Danger Close | Peter Bergen

0:00This episode was brought to you by Staccato. Here's a big question which is, will historians of the 22nd century look back and say the beginning of the end was American reaction to 911? If they were a Theorat war, the Bosch, the Afghan withdrawal, the stalemated Iran war. We don't know. I'm very interested in history because it's the only thing we can learn from. It's unfortunate that we don't learn enough. The changing media landscape, and it's almost in line with what we were promised by social media companies about how this was going to bring everyone together around the world, connect us for a better future. If you look at it in its totality, it has probably done a little bit of that, but most part, it's been used to divide, essentially, and add a net effect of not being beneficial

1:02to society at large. As you know, as a parent of teenagers, I'm glad that meta settled, and I'm glad that putting pressure on YouTube and others to come to that kind of agreement, where it's an hour or a day if you're on to 16. It's so brutal. A little late for us, but certainly these kids find a way around it. They're so smart. But it's probably social, but I'm surprised. I'm like, it is a new high school. They allow the phone into the school. I'm like, really? That's just asking for trouble. What was I think, do you feel this year? I think they stopped it all for you can't have phones throughout the school. The previous school wasn't in the last phones at all, which I think is just like that seems so basic. Yes. Yes. I mean, the dog goes the mind a bit. And then the other part of that that's connected, of course, to know what you do is the

2:05same thing with non-traditional media. So even a podcast like this or others, but when you have an industry that gets clicks, and is therefore allowed to be monetized by promoting, let's say, conspiracies or whatever is going to get you that click. And it doesn't have people at the helm who are, have those journalistic ethics that used to be such as, that used to give journalism, journalists, the light was now called legacy media. They're standing. And that's disappeared. And not disappeared. It's still there. But those voices that can give rise to, let's say, conspiracies in around 9-11, which we're going to hear a lot of probably in the coming weeks. And then it'll switch to something else because these conspiracy theories can get monetized. So it's in it parallels the rise of obviously social media and then all of these, all of

3:09new media. So it's interesting in that it gives us what was kind of promise, what was to connect the world. And then on the journalism side, it was, hey, now you have these other options that we're going to get the truth out there because legacy media is owned by X, Y, or Z and all of that stuff. So once it is not brought us together and there are almost zero. And also Jack, it's all based on theft. I mean, I'm intellectual theft. If you do a search for Al Qaeda who have been in charge on any of these platforms, much of my work is, I didn't agree to any of this. It was stolen, right? Oh, yeah. Literally. I mean, they took 500 of that as in books and, yeah, anthropic is settled for 1.5 billion, which is nothing for them. I mean, all these, and they, you know, it gets dumber as time goes on because more and more people are going to say, well, you can't just take my stuff without my permission or some kind of license back. So what, your podcast on your YouTube channel, what are you usually kind of averaging?

4:14Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't look into that because I'm not a podcaster. I'm an, I look at myself as an author who has a podcast. Okay. It would be very different if I was a podcaster who had a book. I think those two are very different things that the podcast obviously came. Are you getting a lot of traffic? I mean, it's, I guess, I guess you have to, it's all relative compare. You can, depending on who you're comparing yourself to, I mean, okay. Well, I mean, I think you're a big. Well, thank you. Thank you. It's, for me, it's, it's fun because especially when I get to talk to you, I'll, in this conversation, I will hear something. You will say something that then becomes a part of my foundation, my experience that might somehow work its way into a book or spark an idea that says, I'm going to look into a little more. Maybe it's going to be a background to a character at some point. So I just love to have conversations with you in particular. But for me, it's also one of those things that, hey, we need to, like I said earlier, create new readers. What's the way to do that? This is another way to do that. And I'm just pulling people to my books, obviously, but to yours, which is what we're

5:16talking about today, all of yours, which I'm once again, I have right here. There might be a couple still on the shelves behind me because I'm still in the middle of that. But I know I have all of them, if they're not on this stack, they're still some on the shelves. And this one, of course, by the time this podcast drops, which is Friday, September 11th, this year, this one will, will be out there so people can add this to their libraries and then gift this to kids in high school, post college years, whatever it is because really what we owe, all those people who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are the places around the world. There came home dealing with a physical and emotional trauma of the battlefield is to learn from the lessons of the past so we can apply them going forward as wisdom. And that's what this book here helps do. So I'll tell you once again, thank you for writing it. Thank you for writing all of these books. And I've been reading you for over two decades now. And this one right here is so important in your latest book. Everybody needs to read it. And right around now, the time of this anniversary, the 25th anniversary, I cannot believe it's been

6:1925 years since 9-11. But it's a natural time to reflect on what led up to it and then a response to it. And even the second and third order effects of that response. So session before. Thank you for writing. Jack, let me ask you a question because when you, when you, when we, what was your years in the military and where did you serve? So I got in 1996 and got out in 2016. So did those 20 years there. So I had one deployment before September 11th. So I got to see what that world looked like. Deploying for essentially presence, not for purpose. Then I got to see the, the, the next phase, which was deploying for purpose, not for presence. And that was two weeks into my second deployment was September 11th. So I was in Guam and that people started knocking on doors up and down the hallways in the barracks and the phone started ringing because about midnight or in Guam time, somewhere around there. That was morning in, in New York and we all went down to the basement where we had a TV

7:20and we watched the, the Twin Towers fall from there. So, well, I changed your life very dramatically as it changed so many lives, but where, where were you principally deployed when you were deploying? Then it was mostly Iraq, but Afghanistan, Iraq did the Northern Arabian go right away to enforce the UN embargo, oil embargo against Iraq. Kind of see 17s and started heading that way. And thought we were going to be in Torabora and be part of that never, but instead we landed in Kuwait and we ended up doing the ship boarding operations, which was the only time I spent any time on a ship in my 20 years in the Navy was, was for that, that deployment, which was actually ended up being interesting, but you didn't want to be there after September 11th, enforcing the oil embargo against you wanted to be an Afghanistan. So we're now getting into details so you can't sort of explain publicly, but I mean, you, so you were a pop, which steel team were you part of? I started at team five on the West Coast, then that was where we were in with Guam and that deployment to the Northern Arabian Gulf right after 9-11.

8:22Then I went to seal, became an officer after that went to OCS, which is for anyone listening, it's the same thing as boot camp, but you get yelled at by marine drill instructors instead of Navy. But you do the same things, you fold your t-shirts, you fold your underwear, you make your bed, that sort of thing. And then I was right back to the, to the seal teams after that is an officer this time at seal team two and then finished up at seal team seven. So you tried at what rank? As a lieutenant commander, so no four, so major, the other services. Well, you must have seen a lot of action. I, for good or for real. Yeah, it was good. I had extremely fortunate that, that, that a lot of my decisions under fire worked out. So even if you make the right decision under fire, things can go south. And if you make the wrong one, quote, I'm using quotes for those not air quotes for those, not watching us, because you can make that wrong decision. What would be wrong and let's say if we war game something in a nice air conditioned room and put it up on the blackboard and had a red cell trying to figure out what the enemy would do in response to us, you can make the wrong decision under fire too.

9:22And it can work out. So it's just, it's, it's, it's a very strange dynamic when you're out there on the battlefield. Well, of course, but I mean, this is one of the kind of a, maybe a theme of the book. It's also like, yeah, you can have the greatest seal teams in the world. You have the greatest intelligence community. And you know, if the commander in chief, if he or she makes a decision, but isn't that well informed, it doesn't really matter. I, I met with a group of Navy strategists who were from the Naval War College. And you know, we get to the Naval War College. That's one thing. And then this like a further selection is the top 2% I think who become Navy strategist. And I said to them, look, this is not something you may not want to hear. But like, you can be the greatest strategist in history. It's almost irrelevant. You know, the commander in chief is the commander in chief. And it's, it's either a feature of a bug of our system. You know, I've been thinking about this jacket a little bit, which is an apoled entry democracy. It would have been very hard for president George W. Bush to order the surgeon to Iraq. Even the leaders of his own party were against it.

10:23Senator Luger, the head of the Senate Republican, the Foreign Relations Committee was against it. Senator Chuck Hagel, who became Defense Secretary under Obama was against it. And so an apoled entry democracy, you know, the Iraq, the Iraq search would have been very hard to I think order. I think there would have been a vote of no confidence in parliament because so many Americans were against the war by then. Everybody thought it was a bad bet doubling down. So anyway, it's a kind of broader point about the system we have, which is the commander in chief, he or she has tremendous power. And in apoled entry democracy, you can have a vote of no confidence. Yeah, that might get you to stop doing your Bush president Trump right now is ignored congressional resolutions on the Iran War. And Congress has been pretty soupi, and obviously both houses right now are controlled, but the Republicans that may change on November 3rd. But you know, as I think about this, you know, my wife and I used to talk about be great

11:24if I someone to West Point. And as now we're actually well, you know, you know, it's so dependent on who the commander in chief is and he or she can make a not great decision or pull decision. And it doesn't matter in some ways how great your military is if your strategy is crap. There's a book you write. Yeah, I think you talk about it in here. I think I remember you mentioning it in here, but dereliction of duty by a charmer master. The joint chiefs of staff and during the Vietnam War. Yeah. And so that's very interesting. And of course, there are parallels between Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. But one of the things I think about it, I thought about it when I was in the military when I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily in Iraq though, was that if we had made the same kind of tactical level missteps that our senior level representatives were making at the strategic level, we would have been court martial sent home. Certainly, we never have operated in the SEAL teams again.

12:27They can make those strategic level missteps and we're trusting them. They're trusting us to maintain the moral high ground as we're going into these compounds and doing these operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're expecting us to succeed. Yes. But we're also trusting them to make the best strategic level decisions possible. And we had so much information out there in history books. And even history books don't worry even that old. We can get out the Russian, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 79 to 89. That wasn't that long before September 11th. We don't even have to go to the three British incursions or we don't have to go back to Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great. We got it right there. And then we have people like you who are out there writing on a bring some specific points to what you saw on the lead up to 9-11 here. Well, let me sort of ask you a question here, which… So one of the themes of I think of my book is in a sense we've created this imperial commander in chief. The post 9-11 commander in chief expanded his ability to go to war.

13:32Very… And I mean some of the things are obvious. Like Bush going to war in Iraq, a preventative war. We haven't done that in the past where we go to war against a punitive threat that didn't even exist. But to deal with the threat we thought might exist. And then Obama expanded the war with the drone program in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He became the drone president, allowed him to… These countries we were not formally at war with. And then the war in Iran sort of… I won't get into it because everybody I'm looking at this, you know, under the stands. We have no congressional authorization, no imminent threat, no NATO allies, no UN resolution, no real plan for the day after. I mean it was like… It takes a lot of the boxes you don't want to tick. But the commander in chief is less accountable and this is a question. First of all, we don't have a draft. Now our all volunteer military of which you were, you know, the SEAL teams is… I mean it's as good as it gets. Is the most professional military in history in many ways. And then we have a lot of contractors.

