How 9/11 changed everything

0:00Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun, an army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana to as a lovely SUV and inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it! Tonight, we feast! And offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these male fly! Cancel any time.

1:29The most important thing is to have a large air crash in the United States. He has to keep reading. He finishes the book. He doesn't want to alarm the children. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil. Which side would you rather be on? The side of terrorists who will do this without compunction or the side of freedom-loving America? I know exactly which side I'm on in this debate. Today, jury selection begins in a critical phase of the trial of Andrea Yeat accused of drowning her five children. But how will she be able to save her own life? Plus superstar Michael Jordan in the news, the strongest words yet from Jordan, that he will be back. Good morning, America. I'm Charles Gibson. I'm Diane Sarian. It's Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Michael will maybe be back. Good morning, America. That is what the news sounded like on American television, on the morning of 9.11. Just 45 minutes before the first plane would hit the World Trade Center,

2:34and the world would change forever. The preoccupation was Michael Jordan returning to the NBA. 45 minutes later, thousands would die in the World Trade Center and in subsequent attacks. There's no doubt the world changed on 9.11. It was the first attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, the first time that Article 5 of the NATO Treaty was invoked. The world changed, but are we still living with the repercussions of it? Welcome to the news agents. The news agents. It's John. It's Mailless. Joining us as well for this edition of the news agents is Mailless Taylor, who you will hear regularly on the news agents USA, who served in the first Trump administration, although subsequently fell out. This is an episode we're devoting to the 25th anniversary of 9.11,

3:34and the unique perspectives that each of us has on that dreadful day. But also the year itself, 2001, which kind of started as such a year of hope. By September, it felt like it was a different place. Well, it started, didn't it, in a place of absolute confusion, because people were still arguing over the hanging chads in Florida. I mean, for the first three weeks of January, people didn't know whether George Bush or Gawr, would actually end up being the president. And so you could argue that one of the biggest counterfactuals of our lifetime is what would have happened, if Gawr had been president, would a bomb, would a summer have struck the towers, if Gawr had been president, would he have responded in the same way, unanswerable? But I just put that out there, because in the US, they essentially were just getting round to George Bush as president. He'd just taken office, and he swore, of course, that he would be committed to domestic issues.

4:35Didn't want to be the internationalist, didn't want to be the man who started Wars Wave, you heard that before, didn't want to sort of look to where Clinton had been with, you know, attacks and the Somalia and the, you know, the sort of... The USS Cole and all the rest of it. All the rest of it. He wanted to be the domestic guy. In the UK, it was very strange that year, because not an awful lot was happening. We had foot and mouth, so I remember the burning pile, I mean, it's extraordinary, these sort of funeral pies of lambs and cows, but that was the big thing that we had foot and mouth disease amongst our livestock, terrible for farmers, didn't really affect that many people. But as a result, the election that would have been a May election got pushed back to June, and people called it, I don't know if you remember, they called it the hapathy election. People kind of like, weren't that bothered? Yeah. It was kind of fine, you know, Blair had come in on this absolute landslide in 97, and what happened in 2001? I think he lost one or two seats. Yeah, he got another landslide.

5:35Yeah, he got another landslide. Nothing happened. So I sort of put this in the context of it being just an on-restaurant day, an on-restaurant of a year, for a lot of Brits who were kind of, you know, we could say, obviously nobody saw this coming. Well, I mean, for me, 2001, September the 11th, I was the BBC's Paris correspondent, the preoccupation in Britain was not about Michael Jordan returning to the MBA, it was a preoccupation about the problem of illegal immigrants crossing the channel. Yeah. Where have you heard that before? Yeah, I see. And it was the lead story on the one o'clock news in London. I was in Leal at a court case that was being heard to close the Songat Refugee Centre. I was going to be the lead item on the six o'clock news and the nine o'clock or ten o'clock news, that evening, and then, of course, the world changed. And you can see that certain of the things that have happened, I mean, you know, the planes going into the Twin Towers lead to an Afghan star on war,

6:35then lead to even more illegal immigrants coming into this country. And so certain problems are just still there to this day and been magnified by the response to 9-11. And we're going to cover not just what happened on that day. And I know that a lot of our younger listeners and viewers won't remember it because they weren't even alive. I mean, on our own team, we've got members who are too young to have actually been born before 2001. And so we will take you through what happened, but also the ramifications, how it changed the world. And I guess we should start with you, Miles. How do you remember, not 9-11, but the week before 9-11? Because you were kids, and that had an impact, tell us. Yeah, yeah. I was very young at the time, around 15 years old. And, you know, the thing I think that captures it most is actually just the minutes before the news broke in the United States.

