techniques
like goggles, earmuffs, oven mitts,
and then shackled in multiple places.
And then they were just flown,
essentially like cargo, to Guantanamo.
[Rosenberg] The world would go on to see
those 20 men 10 days later, approximately,
when the Pentagon released
combat camera images
of those 20 men inside a cell.
That's them. That's the day one.
- [interviewer] They're kneeling down.
- [Rosenberg] They're on their knees.
You can find 20 human beings
in that picture.
You can find all 20.
The Pentagon released that photo
for a variety of reasons
and Europe was repulsed by it
and thought it said "torture."
[Fallon] When the first planeload arrived
and more planeloads arrived,
we realized it wasn't
the worst of the worst.
This wasn't the al-Qaeda suspects
that we had been tracking.
This was what I refer to as dirt farmers.
They were not battlefield captures.
These were bounty babies.
[woman] From the beginning of Guantanamo,
the word that came down from the Pentagon:
"No matter what you do,
do not call them prisoners."
Because if they're called prisoners,
then we have to treat them
under the Geneva Conventions
that protects prisoners of war.
So that's why we have detainees
and not prisoners.
You were sent here because you are
suspected of being high-ranking Taliban,
or members of al-Qaeda.
Some of you have said you are innocent,
and that you are not Taliban or al-Qaeda.
To you I would say
that America is a nation of laws.
Your case will be heard
and you will be judged fairly.
We are being guided
by the Geneva Conventions.
- [interviewer] What does that mean?
- [Lehnert] It means the guidance
we're receiving from Washington, D.C.,
we're following it.
And I think that you'll find that we're
treating them in a humane fashion.
[interviewer] In a leaked memo you wrote
you used the word "quaint" to talk about
some of the provisions
in the Geneva Convention.
Why'd you write that?
What'd you mean by that?
I used the word "quaint"
to reflect the fact
that the Geneva Convention
was drafted at a time
when wars were between nations,
and not between non-nation states,
like terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda.
We made a determination, the lawyers,
primarily based upon a memo
from the Attorney General John Ashcroft,
that it should not apply,
because al-Qaeda was not a nation-state
that had signed the Geneva Conventions
and that the Taliban
had forfeited their rights
for prisoner-of-war protection,
because in order
to receive those protections
you have to wear a uniform when fighting,
you have to carry arms openly,
you have to fight
under a hierarchical structure
and you can't go around
killing civilians indiscriminately
and expect to receive the benefits
of being a prisoner of war
under the Geneva Conventions.
[Paradis] The Bush administration's
decision back in 2002
that detainees in the war on terrorism
have no rights under international law,
they're essentially non-persons
under international law, is not correct.
In fact, they are protected
by the Geneva Conventions,
a specific part of the Geneva Conventions
called "Common Article Three."
They're being denied basic human rights,
access to lawyers,
access to habeas corpus.
The detainees were exposed to the heat,
the sun, the wind, the bugs.
[Fallon] There were two buckets.
One bucket was for your drinking water,
one was for your excrement.
They had a hard top
and fenced around on three sides
with a gate to get in and out.
It was the equivalent
of a military dog kennel.
[Paradis] There was a simultaneous effort
that was primarily driven
out of the White House
and the Vice President's Office,
specifically, to embrace torture.
I don't think that's an overstatement or
oversimplification of what was going on.
Starting in 2002,
the first high-value detainees
were captured, a guy named Abu Zubaydah,
who ran essentially a guesthouse
that was often a way station
for people who were going
to try and join al-Qaeda,
join the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And so he obviously had the incredible
intelligence of value for that reason.
You know, he knew a lot of people
who were coming and going.
And the FBI starts questioning him
and gets a lot of intelligence out of him.
And the FBI agent, Ali Soufan,
is actually tending to his wounds
and developing rapport-based methods
of interrogation. You get to know them,
the person begins to trust you,
at least to the extent you can.
[Soufan] When we start arresting
these people and talking to them,
it's not a rocket science
to interrogate them.
There are so many different ways
to interrogate individuals
and, you know, in the US government,
we are trained to do something like this.