14:34One of the things I say, I didn't know that eight towns and American contractors had died during the war. And of course 7,000 American service members died. The contractors got a lot less attention, but they were doing a lot of war-like activities, whether it was protecting bases, protecting, you know, significant targets, intelligence, support, etc. And so when you have an all volunteer force, you have a lot of contractors doing things that before would have been done by service members. And then also we've got almost like a hereditary cast. As you know, Jack, the most likely indicator that you're going to be in a US military is a close relative is in the US military. And when I looked at the Odeana, the Patreasas, the Macristals, the almost every commander, their son or daughter went into the service. They may have, Macristals case is some worked in the intelligence community, but also,

15:37you know, Abize's daughter worked in the intelligence community, or many of them worked in the US military. So we've kind of created this hereditary cast for good or for real. And so in a way, it makes it a lot easier. I mean, the military is always going to salute and say, we've had reports just recently that there's been non-concurrence with some of the Iran deployments by the commanders. Yeah, we'll do this, but we don't agree with it, which in the reporting in the Washington Post relatively recently. Anyway, so between the all volunteer force, the reliance on contractors and also this kind of like hereditary aspect to the US military, we're making the commander in chief less and less accountable. Which of those things, you know, a normal volunteer force is good in many ways. A fact that we use contractors, I mean, just as a feature of a bug, the fact that we have this like hereditary military is that a feature of a bug.

16:39You know, but anyway, the bottom line is the commander in chief seems to be able to go to war a lot easier than would have been the case before 9-11 is I think one of the conclusions of the book. Yeah, there's actually in devil's hand here, this is my fourth book. I think I started with the, let's see right here. Yeah, I think it's, and again, we still use this or we did at the time of this writing anyway. Yeah, seven days after 9-11, Congress passed a 275-word resolution titled the 2001 authorization for the use of military force. This document granted the president of the United States the authority to bring individuals and countries involving the attack to justice. One years later, he remains the sole legal basis for the continuing war on terror. Yeah. And the people, and there was only one vote against it was Barbara Lydia of California, the Democrat. And she, you know, it was a very unpopular position down at the time. But she saw something that we didn't see at the time, which is that the war, you know,

17:42they gave the president, you know, you know, who could have predicted that Obama would engage in military operations in eight Muslim countries? You know, Obama's critics and his cheerleaders don't realize that he was as close, you know, he was more similar to Bush than they underserved both his critics and his cheerleaders. And in fact, you remember famously, you went to Oslo to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize early in his presidency. And he actually gave it very articulate defense of just war. You know, he said basically, I'm paraphrasing, you know, like non-violence couldn't stop the Nazis, non-violence is not going to stop out kinder, you know, the just wars are sometimes just, you know, and there's a whole raft of theology. And, you know, so I think he, I think the audience in Oslo, when he gave that speech, wasn't expecting for him to say what he said. Yeah. Well, I want to get to that. I actually want to bring us out to today because that's what this really, really does. It's so timely because it takes them even before 9-11, it gives us little basis there.

18:46And then it takes us through that and then all the decisions that led up to what happened to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and now all the way up to Iran. So extremely timely book right here for everyone to read as well. But let's talk a little bit about the implications of what happened in August of 2021, meaning 2001, we have a, what would, well, most people would think of at the time of, hey, this is a big success here. We expected to maybe get bogged down a little more here in the mountains of Afghanistan. We have this week's long, months long push that takes us up. Let's say to December, but we see that. And then we add 20 years to that. We have Taliban back in power. We have our military equipment left behind. We have C-17s taking off those visuals. So my question is, what are the implications of that failure? Both of the 20 year effort and how we left, both at home and abroad.

19:52Great question. You served many years in Afghanistan. I met my wife in Afghanistan. I spent a lot of time there. I think that we were, Afghanistan was on the way to being a semi-functional, semi-democratic, semi-OK central Asian state. And we just threw that out the window. And when President Biden said, hey, one of the reasons that he decided to do this was because we had to focus on China or Russia. Well, guess what? As you know, China borders Afghanistan. The former Soviet republics border Afghanistan, Afghanistan borders Iran. Wouldn't it be helpful if we still had one of the biggest bases in the world, background air base in our possession still? And so we just, I think, gave it away. And we defeated ourselves. This is actually a great book, Jack. I don't know if you've read it called, just defeating ourselves by a guy called, his last name is Miller. I really recommend it. It's one of the best books I've read on the subject. And I wrote in June of 2001 that we could see a remix of our United States with, you know,

21:01Hasey retreat from Saigon in 75 with ISIS taking over much of Iraq in 2014. Unfortunately, I was right. And I didn't have access to classified information. I'm just using my own brain. And as soon as Biden said, we're leaving, well, you know, guess what? Everybody took that seriously. And you know, I didn't know when I was writing this book. There were more European NATO forces in Afghanistan when we left than there were about 7,000 European NATO forces and 2500 American forces when we left. Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, went to NATO in March of 2021. Our NATO allies said, don't leave. You know, this is ridiculous. We're going to undercut the Afghan government any leverage they have. He went back. He told that to Biden. Biden just didn't listen. And I think, you know, in Biden's defense, he was always sort of thought the Afghan war effort wasn't worth the candle. And he had that view in 2009. He was sort of shot down by Obama.

22:02You know, the Obama 2009, a counterterrorism plus operation, which in retrospect, 25,000, 20,000 troops was probably not a bad idea. Would have been sort of more SF. And but, you know, we went for a more heavy conventional and we didn't really exploit it the way we should have. I think we really dealt the Taliban's from serious defeats in 2010. I was embedded with the Marines in Hellman in Nauha. And they were, you know, I was with Anderson Cooper and CNN. The Marines are pretty smart about that. They did not want Anderson Cooper and his team to be killed in the helmet. So they put us in Nauha, which we thought was, you know, was going to be like, we'd see some action. But then the Taliban, it really, and they were still sort of around, but they, you know, they would tell the big defeat in Hellman and they knew it. And they would do, but they'd tell the big defeat in the counter. Armistice then was not to start really pushing for a serious peace deal with the Taliban when they were on that back foot.

23:02And we also should have done this in January of 2002. And so with every passing year, they had more leverage, they had more strength. And we, the lesson, one of the big lessons, I think is we could have made peace with the Taliban, at least some of them in early 2002. They, a lot of them wanted to make peace. They wanted to amnesty. Some of them were sent in Guantanamo. Unfortunately, we didn't. But so, you know, we, like anybody involved in Afghanistan, 800,000 Americans served in Afghanistan, all their family members, think about all the diplomats, all the journalists, all the aid workers, you know, we just threw it away. And we, we, you know, it's inexplicable. And I think it showed, I don't think it's an accident that Vladimir Putin moved 10 to thousands of Russian troops to the Ukrainian border three months after we pulled out of Afghanistan because it's signaled incompetence and it's signaled American isolationism and withdrawal from the world. Of course, Putin badly miscalculated. And I'm not saying that our Afghan withdrawal precipitated his invasion of Ukraine.

24:02He was going to do that at some point. He just thought, hey, this is the perfect moment. Putin calculated that Biden was pulling back. And so, you know, I think in the Chinese drew their own conclusions and kind of crowed about like, what does this mean for Taiwan? And I just think it was terrible. And while we see we betrayed, look, I say in the book and it's these are not my numbers, a reliable number is only 3% of the people that serve with you with us, you know, got out on those planes. A lot of the people who got out on those planes were just able to buy a young Afghan male so you could get to the airport. And you know, I don't, as I say in the book, of course, the operation was well executed, 124,000 people got out. But Biden then patting himself on the book and on the back. And as I say in the book, this is like an arsonist congratulating himself for helping put out the fire that he set. You know, it just, you know, it was, I think, you know, I feel very strongly about it as you probably have, you know, kind of like anybody who spent any time there because it was,

25:08it was so unnecessary. It starts with excluding the elected Afghan government from any of the negotiations, which was something we didn't need to do. It starts with, you know, we could have started negotiating with the Taliban when we had much more leverage with them. And then they continued and we just, we did not need, none of that needed to happen. It's so heartbreaking how it ended, specifically for the 13 US servicemembers who died. And that began. Well, I look, you know, I'm in touch with some folks in Afghanistan still. I mean, they are the Taliban, you know, have no program for governance. This is a place where people are like, I mean, you know, they're more militant than they were the last time when I was in Afghanistan when they were in power before 9-11. And that was pretty bad. I mean, this is, and you mentioned that better armed. I mean, the US says they have $8.5 billion of military equipment that we left behind.

26:10Well, that's a budget of a small, that's a defense budget of a European country. I mean, I'm glad, you know, just recently, Jack, you may have seen these reports about some, the Afghan opposition is beginning to, you know, do some attacks in northern Afghanistan. I mean, they're not significant. But the point is that I don't think Taliban will be there forever because embedded in their DNA or the seeds of their own defeat because they're not really offering anything other than, you know, it's not a very appealing program. They do have all the guns, you know, and when you have all the guns, it's hard to organize real-life opposition. And they are, you know, they can't be pretty brutal. But that said, let's say there's a terrorist attack in Paris six months from now where a lot of people get killed and it turns out it was planned from Afghanistan. Then the politics around this begin to change. I think we in the United States, 25 years after 9-11, we have very, it's not just the offensive

27:11operations that you are part of, but we have TSA, we have Department of Homeland Security, we have the National Counterterrorism Center, we have a much bigger intelligence budget, we have public knowledge that this is an issue, we just have a much better defensive posture. In addition to whatever we did offensively, some of which was counterproductive like the Iraq War, some of which like killing Bin Laden was well executed and well deserved. Well, let's get there. I want to take you through this for a moment, but also I want people to go back to our podcast from November of 2021. We talk about your background going into Afghanistan in 1983 and everything you've done since your interview with Bin Laden in 1997. I encourage everybody to go back there to get the full scope of your background and also purchase all of your books and add up to their libraries for sure. But I remember being the back of a high lux pickup truck in Afghanistan in 2003 and I was back there with an Afghan who was helping us.