7:39Everything in those minutes before kind of tells you what the feel was like in the United States. And I remember this so vividly because every single year since 9-11, I've gone back and watched the full coverage on the Today Show from that morning, because that's what I had been doing that morning. In the United States, we have standardized testing for students in the fall. And so the kids' school schedules change, and you spend often the whole day in one single classroom doing standardized testing. And that day, we were watching the Today Show. And before the test came in, and it ended up being a delay. And so we sat there for several hours just watching the Today Show in that classroom. So I remember, I could tell you exactly what happened that morning, is they kicked off the show, and Al Roker, the weather man for the Today Show, said it was a perfect fall day. We all remember that in the United States. It was a blue sky perfect fall day. The weather had just broken.

8:39And then they did a segment a little bit into the show with an author who, and I forget his name, but he had just written a book about Howard Hughes, the reclusive, you know, wealthy inventor. And the Howard Hughes segment had just run when they got the news about the towers being hit. Everything that came up to that sort of captured the normalcy of what was happening in the United States. There wasn't any searing political controversy that the Today Show was covering. The weather was good. It was back to school season in the United States. That was the feeling in America that almost leans itself to the literary depiction of a normal world entering into a very, very abnormal one. And that is how it felt in that moment. Yeah, I was watching the ABC Breakfast Show. And it had Sarah Ferguson, Virggy, sitting on the sofa in Wisconsin talking about losing weight.

9:39You know, how she was going to inspire people. I think she was the weight watchers sort of champion or whatever. And she was going to take the good people of Wisconsin and show them how to lose weight. And there is a moment where you think how are they going to get from her, from here, to what happens next. And we're going to play what happens next now. So you get the full effect of just what that sounded like on the morning. This is CNN Breaking News. This just in, you were looking at obviously a very disturbing life shot there. That is the World Trade Center. And we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. There is a major incident in Lower Manhattan. We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City. Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center. We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We have serious news of a major possible air crash in the United States.

10:42An incredible plane crash into the World Trade Center. That happened within the last few moments. Initially, at the time, people thought it was a light aircraft, a small kind of private, you know, a Cessna of two people that had crashed. I didn't understand the phrase. I kept on hearing people saying a plane has crashed, a plane has crashed. And they thought it was a... They thought it was just a private, small aircraft that had kind of lost its bearings and kind of something had gone horribly wrong. They didn't realize it was a passenger jet at that stage. Obviously, the eyewitnesses who saw this bloody thing flying into the World Trade Center knew. But initial reports were that there had been a kind of, you know, maybe it was quite minor but regrettable. Oh my god, it's a big story. But let's see what this means. And it wasn't until the second plane went in that you realized that America was under attack in a way that it hadn't seen for 60 years since Pearl Harbor. And I think it was just disbelief, incredulity that this had happened.

11:45And none of us could quite fathom what it was that was unfolding and what was going to happen next. So I heard it before I understood the pictures. I just started at the BBC. But we weren't yet on air. We were launching a brand new show for London. And I had gone to a lunch, I think, with a newspaper editor. And on the way back, I was in a cab and the driver was on his phone. And I was kind of like, what's he doing? This is really dangerous, stopping on your phone. And then I suddenly understood. I started getting messages and I started understanding what was going on. Sort of through somebody else's, you know, we're telling miles. Just talk us through. I mean, you'd been there just a week before, right? Well, that was one of the really surreal things for me as I had just come back from a trip to New York City to see a family member. And we had had lunch on the top floors of the World Trade Center. I'd never visited the buildings before. There was a beautiful restaurant up there with a great view of the city and out towards the water.

12:47And you can see the statue of Liberty. And I'd come back. And I remember sitting there watching that today show broadcast. And, you know, as John noted, they were debating whether or not some thought a helicopter might have hit the towers. Maybe a news helicopter. And within minutes of that, as they're covering it live on the show, you see a fireball erupt from the second tower. And if there was a single moment that I would say in all of this where you can point and say the world changed, it was that fireball because that is when it dawned on every viewer, every news reporter covering it. This was not an accident. There is an intentional attack underway. And we don't know what's coming next. In the minutes that followed, we saw a flurry of additional reports in the news about potentially hijacked airplanes in other locations. Eventually, the news outlets in the United States started wrongly reporting that there was a car bomb over at the US State Department.