We are trained
to obtain intelligence information
from human sources.
And law enforcements
in the United States do it every time.
The CIA, the military, the FBI,
we were involved in interrogations
in the East African embassy bombings
and the USS Cole bombings,
and a lot of the different plots
that took place around the world,
and the disruption.
Soufan actually has a lot of success,
including identifying for the first time
who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is.
It's easy to forget now,
because he's so widely publicized
as a mastermind of September 11.
But even as late as the spring of 2002,
we don't know who organized
September 11th.
And so the first person to give
that information up was Abu Zubaydah.
The FBI's success is noticed
in getting intelligence out of him,
and so they take Abu Zubaydah
and begin subjecting him
to, what were then called,
"enhanced interrogation techniques."
This simultaneous effort
that had been really started, you know,
within the first few months
after September 11th
to create a torture program,
seized the opportunity
for their first guinea pig.
[Card]
When we knew we could get Abu Zubaydah,
that was a very big deal for us.
When we thought
we could get Khalid Sheikh Mohamed,
that was a very big deal for us.
I mean, so these high-value targets
were very important.
[Gonzales] A decision was made
by the National Security Council
to look at enhanced
interrogation techniques.
George Tenet and the CIA were charged
with, "All right. What do you recommend?"
And so it was important
to get clear guidance
about, "All right. Where is the box?"
And so the Department of Justice
drafted legal opinions
to give guidance to the CIA.
[dramatic music plays]
[Card] I was in the meeting when
the president was given a briefing on it.
But he ended up authorizing
enhanced interrogation techniques
to be used under appropriate supervision
with the expectation that we would be able
to prevent the next attack
in the United States.
[Paradis]
Those enhanced interrogation techniques
are things like forced
24-hour-a-day nudity,
24-hour-a-day light, 24-hour-a-day cold,
24-hour-a-day darkness.
Waterboarding is one of the most infamous
or publicly-known methods that were used.
[Gonzales] I'm not in any way suggesting
that they're not unpleasant or terrible,
but, like, walling.
Walling was a technique
where you put a hood around their neck
to make sure they don't suffer
any neck injuries.
You hold them against a wall
that's not secure,
it will collapse,
and you push them against that wall.
With respect to the facial slap,
the palm had to be open.
You could only hold the hand
so many inches away from the face,
and it could only strike the face
on the cheek.
The abdominal slap, again, open palm,
you could only be so many inches
from from from the belly.
You could only strike between,
I think, the navel and the nipples.
So very detailed instructions
about what could be done.
We went back and looked
at the convention against torture,
which was the genesis
of the Anti-Torture statute.
The head of the Criminal Division
of the Department of Justice
wrote that torture is that activity
which the very mention
sends shiver up one's spine,
such as needles under the fingernails,
such as piercing of an eye
of your eyeball,
such as electric shocks to your genitals.
We weren't anywhere close to that.
[man] I spent
25 and a half years in the FBI.
At the time of 9/11,
I was the first Assistant Director
in charge of Counterterrorism.
Director Mueller, after a briefing
at the White House that He was there,
he called me to his office and said,
"We need to send two agents
to this country."
And I said, "Okay. Right.
We'll get right on that. What is it?"
And he said,
"Well, they picked up Zubaydah."
And I said, "That's great." Because I knew
we wanted him to come back here.
"We'll interview him. That's super.
We need more than two agents."
"We'll put together a packet."
"No, no, no. Send two agents."
I said, "We're bringing him back. Right?"
He said, "No.
The agency doesn't want to keep him."
And I said, "Hmm, that's interesting."
[laughs]
"We have no business
assisting the agency around trying"
"That somebody's not going
to be rendered back here."
I said, "I understand what they can do
and probably will do."
"We don't need any part of that."
And he says, "Yes. We do.
We need to be there to help them."
I said,
"They can't be in the room with this."
And he says,
"No. I told the president we'd help."
And I said,
"You really need to call the president
and tell him we're not gonna do this,
because think about this."
"Our image and the American public.
We're not a bunch of thugs."
"And we can destroy our reputation
by doing something like that."