28:14Back then it was close enough to the 80s where I could still ask, hey, where you and I could look at their age, which is kind of a little harder to judge than in Afghanistan. Everybody looks a lot, everybody, I mean, they all look a lot older than they actually are. Yes, and also because they've lived through years of war and it's just ages people. So I asked him, were you Mujahideen? I was just curious about their backgrounds. I'd always ask, some people would tip to around it, I would just ask. And so it was very interesting, but he was telling me about just his life, one of the bouncing around the back of this pickup truck and the dirt dusty road somewhere. And I remember thinking to myself, my goodness, at the time, I thought I'd barely made it to Afghanistan just in time to get a little bit of this action, to do the job I was trained to do, to do my part. And I thought 2003, I barely made it because we're going to be out of here in a couple of years. We're going to wrap this thing up and I want to find Bin Laden. We're going to crush the rest of Al Qaeda and then we're at the time, we're like, well, maybe security and

29:17we'll help train some people or something like that. But that was kind of our vision back then. And I thought I'd barely made it. But at the time, I was thinking, oh my gosh, also, man, maybe has this person not studied or heard about some of our history with, let's say, Vietnam and leaving Vietnam or how we treated the Kurds? There's multiple people throughout history. Of us co-opting forces or building up forces, making promises, and then leaving those people who helped us to some pretty horrible fates. So I was always thinking that with these people, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we're helping us out. But anyway, just a side note. I mean, Jack, on that point, I mentioned I was embedded with Amrins and Helmut and some tribal elder came up to the Zuternic Colonel, who was from Minnesota, who was leading Amrins that we were with. And the guy said, look, how long are you going to be here? And the Marine Lieutenant Colonel said, he was honest. He said, look, I can only tell you we'll be here for I think nine months.

30:17Yeah, I'm not going to lie to you. I mean, it's actually a new race, a very good point, which is when have we allied with forces that we haven't been abandoned? I mean, it's more the exception that we don't. I mean, we kind of, I mean, usually it's a history of us abandoning our allies. It's a pretty unpretty history, at least in the post-World War II era. Exactly. So I always felt, I always thought about that with the people who were working with, not just them, but their families who were the softer targets, obviously. Well, I wanted to ask you also about the 2003, because I remember being embedded with the 82nd airborne in 2003 on the Eastern border. And their main complaint was boredom and how incredibly hot it was. And I totally agreed. I'd never been that uncomfortable in my life. And we, you know, Al Qaeda and the Taliban seem to have kind of disappeared. I mean, it was near the area opposite skin on the, and I was like, we after several days, I said to my friend, we were reporting with,

31:21I was like, we need to find a way to get out of here. Because nothing is happening. Wow. That may not have been your experience, because you were in the SEAL team. Maybe you would like more targeting targeting. Yeah, we're going to have a strike force out of the program for the most part, but also guys need some of those places as well to stage for different operations. So it was more, it was more, but it was also essentially what every big city, SWAT unit is going to do tonight, though, the server warrant. They're going to do it in the middle of the night. They're not going to have AC-130s overhead or pre-impa-sol fire. There's some of those things, but it does get to this point that in 2003, it seemed like the war had largely been done. And we're shift in focus. We don't have been lied in yet, but we're shift in focus. I want to get to that too. That shift in focus and what it meant for us. But for those who didn't listen to our previous interview, can you tell me where you were on 9-11 and then what was your first thought once you heard that a plane had flown in? Okay, so I'd been watching the DC. My dad was

32:21living with me at the time. He'd been a pilot and he was in Korean war and he said a plane is flown in the trade center and you'd be in a pilot. So he was like, that's pretty odd on a beautiful day and clear skies. And then I went, I was on my way into CNN because I was reporting on Akman Shahz Masood's assassination, which had happened two days earlier. Akman Shahz Masood, I mean, I later learned, I mean, I later learned, I'd been killed by Al Qaeda. This has been a lot of this way of kind of giving the Taliban a gift in a run up to 9-11 because he hadn't clued them in on the 9-11 plan. He knew it would cause some problems. A way of modifying them was the head of their principal opponent. And the second plane hit as I was on my way to CNN. And of course, you know, it was, I just had, I'd written my first book about bin Laden, Al Qaeda, I'd handed the manuscript in a few days before 9-11. As you know, from writing books, your first book, like everything is wrong.

33:23I mean, there's so much to do, you have to get right. And then of course, it's massive kind of thing happened. So I had to rewrite it and it came out in November of 2001. This huge event had happened. And then you know, I, my cab driver, because I was cabbing into CNN and he started crying and I started crying. It was like, you know, it was like, I mean, it just, it was just like, and we didn't, there was a lot of, you know, like 10,000 people died. Was the state apartment on fire. There was so many stories, so many like news, like any big news events. It's not always completely clear, accurate of the time. Something very big had happened. Anyway, I spent two years of my life reporting on bin Laden, went gone to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, all these places where bin Laden had been. So I knew a lot about him. And years later, I went back and I looked at the video log of CNN that day. And I was able to get on CNN at 1 p.m. that day to say the following.

34:24This is the biggest news event arguably in America, you know, in some of you since JFK's assassination arguably. So there's a lot of news going on. I get on and CNN, of course, is not, they're not going to let you get on just like spouts and BS on this about this news event. And they, what I said was you have to look at capability in 10. There may be people with capability, say, the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Russians, the Chinese, but they don't have the intent. They know that there would be suicidal to attack the United States. They're not going to provoke World War 3 by attacking the United States. And then you have to look at intent. There might be a bunch of people with the intent, but not the capability. And the only group that had intent and capability was Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. And that's what I said. Now at the CIA within two hours, they knew that there was bin Laden and Al Qaeda because they had access to the passenger manifesto or two people within Al Qaeda that they were cracking for since 2000. They were on the plan of crashing the Pentagon. So they very quickly knew it was Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. And they'd been warning about

35:25Bin Laden and Al Qaeda throughout the spring of then summer of 2001. So, you know, I, you know, unfortunately, you know, Al Qaeda got very lucky on 9-11 and we were an open target. Even Bin Laden didn't anticipate, you know, he thought he comes out of a construction business. He thought that the towers would collapse above the point of impact. He didn't anticipate that both and of course, they were planning to take out the Congress as well. And that would have been thousands more people killed than the symbol of American democracy, which is a big building on a hill. They weren't planning to take out the White House. It's a small building surrounded by trees. I mean, I'm literally two blocks away. You can't see the White House. When you can see the Congress. So that, I mean, luckily, the passengers on flight 93 disarmed, the passengers disarmed the hijackers and they crashed the plane into Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They saved a lot of people and it could have been even worse than it already was. So,

36:28it was an utterly shocking event. I was very shocked. I wasn't totally surprised because I'd been spending so much time reporting on this. Yeah, certainly. And I read, I mean, there are issues with that book. I think it's called Bin Laden by Yosel Podanski. There's issues with that. The book is almost entirely fictional. Yeah, there was a lot around with that one. But I'd read everything. I'd read everything. I'd certainly read up to that point. On Bin Laden, I had a lot of them with me on deployment. I was in the intelligence representative for the for the platoon as well as being a sniper and all the rest of it. But anyway, so similar, similar kind of a reaction. But also, like you said, there were so many warnings from people in the intelligence community leading up to tonight, 11, particularly from the beginning of 2001, one onward, trying to get the attention of different administration officials. But it wasn't just people in the intelligence community.

37:29I want to ask you about a letter you wrote to the New York Times in August of 2001 on the threat of an imminent attack. Yeah. So, I was in Yemen after the cold attack and I became friendly with John Burns, who was the top foreign correspondent of the New York Times, one three Pulitzers. And we became friendly. I wrote him a four page letter on August the 14th, 2001 saying, I think there is a story here of the Times can responsibly report that there's something big happening. And of course, I didn't have access to classified information. I just could see a lot of embassies were closing in the Middle East in ways that were going to the fifth fleet and Bahrain was kind of alert on alert. And then there was a two and a half hour videotape. Anybody watching on the internet now, that's routine today. But believe me, two and a half hour videotapes on the internet were not routine in 2001. And they were certainly not routine from Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda had this sort of duty to warn sort of theology where, so they released this

38:31two and a half hour videotape. And to me, it was like, it kind of encapsulated all that grievances against the United States, the imprisonment of Sheikh Abdul-Rakman, who was a militant cleric in the United States, was a big one. U.S. support for Israel, U.S. support for Saudi Arabia. And I said this videotape in particular, I think signals that they are planning an attack. Because they had a press conference before the embassy attacks in Africa, which killed more than 200 people. They had suddenly signaled before the U.S. as coal attack that they were interested in, something in Yemen. And so I thought this is part of a partner that I'm signaling. Anyway, John Burns wrote a piece. It went up on the internet, which was very much the same for infancy on the weekend before 9-11. It didn't go in the newspaper because of an editing hour. Can you imagine if a story in the New York Times had been loud? And I think the headline was, I can't remember, just to tell me to strike or whatever it was. Instead, it went in the newspaper

39:34of record in the city that was attacked on September 12th. And they took the internet story off the internet, which they later said was a serious error. Because it kind of like, I'm not clear why they did that, whether they embarrassed it, they kind of had the story and the internet, but not on the internet, but not the newspaper. I mean, bear in mind at that time, the newspaper or record was a newspaper. The internet was kind of like this. And anyway, I think the point of that anecdote is that you didn't need access to classified information to understand something big was potentially happening. Where it was going to happen, how it was going to happen? I had no clue that the intelligence community had no clue. But the policy makers, and this gets back to some of the discussion we had earlier, Jack, about who's in charge, who's the commander in chief. It's the policy makers responsibility, not the intelligence community, or a US Navy SEAL deployed overseas, or a reporter in Washington, to pulse the national security establishment to say, well, I'm getting this information,

40:38highly classified warning saying, I'll kind of planning out to do something. But even if I disagree, at least sort of like say, hey, do we have members of our kind of living in the United States? Tell the FBI to like, you know, get in touch with all their informants. Let's look at all the incoming CIA cable traffic. And let's try and like put this together. Let's have a full scale press to try and find what's up. That did not happen. It did happen during the Clinton administration at the time of the millennium. You recall of the millennium during the millennium 2000, there were a lot of concerns about yet to that, why to K and also like terrorist attacks. And there were very legit concerns, Akman Rassam, who'd been training in an Afghan training camp across the border from US into Canada. Deanna D. In who was the US customs agent, she knows he's sweating in December, she arrests him or detains him. He tried, he runs. He's not a drug smuggler, which is what she thought. He's got a trunkful of explosives. He was going to blow up LAX Airport in the middle of Christmas