13:54It was pandemonium. And in the past, as we all remember, it was many hours before it was clear exactly what had been hit and where and what the nature of the threat was. So in those minutes after the second tower explodes, you start to have this creeping feeling across the United States of America that we are under sweeping attack. We don't know where it's coming from. We don't know who is carrying out this attack. I can remember even in that American classroom I was sitting in, the conversation changing in the room. And I can remember to this day, I won't say her last name, but a student named Hannah sat near me. And she was laughing as she watched the coverage progress because as we all remember, the towers could not bear the load upon them as the metal started to melt. And they collapsed. And I remember a student who didn't quite understand what was happening, laughing at a tower falling and saying, oh, there goes a tower, not understanding thousands of people were dying in real time.

14:57And I turned to her and I said, you don't get it. This could be the beginning of World War III. And to this day, I still feel like in some ways that was right, not that we entered the Third World War, but to an extent what we saw in the aftermath, which we will talk about, really did change the war almost as dramatically as the turn we saw in the early decades of the 20th century. And those few hours as it played out, I think people around the country recognized nothing would be the same. I want to talk about the visuals of what happened because I think that is absolutely critical. Once we understood that this was a crime made for television, a crime made to be a spectacle. I mean, the response that your classmate was having, I guess, was as if she was watching a video game.

15:58That was almost what it felt like. It didn't feel real. We hadn't seen something like that happening in real time on our screens in front of our eyes. We were watching people jump out of windows. We were watching people jump to their death. And it was a really huge moment actually for the broadcasters and for people kind of making their editorial decision about what audiences should be allowed to see, should be allowed to cope with. And I think this goes back to the Osama bin Laden strategy, the al-Qaeda strategy, which was, we want this to be a technological tour de force. We want it to be so in your face, it is unforgettable. It is like an end of the world disaster movie. And frankly, nothing has come close. Thank God to that sense. So when the towers came down, I was then in Calais. And the foreign news were ringing up and saying, have you got your passport with you?

17:00We didn't know that all airspace would be shut for days. But I said, no, I haven't got my passport. This batch rider was sent to my home in Paris to collect my passport, to bring it to Calais because I thought that all foreign correspondents were going to be posted across the Atlantic. And we watched the towers come down as we were editing our piece for the six-club news about SONGA and illegal immigrants. And it was, I, for me, it was one of the most clarifying moments of my life. And I remember feeling it distinctly that we'd criticized America for this and that and the shortcomings of America. And then you suddenly thought, oh my God, there are people who are prepared to fly planes into buildings, killing innocent people wholesale. I think I'm on the side of liberal democracy, the rule of law, free speech, sexual freedom, you know, or the rest of it, everything that America for all its flaws stood for. And I think for an awful lot of people, in 2001, on September the 11th, which side would you rather be on? The side of terrorists who will do this without compunction or the side of freedom-loving America.

18:03And for me, it felt like I know exactly which side I'm on in this debate. And I think for an awful lot of people, in America, I mean, our best friends in France when we were living in Paris. Their son was a teenager, same age as my son, he resolved then that he was going into government service because of what had happened. And so while we've told you about the demolition of the towers, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, what we didn't know at the time, and I can't explain this clearly enough, was the level of chaos that was going through every single person's head at that time. Was it every flight in the US airspace? Was it every car? Was it a train? How big would it be? How dramatic would this be? What was going to be the impact? And slowly we started learning, it wasn't just New York and the Trade Center that was hit. It was also the Pentagon. And then there was the question of what happened on the flight that's now called United 93, Flight 93, where the people on board was starting to get text messages and starting to get bits of information about what had happened at the twin towers, about what had happened at the Pentagon.

19:16And they realized that their flight was going to be next, their flight was being aimed at the White House. And in this extraordinary, real public uprising, this bravery, the passengers took on the hijackers on their own plane. They left messages, they left texts for their family, they said, we know what's going to happen, we know we're going to die. And they managed to avert to make that plane divert from the White House. It was the most extraordinary act of courage and fast thinking. And I just want to play you the voice of a passenger who left this voicemail for one of her loved ones. Also, it's when I only have a minute, I'm on United 93 and it's been hijacked by terrorists and they didn't have a bomb. Apparently they flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already and looked like they're going to take this one down as well.

20:16Also, I just wanted to say I love you and I'm going to look you and sweep you by the walls of the wall. And once we had to follow you, when I just wanted to tell you that, I don't know how familiar it is, you can tell you how you know. The safest in my closet, my bedroom, the combination is you push the key for clear and then all nine, one, three. That was Linda Grunland, she was a passenger on United 93. It is still incredibly tough to listen to 25 years on the memory you talked a moment ago about the visual dimension of this and the fact that it was, you know, we were watching stuff that almost felt like a video game, a horrific video game, but a video game nonetheless. And it was really interesting, you know, at the BBC, there would be anniversaries of 9-11 and you know, there were very strict rules over replaying the fireball moment because it was almost like a kind of like pornography, you know, sort of weird kind of way, but also doing the terrorists work.

