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Nov. 10, 2021 - Kash's Corner
32:38
Kash’s Corner: Honoring the Heroes and the Fallen of 9/11; Is America Safer 20 Years On?
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Hello everybody and welcome back to Cash's Corner.
So Cash, I've been watching One Day in America, this uh, you know, frankly gripping, unbelievable documentary that National Geographic made six-part series.
I think I've watched four of them now.
Um basically 9-11 from the perspective of people who survived 9-11.
Unbelievable.
It's the 20th anniversary of 9-11 that's coming up.
Um I think we're gonna have to talk about this.
It's not just the 20-year anniversary, but that means an entire generation of Americans have been born and become adults since that tragic day, and um I think it's worth time to discuss and educate some folks on our history there.
I guess a lot of people remember where they were when this was happening.
I remember where I was, I was in actually in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Um, kind of in the midst or what ended up being towards the end of a degree that I was doing there.
I just couldn't believe what I was seeing.
But at the same time, you know, it was I was a bit distant from it compared to certainly New Yorkers, but never mind uh, you know, the people that were actually there on the site, and of course, frankly, Americans in general.
Yeah, I mean, look, as a born and raised New Yorker, you know, 9-11 uh hits you a little harder, maybe uh than others.
Um where was I?
I was a senior at the University of Richmond in my college uh dorm room with my roommates, and we had on one of those old televisions with the big boxes, and we got messages um in those days on the computer to turn on the TV, and it was, you know, eight, eight o'clock in the morning, and we turned it on, and that's where we saw the coverage of that day.
And as a 21, 22-year-old kid um about to graduate college, it was um surreal as you know, putting it mildly, and and also just um completely tragic.
But being a New Yorker, then your mind runs to the people you grew up with, uh family and friends.
It was not uh something that you can prepare for.
Yeah, you know, I so I've I've gone through four of the six of the I guess it's a you could call it a mini-series of this of this one day in America documentary, told through the eyes of those these people that you're describing, a few of the first responders that actually survived.
There weren't many of them that many of them perished.
Um you know, one person I just started watching had actually was one of only 14 people that survived the collapse of both towers.
And I don't fully understand entirely what that means, even.
So I think uh I know who you're talking about, and what he's saying, he was one of 14 people who survived the collapse of the Marriott building next door next to the towers that was connected to One World Trade.
I see.
Yeah.
Um luckily because of the first responders, as everybody was running out of One World Trade, these heroes were running in, literally thousands of people survived because they went up the firewell and up the staircase as the building was burning to get people out.
Um and they did an unbelievable job on that day.
You can't even train for something like that.
You just, you know, I'm biased, but when you're born in New Yorker and you're raised in that community, that's that's the what that's what you do.
You just you just don't you don't get said no to.
Um it's in your blood.
And there was something else that kind of came through in in there and it was interesting.
You know, you would expect of course there was a ton of panic and so forth, but a number of the people were relating the fact that people were genuinely helping each other.
Yeah through through the process.
Even like talking about the people up civilians up in the towers and the f the ones that made it, of course.
From just the very next day, there was obviously a need for um blood transfusions to treat the thousands of people that were injured, and the hospitals literally were turning away people who were willing to donate blood because they said they had all they needed the next day.
To me, that was as just uh a tribute to how America responds, not just our law enforcement and our first responders, but the civilians who responded and just said, how can we help?
And that's how they immediately started helping.
It was one of those things that you just remember and it never leaves you.
You know, I so uh approximately 3,000 people perished and another 6,000 were injured and I suppose recipients of of some of these transfusions.
On that day, uh 2,977 Americans lost their lives in the in the three attacks.
And what's probably not tracked as well is since the 20 years since, because of the toxicity of the fumes from the planes hitting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thousands of other people have lost their lives due to 911 related illnesses.
So the death toll probably approaches more about close to 8,000 in the in the 20 years sense.
That's a lot.
That's that is the single greatest uh terrorist attack in US history.
So let's kind of dive into the past a little bit here.
You know, like essentially everything that kind of led up to 911.
This is something that we've been we've been discussing.
Absolutely, and look, that that's why I think this is so important.
911 didn't happen on 91.
91 was in the works and being planned uh for years.
And I would take us back to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 by this guy called Ramsa Youssef.
And uh that was a car bomb or a van bomb that exploded underneath one of the World Trade Centers in the parking garage.
And thankfully the buildings did not collapse and there was not a significant loss of life.
But that was one of the first terrorist acts in New York City.
And then if you f if you go five years down the road to 1998, there were the twin embassy bombings of the US embassies in East Africa in Kenya and Tanzania, where hundreds of people were killed, including US citizens who were serving in those embassies.