41:38travel season. Can you imagine how many people would die? And so this was not an abstract concern that, you know, that these jihadist terrorists might get in the United States and carry out an attack. So the point is the Bush administration was asleep at the switch and there's a bunch of reason for that. Mostly that they were stuck in a cold war mindset. They were all, you know, colleagues who rights the national security adviser was a sociologist. They just couldn't get their heads around the idea that I'll kind of be in large and might really be a problem. And I, you know, I get it from that point of view. On the other hand, it would be very costless to have said, well, CIA is concerned. There's a famous hair on fire meeting where George Tennik goes to see any colleagues arise and say, you know, like we did July 10th, 2001. Yeah, we really think something big is happening. Nothing really happened, you know, and just to zoom out a bit, Jack, you know, Stalin had a huge amount of intelligence that Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet

42:39Union in 1941. He just didn't believe it and he wouldn't act on it. And so this gets past this question of you can have the best intelligence community. Well, you have the best special forces, special operation forces in the world. But if you have policymakers who are either not making the right set of decisions, it doesn't really matter, which is really a side commentary. It really is. And, well, moving on back there, I want to, I want to 30 years, almost 30 years since your in-person interview with Ben Laden. When you look back on it with almost 30 years of hindsight, what stands out to you about that interview or meeting him and Ernie, those impressions different than you had in 1997 right after you met him? Well, I met him in 1997 and I was 33-34, so I was a much younger guy. I would say an extremely immature young man. I haven't really matured

43:43since I come up. My impression of him at the time was, hey, this is a very serious guy surrounded by serious people. They seem all very serious. And, you know, he's the current war on the United States. But I was, we're in the middle of a mud hut in Afghanistan, it was 6,000 miles from the United States. How do you attack the United States from a country that was now being taken back to the Middle Ages by the Taliban? There wasn't a phone system. The only way you could communicate was through a Therayah satellite phone, so we're immensely expensive, very rare. Ben Laden had one, but like, you know, that was it. I mean, they're probably like 20 Therayah satellite phones if that in the entire country. So how do you operationalize an attack? And of course, the embassy attacks in Africa in 98 really, yeah, that was more than 200 civilians dead. Two American embassies blown up within nine minutes of each other. You've written about the Marine Barrett's attack, which was kind of a model in Lebanon in 1983 for what Ben Laden did with the embassy attacks.

44:52That is, that was a military target. You know, these were both civilian targets and it showed that Ben Laden and Al-Qaeda could reach out thousands of miles from that base in Afghanistan, so they had no compunction about killing losses, civilians. From that point forward, any debate about whether Ben Laden, Al-Qaeda, was serious, was kind of moot for anybody who was paying attention. Yeah, and then you talk about in the rise and fall of some of Ben Laden right here, you talk about that, how they viewed killing civilians and it's fascinating to hear you write about that in there, but also from that book, you asked this question, why did Ben Laden build an organization dedicated to the mass murder of civilians and maybe get speak about that for a minute? Well, you know, he believed and it goes back to the Marine Barrett's very much so, the book that you have written, he believed he saw that as a model for like what he could achieve. So

46:00the Marine Barrett through attack 241 American service members are killed. Reagan relatively quickly pulls out of Lebanon. Now, US interests in Lebanon are the sun, but they're not massive. And then Ben Laden also learned from Somalia, which is very interesting, Ben Laden learned from Somalia and so did the US military and they both took the wrong lessons from it. So Black Hawk down 18 American service members mostly SF are killed in one day. Ben Laden learned and Clinton pulled out of Somalia. We have no very few interests in Somalia. Ben Laden learned from that that if you apply enough military pressure in the United States, they're going to pull out, but we're obviously not going to pull out of the Middle East because we're attacking Washington and New York. It was a crazy strategy. So he had an absolutely stupid strategy misunderstood the Americans and the United States. But the US military drew the wrong lesson from Somalia as well, which really

47:03affected the things like the Battle of Tara Bora. So the US military became very risk of us. If you go back, it's very hard for people to recall this, but, you know, because on, do we have enough search and rescue before we send any American troops in? And of course, so the CIA was first in and then of course there were ODAs from fifth group special forces that went in in the North and then also in the South, one led by Colonel, a one led by Captain Mark Newtch and one led by Captain Jason Amarine who was who brought Kazai in the next leader of Afghanistan. So, but there was a lot of risk of version, which is really hard to, and in fact there's a guy called Dick Schultz and you may have read his work, Jack, he was, he'd actually recently died, but he wrote a paper for Rumsfeld that I think then became public called Showstoppers. And it was basically like, we had this great special operations team and like, why didn't we use it? And in the book he says it's like it was like the Ferrari that was kept in the garage that you never drove because you worried about dainting it.

48:06But like what, they became this sort of Somaliaization of the US military is really hard to recall now. And so there was this risk of version which explains why the CIA got in first. And then, you know, General Tom B. Franks who is one of the, you know, it's really one of the worst, I think, military leaders in recent American military history. You know, he turned down requests for additional rangers to go into the Battle of Taurabara where Ben Laden was bottled up. He, he said a bunch of different things about why that was the case. He said the intelligence wasn't good enough. By the way, even if the intelligence was let's say 1% off, you still take the risk if it's Ben Laden. But the intelligence was 100%. It was Ben Laden was there. And then he also said, let's not replicate the failures of the Soviets, which you've alluded to earlier, but sending a sending a battalion of rangers into Taurabara for the limited goal of getting Ben Laden now kind of, but I think a lot of

49:06things might have been different. I say this in my new book. I think, look, if we had captured or killed Ben Laden and many of our kinders leaders at the Battle of Taurabara, I think a lot of energy around the world or in Taurabara would have dissipated because it's hard to make the argument that we need to go to war against Saddam because if you lied to our kinder, which wasn't true, if we basically more or less killed everybody or captured everybody who was leading our kinder, Ben Laden gets away. You know, that would have been because Americans wanted justice revenge. However you want to put it, and Ben Laden, they knew they'd been Laden. The Bush administration from the beginning said, look, if you had ever been Laden to the Taurabara, we're not going to destroy your regime and they chose not to. Tell me a little bit about what I've heard you say a few times about Ben Laden making a world of enemies. Yeah, this is never a great strategy. It's kind of the Napoleon, it's the Napoleon problem. You know, Napoleon made a world of enemies. I mean, he was one of the greatest military strategists of all time and he took over much of Europe. But if you make a world of enemies, it's going to catch

50:09up with you at a certain point, obviously it caught up with Napoleon. I mean, it made an enemy of the British, the Russians, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Eventually, they're all going to ally against you and they're going to defeat you. And so Ben Laden ISIS did this as well. ISIS even to a, every ethnic group in Iraq, they made, they turned into enemies, every religious minority, and then they had a global alliance of like 60 countries that we led that successfully defeated ISIS. So Ben Laden made a version of that problem, which is you can't. Look at Al-Shara, who's a new president of Syria. He ran an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. He was, right, he was imprisoned by the Americans. He's now president of Syria. Well, how did he do that? Because he's so, I think he realized that al-Qaeda wasn't offering anything. It's not offering normal politics. It's not offering governance. And so he began, he took over Idlib in 2015 in Syria, and he actually started governing the city. And that's a city of 200,000 people or so. And then,

51:14yeah, people we haven't think, well, and then, you know, he saw an opportunity to take over Syria when Iran and Russia were really on the back foot because of the Ukraine war. And the US war against Iran in June 2025. And he took over, he took over Syria. And now he's the president. I mean, which is extraordinary. But I get into that in the book because it's a road not taken for people like, you know, al-Qaeda is not really offering anything to anybody. And initially Ben Laden had some you know, I remember being in Islamabad in Pakistan in shortly after the embassy attacks and the US cruise missiles, which you know, were pretty ineffective. There was sent at al-Qaeda training camps. And at that time, Ben Laden was sort of a folk hero in Pakistan. There were a lot of magazines, newspapers that had his picture on the cover. But over time, you know, his popularity really went down because killing so many Muslim civilians. I mean, that was really a big problem. And we now know from the documents recovered in the bad, bad Pakistan, what Ben Laden did the last five years, of his life. He actually began to realize in the last year of his life, this is a big problem. He

52:18started even not the last year of his life towards the end of his life. He realized, look, for a group that presents itself as defending Islam, if most of our victims are Muslim civilians in Iraq and Indonesia, Pakistan, we need to kind of do a reading. So he was actually planning to relaunch al-Qaeda on the 10th anniversary of 9-11 as a group that wouldn't, there were trying to avoid killing Muslim civilians. He didn't care about normal Muslims civilians, but even he dimly realized that, you know, this was a problem. So anyway, he created a world of enemies. It's never a winning strategy. And I think President Bush had a moment after 9-11. He said, if you're, if you're with us, you're against us. He could have said, if you're against the terrorists, you're with us. And that would have been a smarter message. And that actually is the message that we have looked in Iraq and Syria with the fight against ISIS. That was kind of the message. If you're against ISIS, you're with us. And I think that was a pretty, I mean, that's the right message. I mean, you don't have to,

53:19if you're going to war, I mean, you church, you'll find the C7, I included the book. The only thing worse than going to war with allies is going to war without allies. And allies are problematic and difficult. They have their own. But I mean, they're better than nothing. And, and, you know, one of the, I think, very distasteful things for our allies in the war in Afghanistan is when President Trump has really denigrated their sacrifice. The 1,000 to 2,500 American service members died in in Afghanistan. But 1,000 American allied Western troops also died. Nado troops, Australian troops. I mean, I was just talking to a dain, 44 dain's died in Afghanistan. I didn't know. And, but obviously hundreds of Brits and French and Germans. And what you thought with some of these guys, right? So you know, I mean, like the Australian special operations, special forces, very effective British special boat service was at the

54:20Battle of Tara Bora, 12 of them. And, you know, they, oh, yeah. So all by way of saying that, you know, we, fighting with a coalition is obviously is a smart one that many, many levels because it, I mean, it's almost like I don't really need to want to say anything else about it because it's so obvious. We won World War II in a coalition. And, and the war is where we've been successful, we've tended to have a lot of allies. I mean, I think the Afghan war was largely successful. You know, as we, as we discussed in the beginning of this, we, we didn't need to do what we did in terms of ending the war we, we did. And we had 41 41 countries allied. I think there's a number that, of, yeah, and some of them were doing, you know, yeah, some were doing more than others in terms of what they actually did in Afghanistan. But that, that, it helps to have allies.