[dramatic music plays]
[Soufan] They didn't believe
that these guys will talk.
So they wanted to develop a program
that's gonna be
like a cookie-cutter approach.
One, two, three, four,
and the guy's gonna give you everything.
That's not how the world works.
That's not how human nature works.
[Paradis] It was kind of a politics
of fear had set in.
To see that fear,
that I certainly had and everyone had,
just become a poison in the society
that you would just abandon the things
that make the United States unique.
[Soufan]
The CIA Inspector General, in 2004
came with the conclusion
that they cannot prove
one imminent threat was disrupted
because of enhanced
interrogation techniques.
- [interviewer] There's no evidence?
- There's no evidence.
And this is the CIA themselves
saying that, not me.
This is a huge thing about torture.
Torture will give you compliance.
It does not give you cooperation.
The difference between compliance
and cooperation is with compliance
the person will tell you whatever
you wanna hear for the torture to stop.
He won't tell you the truth.
In cooperation, you get the truth.
[ominous music plays]
It produced little useful intelligence
to help us track down
the perpetrators of 9/11,
or prevent new attacks and atrocities.
[Rumsfeld] Anyone who suggests
that the enhanced techniques,
let's be blunt, waterboarding,
did not produce an enormous amount
of valuable intelligence
just isn't facing the truth.
[McCain] I'm deeply concerned
about who we are as a country
and what we stand for and believe in.
America has always been an example
and an inspiration
to other countries throughout the world,
and if we practice, uh, torture
and do things that, uh, diminish
and even harm
the image of the United States
and motivate our enemies,
then it could have profound consequences
in the future.
And think of what would happen if,
in another conflict, an enemy,
not a terrorist organization,
takes Americans prisoners,
then obviously they will feel that they
can do the same thing we have practiced.
[Rosenberg]
It took me a long time to understand.
Guantanamo Bay,
and the prison there, particularly
was the first no-exit strategy
military enterprise since the Vietnam War.
[reporter] Hundreds of Taliban
and al-Qaeda suspects
are already in US custody,
including 30 more from Afghanistan,
delivered today to the US Naval Base
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
That brings the total there now to 110,
with many more to come.
[Rosenberg] Nobody would know
how this story would end.
[reporter]
How did they sneak up on us like this?
[indistinct shouting]
[agent] It definitely is a failure
of US intelligence.
[airplane flying]
[reporter 1] Today, just the sight
of a jetliner overhead
[emergency sirens blaring]
the sound of a siren
even the morning mail brings suspicion.
[reporter 2] For New York, it was another
day on the front line of fear
in the trenches of terrorist hysteria.
In Rockefeller Center,
an anthrax case at NBC.
You just feel so vulnerable now,
because you don't know
what's gonna happen,
where it's gonna happen.
[Gonzales]
That weekend after 9/11 at Camp David,
it was about informing the president
where we lack authorities,
where we lack capabilities,
and what was necessary
to prevent this from happening again,
to punish those responsible
for what happened on 9/11.
And it set in motion
certain things like the Patriot Act.
[applause]
The Patriot Act is one piece
of a massive surveillance effort
that starts to grow in the 9/11 aftermath.
[Bush] These acts of violence
against innocents violate
the fundamental tenets
of the Islamic faith.
And it's important for my fellow Americans
to understand that.
America counts millions of Muslims
amongst our citizens.
And Muslims make an incredibly valuable
contribution to our country.
Muslims are doctors,
lawyers, law professors,
members of the military,
entrepreneurs, shopkeepers,
moms and dads,
and they need to be treated with respect.
[woman] Even as President Bush was saying,
"We don't blame an entire religion
for the acts of a few,"
the government started doing exactly that.
[reporter] President Bush
signed the so-called Patriot Act
into law on Friday
in the East Room of the White House.
Following 9/11, we started
to see and hear conversations
about how our country's
intelligence had failed.
Agencies weren't talking to each other.
How did all of these hijackers get in,
get trained,
get on planes and nobody noticed?
As of today, we're changing
the laws governing information-sharing.
And as importantly,
we're changing the culture
of our various agencies
that fight terrorism.
[Billoo] And so what starts to happen
really fast and really frighteningly,
is we're increasing our investments
in law enforcement and surveillance.
The library provision,
so you could access our library records,
see everything we're reading.
And another provision
is the sneak and peek warrants.
The Patriot Act permitted law enforcement
to go into our homes
and leave without telling us.
So come in, look around quietly,
leave behind whatever I want,
take whatever I want,
and there's no documentation I can access.
[reporter] Federal agents swept
through Islamic homes and businesses
in suburban Washington, looking
for ties to terrorist organizations.
[Billoo] It's beyond
personally offensive as a Muslim.
It's offensive as an American.
It goes against the very core
of what we understood
as privacy rights that were
enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
[man] The National Security Agency
is part of the Pentagon,
part of the Defense Department.
And it is the agency
in charge of electronic surveillance
of all kinds of foreign adversaries
of the United States.
It was created in 1952
by President Truman in an Executive Order.
And it was an outgrowth
of the wartime code-breaking
that the US had conducted
during World War II.
And it has grown over the decades
into a massive modern cyber-security,
cyber-offensive, code-breaking,
electronic-eavesdropping organization
of unprecedented scale.
It's the largest such agency in the world.
[man] There's before 9/11
and there's after 9/11.
I was part of an agency that was supposed
to keep people out of harm's way.
And my first day on the job, and
Every time I say this, I get goose bumps.
I'm feeling them right now,
because that day is literally frozen.
9/11 was actually my first day reporting
to my new duty station.
And I can play back
that day second by second,
minute by minute, hour by hour.
But what I didn't know in that morning
is the secret decisions that were made
at the highest levels of the government
and what the government was willing to do
under the blanket of national security.
What they were willing to do
in going way outside the law.
[man] Jack Goldsmith,
Assistant Attorney General,
office of legal counsel.
I went to the White House to be read into
what was basically
the Stellar Wind program.
I went to David Addington's office.
He was the person who read me in.
Now, this was unusual
that the vice president's counsel
was reading me into a highly classified
intelligence program.
Addington actually had
the original authorities for the program
in his safe in his office.
And he said,
“Prepare for your mind to be blown.”
He basically said, "You're gonna learn
about something you won't believe."
[Drake]
Immediately, I mean within days and weeks,
verbal authorization was being granted
for a program called Stellar Wind
in which they're turning
the extraordinary power of NSA
and pointing it,
not just foreign, but also domestic.
[rapid electronic beeping]
[interviewer] What was Stellar Wind?
I have to be careful here.
Parts of it are still classified.
I'll just call it
a warrantless wiretapping program
that involved large metadata collection
and also collection of content,
much of it happening in the homeland.
[phone line ringing]
[reporter] Imagine you have a computer
that's tracking every time a call is made,
when it's received,
where it was made and received,
and how long it lasted.
That is metadata.
[Gonzales] The Stellar Wind program
had three baskets,
if I could describe it that way.
The first basket is
the collection of the contents
of telephone communications
where a senior operative at the CIA
believes one person on that call
is a member of al-Qaeda
or some way affiliated with al-Qaeda.
The other two baskets did not
have to do with content collection.
It had to do with metadata,
the second basket
being telephone metadata.
You don't see on there
the contents of the call,
but you see the number you called
and perhaps the length of the call.
Basket three is a collection
of email metadata.
It's who you sent the email to and from.
[Goldsmith] The basic idea was that
through massive collection
of this metadata,
even of people who weren't suspected
that you could have a network
that would allow you
to put the pieces together
with little pieces of evidence
that you have about terrorists.
You would have a pool
of information that, it was hoped,
would prevent the next 9/11.
That was always the theory.
[Drake] It's the digital age.
We're drowning in data.
So the NSA said, "Why don't we just take
as much as we can?"
"Wow. Look how easy it is.
We'll just take it all."
The government entered into
these extended special arrangements,
which were super secret,
with certain companies
like the Verizons of the world,
like AT&T and others, for data.
So they're just sweeping it all in,
claiming,
"Well, hey. Until we look at it,
we're not in violation."
This is turning the Fourth Amendment
inside out and upside down.
[Risen] In the Bill of Rights,
the Fourth Amendment grants us the right
to privacy in our own homes,
the ability to avoid
having government agents
barge into our homes without any approvals
or without any authorization,
and take whatever they want from us.
And this was the electronic version
of an unauthorized
government raid on your house.
[Watson] Director Mueller came back
from a briefing one morning.
He called me and he said, "Dale,
there's a special program going on."
"I want you to No one knows about it."
"Probably there's only four or five
or six of us in the US government."
I said, "Yeah? What's that about?"
And he said, "I can't tell you. Go."
So I went over
to the Pentagon the next morning,
in a secure space over there,
and had a meeting and was briefed on it.
And so I went back and told the director,
I said, "I'm not sure this is gonna work."
And I didn't feel comfortable about it.
I said, "This is not going to last."
He said, "Well, you're not authorized
to tell anybody."
I saw the product of it.
I saw the results of it.
I'm here to tell you, I saw
nothing productive that came of that.
[dramatic music plays]
[Goldsmith]
My office, I didn't realize at the time,
but it was charged
with approving its legality
every six or seven weeks.
The main problem with the program
was it seemed to fly in the face
of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act.
And it's a very complicated statute,
but basically on its face, it didn't seem
to allow what was going on.
Rather than go to Congress
and get those laws changed
the Bush administration
blew through some of them
and interpreted some of them in a way
that they just were able to sidestep them.
[ominous music plays]
[Gonzales]
In March of 2004, Jack Goldsmith,
who was the new head of OLC,
expressed concerns
about aspects of Stellar Wind.
He says, "I cannot find legal support
for this aspect of Stellar Wind,
and we may have to discontinue this."
- [interviewer] Discontinue the program?
- Discontinue something.
[Goldsmith] I basically had decided that
approximately half of it could continue
and approximately half of it
I thought couldn't continue.
That I couldn't find
any legal justification for.
When I informed the White House
that I couldn't approve a large chunk
of the surveillance program,
that's when David Addington
got angriest at me he ever got, and said
“If you roll that way,
you'll have the blood of 100,000 people
who die in the next attack on your hands.”
I think that he thought, A: I was wrong,
and B: that's what would happen.
And by the way,
he didn't have to tell me that.
I had the same feeling,
and it weighed on me a lot, obviously.
[Gonzales] I remember calling Andy Card.
Andy came back from vacation early.
We met with the vice president.
I think George Tenet
and Michael Hayden were there.
And we talked about this.
This was a very important,
very significant program.
Probably one of the most important
and effective programs
that our government had
in collecting information.
And so, the notion that
we would discontinue something,
that was serious.
[Goldsmith] Attorney General Ashcroft
approved my decision,
which was an amazing thing
since Ashcroft had been approving
the broader program
on advice of the Office of Legal Counsel.
It was a brave thing for him to do,
because it was a back-down for him.
And he wasn't happy about it,
but he went along and was persuaded.
[distant emergency sirens]
[Goldsmith] Within hours after Ashcroft
signed off and said he agreed with it,
he went into the hospital
with acute pancreatitis.
And he had to have
his gallbladder removed,
he had to have surgery.
And he was very sick, and it wasn't clear
if he was gonna survive.
[Gonzales] We were running up against
I think March 11th was the time
that the existing authorization
was gonna expire.
And any time there's a hole in collection,
you don't know what you might miss.
And so I talked to the president.
He was concerned,
because we were starting to hear chatter
that perhaps something big
is about to happen.
And if we don't have
the Department of Justice signature
on that authorization,
the telecom carriers
are probably not gonna cooperate with us.
We should call John Ashcroft.
- [interviewer] Gonna go to the hospital.
- We're gonna go to the hospital.
The president asked me and Alberto
to go to the hospital
and tell him what was going on,
and bring a document he had signed before,
wondered if he'd be willing to sign it.
[Goldsmith]
I sped to the hospital, ran up the steps,
and I walked into the hospital room.
Ashcroft was in intensive care.
He had all these tubes in him.
His eyes were almost closed,
and he was very gray.
And he didn't look well at all.
I wasn't in there five or ten minutes
before Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card,
the White House Chief of Staff, walk in.
And they had the Stellar Wind approval,
and they were basically
asking Ashcroft to sign off on it.
Andy and I went up to John Ashcroft's
room, and John was laying in the bed.
Now, clearly,
he looked weak and he was pale-looking.
It wasn't obvious to me that he understood
what we were talking about.
[interviewer] He's not coherent?
[Goldsmith] He didn't say much,
and he looked terrible.
And I just wasn't sure
what was gonna happen.
So, they come in and make this request,
and the most extraordinary thing happened.
Ashcroft, to my surprise,
kind of lifted himself up
just a little bit off the back of the bed
and he said
"I agree with the decision that was made
by the Justice Department."
He made it clear he didn't appreciate them
coming to his Intensive Care room
and bothering him.
And then he collapsed back into his bed.
And I was sure
he was gonna expire right then.
[monitors beep]
The considered view
of the Justice Department
was that this thing
this program
had not been operating lawfully.
And this was an effort by the White House
to get him to change his mind.
[Gonzales]
We just thanked him and we left.
When we get back into the Suburban,
we tell Addington it didn't go well.
We don't have a signature.
[Goldsmith] President Bush
reapproves the entire program.
He defies our advice,
which is his prerogative to do.
He's the president of the United States.
[distant siren wailing]
The whole Executive Branch
was about to melt down.
There was gonna be massive resignations
in the Justice Department.
The program would've come out then.
Everything would've been worse
for the White House and president,
including on the national security front.
And I think that's why they backed down.
Nothing like that, as best I can tell,
has ever happened in American history,
on so many levels.
And I basically was just immensely furious
with the excessive secrecy
and control of the White House.
I felt like they really
didn't want us to do a thorough
and real vetting of the program.
They got the answer they wanted early on,
and they didn't want it vetted after that.
I didn't feel like
the White House was candid with me.
[Drake] I started blowing the whistle
internally, through multiple channels.
I confronted the lead attorney
who had the access to the program.
I reported it
to the Inspector General of NSA.
In February 2006, I went to the press
with unclassified information
regarding the mass
domestic surveillance regime.
They decided
to make life very difficult for me.
But we all have moral agency.
We all have the ability
to make our choices.
We also can choose in how we respond
to things that do happen.
You know, I witnessed a history.
It was an extraordinary period.
And I just I came out of the dark.
I wasn't gonna just sit by
and watch it all happen.
I would've regretted it
for the rest of my life.
[Goldsmith] The Stellar Wind program
was controversial,
but the law didn't change. And, in fact,
Congress ended up
renewing the surveillance law
and, in some respects,
expanding surveillance powers.
The Obama administration
changes some policies and stuff,
but the essential law didn't change.
Basically, the massive surveillance powers
of the government have continued,
and have been reapproved largely
even after the revelations.
It's quite clear that they acted
super aggressively after 9/11,
and that they were really fearful.
They felt blind
about what the enemy was up to.
And they, in a panic, did everything
they could to collect information.
And they did so in ways
that pretty clearly broke laws.
[dramatic music plays]
Any power without constraint
always leads to abuse.
[Paradis] 9/11 certainly just
made people want to not be soft.
And probably more, you know, prosaically,
they just wanted
to beat the shit out of people.
It was anger. Right? Wouldn't you want
to beat the shit out of someone who,
you know, murdered 3,000 people?
Who wasn't angry?
But that's why we elect leaders:
to be the cooler heads,
to have the longer vision
to protect the values
that we claim to treat as the organizing
principle of our society.
To actually protect those things,
so that the world we're living in
after the current crisis passes
is not so radically different
than the one that we came from.
- [man] All right.
- [woman] Give Dad hugs.
[baby coos]
[reporter]
Thousands more in America's military
heading now to distant points.
[helicopter blades thumping]
[man] Ten days after I graduated
high school, I got into the Marine Corps.
[artillery fire]
What have I gotten myself into
would not become clear
until my first day in combat.
[explosion]
[dramatic music plays]
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