Both of those attacks were engineered by people who would either affiliate later with Osama bin Laden, who is obviously the nine-eleven um architect, or folks that he helped train.
But it back in the nineties, Al Qaeda wasn't the Al Qaeda that we would come to know in two thousand and one.
Osama bin Laden and this other guy named Ayman al Zawahiri, his deputy were building this terrorist organization originally first by setting up shop in Sudan, and then later Osama bin Laden would move to Afghanistan, uh, where he would link up with the Taliban, and also there they would allow Al Qaeda to become an international terrorist organization, or that was their plan.
And 9-11 is sort of the culmination of it, uh, unfortunately, but there was an event that happened that a lot of people don't talk about just before 9-11, and it was a bombing of the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in the Middle East, and uh a number of US Navy sailors lost their lives in that attack, which was also perpetrated by Al Qaeda and at the behest of Osama bin Laden.
And so these events were being planned against the United States both on American soil and overseas against Americans for a number of years.
And part of the 9-11 Commission stuff, which we'll get to later was to figure out why didn't we prevent 9-11.
Um but that's a little bit of the history that leads up to 9-11, the genesis of Al Qaeda, um Osama bin Laden, and the reach that they ended up ultimately having.
Um if you asked anyone before 9-11 whether somebody could fly a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center, people would have thought you were rightfully so crazy.
And then they did it.
And the world stopped, and we had to re-jigger how we protected this nation.
And I think that was a process that took decades, and we're still tweaking it.
So why was the USS coal attack so significant?
You said it's all often overlooked but important.
Because it was another way that um Al Qaeda attacked America overseas.
What they were showing in that attack was they could attack the United States military directly and not just at home.
They had done the 93 bombings in in uh World Trade Center bombing, they had done the 98 bombings in Africa against the US embassies, and just a quick reminder, US embassies are American soil.
They're just overseas.
And they killed Americans.
So they were showing their reach, and from their perspective, they were delivering a blow to the American military apparatus directly and killing American military service members.
So I think they were unfortunately showing the measure of their resolve against America by attacking the coal.
And also why it's key is because some of the individuals involved in the attack on the coal were individuals associated directly with bin Laden and Al-Qaeda at that time.
And it was just before uh the attacks on September 11th.
So, you know, as a little bit of uh, I guess background also in terms of um, you know, the findings of the 9-11 Commission.
No, did these the attacks on U.S. soil were planned well in advance, and it was obviously all done from U.S. soil.
Yeah.
Uh so for 9-11 specifically, there were 19 hijackers that hijacked the uh three aircraft uh that struck World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the and the and the airplane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
And those hijackers, we would learn later from the 9-11 Commission were trained directly at the behest of Osama bin Laden in places like Afghanistan and other regions in the Middle East, and then they had to be sent to America.
These individuals boarded domestic flights.
All of these flights were domestic flights.
American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed into the North Tower, excuse me, four flights, um, because there were two planes that went into the World Trade Center.
So four types of flights total were hijacked.
The one that uh crashed into the Pentagon was another domestic flight, and the fourth was the one that crashed into the uh field in Shanksville was another domestic flight.
So Al Qaeda had to plan an operation to move these individuals into America, these terrorists on American soil, allow them to assimilate to American culture so they wouldn't be spotted, and we did miss them, and then figure out how to board a plane, hijack it and literally fly it into buildings and towers.
And so that's an extensive operation for a terrorist organization that operates on the other side of the world in Afghanistan.
And how they got in was another failure of our uh national security apparatus um putting the attacks themselves aside.
You know, we we've been hearing that um some of the findings that have up to now been classified.
The plan is, I guess within six months or something like this to have some declassifications of that material.
But maybe you can kind of refresh our memory, like, you know, how did this actually happen?
How is this possible?
Right.
And and what we had to do was launch an investigation that searched across the United States government and an oversight investigation falls to Congress, and they created the 9-11 Commission, a bipartisan congressional inquiry as to how a 9-11 was perpetuated on American soil, what security measures failed, what intelligence measures failed, and how are these terrorists able to attack us here at home in America in such a spectacular fashion?
So that was the purpose of the commission, and it was also let's not just highlight the problems, how do we fix them?
And from a congressional perspective, from a guy who ran a congressional investigation, the 9-11 Commission was a true bipartisan commission that did, I think you'll find over 95% close to unanimity that it was really well done, an excellent work product, and something that could be released more publicly to the American people to say this is how we were attacked, and this is how we were going to change going forward.
And of course, there's classified components like any investigation to all that.
But I do think Democrats and Republicans got together and issued a report that was um troubling in what it found in terms of our lacking and failures that led up to 9-11, but also impressive in how they responded together as a nation to fix it so that doesn't ever happen again.
How did these people actually manage to get in and you know, and take over these planes?
There was 19 hijackers that uh ultimately got in.
Many of them flew in, some of them crossed the border illegally, um, fake documents, and then planted themselves in American cities and towns.
And certain of individuals were close to military installations, others were just living in their what they would call normal American lives, but obviously receiving information directly from Al-Qaeda overseas on how to perpetuate these attacks.
So the the report sort of unveils how they entered the U.S., um, how they hid in the U.S. Um, somewhat in plain sight, and how they received information to carry out these attacks and resources to do so.
And it uh it was unfortunately a shocking failure of multiple agencies to allow them, just this group of individuals is terrorists to come into the country, and then another even bigger failure to allow them to carry out these attacks.
And as you know now, airport security was totally changed after 9-11.
Um you and I are old enough to remember flying before then versus flying right after then.
It was completely revamped and rightly so, and continues to be revamped so that no airplane is ever hijacked again or blown up over American skies.
Um, and I think we um have done a good job, but we can still do more.
Yeah, since that time I've I lost a lot of pocket knives, yes to say.
But but so I a question that always comes to my mind is you know, it's incredible that these people were s sufficiently skilled to actually fly these planes as they did.
Right.
Some of them were um trained uh partly here in America in aviation.
Um that was another finding of the 9-11 commission.
And um some of them were trained overseas and brought that talent here, and you're right, to actually hijack a commercial airliner while it's in flight, and then direct it to crash into buildings um and American people is something that takes an enormous amount of it.
Strategizing effort and sophisticated and sophistication for unfortunately lack of a of a of a better uh word for that.
But um they were here and planning for years.
That's why we highlighted the World Trade's Best Center bombing in '93, the embassy bombings, the U.S. Cole.
Al Qaeda was forming itself to be an international terrorist organization under bin Laden, and they were showing their efficacy on the world stage, and they were honing their specialties to create 9-11.
So, you know, I guess this has led to the 20 years in Afghanistan, of course, um, that we've been discussing recently quite a bit.
I mean, it the effect was profound, and you know, this is you could argue this is you know, an area where these terrorists actually succeeded.
It led to the Patriot Act, dramatic reduction and civil liberties.
It led to, I guess, well, you know, weapons of mass destruction.
That didn't exist in Iraq to be used as a pretext.
It led to all these things that were not uh, you know, many people would argue certainly were not, you know, the the best things for America, right?
Um, in in response to trying to deal with this threat.
Well, I think in response, you know, that's that's just it.
You know, America was looking for a response.
So if we look back at it 20 years hence, um, we can maybe criticize some of the actions that were taken, right?
You know, whether or not the Patriot Act was the right thing to do.
Um, I think it provided valuable response from a congressional perspective and then a law enforcement and military perspective to allow the commander-in-chief to exercise actions against terrorism.
So I do think there's a lot of good in there.
But like anything that is reactionary from a tragedy like 9-11, we don't get it all right right away.
But as a former terrorism prosecutor who has utilized the Patriot Act, who has utilized the FISA application process and the FISC, I'll be the first guy to tell you that the FISA process needs to stay.
Um it is valuable in targeting terrorists and preventing terrorist acts against Americans, both here and abroad and our allies.
As also the individual who led the Russia Gate investigation into FISA abuse during a presidential election, I will also tell you that the FISA system needs reform.
It's not perfect.
And I think there are many ways to reform that court that we can get into later, but in terms of utilizing intelligence and sharing intelligence, it's Gotten better, how we present it to a foreign intelligence surveillance court to protect America is a good process, but not perfect.
And I think the Patriot Act has largely been successful in response, but not perfect, and we need to continue to change the ways in which we engage the war on terror.
We have to be more forward-looking and not just reactionary as terrorist acts occur and make sure that those acts never happen again.
But ultimately, you need a Congress that's willing to adapt legislation and a commander-in-chief to sign that.
And the current environment doesn't bode well for too many changes in the national security arena.
But I think ultimately, with time, we will be able to get back to increasing American security while also not decreasing Americans'privileges and rights under the Constitution.
I think we've done a good job in balancing that act, but it needs some more work.
So my intention isn't to second guess the decisions that were done there, but like objectively, you know, the civil liberties of Americans and frankly a lot of other people in a lot of other free countries were reduced significantly.
Yeah.
Right.
And then there were these, you know, for example, what we discovered years later, um, significant questionable intelligence was used to make, you know, very to justify big decisions to the American public and the world, right?
Well, yeah, there's a lot in that.
So, yeah, in terms of from uh just an airport security perspective to the Patriot Act, to FISAs, and then ultimately to invading Iraq, those are all separate things that were addressed as a result of 9-11.
And for those kids who were born or right around 9-11 who are just be turning into adults and probably graduating college soon, asking why airport security is so extensive and why there are so many restrictions when they travel using mass transportation, not just domestically, but overseas as well.
It's because the world responded to 9-11 in terms of how it handles security screening procedures at transportation hubs like airports around the world.
And those processes kept changing.
It also led to the Patriot Act, as we talked about, and the implementation of stricter um intelligence apparatuses being utilized against terrorism, but it also created, I think, correctly, uh a stronger ability for the U.S. to respond at the military and law enforcement level against acts of terrorism to prevent them, because that's the ultimate goal.
Finding them and preventing them and not reacting to them as we had to do during 9-11.
But I understand over the course of time, people have found flaws in the response to 9-11, be it in the Patriot Act, be it in how we went into Iraq, or be it in airport security measures, because they're not 100% effective.
They can't be, unfortunately.
And we've had individuals such as the underwear bomber who flew on an international flight into Michigan, and luckily his device didn't go off after 9-11.
Um, so obviously we missed something there, and we are constantly learning from that and those types of incidents and trying to prevent another airliner from going down or crashing into a building.
It's a difficult situation to juxtaposition your civil liberties versus preventing another 9-11.
It's very hard balance.
And I think the 9-11 Commission tried to address a lot of it.
At this point, is America safer than it was 20 years ago from terrorism.
Uh, I think so.
And I think that we have responded uh to a lot of terrorist threats, and we've shut a lot of them down that the American public probably doesn't really know about unless you're following federal court cases about terrorism prosecutions, which I myself handled about the application of FISA in those cases to prevent acts of terrorism on American soil.
Um, unless you're following that, uh you probably don't know the extent of the 9-11 response by America.
And it was thorough and it was uh, I think rightly so, uh effective in most places.
Now that's different from the military operations overseas in response to 9-11 and how we went into Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or Somalia or what have you in the name of the war on terror.
And unfortunately terrorist groups grew after 9-11.
They didn't shrink and you had other groups created like ISIS, which ballooned and ended up taking over in terms of a numbers perspective, the number of ISIS fighters versus the number of Al-Qaeda fighters.
And so you have to constantly respond to those situations.
It can't be a static defense posture.
It has to change your intelligence posture has to change.
Your military posture has to change and whether or not the commander in chief says yes we're going into another war zone, those that decision making process needs to adapt with the times.
So Cash, I mean this might sound overly simplistic, but did the war on terror work?
I think it has been far more effective than not effective than ineffective because we as someone who ended up in the national security arena as someone who was a terrorism prosecutor, a civilian in the military and then held positions at the White House and ended up running our intelligence community and our Department of Defense, I've seen it firsthand how it operates.
And by utilizing the laws that were changed and created after 9-11, I can personally speak to how we've applied them to protect Americans both here domestically and from a law enforcement perspective and also overseas from a military perspective because that's the only people who can function overseas.
So I think it has worked.
It's not been perfect.
It definitely has flaws in how we executed some of our missions overseas.
I think Iraq's probably the biggest failure in terms of why we initially went in.
But I do think we've had success in places like East Africa, in places like Syria, even in places like Afghanistan.
We've had success there.
We have targeted terrorists, annihilated them and we have had terrorists who have taken American hostages and rescued them so I think America needs to remember that this these situations are continuously ongoing and we are responding to them but it's not a it's not a perfect response but I think it's more far more good than than bad.
You mentioned that you know the the way that we entered Iraq that that was a big problem.
Well at the time you know I wasn't in um national security yet but at the time the big question was should we invade Iraq?
Should we invade another country?
And the justification we American was were given was what sounded like a righteous one was that Saddam Hussein was collecting and creating weapons of mass destruction nuclear weapons and the like to utilize against America.
Now that's an act of terrorism.
So on its face I think based on that justification it seemed like the appropriate measure.
What we would later find out is that he, Saddam Hussein, never possessed WMD or had a WMD program.
And I think that's another significant intelligence failure that caused a nation, America to launch a war, an invasion of Iraq which caused further loss of American service members.
And I think that we got that one entirely wrong.
And that's what caused so many people rightfully so to be so angered with our government and our leadership and um it's it's different from why we went into Afghanistan in 2001 very different because we went to where the enemy Al-Qaeda was residing and housed so if you take Afghanistan and put it next to Iraq the reasons we went into one versus the other are different.
But I think Iraq could have been handled entirely differently and it was again a failure of intelligence sharing and also a failure of our leadership at the time to recognize the intelligence that existed and say there aren't a WMD.
Why are we going?
We cannot start a war based on faulty intelligence and I think that rightfully so um angered many Americans.
Well and let's talk a little bit about you know go going back to 9-11 now.
You know, there was uh you know, some pretty significant you know, you mentioned the underwear bomber.
That was obviously an intelligence failure.
There were very significant intelligence failures in the the community, intelligence community.
And I'm just wondering, you know, 20 years on, have these things been resolved?
Not a hundred percent.
It's it's not a hundred percent.
So if you go back to the nine-eleven commission, the the big question, how did this happen?
The nine-eleven commission's response was it was a failure to share intelligence.
That is to say, it's since been declassified that in the 9-11 Commission itself, that there were pieces of information held by certain components of the intelligence community regarding bin Laden and Al-Qaeda's origins and his operatives overseas and what they were doing and who they were communicating with in America.
That information wasn't shared throughout what we call the intelligence community and it didn't cross over into the law enforcement community, and it didn't cross over entirely into the military community.
Because you have to remember, you know, our our CIA and NSA cannot operate domestically, our FBI can.
So for example, if our CIA has a piece of information on bin Laden that they didn't share with our FBI, who operates in New York, in Washington, um, and across America, then they can't execute their authorities based on that information.
And I think what the 911 Commission found was that there was critical information that was not shared.
And so the Patriot Act and other pieces of legislation broke down some of the walls that prevented that sharing of intelligence.
And in it used to be siphoned off into different pipes, and they tried to bring that together with places like the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who oversees the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies when it comes to intelligence collection.
Still not perfect, but better.
Um, better way.
I've been in the middle of it, I've run it, uh, and I've seen how intelligence is supposed to move across the United States government.
And it's a huge operation.
It's not perfect, but it's gotten much better.
We've we've talked a bit about the, you know, the the civilian courts and FISA and so forth.
Um what we haven't talked about yet is, you know, there's been a lot of criticism of Guantanamo Bay and the military courts.
Yeah, there has been.
And and probably rightfully so, but again, we're looking at it, we're looking 20 years in backwards.
So 9-11 happens, and people were being terrorists, were being captured on the battlefield overseas, and America needed somewhere to put them um until they could be tried.
And Guantanamo Bay was um used for that purpose.
And it still houses at its peak, it housed something like 800 suspected terrorists.
Um now it's down to less than 50 are still at Guantanamo Bay.
And there's problems with the release of many of those individuals who have returned to terrorism that I disagree with.
Um, but some of those individuals, um, I do also agree, some of them probably should never have been there in the first place, but the majority of them I think should have.
The problem ultimately for someone who's a federal public defender and a federal former federal prosecutor is, you know, you can try these cases, and we proved it.
The National Security Division at the Department of Justice's job is to try terrorism cases in part.
And we tried them across America for acts of terrorism.
The World Trade Center bombing in 93.
Ramsey Youssef was tried and is currently serving 255 years um at a supermax facility.
It's possible to try these terrorists.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who happens to be Ramsay Youssef's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed KSM, the 9-11 architect, has been in Guantanamo Bay since I think 2002.
And he has not been tried.
And I recommended a sort of hybrid approach to solving the Guantanamo Bay or the failures of the military trying to tribunals in Guantanamo, which is there is a reluctance to bring those terrorists to American soil in America to try them, which I understand, but you can set up with modern technology a system where a jury, and that's the difference between a military tribunal and federal court.
When we try terrorist suspects in America in federal court, it's like any other criminal case.
And I believe we've shown that we can successfully do that.
I think we can do the same for the individuals in Guantanamo Bay using our our our what we call video capabilities To have the juries view them from American soil and host a federal judge and say, we are going to try you criminally for your acts of terrorism and we're going to apply the laws of the Constitution, the rules of evidence.
We're going to try you.
You're going to have your rights to appeal, and if you're convicted, and you can take it all the way up to the Supreme Court.
I think there just needs to be a bigger movement to tackle it rather than just castigate Guantanamo entirely.
I think the victims of 9-11 deserve it.
And it's not just 9-11 perpetrators were housing in Guantanamo, they're other terrorists.
And I think also from their end, from a due process end, which is what the U.S. criminal justice system is based on, we need to show the world that we can utilize our due process and our constitution to prosecute those terrorists.
And I think we can do it.
So, Cash, tomorrow, a lot of Americans, certainly a lot of New Yorkers will be commemorating 9-11.
What what would you like to say to them?
I would say that as many Americans as possible should go and support Americans across America, not just in New York and Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, but everywhere.
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