55:23Certainly. And this, this is September 11th. So I think it would be helpful to touch on what a lot of people termed an intelligence failure of 9-11. Yeah. 9-11, Commission report calls a failure of imagination, which is a little bit, it's kind of odd terminology, but I understand what they, I understand what they mean. And as we talked about earlier, there was a multitude of warnings that something was coming, some that we, well, as you said, you don't need a security clearance to have, to have kind of, to be, be, include into. You didn't have to know that the director of the CIA was sending letters or trying to get a meeting with so and so, we're about this al-Qaeda threat that, as you wrote the New York Times was, was probably imminent. We had some things out there, very open source like the East Embassy bombings, like the US poll, like Ben Laden himself declaring war with, I mean, he can't really do a thought well from what I understand, but issuing what he called a thought war, people termed a thought about, issuing a declaring war in the United States. So,

56:26so it's out there. It is very clear. But a lot of times we say, I was 20, 20 hindsight, well, not really, that's pretty clear. When someone direct statements says they declared war, they're responsible for the two East Embassy bombings in Africa, and they are responsible for the USS Cole bombing. So, they've killed civilians, state department personnel, they've killed US, US sailors on the USS Cole, and they're saying they declared war. And yet, we somehow can't look a little deeper into some possibilities of upcoming attacks with all, all these warnings. So, just worth just talking about briefly the numerous reports and briefings, but even the Clinton and Bush administrations that some of those officials received in office and some of the decisions, because this is really talking about decisions post 9-11, but still there were some decisions in the lead up also that could have changed the course of history if we listened to Ben Laden, if we had taken different lessons from the East Africa Embassy bombings, if we'd taken maybe different

57:27lessons from the USS Cole that could have changed the course of history. Yeah, well, I mean, you've done a very good job of summarizing the kind of threat stream, there wasn't just, you know, I mean, there was evidence whether it was Ben Laden statements or his actions, and I would add to that the first trade center attack happened in February 26, 1993, which kind of launched me in a three-decade plus, you know, kind of effort to try and understand these guys. I mean, so those guys who attacked the trade center, they wanted to bring down both twin towers, they parked a bomb with, they parked a van with a bomb in the basement, they killed six people, luckily they didn't bring down the towers, but all those guys, many of them are trained in Afghanistan or on the Afghan Pakistan border, many of them supported the Afghan war effort. This is all public knowledge, and then I mentioned Akram and Risham, who was a resident of the US County, and it can't have a border in December 1999. That was all public knowledge too. So,

58:29you know, the idea of this was an intelligence failure, I think, is it allows the Bush administration to get off the hook, even in Bush's biography, which he wrote, autobiography in 2010, he talked about an intelligence failure. I mean, maybe he believes that I don't, I mean, and just in anybody, I mean, the 9-11 Commission report is the, you know, one of the, we could never have a Iraq commission, unfortunately, because the whole question was too politicized, and we never had a COVID commission, because it was too politicized. But the 9-11 Commission is exactly what we kind of need. Anytime we have a Iraq war or a COVID or 9-11, which is a dispassionate bipartisan, very serious investigation, and I think they did a British op, and you can just read the report and see the warnings that were coming in that we only know about, because of the 9-11 Commission. These were, the something called the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, I think, you know, highly classified, or, you know, even today some of those haven't been classified. But the point is, is that they were warning something was brewing in the spring and summer of 2001.

59:33So, this was not intelligence failure. The CIA did make a mistake. They knew two members of Al-Qaeda were likely in the United States, didn't warn the FBI till August 25, 2001. That's a tactical failure. As a strategic matter, if they did warn policy makers, and at the end of the day, CIA's real job is strategic warning to policy makers who then make policy. On this question, failure of imagination that you raised, Jack, I, I get, and I, you know, I think on a lot of levels, I think that's not, you know, the 9-11 Commission was a great piece of government work. Jack Keen, Lee Hamilton, unfortunately, recently died, the Red-o-V recently, the other commissioners, they did a great job. The staff of that committee, they put out the report in about two years. I mean, it's, and it's a massive, and by the way, the footnotes alone are like a separate book, because they're also a road map to a lot of things that you, you need to,

1:00:34that I, you know, as an historian or as journalists or anybody interested, like the notes, the footnotes were very helpful in getting into some details that it's too much for just the, you know, somebody just reading the report. But a failure of imagination, as I began, when I started writing this book, I was like, ah, maybe it's not quite, that's not quite good enough, because it was certainly a failure of imagination for some people, but, you know, CIA did produce a presidential daily grief saying been, been a lot in the term in striking the United States. On August 6, 2001, all the things we've just discussed that you laid out, Jack, that I laid out, I think failure of imagination is, it was, I don't know, if I, even that made let people off the hook a bit, particularly, of course, you know, hindsight is 2020. The signals are very clear. When you look, I mean, look at, you look at Pearl Harbor, there were a lot of signals in the noise, you know,

1:01:34Roberto Walstetter wrote the book on Pearl Harbor called Pearl Harbor Warning and Decision in 1962. And I quote Thomas Shelling, who wrote the forward to the book, which is, sometimes, I'm paraphrasing the idea. I don't have a copy of the book in front of me, but it's in the, it's kind of the ep, one of the epigraph in the first chapter, but the idea is, people confuse the, something that they haven't encountered before as being very improbable. And that is not always true, unfortunately. You know, it's sort of like, if we get hit by a, a bioweapon, by somebody who, you know, 10 years down the road that it's using AI to manipulate viruses, you know, we may be shocked, surprised, or whatever. On the other hand, we may, we may say, well,

1:02:36that, you know, maybe that was predictable. Especially if the person saying they declare war on you, and if, in other ways, they're working their way up to something bigger, perhaps. Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm a great believer in taking seriously what your enemies say. Because often what they just say publicly is pretty much what they, you know, it's, it's a pretty good guide to what they may do. And so, Bin Laden, memory said he did, unfortunately, what he did, you know, we're here, we're here on the anniversary of 9-11. A lot of things happen, which were very unpredictable as a result. But, you know, as a, since we were, this is on the anniversary of 9-11, Halas-Shaykh Muhammad, the operational commander of 9-11, this morning, I got an invitation to a pre-trial hearing, a Halas-Shaykh Muhammad, which is a, you know, a massive failure that we

1:03:38are still in pre-trial hearings for this guy, who, by the way, if you've been put in the southern district of New York in a federal criminal trial, he would either be in Supermax in Colorado today or would face the death penalty. The southern district of New York is a few who locks from ground zero. I don't think a New York-based jury would, I mean, Halas-Shaykh Muhammad gave a very detailed interview to Al-Jazir in 2002, where he admitted that he was the guy who bombed, you know, was the mastermind of 9-11. But because we tortured him and, you know, we, and he's now, the military commission system in Guantanamo has tied itself into all sorts of pretzels in order to try and get this guy on trial. But we're still in pre-trial hearings. Now a judge just ruled that even his clean confession to the FBI is inadmissible. So, you know, this guy could be just, by the way, I prefer to be in Guantanamo than in Supermax. In fact,

1:04:38Kalashek Muhammad would prefer to be in Guantanamo than in Supermax. If he cuts a deal, he's tried to cut a deal where he wouldn't go to Supermax, which is, you probably know, his influence Colorado, the other Florence. He's nephews in there. He's nephews in there. So Ramsey, Yusuf, and others, and he's like being buried alive. I'm going to mess that up by the time. No, no, no, no, no, Jack, you're 100% right. Ramsey, Yusuf, his nephews in there. As I just, you know, Ted Kuzinski, and maybe Ted is now, you know, a bunch of the who's who of sort of, you know, bad people are in Supermax. And, uh, Halashek Muhammad doesn't really want to go there. Anyway, so that whether, league that aside, the fact that the operational commander of 911 hasn't been tried, you know, that's really a problem, I think, for the United States, for the 911 victims, for the 911 families, it's just we, you know, anyway, yeah, no, it's, uh, I mean, maybe he'd

1:05:42resist a little more in his, in his capture, maybe anyway, regardless. Um, because it's 911, also, I wanted to ask you your thoughts on some of the ongoing litigation around, uh, uh, a Saudi, because 15, a lot of us go back to that 15 to the 19 or, or Saudis. And there's reason for that with past ports and being able to get the United States and all of those sorts of things. But, uh, how do you pronounce the name? Is it that, that, Biomi? Who we met in San Diego with, uh, yeah. I mean, this is a fascinating story, Jack. I, you know, I, I was always a little skeptical for some period of time that the Saudis, well, two things. First of all, as I say in the book, my new book, Prince Banda, Prince Banda was the Saudi ambassador to the United States. He, you know, he was so close to the Bush family, he was known as Banda Push. And he was very close to George HW Bush, he was very close to George W Bush. And he was one of the few people in Washington, because go to the White House and drop in unannounced. And he, you know, a very affable guy,

1:06:42perfect American English, smoke cigars, fly, pilot, you know, great. And, but, you know, the Bush administration, they spent a lot of time saying one way or another Iraq was involved in 911, but there was strangely readily silent about the Saudi question. Now, it's not that they were completely silent, 15 of the 19 hijackers was Saudi, but they, yeah, the Bush family had made, you know, their money was largely in the oil business, so they were very comfortable with the Saudis. And we now know, we've always known that the Saudi official called Bayumi, we know for a long time, that he was unusually supportive of two of the Pentagon hijackers. He signed their lease. They lived in the same building he did, they didn't speak English, he had a party for them when they arrived. We knew some of this, which seems kind of odd. And, you know, he, this, and this, by the way, the Saudi official said he was a, he was like a permanent

1:07:46student that never went to class. He was getting a stipend that actually went up around the time that the Saud, these two hijackers moved to San Diego where they were all living. That's what we knew. In 2024, we suddenly find out a whole bunch of new things, which I found fascinating. Well, let's begin with the fact. And so shortly before 9-11, this Saudi official moved to the UK. That's interesting, two months before 9-11. And then, then he moved to Saudi Arabia, shortly after the British police searches a parliament. Now, the British police found a videotape in his apartment and they also found some documents. And these were not, we now know of them because of the 9-11 victims who sued. And the videotape is fascinating because it's a, what I would const, like, I think any kind of person would say, hey, this is a casing video of the US Capitol. Now, if you're a tourist, now, this is with the pre-iPhone era, right? So,

1:08:48you've got to actual video camera. So there's a little bit of pre, it's not like you're just a tourist. He's got his video camera. He's showing where the, the, the century post are. He's showing the security. He's talking about the plan. He refers to the brothers, which is how Al Qaeda referred themselves internally, internally. He refers to the devil in the White House. He talks about the nearby airport, which of course is Reagan National Airport, which is like one minute flight from the US Capitol. And this is, I mean, like any normal person would think this is a casing video. Then the documents in his, in his, in his British apartment of somebody at the FBI who's an aeronautical expert looks at these equations and says, well, these are the equations that you would need if you were flying a plane at like 150 miles an hour and trying to hit a landmark 50 to 70 miles away. Now, Bayoumi, his, so instead of just like, well, he was, he's