21:32Look what we did on 9-11, we flew planes into the World Trade Center. And rightly, there were very, there were huge sensitivities about re-showing those pictures again and again, because, you know, what TV does, you get a dramatic picture, you put it on a loop and it goes round and round and round and round. And you get desensitized, frankly. And you know, the reason we wanted to do this episode of the podcast is so that actually we can evaluate what happened, but also the consequences of it. And a mouse, I think, for you, it was a galvanizing moment as well in terms of what you wanted to do with your life and bringing you to Washington. I think, you know, there, there's a couple of aspects to the attacks that are really important for us now 25 years later to remember. And one, of course, is what we've talked about, the extraordinary collective shock and fear that the world went through for anyone who wasn't alive then doesn't remember it, you cannot overstate that collective shock and fear.

22:34We all bear it now in our DNA. We keep it with us at a cellular level. I think you hear that in John's reflections and Emily's reflections in mine. But there's another piece to this. And that was an uncanny collective feeling of resolve that spread across the Western world. We have experienced nothing like that resolve since. And in my case, I was pretty much hellbent to go do whatever I possibly could do as a young man and effectively dropped out of school. Went to Washington DC as a congressional page and ended up working for the Speaker of the House at the time, the number three in the US government who was Dennis Hastert. And so all of a sudden that was thrust from a small town in Indiana to see the vice president of the United States come in to meet with the speaker, being on the House floor every single day as members of Congress were responding to the attack. And significantly this was a moment when the divided country Emily mentioned at the beginning after a tough 2000 election suddenly went to more than 90% approval of the president of the United States.

23:39Democrats and Republicans literally were crossing the aisle in the House of Representatives hugging each other working on legislation. It was the most unified we have seen American politics in the modern era. Why does that matter today? It matters today because there are those of us who are alive who remember it was indeed possible to be a country where political parties worked together. And so we were able to see that there were people on opposing sides literally embraced each other in difficult moments and said we're going to get through this. It's not inevitable that politics is divisive and we experienced that and in those years after 9-11 I basically stayed in Washington and kept dropping out of school to take jobs and ended up working in the George W Bush administration and helping to stand up our response to the 9-11 attacks, the US Department of Homeland Security. And capturing that resolve is something that's important for us today. Yeah, Miles, I think that's right. And I think we should still talk about whether ultimately the response of George Bush ultimately the response of the administration that you went to work for created some of the longer term division over the next two decades.

24:56Let us first take you to the moment where George Bush heard what had happened because there is one visual where he is reading a story to a group of children. It's a little spelling book about a goat and it's a very, very famous piece of footage because you see an aid come into the room and whisper in his ear what has just occurred. His chief of staff goes in and he's sitting with school children and you can see the sort of whites of his eyes where he learns that a plane has gone into the trade tower and he also understands that he cannot show what has been told to him on his face. He has to keep reading, he finishes the book, he doesn't want to alarm the children, perhaps more importantly he doesn't want to alarm all the cameras, he doesn't want to let anyone know what has happened. And in that sort of registering on his face, I guess you can suddenly see this pivot of what this is about to mean.

26:02You know, there is something going through his head which says everything that happened yesterday has now become entirely relevant to my presidency and everything that happens from now on will be a brand new slate based on the three sentences I've just been told. And when he goes out to talk to the American public later that night, this is what he says. Good evening. Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and acquired unyielding anger.

27:15I mean, that day after the president got the message that the what had happened when he was at that school, apparently Air Force One when it took off, they knew nothing. They knew that they'd been in an attack and they didn't know whether they were anti aircraft guns firing at the plane or whatever they come under missile attack. And apparently Air Force One took off like a rocket, it just didn't glide upwards. It went straight up that the plane was shaking and they landed some airfield in Nebraska and go to some bunker where they think they can be safe. Before George W. Bush thinks it is safe to go back to Washington. And it was when he went back to Washington and he conferred with his national security colleagues and allies in Europe that the resolve came about what America would do next. And that's what we're going to consider in the next half. So a lot of the attackers, the people who had been behind the attack, many of them were Saudi nationals.

28:26The common thread was they had been sheltered if you like or even trained if you want to put it more accurately in Afghanistan, where there were al Qaeda terror training camps. And it was obvious that the first move of the Bush administration and the West and of America's allies would be to try to get al Qaeda to surrender in Afghanistan. And that if the Taliban wouldn't give up the al Qaeda terrorists, then America would be moving in. And that would be a very important move. In November 2001, as we're telling this as a sort of personal anecdote, I found myself in northern Afghanistan moving with a front line with the Northern Alliance, which was backed by the US and British forces, to try to kick out the Taliban from Afghanistan. It was a lot of support and was hugely successful. It's what happened then when it moved from Afghanistan to broadening it out to Iraq that things change.

29:31And perhaps we should talk a little bit about this clash of ideologies, clash of civilizations, because you set up this thesis that as soon as the towers were hit, you knew which side you were on. And to put this in context, I mean, it was essentially seen as Jihad by bin Laden who had sent off his suicide bombers to train to fly to learn how to fly these aircraft. I mean, the extraordinary thing was they were training in Florida. They were training in, I think, Minneapolis, Minnesota. There was actually a huge number of intelligence warnings that became intense in the summer of 2001. US agencies were actually picking up what wouldn't be put together at that point, but they were picking up what they call blinking red signals. So there were lots of, there were lots of sightings of what he doing, why is he training, what's this man doing from Afghanistan suddenly doing trying to, you know, going to flying school.

30:35This was all happening before our eyes in America, but it wasn't ever joined together to make a comprehensive threat as we can now see looking back. And I just want to put this in another context and interesting, I was, I was listening to the history boys actually Tom Holland and he reminded us that when they were talking about the subject some years ago, that this was actually only decade, 15 years or so after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And I do think that that is quite an important sort of focus because we were trying to establish then, you know, Francis Fukuyama, just in the end of history. Have we seen off the communists as it were the baddies? Have we seen off the guys who were trying to take away our liberal democracies? Great. You know, in the 1990s, the world felt as if it had settled on the ideal sort of, you know, ideology form of government, it was going to be a world of liberal democracy.

31:40And that was going to be the way that we live from then on. And yet a decade later, suddenly you have got this islamist jihadist clash. And what we all remember at the time was the sort of the fervency of the, you know, islamist beliefs. But actually what some of us have forgotten was quite how important the Christian side was in the arguments that Bush was making, that Blair was making, you know, they were both committed Christians and they did see this as a struggle between good and evil. So it wasn't just about sort of social freedoms. It was, it was, it kind of got right to the heart of something. It was civilizational. It was good versus evil. And both those leaders, whether it was Asama bin Laden, whether it was George Bush, they talked in those terms, good for evil. Well, and it's one of those things, Emily, that I'll say that period of time is a real reminder of why history is not inevitable. And leadership really matters because in the immediate wake of the attacks, the response could have been very different and much more decisive. And we'll get into the Bush administrations wars and the extension of the conflict.

32:55But if you think about what George W. Bush could have done in the aftermath to make this a religious war and to say we are against Islam. And there are leaders in our politics today who if they had been in George W. Bush's position might very well and very quickly have turned this into a war against ordinary peaceful loving Muslims had them deported from the United States and turned this into a very different sort of conflict. But in the days after the attacks, where did George W. Bush go? He went to a mosque in northern Virginia, his administration bent over backwards to say the conflict is not with our neighbors who are Muslims. It's with a group of people who have warped and perverted a peaceful freedom-loving religion into something else. That was a really critical moment where it showed that leadership really can affect the trajectory of a conflict and a nation's response to a conflict. And we saw that at the outset. And it's one of the reasons why you saw at least for a number of years just that extraordinary political unity we talked about in the United States and across the West.

34:02But ultimately, Miles, it didn't. I mean, yes, he went to a mosque, but actually, and this is where I guess we're going to get on. You understand the response to Afghanistan because you think you are trying to hunt down the leader of the terrorist attack, a zombie in Lada, who was in Wasiristan, whatever Heidi in a cave. Suddenly, this pivot is to Iraq. And it's a completely different argument and it's a completely different country and it's a completely different war. And actually, that has never been fully explained. It's never been fully understood. And I think for many people now growing up, you know, in the aftermath of 2001 or the Iraq war, they're saying, well, this did look like a hit on Islam. It did look like a hit on Muslims. It didn't look like retribution against the guy organizing the attack. Well, let's hear George W. Bush now talking of framing this argument that would be a kind of a defining argument that has taken place now for decades about good versus evil.

35:07This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies. And this saw the fracturing of the alliance that was there after 2001. Yes, Britain went with America, but Germany and France very notably did not and said, you know what? There is no kind of obvious link between Afghanistan and what's happening in Iraq. There are two different situations and that frankly you going into Iraq will create more problems than it will solve. And maybe that is the legacy of 9-11, the what's happened in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq, which tore a country apart, which led to a kind of fracturing of solidarity in the West.

36:21And caused absolute mayhem and death and destruction where literally hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in what became a civil war between the sheer and the sunny and the Kurds in the different regions of Iraq where America had underestimated what would happen as a result of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Well, I think it's interesting when you try to break down the why this happened in a certain sense it goes back to what the three of us were talking about earlier the impact we each felt on that day. And to understand why the United States went into Iraq, I think you really have to understand George W. Bush's psychology and I spent a number of years writing about this. I mentioned earlier dropping out of school to go to Washington after 9-11. I also dropped out of my PhD program at Oxford where I was writing about this. I'm a perpetual school drop out you guys. But what I was writing about at the time when I was there is what George W. Bush had called his freedom agenda. And I actually think one of the most important speeches of the entire two terms of George W. Bush to understand this man was his second inaugural address.

37:34He sat on the platform there in the West Front of the US Capitol a few feet away from Bush when he delivered that address. It was a very unusual inaugural address because of course he had been reelected and he spoke he devoted the entirety of it to talking about how America's purpose in the world was to go plant a flag for freedom. You all talked about in the post Cold War era with Fuku Yamasein history was over George W. Bush was saying it's not over and the fight must continue to liberalize the world and agree with it or vehemently disagree with it. Bush had this deeply held personal view that the United States and the wake of 9-11 to prevent another attack needed to go on a quest to use all elements of national power to try to liberalize the illiberal parts of the world as a way to proactively keep the fights overseas and prevent a 9-11 from happening. Now I think many people today can see how deeply deeply misguided that journey was into Iraq and how clearly it was set up for failure and unintended consequences.

38:42But as historians look back as citizens look back and try to understand the period, it was that sort of ideological fervor that Bush himself explains overtook him, that freedom agenda that led him down the wrong path. Yeah, and I traveled with Tony Blair when he went to Chicago and delivered the speech on liberal interventionism. There'd been an eight-o'-summit in Washington and we flew to Chicago and that was before all of this where he was setting out the argument for why the West should intervene in other countries to spread democracy. Almost like the crusaders were spreading Christianity a thousand years earlier and it was a kind of a noble cause he thought and others around him. There were others I think who had a darker motive for wanting to do this and to be involved in these countries. But there was a belief that the word of democracy could be spread and if it was at the barrel of a gun as would be the case in Iraq.

39:45It did happen in the aftermath of the Arab Spring which seemed initially to be about optimism and about people kind of rediscovering democracy and freedom and all those sort of things. Well, yeah, it's kind of, you know, going... I mean, I would say before you get them, before we kind of fast forward the Arab Spring, you've got this sort of slightly messianic approach from Blair from Bush, this idea that we now have to go out and spread democracy. And at the same time, you have the beginning of a domestic erosion of human rights which was frightening. So you had the opening of Guantanamo Bay totally understandable. What was the topmost on the president's mind, on the Homeland Security's mind, we have to get these people off American soil and lock them up. We have to get them in and lock them up. But people were put into Guantanamo Bay which is, I mean, just to geographically focus you, Guantanamo Bay is basically a base on the island of Cuba.

40:45And they were sent down there, many were not tried, many spent absolutely years incarcerated. And there was no proof that they'd got the right people. There was no proof really that they had been part of the plot. I mean, obviously the suicide bombers were dead, but there were people connected to it. And yet in the interest of this sort of new world, spread of democracy, taking democracy out the Middle East, we kind of start deroting many of our own values. There was this whole big question in the UK. And I remember it really clearly because it was called the 42-day detention. So it was about whether you could lock people up essentially for 42 days. And I remember it because one of the headlines was, you know, politicians are at sixes and sevens over whether this can actually work. And it was like, OK, I was just taking my kids through their times tables and sixes and sevens was 42. And that was the 42-day detention period where we thought it was OK, you know, to put people behind bars without, you know, we've got, have you as cool as you have to let people go if you can't actually charge them.

41:51And in America it was 10 times worse. You had Guantanamo Bay. You had all that sort of the black side smiles. You'll remember this. The places where they weren't really part of UK territory, but they weren't really American, but you could kind of torture them to get an answer because, you know, it wasn't really on our soil. I mean, we lost a lot of our own values during that period, right? You know, it's interesting because there was a big debate here in the United States and around the world, of course, about civil liberties and civil rights. And I will confess very much to being on the side of that debate and saying, the people who are trying to sound the alarm that we're going too far don't understand. We are just focused on these terrorist organizations. And at that point I'd gone into counterterrorism in the Bush administration and to a certain extent that was right. Largely, the folks that we were targeting were indeed folks that ended up being tied to Al Qaeda and Islamist terrorist organizations.

42:54And this vast US government counterterrorism apparatus was trained against the enemy, but you had voices throughout the American political spectrum saying, but these tools that we are building without the right safeguards and in the wrong hands could be abused to form the foundations of a police state. I spent many years saying those concerns were hyperbolic and misplaced. And it's very interesting now 25 years later after 9-11 to see, at least in the United States, we indeed have had an American president come in, look at that vast post 9-11 national security architecture that was built and say, this could be used against my political opponents, whether it is migrants in the country, whether it is people with visas, whether it's political opponents. We have seen 25 years later the extraordinary weaponization of the Homeland Security apparatus in the ways civil libertarians warned about it. And I've actually said to many of those prominent folks in the American discourse, you know what? You were right. And I was wrong, but that doesn't get us anywhere to fix the problem.

44:02We have to have those mechanisms in place that some people in the immediate wake of 9-11 said we must be very careful to heat the lessons of history and put the protections in place. But you talk about the civil liberties arguments and what has happened as a result of it. At the time, the mentality was, I think, for the national security people who were trying to keep a country safe. Look, if we can get information out of them that stops another terrorist attack from happening imminently and we have to use the thumb screws or, you know, waterboarding or whatever it is, what do we do? Are we more worried about the civil liberties or are we more worried about another terrorist attack? I think that you can see in that deeply paranoid, scared environment that policymakers we can now say made a number of wrong decisions.

45:02But I've got to say at the time I understood what was happening and why it was happening because you thought if my job is to prevent another attack on our homeland and I will do whatever it takes and whatever needs to be done. And so, sure, we can look back now and say bad decisions were taken and people went down the wrong avenue and the black sites and the, you know, enhanced rendition and all the rest of it was wrong. But that was the world that we were in and what we're going to do next is consider the way the world has changed today as a result of 9-11. And we're back. I mean, we were talking earlier about how 9-11 played out in terms of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there's a longer term legacy here to be talked about namely the controversies around immigration in the wake of 9-11 across the Western world, the populism,

46:13how a lot of those debates in that period set up the moment that we are in in world politics. And one of the things that we were talking about earlier, Emily, is how some of the architecture that was built after 9-11 has influenced debates today. The literal agencies in Great Britain and the United States that were formed to protect against a terrorist threat. Some of those institutions have now been heavily politicized and have become the focus of popular debate, especially when it comes to issues like immigration. I wonder how you see that today and how you see the impact of 9-11 on those debates in the current political moment. I mean, look, we've covered a lot of subsequent terrorist attacks. I covered the battered clan attacks in Paris where it turned out that they were Islamist, jihadist attackers again. We covered 7-7 the bombings on the London Underground here. I guess the question I would have is if we are now in an era where many of the populist parties of the right are talking about

47:23Islam as being the destruction of civilization. And there is kind of tangible Islamophobia which they would quite happily admit to. They'd say, yeah, we don't like Islam as a faith. This is not about people. We don't like Islam as a faith. We think it is a religion of harm and evil. How much of that came from the 9-11 attacks? How much is that based in essentially what felt like a legitimate fear that Islamists would do whatever it took to destroy Western civilization? Yeah, look, I think that what has happened is that an important distinction has got blurred. The problem of Islamism, I extreme interpretations of the Quran that would justify more or less anything, is a legitimate source of real concern for the West and how it needs to be countered and how you need to deal with that sort of extremism. But it's also blurred into thinking, well, Islam is a bad thing. And that is informing an awful lot of right wing populist thought which I think needs to be challenged. I think that is a lasting legacy of 9-11, the Iraq War, the terrorism attacks that you talk about on 7-7 or the Bataklan, I saw it in San Bernardino in California.

48:41There were other terrorist attacks that have taken place around the world that kind of feel that they want to generate this idea of two civilizations at war and that they want to take over the civilization of the West, which is seen as decadent and corrupt and all the rest of it. And I think that is part of the legacy of 9-11, although I think on the upside, I think that there has been miles was talking about the extraordinary resolve that was felt in America in the wake of 9-11. And that was absolutely real. But I think there is a recognition that some of the values of the West, on freedom of speech, of free and fair elections, of due process and all the rest of it that goes with it. A good and those are enduring values and worth fighting. I want to go to miles because in 2026 we're in a very unusual place now where a foreign policy issue like Gaza is playing so big amongst the Democratic Party now in a way that we haven't seen for 20 years.

49:44It's almost the exact reverse, it's the inverse of where people were 25 years ago after 9-11. It is the inverse and I think that that's really interesting as folks have gotten to a place where they now feel more comfortable, they don't feel intimidated by the argument of security. Hey, security has got to, you know, trump everything exactly what John said earlier, the fear, the paranoia we felt after 9-11 that stuffed out parts of the political discourse. And that has evaporated and folks are now saying, well, I do want to talk just about the civil rights in a certain region. I do want to talk about the humanitarian toll and we've seen that flip. We've also seen it with my former boss Donald Trump. I mean, my first experience with the man, the first time I met Donald Trump was after in 2016 on the campaign trail, he said the words Muslim ban. Donald Trump said publicly he wanted to ban Muslims from coming into the United States.

50:46And I was a part of a team dispatched by the House Republican leadership to essentially meet with Donald Trump, consult with him and explain to him why that was a wrong national security approach. That what he meant was we needed to go after Islamist terrorists and that he should talk about focusing on people who wanted to bring violence to the United States. And so I do, Emily and John, what was very revealing in those early conversations on the campaign trail with the candidate is it was clear that's not what Donald Trump believed. We were trying to put words in his mouth because we were appalled what the man believed is he wanted a Muslim ban. He wanted to ban a religion from coming into the United States. And that was a wake up call for me because I'd mentioned earlier that leadership matters. And in those weeks after 9-11, if you had had an American president say we must have a Muslim ban. We will ban Muslims from coming into the United States. Not that George W. Bush's approach kept the West on the rails, but that would have thrown it off the way rails just days after the attacks.

51:51And here we had a candidate arguing for that. And I'll tell you through his first administration, Donald Trump wanted to bring that sort of extreme approach to migration into the American political system. He was held off by a lot of folks who felt like the things he wanted to do were illegal and unconstitutional. But we are seeing now in this moment whether it's with Trump or others arguing for vastly more restrictive immigration policies, a xenophobia that has overtaken the politics and a populism that's carrying that through to fruition in many places. Miles, brilliant to have you with us. Thank you for that contribution. We're here marking the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And rightly so because it was such a horrific attack and hopefully we've conveyed some of the kind of implications of it worldwide. In two months time there is going to be another anniversary which will go utterly unmarked of something else that happened in 2001. Which I would say was almost as significant in terms of geopolitics and the global economy, which no one will take any notice of.

52:58And that was China's accession to the World Trade Organization, which arguably has well has changed the world for good. And I'm not going to go into a whole special episode on that in two months time. Well, fantastic because that has also changed the world and talking about a lot of the things that drove Trump to power, about the 2008 financial crash that kind of deindustrialization of America. And Britain, those are all the consequence of China becoming the world's kind of superpower in trade and manufacturing that has also had profound economic consequences. Yeah, and I would just say, I guess, you know, if we're looking at where America is now, the reason that we didn't go into Syria to stop us out after chemical weapons were used was because of Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost certainly the reason why Trump has set himself up as somebody who actually doesn't really give a shit about the rest of the world. Although, obviously, the homeless straights kind of bucks the trend was because he grew up, he learned the lessons he thought of Iraq and Afghanistan didn't really want to get involved in the rest of the world.

54:05And so I guess the last thing I'd say Mars and I know you have to run is I think it has changed the sense of what America itself is in America. And so what I think is the fact that the rest of the world is in the rest of the world now, would you agree with that? It has. And, you know, those lessons again are not inevitable. We've got a certain cadre of leaders in the United States who want to perceive those lessons in a lot more isolationist terms. And so I think the President right now that is intervening in places like Iran, despite a pledge for no more forever wars, in aggregate, you see an American President who believes that America should rearchitect its relationships. And in part, that's a reaction to the post 9-11 period. Donald Trump no longer believes democracies should be America's friends. And he's engaged in a form of quite belligerent retrenchment by attacking America's allies, literally in some cases creating memes of himself but bludgeoning allies like the Canadians with hockey sticks, literally hitting their leaders in the face with hockey sticks, which symbolizes his view about America's relationship with democracies.

55:24On the other side, he sends emissaries to go meet with the Chinese and the Russians and to deliver flattering, faunting comments about their leadership. That's a really pivotal turn for the United States to go from George W. Bush's flag planting freedom agenda in his 2005 inaugural address to Donald Trump saying, we're going to change who we ally with in the world. We're going to change who our friends are and who our foes are and that is a reaction to what happened in those years after those tragic attacks. And you just have to say, when George W. Bush's reaction to Donald Trump's first inaugural address where he tends to Michelle Obama and said, that was some weird shit. We will be back on Monday and Mars Taylor will be with us every week on the news agents USA in him or from him then. But for now, bye bye. Bye bye. Bye. This has been a global production.