1:09:53claimed about, he was just being a nice guy with these, with a hijackers, right? It's a Saudi hospitality thing. Okay, that seemed more plausible. Now in 2024, it looks like he had four knowledge of the attacks. Now, you know, as a legal matter, I think we're both going to have to say that Bayoumi don't deny his everything. But I think common sense, which suggests that he was supporting the hijackers when he was in San Diego, he had some kind of four knowledge of the attacks. And the bigger point here is this points to have some Saudi officials, even though Al Qaeda's plan was regime change in Saudi Arabia, well, that's kind of what they wanted. But the point is there was Saudi officials who were sympathetic to Al Qaeda. And the Saudis only really got serious about it in 2003, starting in 2003, there were attacks on Saudi oil facilities, Saudi housing facilities for

1:10:56Westerners, living in Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia amounted what I would sort of say was a domestic insurgency against the Saudi government. It wasn't just like a couple of terrorist attacks. They were facing like a domestic insurgency. Then the Saudis got very serious. They arrested, they fired like thousands of people in the government. Many of them in the Saudi Ministry of Affairs or militant clerics, they kind of cleaned the house. And now today, I haven't been summoned. We run the country. It's like he's all that, I mean, he's really changed the country lots of ways. He's made it a much more of a police state. But he's also put the religious police back in that barracks and sort of changed things on that front. But anyway, you raise a good point because we know the interesting thing about writing history, you wrote about the Marine barracks with, you know, with every passing year or decade, other documents surface or new witnesses come up or things change or your perspective changes. And this, I think this Saudi, the question of the

1:12:02Saudi support for 9-11, the case has yet to go to trial in the Nile, which is, you know, it's amazing 25 years later. There are some Saudi charities that I think certainly were part of this support network. Were they witching? In some cases, they were unwitting. Were they, in some cases, quitting. I think the plaintiffs will say the Saudi charities were whitting, you know, supporters of Al Qaeda. And I, you know, the Saudi Arabia at that time, and still to a large degree today, but particularly then, look, if you're running a Saudi charity, it's not like there's some big difference between you and the government. Everything's part of the government, particularly at that time. These Saudi charities were administered by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. It's part of the government kind of superstructure. And I mean, just one final point on that.

1:13:04Al Qaeda's founding minutes, we now know the formal meeting where Al Qaeda was founded, it was in 1998 in Peshawar Paksam. Well, they were recovered in a, in Sanriyava in Bosnia in 2002, in the offices of a Saudi charity that was sort of part of this support network. Like, why would the Al Qaeda founding minutes be in a charity in Sanriyava in Bosnia? If it wasn't for the fact that this charity had some role in sort of Al Qaeda, a larger support network. And so, you know, as we look at this, the Saudi government wasn't responsible for 9-11. I think they were responsible for the export of, you know, this militant Wahhabi ideology around the world. It came back to bite them in a way. Obviously, it decided that that wasn't such a smart idea today. And, you know, the 9-11 trial, the 9-11 families will eventually get that day in court.

1:14:05And I think we'll see what the case is, but I think there is, there certainly was Saudi officials, Saudi officials at some level helped were supportive of Al Qaeda. And I just, I mean, I think that's just a fact. Yeah, the Bayoumi litigation is extremely interesting. I mean, the math equation. I mean, who doesn't do math equations for airliner flying into buildings? Well, you know, it's not your son's homework, as I think was sort of like the defense position on this. It's something added to everything else. It's, yeah, yeah. Please once again. But also, speaking of those charities, I believe in the correct me if I'm wrong, was it a little less than $500,000 is what, the general consensus is of what it costs to pull off the 9-11. I was in the government commission estimate, which seems reasonable. Yeah, I think so. And of course, we know about Zacharias, Miss Ali. But there was another 20th

1:15:06hijacker that the youth building about before I wonder if you could talk about that. Well, he's his name is Al Qatani and he was a very smart customs agent in Orlando Airport thought there was something off about this guy and wouldn't lend him in a country. And I think it's, I think we now know, I think, Mahamadata, the lead hijacker was waiting for him in the car in the parking lot the same day. So Qatani was not allowed in, you know, say he's going back to Saudi Arabia. Eventually, he was picked up. He was taken to Guantanamo. He was, he had 48 days of interrogation of a judge at Guantanamo said it, mounted a torture. He was, he lost 60 pounds. He was hospitalized twice during these 48 days of interrogation. He was given animals to kind of keep him awake or like sustain him during this 48 days of interrogation, where he was kept awake. Anyway, Qatani did say during the course of his interrogation that there

1:16:11was this guy Al Qwaiti who acted as a courier for bin Laden. And that was part of, I mean, there were, we were discussing Panam 103 and the book that you were going to write. The, the, the Hanf of bin Laden was an agatha Christie story, just like the Panam 103 was an agatha Christie story. In the sense that this is a lot of detective work and putting together a lot of different things. So Qatani gives up, he says he talks about Qwaiti. Now, Qwaiti is a student and he means somebody from Qwaiti. Abu Ahmed al Qwaiti is like saying, John's the father of John from Chicago is like, it's a clue, but it doesn't produce the, and it's still a norm to care, right? It's not a real name. So the, you know, the Hanf of bin Laden, I brought another book about this manhung where I get into a lot of the details. Thank you for, thank you for reading it. It has a happy ending.

1:17:18And, you know, at the beginning, I actually want to talk about that for one minute here, not the agatha Christie, but I interviewed Admiral McRaven who was, you know, brand joint special operations command and you must have encountered in your career. And I was in his office when he was the transfer of the University of Texas. I asked him the following question. Who killed bin Laden? As you know, in the community, there's a little bit of a disagreement about that. And he paused and he did something that I found very surprising that he started crying. And I think, and I was taking it back. And I, and at the end of the interview, I said, so, you know, that was, you know, a very real emotional reaction.

1:18:19And I, but I don't want to, you know, kind of embarrass you and I, you know, if we, we won't use it if it's if it's something that you find problematic. He said, use your own judgment about what to use. I thought that was a pretty cool, yeah, response. And we used a bit of it. But what I think, the way I interpreted that response was the video tape ran through Adam McCrave's mind of all the operations, all the people who died, all the people who were wounded. You have the idea that the one, you know, of course, everybody on that operation played a role in that, you know, including the, do speaking CIA officer who told the crowd I was gathering, you know, this is a Pakistani military operation. You need to move away. The guy who bought the dog on the operation, everybody played a role. But even to get to that point, I mean, why did Obama approve the raid? Apart from everything else, he had great, he knew the SEAL team six

1:19:21and SEAL teams like the ones you were on were doing doesn't raise every night on average in Afghanistan. This was like from a military point of view, this was not a McCrave and told the bomb. From a military point of view, this is not particularly hard target necessarily. It's the, you know, it's in, you know, doing this in a country we're not at war with and is it been large and what would the Pakistani military do? I mean, I see stories, which is a relatively recent book by Adam McCrave and I hadn't produced some details that I hadn't realized to not only was, we knew that there was a Pakistani military, the Pakistan's version of West Point was close to Bin Laden's compound at a bar-to-bar. But there was also a Pakistani military brigade nearby. It was also a Pakistani military, a Pakistani police station. So, I mean, like a lot of things could have gone wrong. But the point is is that when I, the reason I wanted to say that was to say all that is like, you know, the Bin Laden raid was the apex of a lot of the transformation that happened in the US military.

1:20:21J. Sock itself was a, you know, a creation because of the failure of Operation Desert One in Iran in in in in 1989 in 1980. And you couldn't have got there without everything that preceded it, right? I mean, in thousands of other similar operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, you know, despite the fact that we, you know, I say it's got a lot of things wrong in these wars, we also got a lot of things right. And I say that in the book whether it was the National Security Agency, you know, but the National Security, National Security Agency by 2005 could listen to a hundred could could download the content of a million calls in Iraq every day. And I could download and a hundred million calls in terms of who called who, you know, from when to when. And that was in 2005. Of course, the insurgents had no idea. And then J. Sock became this Ferrari in the garage that wasn't used to like being used all the time. And then, you know, we we developed,

1:21:25you know, CIA became this paramilitary organization, anti terrorists and look. So I mean, we we the United States, I think started getting some things right. Certainly from a tactical and operational point of view. And that, you know, the bin Laden raid was kind of the summation of all these things. It wasn't just the it was Obama made the right political choice. You know, not with incomplete information, which is why we want commanders in chief. Like at the end of the day, when it gets to the commander in chief's desk, it's like, yeah, you're going to have incomplete information. JFK didn't know that there were tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And luckily, he treated it as a political problem, right? And not, you know, Curtis LeMay was saying, let's bomb the shit out of Cuba. Well, that would not have been smart. And we might not be having this conversation, you know, because that would have might have led it led to the World War III. So when a guest of commander

1:22:27was in chief's desk, it isn't going to be complete information. You're going to have incomplete information a lot of times when you're making these decisions. So he made the right political decision. JSOC was, you know, like at the peak performance, CI really performed well to get the intelligence pictures as good as it could get. And the system worked very well. I mean, and I mean, it didn't work all the, I mean, obviously, you know, and the Belan opera, you know, I write in the book, you know, John Brennan, who's a pretty hard bull guy, he was CI station chief and re-ad and spent 15 years hunting Ben Laden, you know, he comes out of the White House that, you know, they've been in a bubble. They're in a situation where there's no cell phones, there's no like, you know, and he, you know, they walk out and like after Obama gives his speech, the night the Ben Laden's killed 11 25 PM may first. It's a very brief speech. And then they walk out and,

1:23:29you know, there's always cheering thousands and thousands of kids who, you know, who were children on 9-11, they're university students now. And Brennan starts crying, recording to his own account and as do others. I mean, they didn't understand what it meant emotionally for so many people that finally, justice was done, some kind of method of measure of justice was done. So, you know, my book attempts to tell this whole history and one of the reasons I wrote it, Jack, is my students, even my graduate students, weren't even born on 9-11. And yeah, or if they were born, they were very small kids. And 9-11 still has a very long tail. I look, I'm 63. The Korean war happened before I was born. The Korean war doesn't have a long tail in quite the same way for 9-11 still with us. If you look at the justification for the war in Iran, it's because they're getting a

1:24:32nuclear weapon. They're the number one state sponsor of terror. You know, the kind of framing of the war on terror continues to influence American national security policy and foreign policy. And that is, yeah. So, I wanted to write a book that tried to put it in one place, kind of everything that would need it to be said without being a giant Wikipedia entry where you try and tell the you know, I also wanted a narrative. And as you know, for writing books, like what you leave at is as important as what you leave in. Because if you tell the reader everything, he or she is like it's too much. You know, they want to know what you have to make some narrative choices about what's important, what isn't important or what I mean, like, you know, I a guy I really admire called Kang Diamond who's a former special forces Colonel PhD. He just reviewed the book in Small Walls Journal, which is a really good outlet, which he actually edits. And Ken said,

1:25:34you know, I wish there'd be more about Southeast Asia. And I totally get it. There's a whole, there's a great story to be told about the Philippines, which I don't get into in the book because you know, that was an SF led war against Abu Sayyaf. And it was largely David Maxwell, Colonel David Maxwell and people like Kang Diamond. I mean, you know, that was a success. It was done with host government approval. It was a very small US footprint. Abu Sayyaf was basically more or less completely put out business, not completely. And that, I mean, if there was a moral from the book in terms of like how we approach things, it's I say I call it go like go long. And that was certainly our approach with ISIS. It was relatively small SF 82nd Airborne, presence in Iraq and Syria. And it worked. And it came with some costs. I mean, there were still 35,000 American Air strikes and during the fight against ISIS, a Mosul was largely destroyed. Look, I mean, we can learn from even things that we got mostly right, like the fight against ISIS. It still could have could have been done better. Fewer American Air strikes. Yeah, but it's still

1:26:39ISIS was destroyed. And at one point they control 40% of Iraq and 30% of Syria. So this kind of go like go long approach, which is preaching the choir here probably. Largely as largely a soft thing, special forces, advice in assist, persistent presence, understanding the environment, that all works. What doesn't work is vast conventional forces. It might work if we get involved in World War 3, but vast conventional forces, not understanding the environment you're in, having no persistent presence, search and destroy missions. You have to understand the war you're fighting, which is why I went keep going back to Cloud Switz, which is for the policymakers to understand, what is the war we're fighting and not mistake it for some other thing. And that's actually hard, I mean, it's easy to say it's hard to do. Oh yes, I I I landed that in here at the climate, but in here there's a couple of them. But I've only gotten through two of my three

1:27:43and a little bit more pages. So we're never going to get to all this. But let me up real quick, so a little bit more in the book right here. All the presidents wars once again, the apostrophe. Of course, significant. So what has been Laden's mindset in November and December of 2001? Where is he? What is he doing? What happened in the mountains of Torah, Borah? And then it's quickly, why are Tommy Franks and his deputy is a general Michael DeLong? Their views versus CAA Officer Hank Crumpton at the time. We talked a little bit about this. We talked a little bit about the why there was this aversion risk aversion by our top generals because of desert one, because of Moge issue. But we have, as you mentioned, Gary Bernstein's team on the ground listening to bin Laden on the radio. And yet he slips away on December 12th, 2001. He slips away. But we spoke about most of those already in some way, shape or form. But here's the other side of this. So in December, when we get to this point where bin Laden slips away, what is Donald Rumsfeld

1:28:46doing at the time? And the president Bush on Iraq. But the symbology here is fairly, I mean, the great thing about writing new books is you, I mean, I really was able to nail this time. So bin Laden's, as I were here, he is then number two and bin Laden's sons leave the battle of Torah, Barbarra at December 12th, at 11 p.m. And we know that because that we're here, he would really be recently put out a kind of fully detailed account of what happened. And it's on the night of power, which is the sacred night of Ramadan, so 27th of Ramadan. So I was able to kind of like see when to that, when did that happen? And it happened in that part of the world on the night of December 12th. We know from Tony Frank's biography, autobiography, that he was briefing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about the new Iraq war plan that afternoon. Now there's an eight and a half hour time difference, as you know, between Afghanistan and Eastern time. So the afternoon of December 12th,

1:29:50Tony Frank's briefing, the new war plan, now for Iraq to Secretary of Defense, what Rumsfeld is supposed to run 45 minutes, it runs an hour and a half, is Rumsfeld's fascinated by the briefing. Now the Iraq war plan at the time was all plan 1003. It's 800 pages. Tony Frank's had spent with his team the week before rewriting it, as you know from, I mean, like these are not trivial. This is like 18 hour days to rewrite these kinds of things. So anyway, it's indicative of where the Bush administration was. And I think, you know, it speaks for itself about where the head was at. The Netherlands escaping. They turned out these requests for the battalion of Rangers. We know also now, by the way, know from Jim Mattis. We always known that Jim Mattis was in southern Afghanistan with 1500 Marines. They took, they took Rhino in southern Afghanistan,

1:30:531500 Marines. Now, can you imagine more Gangho group of Americans, 1500 Marines and Jim Mattis in charge? And in December 2012, it's 2001. Yeah, I'm a well-trace center, still smoldering, right? Holding. And the Pentagon is still, you know, so, Mattis, we now know from his new, relevant, but, um, biography, is saying, hey, I'd love to send my 1500 Marines. And I also have 3500 Marines in ships in the Arabian Sea, by the way, as well, in Taurapara and trying to cut this guy off. And he makes multiple requests that never denied and that never agreed to. And it just sort of dies on the vine. So you must have been yourself. That wasn't there at that time. I get there. But I'm just saying, like, not denied and not, like, request it on the night they aren't accepted. Yeah, yeah. I mean, think that's probably more, maybe even more common than not. But, um, and it just died on the vine.

1:31:57And so it's really, it's one of those great what-ifs, I think. And, um, again, I didn't, I'd always assume that Jim Mattis would be making these requests. And I actually kind of knew that he was making these requests, but he really lays it out in his, in his biography, in some detail about the, I don't say his plan. He was going to set up observation posts outside Taurapara with interlocking fields of fire. I mean, he had a whole plan. And unfortunately, it was, no one said yes. Yeah. And I'm going to get in some what-ifs. And I was going to ask you, but people can look up because I've put his, we're getting closer on time. And I want to get a couple more things. But I want to let people know that you are also, uh, when into Pakistan, after the raid to capture Kiloson, bin Laden, uh, and went into the compound before it was destroyed. And yeah, you're welcome. Actually, I'm going to ask you about that really, just really quickly, what's the one main thing that stands out in your head, um, from, from being in Afghanistan,

1:32:5983, then to 97 to interviewing him, then to living through here 9-11 and all these years in between. And now finally, you're standing in the spot where he was finally killed. When you look back on it now, what, what, what, what were you, what were you, what was that? Why just slight correction. So on, in 1983, I was on the Afghan Pakistan border when I was 19, making a film about the Afghan refugees. We went into Parachnale, which is that area, which Justin with the Musha deen, but we didn't get into Afghanistan itself, um, in 83. But, you know, what, like, I was really like, I didn't know they were going to demolish the compound two weeks later. They knew I didn't know. I mean, I'm assuming they do. So I wasn't like, I was really doing my job. I had very, there was, I'm with one guy for military intelligence agency, ISI, and then one guy from the Pakistani military, he's armed, he's a, he's a captain with a weapon. And I'm not allowed to take photos of us. I have, yeah, it's like two hours to tour the compound. I'm really doing my job. I saw, you know, I saw the, you know, I went into the yard where the helicopter went down. I could see the scorch marks. It was still on the wall where that

1:34:03tail of the helicopter hit. And then, of course, they blew up the helicopter on the way out to kind of keep its secret avionics out of enemy hands. Um, you know, I saw the place where they killed the, the first bodyguard wounded his wife. That was in the first, there was, you, you kind of, okay, so you go in, there's a big field. This is where they were growing crops and like, they had cows and that kind of thing. Then you turn the left, there was a small little house where the bodyguard lived with his wife, one of the bodyguards, big firefight, lolic loss. Then I turn into, there's another, uh, turned left into this area where there's a three story house. This is the bin Laden house. He's up on the third story. They killed the bodyguard and another bodyguard and his wife on the ground floor. I go in, then I go into the kitchen. Now in the kitchen, I could see that there is a huge, who puts a big, blast door in between the kitchen and the stories, the stairs

1:35:08to the rest of the house. Well, yeah, I'll cut, I'll cut his leader did. Went through that door, it was a yellow door. Then I walked up, you know, could see like, on the second floor, they killed Harlet bin Laden, the sun. Then I went up to the third floor. This is where they killed bin Laden. There is a dispute about who killed bin Laden. We won't get into that here. But and I go into the room. It's pretty low. The ceiling is low. Bin Laden, six foot four. I noticed that there is a black kind of like on the top on the ceiling. There's this black, big black spot. Now, I'm not a forensic scientist. I wasn't also, you know, I'm not like trying to solve the crime. I mean, it seemed interesting. It seemed like that would be the where maybe somebody had shot him in the head. His head blew up and it's blood spattered on the wall. But I don't know. I mean, it could maybe be. But what I saw during my, because you know, as you may remember, Seymour Hirsch, wrote a piece that got a huge amount of attention, claiming that the whole thing was a set up

1:36:09between the US government and the Pakistani government that was, bin Laden was living there. There was just this handover of bin Laden. There were only shots fired that night while the ones that killed bin Laden. This is, I mean, to say this is a fairytale is giving, you know, the brothers give him a kind of a pass. I mean, this was a total nonsensical fairytale that it is all the evidence, all the first time testimony and simple common sense told you doesn't make any sense. But, you know, like a lot of things like, you know, Seymour, Seymour Hirsch, he, you know, he, he, he wrote about the my life, what, massacre that happened. He's got a good reputation. He wrote about Abu Ghraib that happened. But anyway, in this case, you know, I can just tell you from my own experience, the kind of the narrative about what happened is the, is what actually happened, you know, and bin Laden died and it wasn't a heroic ending. And you know,

1:37:09one of the reasons that bin Laden, I think is, you know, he, he didn't reach for the weapons in his room. He had an AK-47, he had a smaller kind of mackerel of pistol. He didn't reach for his weapons. Maybe, you know, it was his family were in the room. And it was the middle of the night. He knows the Americas have come. There's no electricity on. And, you know, he may, we don't know what he was thinking. He chose not to put up a fight. Maybe he was worried about killing some of his kids and his wife or, or maybe he just was stunned into like, he didn't know what to do. But he didn't, it wasn't a heroic kind of last stand on the field of G-Had, right? That he has followers, I think, expected. Which I think, you know, he's, he's receded from history. I think he is, his legacy is one of our unsnilest and, you know, he, he, he didn't, he was not a clairvoyant. He didn't know that we'd invaded Iraq year and a half after 9-11. He didn't intend to draw

1:38:09the United States into endless wars. He wanted, he, he really believed his own propaganda. The United States was a paper tiger. We'd pull out of the Middle East as a result of 9-11. That did not happen. Anyway, you asked me this question, like, what was going through my mind? I can really tell you that what was going through my mind was I'm here to do a job at a very limited time. Let's, get as many notes as possible. Let's try and sort of work out how has been a lot of living here? What was the circumstances? Where was his office? Where was his wife? Each of his wives had their own little apartment with a little kitchen and their little bedroom. And then he had an office where he was trying to stay in control of his movement. And so I was really just focused on trying on, and I saw, you know, he had a just-for-man hair dye, which he was, you know, he was 54 when he died. He looked a lot older, but he was dying his hair, you know, he was, you know, trying to look younger. Yet, you know, so I went into the bathroom where he was, you know, it was a tiny little, he wasn't living large on the other hand. You know, it was not uncomfortable. He was the world's most wanted man. He was living in a suburban compound in this relatively affluent city,

1:39:13in Pakistan. It wasn't a bad life for the world's most wanted man. But he, you know, all ended with a whimper, not with a bang. I think that's why, you know, I think his jihadism as an idea is hard to abolish because it believed, you know, you believe that God is on your side. That's a hard kind of belief to kind of get rid of. If you really believe Allah is on your side, we see in Mali today that Al-Qaeda was taken over much of the country, threatens the capital when Al-Qaeda affiliate there. But, you know, Al-Qaeda is pretty much managed, you know, manages a hard verb for politicians because if you say that we've managed something, what happens is they're in attack tomorrow. You open yourself to political problems. But we the United States have managed to threaten with our allies. We haven't destroyed an eyelid defeated totally. That doesn't happen. Terrorism is a tactic. You've written an entire book

1:40:15about it. It's been around for a long time. It will be around for a long time in the future. You know, it so, but, you know, 25 years after 9-11, we're well defended. We made a lot of mistakes. The luckily our enemies also made a lot of mistakes. And I think we did learn from some of our mistakes. I think our enemies mostly didn't. And I want to say our enemies. I mean, jihadist militants in general. Yeah, I do want to ask you, as we close in on that here, there's so much to ask about. People will have to get the book here. All the presidents will be out for about Iraq, about Syria, about what's going on in Iran right now. So pick this book up, all the presidents wars. But tell me read this here. And you write, President Bush's initial response to the 9-11 attacks gave him the highest favorability ratings of any president since record began. 30s. Yet his disastrous war of choice in Iraq greatly contributed to the American

1:41:19public's growing distrust of their government. It also heated the notion around the world that the US superpower knew what it was doing on the world stage. You know, states had won the cold war against the nuclear armed Soviets. And during the first Gulf War, the US had briefly had definitely expelled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait in 1991. A decade later, the CIA and the US military easily toppled the Taliban in the winter of 2001 while suffering almost no casualties. Some observers even began to refer to the United States as a hyper power. That hyper power image was buried in the deserts and cities of Iraq, where American soldiers got sucked into a long violent insurgency and were caught in the middle of an intense civil war during which the US came off as hapless and clueless. So I wanted to read that and then I wanted to throw some what ifs and I was going to go on but instead I'll just read these because within those what ifs, I think there are lessons. I was going to run through a couple of these right here. What if UBL was captured

1:42:20or killed in Sudan in the 90s or after the Africa East embassies were the attack on the USS plus 9-11 happened? What if the US had flooded Afghanistan after 9-11 and blocked escape routes out of Torah Borough? What if we had stayed solely focused on al-Qaeda and not the nations that harbored them? What if we had framed it as a war on al-Qaeda and not a war on terror? What if the Bush administration had not decided to invade a room? What if we had not decided to engage in nation building? What if we had wound things down in Afghanistan after the killing had been lied in 2011? So some of those what ifs there are lessons in those what ifs. Yeah, and those are great what ifs. I mean, and I think there are a lot of, I mean, keeping the not focused on al-Qaeda. The Pentagon, you know, like we bracketed Taliban and al-Qaeda together, we could have that was not necessary. The Taliban were ready to make a deal. Our big water if is we should have made a deal with the Taliban in January of 2002 when they were entirely defeated and many of them

1:43:24looking to make a deal. We could have made a deal in 2011 when they were really suffering defeats in Helmand and Kandahar. With every passing year they got stronger. So like they do a peace deal when your enemy is totally defeated. And so and and brag, you know, all the what ifs are great what ifs. And I think a friend of mine actually compiled the what ifs from the from my book. And you know, there were a lot of what ifs. And you know, we wouldn't we wouldn't have we'd be having a very different conversation today if we'd caught bin Laden or Tara Bara if the Iraq war hadn't happened, which gave al-Qaeda a new like lease of life, which eventually led to the rise of ISIS. And there are I mean, I say in the book, this is Colonel Joel Rabin and Colonel Frank Topps, Subtrak with the lead pens for the army history of the Iraq war, which is the only official history we have of the Iraq war because it was never any Iraq war commission. It's an

1:44:29era single haven of official history and they say Iran was the only winner of the Iraq war. I mean, that's an extraordinary conclusion from the official army history of the Iraq war. And very so I was there in Basra in 2011. That was that was the conclusion. Of anyone willing to just pick up their head for a second, take a breath. And yeah, I was in Basra in 2008 and I was I was you know, it was the first time I've been to Iraq. I hadn't spent a lot of time. I had spent no time there. And I, you know, the British were really defeated in Basra, which the Americans, you know, and they they had a lot of history in Iraq, of course they had taken Iraq in 1920. But yeah, there's so many what ifs. And I hopefully American policy makers learn from our mistakes. I mean, you know, I'm not holding my breath. But the only thing we can learn from is history. We have nothing else to guide us. History doesn't repeat itself. It does

1:45:31occasionally rhyme. You know, we got a rhyme or two today in Iran. We elect commanders in chief, hoping hoping that he or she will make decisions that are informed by intelligence. And and yeah, but you know, history doesn't. You know, here's a big question, which is, well, will historians of the 22nd century look back and say the beginning of the end was American reaction to 911, the failure of the Iraq war, the Bolsheviks Afghan withdrawal, the stalemated Iran war. We don't know. I mean, you you've written history. History is not static. Historians, judgments are not static. You know, Heraclitus who I said you can't step into the same river twice, which I think is very useful. He's the first historian that we know of that we have. And I, you know, I, you know, I think of myself as an historian, I studied history at university. I'm

1:46:37actually completing my PhD very eight, very age 63. I'm trying to do a PhD at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. History PhD. But I, I'm very interested in history because it's like, you know, it's the only thing we can learn from. It's unfortunate that we don't learn enough. And it's also somewhat frustrated sometimes because we have a lot of history now. My wife and I make documentaries made a film about the, the generation at West Point that joined in the early 70s, the Patreas, the Macristals, the Odeanos. You know, those guys went into a military that was despised by most Americans. So he wasn't there for the Vietnam War didn't go well. But they joined at a time when the military was, US military was at its end of the year. And what was fascinating to me when I'm talking to these officers, you know, years later was Vietnam was like almost like a verboten topic at West Point. And, and kind of counterinsurgency also.

1:47:42And, and you learn more about the American Civil War than about counterinsurgency by orders of magnitude. And so, you know, we, we, the US military, and this is a smaller version of not learning from our mistakes, is the US military wants to fight the war, is that it's really kind of, wants to fight. And I get it. I mean, we all want to fight the war if we want to fight. Unfortunately, the enemy gets a vote. And they kind of, I remember when people would say, well, the Iraqis are not fighting for them. Like, yeah, no surprise. I mean, they're not fighting, they're not going to like fight to our advantages. They're going to fight to our disadvantages. And so I hope that, you know, I've talked to, you know, some of the generals who fought these wars. And they, they say, and I'm surprised by this, that the lessons of these wars are not really being absorbed by the next generation, which I find very surprising. I hope is not really the case. And that at West Point, the naval war college and everywhere else that, because we're statistically much more likely to

1:48:42fight in Afghan war or in Iraq war, then we are to fight well, war three. I mean, I hope we never fight well, three, but like as a matter of history, we're more likely to be involved in these kind of messy, sure, lengthy, yeah, well, irregular war certainly seems more regular than now. I think that that is very true. And understanding the nature of the conflict in which we're engaged or about to engage US forces is part of that foundational understanding that that books like this help build for people. So that's why this is so, so important for everyone to read right here. And just in our, in our final moments, oh, I think I mentioned this to you before, but when I think about the intelligence that led to the invasion of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, I don't think in 2005, 2006 in Iraq time, Ramadi Baghdad, where I was at the time, I don't think we would have been allowed to, we've been given the green light on a mission to go capture an ID maker based on that type of intelligence, meaning we needed at the time to different

1:49:42human sources, to different networks that were disassociated from one another and corroborate that with some technical sort of intelligence. Like you really had to build these target packages in a way that would almost stand up scrutiny in the US type of a court. You had to prove that this person was an ID maker before you went off and we launched an entire war based on a lot less than that. But that's just, that's the point here. As we wrap up, I want to mention two lines from the book here. I found this one extremely poignant. And you write, where once the United States had tried to uphold the rules based global order, now it was seen as a destabilizing force around the world. And I know we have to go, so I want to see the comment on that. I just want to say that as another reason for people to pick up this book right here. But then also I want to say that even with all the missteps, and you say this in the book right here, even with all these missteps and mistakes, we've concentrated on a lot of those today. The central aim on the war of the war on terror was achieve with no large-scale 9-11 type attacks on US soil. So I wanted to

1:50:43make sure we got that in there as well. And then this was interesting. And this is what I'll second to last thing. You write this, a quarter century after 9-11, the global war on terror, not only lived on, but was continuing to take on new and unexpected forms. And I know we can talk about that for the next half hour. And I know we have to go. But I will, that's the one right here. If people need to pick this up because that's one of the real reasons we need to take these lessons and now apply them to present day and the future as wisdom. And one last thing right here. So this one that Ryzen followed us on in a lot of time, I come back to this quote from your book that you wrote quite often. And you wrote Al Qaeda was part of a fourth wave of religious terrorism driven by Islamist militancy that began in the 1980s with the establishment of the viaz holo-companies regime in Iran and with the arrival of the Afghan Arabs fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. This wave was likely to last longer than previous terrorism waves because it was in the mind of its believers

1:51:44sanctioned by God. And it's hard to abolish God. Wow. I'm fortunate. Powerful. I know we have to go. I want to thank you so much for spending the time. I get to talk. We can talk all day. And we'll have to link up in DC at some point when I pass through your area of operations. Thank you for the great interview. Thank you so. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Once again, thank you for writing this and for all that you've done. It's sincerely appreciated. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye.