♪ ♪
Two decades after 9/11... in Afghanistan,
America's devastating defeat.
The Taliban have taken control of the nation...
And at home, distrust and division...
You traitors!
Four presidents... the decisions, the mistakes,
the consequences.
Now drawing on years of "Frontline's" reporting:
"America After 9/11."
♪ ♪
If you're just joining us, you probably already know
the World Trade Center towers, the Twin Towers,
the New York landmarks, have collapsed and are gone.
NARRATOR: 9/11.
This is huge, this is huge.
NARRATOR: America attacked.
Claire, let me interrupt you for a second,
we now have fire confirmed at the Pentagon.
NARRATOR: In Washington, D.C., fear.
The State Department has now been evacuated,
the White House has been evacuated,
the Capitol has been evacuated...
This is just not the place to be.
NARRATOR: The U.S. Capitol a target.
The American public was really not prepared
for the idea of an attack on American soil.
It is surrealistic, but at the same time,
it is one of the darkest days in America.
When 9/11 happened, I think it was very easy for people
to understand, even at that moment,
that we were embarking upon a new era in American history.
♪ ...beside her and guide her ♪
♪ Through the night with the light from above ♪
NARRATOR: By evening, the nation's leaders began to react.
♪ To the oceans white with foam ♪
♪ God Bless America, my home... ♪
It is almost impossible to imagine
that sort of scene occurring today.
With members from both sides of the aisle coming together
in song, putting country over party, at a moment of crisis.
♪ God bless America ♪
There are prominent Republicans
and prominent Democrats, and it was a real gesture
of the sense that, that we were going to find something
within ourselves that would rise above it
and would pull us together.
After September 11, we all are willing to go to war
as one against this yet-to-be-seen enemy
that is so far away from us.
We had a great sense of mission at the time.
The American people had a great sense of patriotism.
We experienced domestic unity
like we never experienced before.
NARRATOR: But in America's response to 9/11,
through three presidencies,
a chain of of unintended consequences:
growing anger, mistrust, division.
And ultimately, the Capitol again a target.
(people shouting)
(chanting): Trump won! Trump won!
The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol
was the logical endpoint of the 9/11 era.
(shouting, glass shattering)
When you have people who can't trust institutions anymore,
who are angry that the wars that they were promised
great victories in didn't turn out well,
they start to look for people to blame.
(bleep) the G.O.P.!
A lot of people felt they had been lied to.
It's no wonder that you would have so much anger,
a sense of betrayal, a sense of frustration.
Particularly among those who served in the military
during this period of, of endless wars...
It would have to be there.
(chanting): Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!
Stand down, mother(bleep)!
We went over to Iraq and Afghanistan to change
those societies, to make them more like us.
We had great faith in democracy.
Get the (bleep) out!
And yet, 20 years later, when you look at where America is
today, it's almost as if America has become more like them.
(people shouting)
Who are we?
And what do we want to do as a nation?
We answered that question too simply on 9/11...
We're the good guys.
(alarm beeping)
And 20 years later, we found out that we are the enemy.
That the biggest national security threat
facing the United States is internal.
And it has grown partly as a result of American leadership
failures over the last 20 years since 9/11.
(sirens, helicopters)
NARRATOR: September 11.
It was a tragedy that changed everything.
(chanting): U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
NARRATOR: In the aftermath, American presidents
were called to action.
(gunfire)
Leading the country through decades of conflict.
(child crying)
That left a legacy few foresaw.
Values compromised.
(dog barking)
Truth trampled.
(sirens)
Trust eroded.
Solidarity broken.
And wars abroad...
(chanting): Trump won!
NARRATOR: and at home.
Trump won! Trump won!
(chanting fades)
(helicopter whirring)
NARRATOR: By the evening of 9/11, President George W. Bush
finally arrived at the White House.
President Bush is back at the White House, he's about...
He was flown by Marine One, the Marine helicopter,
to the South Lawn...
NARRATOR: He'd been on the move since he'd been told
about the attack that morning.
There he is, the president, coming back from a trip
that has taken him first to Florida today...
I whispered into his right ear,
"A second plane hit the second tower.
America is under attack."
NARRATOR: The Secret Service took over.
Where is the president of the United States?
Pretty soon the country needs to know where he is.
NARRATOR: The president kept out of Washington for hours.
They are still quite worried about his own security.
The president was in parts very much in a bubble.
He was evacuated from Florida, he was on Air Force One,
flying around the country.
President Bush was flown secretly today from Florida,
first to Louisiana...
When the country saw the president,
a couple of times that day, he seemed unready.
He looked like he was the hunted, not the hunter.
(static hissing)
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Nearly 3,000 people were dead.
In the days ahead, Bush would be haunted by the question
of what he could have done to prevent it.
Remember, it was the worst terrorist attack ever
on the United States, and it happened on his watch.
As president, you do feel a certain responsibility
when something as serious as that happens
while you're the commander-in-chief.
The president now, just a few moments away
from addressing the nation from the Oval Office.
George W. Bush, live in the White House,
about to make his comments.
NARRATOR: That night, the nation waited to hear from him.
Well, it's a critical time for him.
The nation is being tested.
The new president is being tested, as well.
(slams)
NARRATOR: He would lay out a stark vision
of the new world after 9/11.
Now we go to the Oval Office and President Bush.
America was targeted for attack
because we're the brightest beacon for freedom
and opportunity in the world.
And no one will keep that light from shining.
Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature.
George Bush, in his mind, I think, did understand
that something very evil had happened...
And it had happened.
It was an evil act, 9/11.
It killed thousands of civilians.
Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve
and I pray they will be comforted by a power greater
than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23:
"Even though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me."
But, once you define yourself as good
and the other side as bad, it's a slippery slope,
because you start thinking anything you do for your cause
is good, and we wound up doing some very evil things
in the name of goodness.
All right.
Sad day.
("Star-Spangled Banner" playing)
NARRATOR: In those early days, around the world,
the lines between good and evil seemed clear.
(bell tolling)
The world rallied around America.
NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history,
"An attack on one is an attack on all."
(group singing)
Well, it's good to know that at times like this,
America is not without friends.
And even in parts of the Muslim world,
a real outward expression of, of pain and sympathy
for the United States.
God bless you, God bless you, God bless you.
In Tehran this week, demonstrators held a candlelight
vigil for victims of the attacks...
There was a great outpouring of, actually, of love
for America, of support and of solidarity.
(man chanting)
And outside the American Embassy in Moscow,
where people bowed their heads and wept.
The Americans had been attacked.
There was no excuse, no explanation possible,
and the world, in a sense, was on revenge mode.
We had to kill the murderers.
NARRATOR: The C.I.A. knew the culprit.
They told the president it was Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden,
the founder of the Islamic militant group Al-Qaeda.
(gun fires)
We had been projecting a spectacular attack by Al-Qaeda.
Here it was.
We had the names of some of the people involved
that we recognized.
They were Al-Qaeda.
NARRATOR: Bin Laden was operating out of Afghanistan.
The C.I.A. said they could use their fast attack forces
to take him out.
We'd spent years working on this stuff.
Where everybody else is looking for their maps on Afghanistan,
we're ready to rock, ready to roll.
NARRATOR: The president liked the sound of it.
The C.I.A.'s director of counterterrorism, Cofer Black,
would take the lead and set the tone for what was to come.
There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11.
After 9/11, the gloves come off.
My last meeting with Cofer, he basically said to me,
"Your job is to find bin Laden, kill him,
and bring his head back on ice."
(laughs): And I said, "Well, that's about the clearest,
direct, most direct order I've ever received
as a C.I.A. officer."
And I said, "I'll do my best.
We'll, we'll try to get the job done."
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Two weeks after the 9/11 attack,
the small C.I.A. strike force arrived in Afghanistan.
They needed to deal with the extremists in charge
of the country and harboring bin Laden... the Taliban.
My team, seven officers, including myself
and three air crew, flew in on the 26th of September.
When I began to distribute money, $200,000 here,
$250,000 for this, I think it was,
they were convinced that we, we were sincere.
NARRATOR: The American dollars bought the cooperation
of the Taliban's enemies, rival militias and warlords.
I remember immediately realizing the horrific choice
that was being made.
(shouting)
We got into business right away with the warlords
who had been running and ruining Afghanistan for many years.
These were brutal killers, and they were up against
the Taliban, which were also brutal killers.
NARRATOR: Devastating American air bombardments
did their part to weaken the Taliban.
We dropped these massive bombs called daisy cutters
on Taliban troop positions
in the northern part of the country.
(explosions)
Essentially let Afghan forces to rise up
in different parts of the country
and, and push out the Taliban regime.
NARRATOR: Within weeks, the Taliban had been driven
from the capital city, Kabul.
There is jubilation in the cities that we have liberated.
(gunshots)
And the sooner Al-Qaeda is bought to justice,
the sooner Afghanistan will return to normal.
NARRATOR: But for all the celebrating,
the truth was that the C.I.A.'s primary target,
Osama bin Laden, had vanished.
The mastermind of 9/11 was believed to be hiding
in the mountain stronghold of Tora Bora.
A small contingent of American forces
joined Afghan fighters there.
Those of us on the ground, you know, a few dozen
international reporters, we far outnumbered the number
of American Special Forces and, and C.I.A.
who were on the ground there.
There was a bigger journalistic contingent
at Tora Bora than there was American fighting force.
(explosions)
NARRATOR: U.S. and allied forces bombed Tora Bora,
but couldn't get bin Laden.
(explosions)
The C.I.A. team leader wanted hundreds
of U.S. Special Forces on the ground.
I asked for, you know, ground support.
And I knew that we needed U.S. Rangers... the longer we waited,
the further he fell back to the border.
NARRATOR: The military did not send in the reinforcements.
It was a catastrophic mistake.
Because of miscommunication, some bureaucratic infighting,
the most elite of U.S. troops weren't dispatched there.
We didn't send in the Navy Seals or the Army's Delta Force.
NARRATOR: Bin Laden and his besieged Al-Qaeda forces
slipped over the border to Pakistan,
an early and ominous sign that the war would not be so easy.
The fact that he was allowed to survive...
The fact that he could then claim to have escaped
the most technologically advanced military
in the history of mankind, fed into a defeated organization's
narrative that served to breathe new life into them
and enabled them to survive Operation Enduring Freedom,
the defeat of the Taliban, and the routing of Al-Qaeda.
NARRATOR: With bin Laden still on the run
and Afghanistan in tatters, a new reality set in.
America was now embroiled in a country ravaged
by years of war.
♪ ♪
Afghanistan is a devastated country.
Many of the buildings in the capital, Kabul,
have been destroyed.
♪ ♪
The women and men of Afghanistan,
all of them are suffering right now.
Their faces out of a Dickens novel,
many without shoes and socks.
Terrorist car bomb left a square in downtown Kabul
a bloody shambles, at least 15 dead.
♪ ♪
Fears remain that the Afghan people's suffering
is far from over.
NARRATOR: President Bush and the presidents that followed
would struggle to come to terms with America's role
in Afghanistan.
There was never the political will and therefore the ability
to invest the amount of money and boots on the ground
and attention that it would have taken to have
a more definitive resolution of that conflict.
NARRATOR: It would become the longest war
in American history.
(videotape loading)
NARRATOR: Over the border, in Pakistan,
bin Laden seized the moment.
Distributing videos.
Taunting the Americans.
When Osama bin Laden talked about 9/11,
he sometimes said that the purpose of it was a strategy
that he called "death by a thousand cuts."
(speaking Arabic):
By which he meant it was not just the symbolic power
of taking down the World Trade Center.
It was also the beginning of a process,
of a cascade of events that would ultimately lead
the United States, on its own, through its own decisions,
to do a series of things that would, in the end,
weaken the United States rather than strong,
rather than strengthen it... That was Bin Laden's idea.
It is a somber time for this country.
The U.S. government has received intelligence
that more attacks against Americans may be imminent.
The possibility that Osama bin Laden
may be trying to get nuclear weapons.
Osama bin Laden may be closer to building a crude
radiological bomb than anyone realized.
Disturbing news from Boca Raton, Florida...
Another anthrax case, this one in New York.
NARRATOR: In the weeks after 9/11, fear gripped America.
Anthrax anxiety has become a plague of its own.
Fears over anthrax spread to Washington...
People forget, but within a month after 9/11,
we were worried about anthrax attacks.
They will not take this country down!
And we feared then that the terrorist groups have tried
to get not just biological and chemical weapons,
but even nuclear weapons.
We don't understand what might happen
and we certainly don't know what to do about it.
NARRATOR: During President Bush's daily briefing,
the head of the C.I.A., George Tenet,
delivered the incoming threats.
Every single morning, the president and the top leadership
are waking up to a drumbeat of new possible threats,
day in and day out, week in and week out,
month in and month out.
NARRATOR: The vice president, Dick Cheney,
watched over an encrypted video link, often hidden
in what was called a secure, undisclosed location.
This was Cheney's nightmare come true.
He'd been getting ready for doomsday for years,
and thought a lot about it.
And then, on 9/11, it seemed like it was almost coming true.
He felt sort of death was stalking him.
He kept a gas mask and a hazmat suit in a bag in the backseat.
NARRATOR: Cheney obsessed over the threats.
The danger.
And the need to act.
What 9/11 did was really replace the ideals
that we professed, in terms of democracy
and in terms of moderation and restraint,
with a single impulse... Survival.
And everything else that was done that was contrary to that
was thought to be a kind of effete, liberal, wishy-washy,
romantic sentiment.
NARRATOR: The president had said the war on terror
was a struggle between good and evil.
It's hard for Americans to imagine how evil the people are
who are doing this.
NARRATOR: And he assured the country
of its moral high ground.
We're a nation of strong values and we value life.
NARRATOR: But the vice president
had a different approach.
We also have to work the sort of, the dark side,
if you will... we got to spend time in the shadows,
in the intelligence world.
A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done
quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods
that are available to our intelligence agencies
if we're going to be successful.
You have these clashing impulses of, how do we hold
the moral high ground and leverage
that in this global struggle, versus the people who,
at the price of being tough against the enemy,
such a terrible enemy,
were willing to do things that could end up sacrificing
that moral high ground, and fatefully compromise
America's position in the world.
NARRATOR: Cheney's dark side approach would be put
into action in Afghanistan, where the U.S. and its allies
captured thousands of prisoners.
I think the response was just part of this whole attempt
to demonize everyone, and all Muslims
who were caught in the war zone.
So there was a lot of false jailing, and capture
and jailing, of, of people who may be sympathetic
to Al-Qaeda, but have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda.
(indistinct chatter)
NARRATOR: Cheney wanted to get tough with the detainees,
and didn't want international law
or the United States Constitution to get in the way.
They don't deserve to be treated as a prisoner of war.
They don't deserve the same guarantees and safeguards
that would be used for an American citizen.
Because of this mindset of constant fear,
they looked at law not as something strengthening them,
but as something that was constraining them,
and they looked for ways to get out of the constraints
of the law.
Law became an impediment to get around.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: They took the prisoners 8,000 miles
from Afghanistan to the American Naval base
on an isolated corner of Cuba, Guantánamo Bay.
The Bush administration argued that Guantánamo
was beyond the jurisdiction of the United States.
It chose Guantánamo to hold detainees captured in the war
on terror because it insisted that they were beyond
the reach of the U.S. Constitution.
There was this classic picture, you remember,
of all these detainees sitting in a plane,
being conveyed to Guantánamo, a 24-hour flight.
Our eyes covered, our ears covered, our mouth covered.
And you sit, sit like this, I mean, for, you, just...
I just... I don't know, like... I cried.
It was, it was hard, it...
Was young, and very, very hard.
NARRATOR: The detainees were taken from the plane
to a place known as Camp X-ray.
Open-air cages.
No toilets.
No running water.
Concrete slabs.
Guantánamo Bay's climate is different than Afghanistan.
To be in a eight-by-eight cell in beautiful, sunny
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is not a, a, uh, inhumane treatment.
I mean, we were like animals in cages.
Literally.
Just animals who can behave like humans.
That way we were treated.
NARRATOR: To the world, the photos and the accounts
from inside were shocking.
Images, as they started to come out from Guantánamo,
really captured global attention.
It brought what many believed to be American values,
or what America claimed as its values,
in conflict with the images that people were seeing.
NARRATOR: They called Guantánamo "Gitmo."
It became a symbol of America's willingness to use
any means necessary to right the wrongs of 9/11.
To the rest of the world, the people in orange jumpsuits
were a symbol that the most powerful force in the world,
the United States government, was willing to use
the full extent of that power to just brutalize people,
including innocent people.
And I think it, it permanently damaged our capacity
to speak about things like human rights,
to speak about things like democracy and the rule of law.
NARRATOR: And Gitmo had begun to change
how America saw itself.
It starts raising a series of questions,
in our allies and among our own people.
"Wait a minute, why are we doing these things?
Why are we fighting this war?
If we're the good people, why are we behaving in this way?"
(chanting): Ho-ho!
Guantánamo has got to go!
Complaints over the treatment of the detainees
is growing overseas and here at home.
What they don't have is prisoner-of-war status,
which continues to draw fire from human rights advocates.
Living in open cages apparently outside
American law.
NARRATOR: Even as the outrage was growing,
Vice President Cheney pushed the president to go even further.
This time, it would be carried out in secret...
The torture of detainees to get intelligence.
Cheney believes the only way you can fight these people is
with accurate intelligence and take some fairly
what he calls robust measures to break their will to resist.
So where do you do that?
And how do you do it?
You keep it secret from the Justice Department.
You keep it overseas in countries
that agree to keep it secret.
You build these things with C.I.A. money,
so that nobody knows this is going on,
except vaguely the president and, of course,
the people in the C.I.A.
NARRATOR: They would test the secret program on Abu Zubaydah,
suspected of running a terrorist training camp.
His story was revealed when the United States Senate issued
what was known as "the torture report" in 2014.
At approximately 6:20 p.m., Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded
for the first time.
NARRATOR: Zubaydah's personal drawings illustrate his story.
Over a two-and-a-half-hour period, Abu Zubaydah coughed,
vomited, and had involuntary spasms of the torso
and extremities.
He describes it to the Red Cross,
and he can't breathe and he's beginning to drown,
and the, the feeling of drowning is terrifying.
NARRATOR: It went on for more than two weeks.
Waterboarding.
Beatings.
Confinement in small spaces.
Sleep deprivation.
Freezing.
Some who knew the program's secrets said it didn't work
and wasn't worth it.
We devolved and became the person that we were going after.
That's what it meant.
That was the consequence.
That we lost our moral authority around the globe.
Remember, even in countries that hated us,
they were crying over what happened to America.
And we squandered it.
What a waste. What a waste.
♪ ♪
(applause)
Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States.
NARRATOR: Just four months after 9/11,
in his first State of the Union address,
the president decided to dramatically widen the war.
North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons
of mass destruction.
Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America
and to support terror.
When you do hear that, you perk up,
and it's kind of surprising.
Because here you had the president of the United States
addressing Congress, and then naming these countries
and putting them, lumping them together as this "axis of evil."
States like these, and their terrorist allies,
constitute an axis of evil,
arming to threaten the peace of the world.
For a Frenchman, the speech about the axis of evil
is simply impossible to understand.
You know, it's really coming from another world for us.
We said, "Axis of evil?
What does it mean," you know?
I will not wait on events while dangers gather.
I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer.
The United States of America will not permit
the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us
with the world's most destructive weapons.
(cheers and applause)
What had begun with this attack in New York
and Washington had now grown into this much larger
and graver attack on America in the political language.
Our war on terror has well begun, but it has only begun.
The idea that we weren't at risk just of terrorism,
but in fact, we were at risk of a nuclear attack, a WMD.
And that was an entirely new realm of conceivable combat.
President Bush announced to the world that America's war
on terrorism will expand.
Iran and Iraq, who, along with North Korea,
were described as a axis of evil.
What was really ominous about the speech
was this so-called axis of evil.
NARRATOR: Bush had already decided on the first target...
Iraq, and its longstanding dictator, Saddam Hussein.
You can only understand the decision to attack Iraq
in the context of 9/11.
I think after the first attack, President Bush was terrified
that there could be further attacks.
He had failed to prevent the first.
So he was looking around, you know, who were enemies
of America who might want to do America harm?
We know that Saddam Hussein has a long history
with terrorism.
Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists.
NARRATOR: Bush and his inner circle made the case.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted
to weapons of mass destruction.
NARRATOR: Often word for word.
Simply stated... BOTH: There is no doubt...
That Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
Has produced weapons of mass destruction.
There is no doubt that he has used them.
The United States knows that Iraq has...
ALL: Weapons of mass destruction.
Absolutely.
We cannot wait for the final proof...
But we don't want... BOTH: the smoking gun...
to be a mushroom cloud.
That could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
NARRATOR: Intelligence reports, leaked to the press,
splashed on the front page.
Some of the most credible, most respected American
news organizations, like "The New York Times,"
had written very detailed, and, in its own way,
supportive coverage of the evidence.
Then there was an amen chorus in Washington
that was sort of willing to go along with the administration
on the chance that it was right.
Our editorial page at "The Washington Post"
was supportive of the invasion.
Those lies, in effect, were translated
through the credibility of news organizations
right there into the field of view of Americans.
(sirens wailing)
(gavel banging)
NARRATOR: In Congress, prominent Democrats
also lined up behind Bush, echoing the threat of WMD.
Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical
and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability,
and his nuclear program.
People who knew better voted for it because they were afraid
of, of being called weak.
Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein
pose a real and grave threat to our security.
You have Democratic, as well as Republican,
members of Congress voting for a war that,
does anybody really believe that, if they were president,
they would have chosen to do that?
Saddam is dangerous.
The world would be a better place without him.
But the reason he poses a growing danger
to the United States and its allies is that he possesses
chemical and biological weapons
and he is seeking nuclear weapons.
That undermined, I think, confidence
in the American public in their leaders.
"Who can I trust anymore?
The Democrats voted for this war, too... how can I...
Why should I trust them any more than I trust the Republicans?"
You know?
On the other side of the debate is continental Europe,
where there is widespread opposition to war.
NARRATOR: But the world was skeptical.
When we come to Iraq, Europe was deeply, deeply divided.
Overseas, protesters took to the streets in Paris,
Tokyo, and Cairo.
The British are trying to influence the Americans
while the French are taking the lead of the resistance.
(shouting in French)
No blood for oil!
NARRATOR: American protests also began to grow.
The largest protest was in Washington on Saturday.
Demonstrations in San Francisco also drew
large crowds.
We flooded the streets.
You know, we were part of a global anti-war movement.
I was one of the students leading the anti-war protests
in the Bay Area.
And we didn't stop; we continued to stage civil disobedience,
hoping, praying that our actions would matter.
The demonstrations have not softened
the administration's resolve,
for now the U.S. is preparing to strike
with limited international support.
The president, of course, is driving toward a confrontation
with Saddam Hussein.
He knows that people have discounted a lot of the things
that he has said, so he turns to the one person in his team
that he thinks has credibility.
And that would be Colin Powell.
NARRATOR: Colin Powell, a former general;
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
under Bush, the first Black secretary of State.
He had ratings like Mother Teresa.
We used to talk about that, "Who is going to be top tomorrow,
Mother Teresa or you?"
You know? And he'd laugh.
But he did.
The American people trusted him.
NARRATOR: The president, relying on Powell's formidable
reputation, wanted him to make the case for war.
And he made the decision in the middle of January
that it was going to require military action.
And he asked me to take the case up to the United Nations.
So that speech, why you? Why do...
I'm the secretary of state.
Who else would you send?
You can't send the secretary of defense
to the U.N.
The U.N. ambassador, this is a little above that pay grade.
And so, he selected me, and I think he thought I had
credibility to deliver a speech and it would be believable.
NARRATOR: Just over a week later,
he arrived at the United Nations.
The world was watching.
It was a major, major moment.
Powell was really showing the world,
you know, trying to convince us that there were WMD in Iraq.
(camera shutter clicking)
He had remarkable credibility around the world.
I think many people in the business knew that
he had doubts about this.
And so if he was saying it, then people would be much more likely
to believe that, than had it been some other spokesman
who had less credibility.
Saddam Hussein already possesses two of the three
key components needed to build a nuclear bomb.
Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb.
I was a salesman that day to present a product.
But the product was something that came out
of the intelligence community.
The most damaging piece of material
in this entire presentation
with respect to the American people
was the connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,
and thus 9/11.
I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative
telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons
to al-Qaeda.
Fortunately, this operative is now detained
and he has told his story.
I later found out the al-Qaeda operative
was Shaykh al-Libi, that he was tortured by the Egyptians
well before this time,
that the information he had revealed he himself had recanted
within a week.
And so this most powerful moment in his presentation,
probably the most influential moment
with the American people, was a complete fabrication, really.
Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons
of mass destruction...
NARRATOR: Even after Powell's performance,
the U.N. was unconvinced.
Bush would put together his own war coalition.
At this hour, American and coalition forces
are in the early stages of military operations
to disarm Iraq, to free its people,
and to defend the world from grave danger.
(explosions roar)
NARRATOR: After the invasion, the first mission: find the WMD.
The troops spread out.
There weren't any.
When it was revealed there were no weapons
of mass destruction, we looked like idiots;
we had claimed absolutely there would be
weapons of mass destruction.
So it was a, it was a real extraordinary revelation.
And, really, very difficult for us to understand.
It's the final word... Saddam Hussein had no weapons
of mass destruction.
As the U.S. has come up empty in its hunt for weapons.
The lack of hard evidence calls into question
one of the basic reasons for the war.
When it turned out that the evidence had been manipulated
and falsely represented, it didn't just undermine
the credibility of the administration,
it undermined the credibility of the American media,
who had been so instrumental in getting that message
out to the public.
Containing biological...
Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.N. in February
that Saddam Hussein was harboring up to 500 tons
of biological and chemical weapons.
So far, coalition troops have not found one ounce.
NARRATOR: The administration's most trusted
figure had been wrong.
Suddenly, the C.I.A. started to let us know
that the case was falling apart...
Parts of the case were falling apart.
And it was deeply disturbing to me and to the president...
To all of us.
NARRATOR: It was devastating.
Trust shattered: in Powell, the president, the government.
If the intelligence was shaded or manipulated,
it could be a significant scandal
for the Bush White House.
My government's lied to me so often,
they've lost their credibility with me.
And it's very, very bad that people don't trust and believe
what's coming from the White House.
The long-term effect was a beginning of a certain level
of distrust of the government, that the government lied
to them and that we went into Iraq under a false pretense.
And so, we had all of this lost lives, money spent,
blood and treasure, that was just kind of wasted.
No blood for oil!
You could see the beginning of some
of the conspiracy theories that have sort of infected
the American mindset.
People began to come up with, "Well, if it wasn't for WMD,
is our government lying to us? And why?"
People began to sort of distrust their own government
in a big way.
(crowd jeering)
NARRATOR: In Iraq, at the very beginning,
it looked a lot like victory.
A feeling of satisfaction, I guess.
It's almost over, so I can go home soon.
The United States believed we would be welcomed as liberators.
That firstly, it would be a cakewalk to go into Iraq,
and, secondly, within a matter of weeks,
the country would be stabilized.
NARRATOR: But like Afghanistan,
Iraq quickly became a quagmire.
We watched as the statue fell on April 9.
By April 10, we woke up in the morning and the university
was being looted.
Saddam's palaces, all open, all looted.
Baghdad very quickly moves from a state of joy
and euphoria...
No Saddam, he is squashed! No Saddam!
To one of almost utter bedlam.
Looters set upon government buildings, upon businesses,
fires break out.
And there are thousands of U.S. troops in the city
at that point, but they don't have orders to stop it.
The goodwill in Iraq lasted only a few days,
because the U.S. attacked Iraq without any plan B at all.
I mean, there was nobody even to keep law and order in Baghdad,
leave alone the, the other cities.
I picked up a newspaper today,
and I couldn't believe it.
I read eight headlines that talked about "Chaos!"
"Violence!" "Unrest!"
And it just was, "Henny-Penny, the sky is falling."
I've never seen anything like it.
It's just unbelievable how people can,
can take that away from what is happening in that country.
NARRATOR: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had
overseen the planning for the war.
Now he was doing damage control.
It is a fundamental misunderstanding
to, to see those images over and over and over again
of some boy walking out with a vase and say,
"Oh, my goodness, you didn't have a plan."
That's nonsense!
He said, "There's one little riot in the street or something,
and people say, 'Henny-Penny, the sky is falling.'"
I'm on the ground in the summer of '03 in Iraq,
and it's very clear to me that what I'm seeing
is very different from what people
at the Pentagon are seeing.
And it's untidy. And freedom's untidy.
And free people are free to make mistakes
and commit crimes and do bad things.
They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things.
And that's what's going to happen here.
NARRATOR: Rumsfeld's disconnect grew
as the country continued to unravel.
Rumsfeld actually thought and said
that we could just go in and then get out.
We weren't going to do nation-building in Iraq.
And if Iraq imploded, that was somebody else's problem.
In Baghdad today, the looting and shooting continued.
They still come in waves, carting away metal frames...
NARRATOR: To fix the problem, President Bush handed it
to a little-known diplomat, L. Paul Bremer III.
Jerry Bremer has agreed to become the presidential envoy
to Iraq.
Paul Bremer wasn't a Middle East expert.
He wasn't seen as an Arabist.
He wasn't a person who was an expert
in post-conflict rebuilding.
And then he becomes a sort of de facto ruler of Iraq.
NARRATOR: Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad with grand ambitions.
When Iraq was found not to have weapons
of mass destruction, the mission then morphed
to installing democracy.
So Ambassador Bremer spoke about, you know,
"We're going to rebuild Iraq like we did Germany
and Japan after World War II."
And to do that, we couldn't build from the old foundations.
We had to create new foundations.
NARRATOR: Bremer's first step to making
this new Iraqi democracy...
Purge the entire Iraqi government
of tens of thousands of members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party.
And those who were on high before,
in particular the Ba'athists,
who used their power to repress the Iraqi people,
will be removed from office.
They threw tens of thousands of people out of their jobs,
out of their homes, out of their future,
and even robbed them of their position in society.
Shortly, I will issue an order on measures to extirpate
Ba'athists and Ba'athism from Iraq forever.
So there was no reason for these individuals
to support the new Iraq.
In fact, it was in their interest to oppose it.
What was the Pentagon expecting?
That American officers would take over the ministries
and become minister of culture and minister of health?
It was, it was really an abysmal situation.
NARRATOR: Bremer's second order: disbanding the army
and firing hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
I was stunned, because this was not the plan.
The C.I.A. was stunned.
And the commanders in the field out there were stunned.
Because this was the solution to the security problem.
We were going to reconstitute the Iraqi army
so that they could secure their country.
And instead, we dismissed them and we turned loose
all of these trained military people who might have weapons
with them and knew where weapons were.
(chanting)
NARRATOR: Saddam Hussein's former soldiers
took to the streets.
Week after week after week,
the big demonstrations got larger and larger.
There was enormous concern where there were actually killings.
(gunshots echo)
The army was the central instrument
of Saddam's repression of the Kurds and the Shia.
I think the decision not to recall Saddam's army,
from a political point of view,
is the single most important correct decision that we made
in the 14 months we were there.
NARRATOR: Bremer's assertion would be put to the test.
In no time at all, the insurgency began.
Hell broke loose in Iraq.
(explosions echo)
We were taking casualties somewhat systematically
every week.
And then it began to be almost every day.
And we were very slow to come to the recognition
that we really did have an insurgency on our hands.
NARRATOR: It all ramped up: the insurgency and the denials.
In Iraq, difficult work remains.
They're making progress against the dead-enders
who are harassing coalition forces.
The fact is that most of Iraq today
is relatively stable and quiet.
The remnants of the thugs and crooks that looted their country
and oppressed their countrymen will be rooted out
and they will be taken care of.
There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions
are such that they can attack us there.
My answer is, bring them on.
We've got the force necessary to deal
with the security situation.
The war was driven by vengeance and idealism.
The vengeance part of it was the attempt to eliminate the people
whom George W. Bush referred to as the, quote-unquote,
"evildoers."
And the idealism was the idea that these places could be
remade as Western-style democracies.
That doing so would be relatively straightforward
and almost easy.
All those ideas are naive.
There's a naivete implicit in all of that.
The United States' invasion of Iraq is proving to be
a Pandora's box.
Now, adding to the crisis of credibility,
allegations of torture.
Photographs surfaced showing American soldiers
abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners.
I was shocked and disgusted.
But I also felt extreme fear of, when you treat people like this,
what comes from that?
The photographs were taken by the soldiers themselves.
The damage to U.S. interests in the rest of the world
is hard to calculate, but it will be significant.
Abu Ghraib was, yeah, it was, it was heartbreaking.
It was shocking.
I, I wanted to believe very...
I so wanted to believe those pictures were not real.
I didn't want to think that Americans
could do this to Iraqis.
NARRATOR: The abuse happened at Abu Ghraib prison.
Once again, like at Gitmo, like the C.I.A. torture program,
America's war on terror had come to this.
What was going on at Abu Ghraib came from Guantánamo.
Abu Ghraib was a kind of, you know, a consequence
of that initial decision of the C.I.A.
It bled out, you know, to Iraq.
Across the Arab world today,
there was condemnation of U.S. troops.
(speaking in world language)
To see that splashed on newspapers around the world,
it literally sent the entire world up in arms
over the, over that treatment.
Beating with a broom handle and a chair.
Sodomizing with...
From the very start, President Bush had said
this would be a war of ideas, and that American values,
America's faith in freedom and democracy, would triumph.
The America I know is a compassionate country
that believes in freedom.
The America I know cares about every individual.
The America I know has sent troops into Iraq
to promote freedom: good, honorable citizens
that are helping the Iraqis every day.
It exposes what many people saw as the hypocrisy
of American foreign policy.
For many Iraqis, it was seen as sordid.
So you started to see a dwindling of support
for the actual war.
♪ ♪
Abu Ghraib was the moment when the curtain kind of fell
on America, and enough Americans saw what the world saw,
which is that this has gone completely wrong.
We had gone to war thinking of our better selves,
and now we were a country that was occupying Iraq
and torturing its people in, in kind of grotesque,
almost casual ways.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: America was losing its moral authority,
its standing.
What was lost was the hope that Americans
had good intentions, that they were trying to rebuild Iraq,
that they were protecting the Iraqi people.
It did not look like that at that point.
So anyone who still had some hope at that point,
I think, was faced with that reality.
The photographs are so powerful.
They antagonize the Iraqi public.
There are people, we know, who join the insurgency
because of those images.
Which means that American soldiers torturing Iraqis,
and photographing it, helped get other American soldiers
and Iraqis killed.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: And there were more consequences to come.
Osama bin Laden seized the moment.
For al-Qaeda, this was an opportunity to emerge
from the shadows, to confront the United States
invading yet another country.
NARRATOR: Bin Laden rallied his followers
to join the insurgency in Iraq.
Foreign fighters came in to fight against the occupation.
And because all the security forces had been dismissed,
there was nobody to guard the borders.
And so these, you know, foreign fighters, jihadis,
could enter the country.
(people shouting)
NARRATOR: Jihadis, Ba'athists, former soldiers
uniting in opposition to America.
It created a monster, a Frankenstein monster,
that half-bin Laden and half-Saddam...
A monster that did not exist before we went to Iraq,
but because of what we did in the aftermath
of our invasion, that monster became a reality.
NARRATOR: The centerpiece of Al-Qaeda's strategy:
fomenting civil war.
(explosion)
Explosives detonating just after 7:00 a.m. this morning
underneath the golden dome...
NARRATOR: A bombing designed to inflame tensions
between Iraq's rival religious sects, the Sunni and Shia.
One of the country's most holy
Shiite religious shrines.
And that set off a cycle of violence...
(explosion)
between Sunni and Shia that Al-Qaeda tried to fuel
as much as they possibly could.
(sirens)
This violence had so much momentum
that it was very, very difficult to stop it.
(explosion)
We had now sectarian strife,
we had now armed groups killing whoever they wanted,
we had now Al-Qaeda rampant in the country.
Friendships were torn.
Families were torn apart, um...
Cities will never be the same as they were, um...
There's a, there's a generation that has grown up
that has never known one day of stability
in their entire lives.
NARRATOR: The high cost and consequences of war
came home to America, too.
Every week, at military bases, the bodies arrived.
Soldiers and contractors.
As these troops were going to Iraq,
these wars were being lost, or they looked like
they were losing these wars.
Suddenly, Americans started to ask,
why are we here and is it worth it?
NARRATOR: The wounded, haunted,
forever changed.
Tens of thousands of them.
Is it worth the costs?
Not just in terms of taxpayer dollars.
Is it worth the costs in terms of human lives
and in terms of values?
Most soldiers say, when they leave the battlefield,
the battlefield doesn't leave them.
20% to 40% of individuals come back with significant
post-traumatic stress symptoms.
They are dying in record numbers...
And I'm not talking about on the battlefield,
but rather by their own hand.
One of the ugliest legacies of this crisis is home-grown.
We've seen both the best of America,
and now because of hate, begin to see some of the worst.
NARRATOR: At home during those years,
a different war was brewing.
Is America becoming Islamophobic,
a prejudice against Muslims?
NARRATOR: In fear and frustration,
Americans were turning on each other.
A growing number of Americans saying,
"Forget political correctness."
I tell you what you do... You racially profile.
I am not going to stop until I have executed
at least ten Muslims.
In the wake of 9/11, we saw a wave of hate violence
all across the United States.
Muslim Americans, Sikh Americans at the forefront
of this violence.
In Ohio today, another mosque vandalized.
Saturday, a Pakistani Muslim shot dead in Dallas,
and in Arizona, a gas station owner shot and killed...
Not an Arab or a Muslim, but an Indian Sikh.
So to be a Sikh American at that time,
it was to feel as though our nation was under siege
and that our families were under siege.
We would like to make it very clear
that we are Americans, too.
It's not about religion.
It is about stopping Tennessee home-grown terrorists.
We were receiving phone calls from loved ones who were saying,
"Our brother has been shot.
Our gurdwara has been vandalized,
someone's going to die, someone's going to die."
The man who plowed his pickup truck into a Tallahassee mosque
said he did it because he hated Muslims.
It was very easy to see after 9/11 that the result
was a more truculent, antagonistic version
of the United States.
The number of hate crimes is growing by the day.
We to date have initiated 40 hate crime investigations.
120 investigations...
316 hate crime invest...
In excess of 400 investigations...
532 hate crime investigations where the victims
were either Arab, Muslim, or Sikh.
And you could see the hostility that was directed
at Muslim Americans or people who were perceived
as Muslim Americans.
Somebody needs to grab the Muslim world by the shirt collar
and say, "Straighten up or we're going to eradicate you beetles
from the face of the Earth."
You have to set up encampments
like during World War II, like with the Japanese and Germans.
The Quran is a document of slavery.
Take your religion and shove it up your behind!
You round them up and then ship them out of this country,
period.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: George W. Bush's war of good versus evil
had ushered in a dark era of division.
Moral compromise.
And expanding conflict.
3,000 people were killed on 9/11.
And the U.S. response to that event included invading Iraq
and Afghanistan, holding people without due process,
torturing detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay,
kidnapping suspects in one country
and transporting them to another,
and assassinating people in countries
where the U.S. wasn't even at war.
In this obsessive hunt to eradicate terrorists,
undermined the very rules-based international order
that it had set up and led for 70 years.
(trumpet fanfare playing)
NARRATOR: Oslo, Norway.
The Nobel Peace Prize is about to be awarded to the president
of the United States.
It is not George W. Bush.
(cheers and applause)
Here's a president who is given the Nobel Peace Prize
nine months into his presidency.
He had barely had time to figure out his way
to the situation room and how to get to the Pentagon
before he's got the Nobel Peace Prize.
A little embarrassing.
He got the Nobel Peace Prize even before he'd done anything.
Just for not being President Bush.
There were huge expectations of Obama when he came in.
They expected him to remedy what was being done in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
So the expectations didn't just lie
with the Nobel Peace Committee, it lay with public opinion
right across Europe and more widely in the world.
(applause)
NARRATOR: Barack Obama's surprising rise
in American politics had been fueled
by growing disillusionment and anger over George Bush's wars.
There's a zero percent chance that Barack Obama ever becomes
president of the United States without the Iraq war...
I mean, zero.
In this very kind of curious accident of history,
the Iraq war opens the door to the first Black president
and to Barack Obama himself.
NARRATOR: He ran for the presidency
as the anti-war candidate.
I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale
and without strong international support will only fan the flames
in the Middle East.
He had called the war in Iraq a dumb war.
And so he was the anti-war candidate
that everybody was looking for.
And he got great reception with that position on the war.
Fired up!
(audience repeats)
Ready to go!
(audience repeats)
Fired up!
We are now less safe than we were before 9/11.
We will reject torture.
We will close Guantánamo.
It is time to write a new chapter
in our response to 9/11.
He basically created an argument:
how can you trust these people after they got this so wrong?
But the American people weren't just failed
by the president, they were failed by the Congress.
What Obama tapped into was not just the anger
at the Iraq war, but the anger at how fake everything felt
about it, that, from the news media to how politicians
justified their actions, to just the failure to properly account
with this horrible thing that had happened
that was leading Americans to die.
(trumpet fanfare playing)
NARRATOR: Obama's anti-war message earned him that Nobel.
The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for 2009,
President Barack Obama.
NARRATOR: But accepting the award, he had a surprise.
The anti-war candidate would be a wartime president.
President Obama may be the first person to accept
the Nobel Peace Prize and use it as an opportunity
to lay out his philosophy of war.
I cannot stand idle in the face of threats
to the American people.
For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies.
Negotiations cannot convince Al-Qaeda's leaders
to lay down their arms.
In terms of Nobel speeches,
this is probably the most belligerent speech
that you have, as a Nobel Prize acceptance,
in talking about the fact that sometimes you have to wage war.
It was the most non-pacifist Peace Prize acceptance
that we've ever seen.
♪ ♪
President Obama came to office facing two wars.
Inheriting what was left by the Bush administration...
Obama will need all the magic he can muster to solve
the huge problems he's inheriting.
NARRATOR: Facing two wars,
he knew which one he was going to fight.
There was a huge and deadly explosion
in Afghanistan tonight.
Obama's global analysis of the situation
was that Afghanistan was the right war,
and Iraq was the wrong war.
Afghanistan is bracing itself for Taliban attempts
to disrupt law and order.
For President Obama, there was justification
for us being in Afghanistan,
because the attacks on 9/11 had come from Afghanistan.
President Obama's message was,
we were going to double down,
we were going to win in Afghanistan,
which was the good war.
NARRATOR: Obama wanted to reverse years of failure
in Afghanistan and deliver the victory
that eluded President Bush.
To do it, he brought in hard-charging
General Stanley McChrystal.
General McChrystal has been for years
the head of Special Forces,
and he brings with him his old Special Forces group,
who speak in the harsh language of Special Forces.
We don't hire the snake eaters, as they call themselves,
to be America's diplomats.
He describes the Afghan conflict as at a precipice,
and we're at real risk of losing the war.
But it can be turned around.
NARRATOR: McChrystal said a surge of tens of thousands
of troops was necessary.
Obama was reluctant, but wanted to win.
He agreed.
(helicopters whirring)
Thousands of U.S. troops are now heading to Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, the surge of American troops
is now at its peak.
The final deployment of U.S. troops
is arriving in Afghanistan.
The question is, is that troop surge working?
NARRATOR: General McChrystal had to quickly deliver
on his promise that the surge could bring victory
in Afghanistan.
Military commanders wanted to show how additional forces
deployed by President Obama could turn the tide of the war,
to show how U.S. forces could knock back the Taliban.
NARRATOR: McChrystal designed a test case...
15,000 troops would try to rout the resurgent Taliban
from their stronghold in Marjah.
I was there on the ground, and the truth was,
Marjah was a mess.
Come on!
(gunfire, explosions)
Come on, let's go!
Watch yourself!
(yelling)
(gunfire)
(explosions)
NARRATOR: The American forces could not hold Marjah.
They faced constant counterattacks from the Taliban.
Taliban fighters would sneak in,
they would lay more roadside bombs,
they'd lay in wait and ambush.
NARRATOR: McChrystal called it a bleeding ulcer.
What was thought to be a war that could be turned around
with some additional troops really starts to look like
it's fundamentally unwinnable.
Marjah brings the challenges of Afghanistan
into much starker focus in the White House.
NARRATOR: With Marjah, once again, an American president
was being forced to concede there would be no easy victory
in Afghanistan.
He's thinking a lot about Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.
And he's thinking, here he's, might be in
the very same situation... A president with a grand,
ambitious, domestic agenda with a war overseas
that's unwinnable, that's, that's sucking away energy
and lives and possibilities.
♪ ♪
He basically changes his mind.
He gets into the Afghanistan work, he escalates,
and then decides to draw back in Afghanistan.
NARRATOR: But disentangling from the country
where 9/11 was launched would not be easy, either.
The political incentives are such that the risks associated
with ending wars are seen as far greater than the risks
associated with kind of being in them.
There was this calculation that, well, what happens
if there's a terrorist attack, you know?
That would be the end of a presidency.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: It was now Obama's war.
A quagmire with no visible exit,
as the death toll on both sides mounted.
He felt that, with all the goodwill in the world,
America couldn't bring democracy to Afghanistan.
And the best that you could probably do
is just mow the lawn, keep terrorism under control,
and stop Afghanistan becoming a sanctuary for terrorists.
("Taps" playing slowly)
NARRATOR: During his presidency,
American deaths in Afghanistan surged.
♪ ♪
Almost three times as many as under Bush.
(guns fire)
Nearly 2,000.
(guns fire)
And there would be far-reaching consequences at home.
(guns fire)
There's just finally been exhaustion in the United States.
The Afghan policy was a failure.
And all the smartest generals and the presidents
of both parties, nobody could make this policy succeed.
It's a humiliation for the United States.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Guantánamo Bay.
By now, it had dropped to 242 detainees.
Obama had promised to close Gitmo.
He'd tried it with an executive order.
I hereby order Guantánamo will be closed
no later than one year from now.
We were so hopeful with the Obama era.
I was one of many who campaigned for Obama
and really believed in this vision of, of hope and change,
and I took that vision to mean a clean break
from Bush-era policies.
NARRATOR: But for the controversy over Gitmo,
Obama hit a wall trying to roll back
what Bush and Cheney had begun.
This was his first executive order when he came into office.
He's going to shut down Gitmo.
Why are we closing Gitmo? It makes no sense.
It's a lousy idea.
And the entire Congress had a complete meltdown,
including Democrats.
Part of what we don't want is them to be put in prisons
in the United States... We don't want them around
the United States.
The American people want to keep the terrorists
at Guantánamo, out of their neighborhoods,
and off the battlefield.
Mitch McConnell went down to the floor of Congress
every single day and just ranted about it.
Keep this secure facility open...
And what he was trying to do
was just make it politically untenable for Obama to do this.
This is insane in my opinion.
These people, many of them are terrorists,
we've had some of them that were released
and went back to their home countries
and became terrorists again.
There were enormous not just legal issues involved,
but, really, political issues.
(gavel banging)
The yeas and nays are ordered,
the clerk will call the roll.
Mr. Akaka.
NARRATOR: Congress voted to keep Guantánamo open.
By an overwhelming vote, the Senate today rejected
the president's request.
The 90-to-6 vote was a big bipartisan vote.
He runs into huge opposition in Congress and basically folds.
NARRATOR: In Obama's defeat, a triumph
for the brewing politics of fear.
I was selected as a legal observer to travel
to Guantánamo... I thought I was going to be
among the last visitors to ever set foot on Guantánamo
where prisoners were still held, and here we are,
and Guantánamo is still open.
NARRATOR: The island prison would endure
as a monument to the consequences
of moral compromise,
embracing what Cheney had described as the "dark side."
One of the things that I find most shocking, unforeseeable,
unimaginable, is that 20 years later,
Guantánamo is still a prison.
It's just such a violation of everything
that you think of as American values.
NARRATOR: The president who'd been given a Nobel Prize
with the hope he would reverse Bush's legacy
was now presiding over an even more unsettled nation.
Every day, there are reminders that terrorists
are still planning to attack this country.
Here in New York, a reminder of the continuing threat
of terrorism.
There hasn't been a terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11,
but tonight, federal agents say they just stopped one...
A big one.
He was a truck driver living in Ohio and he was a terrorist.
NARRATOR: On television, a drumbeat of warnings, attacks,
thwarted plots.
"Somebody is up to something."
Six Muslim extremists are in jail in New Jersey.
In the media, people discovered pretty quickly
that a terrorist attack,
no matter where it was in the world,
would immediately seize people's attention.
And found the vehicle packed with gasoline containers
and propane canisters.
It was almost like the battlefield that was limitless
in the war on terror had also become limitless
in the American consciousness.
That we were constantly at war.
Not only abroad, but also increasingly within...
In our own borders.
The four suspects hoped to be martyrs,
and were on a mission to commit what they called jihad.
No one wants to use the M-word or the J-word,
Muslim or jihadist.
It was about fear.
It was about us versus them.
It was about all these immigrants, that they come,
or Muslim names, that they come, they are coming to kill us.
Suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
Nidal Malik Hasan...
Nadir Soofi...
Faisal Shahzad, connected to the Taliban...
There was this constant torquing up of phobia
about Arabs, about Muslims, about foreigners...
There's no question there is a Muslim problem in the world.
Not all Muslims are terrorists,
but all terrorists are Muslims.
All the people who have tried to blow airline,
airliners out of the sky pretty much look alike.
Equating them with criminals and terrorists.
We need to kill them!
You're in danger.
I'm in danger.
And throwing Obama into that camp.
Why do you think one in four think that he is a Muslim?
He was raised a Muslim.
Barack Obama, raised as a Muslim...
The anger at Obama was less about the specifics
of his policy in Iraq or Afghanistan...
But it is entirely fair to say he has Islamic sympathies...
than it was about this sort of inchoate anger
against him for being him.
For being Barack Hussein Obama.
Barack Obama has deep emotional ties to Islam.
What I felt very acutely in the Obama years
is a lot of that nationalism and xenophobia that was stirred up
in those Bush years, because it wasn't going to get expression
in some victory in Afghanistan or Iraq,
it suddenly began to be repurposed to, "We oppose Obama.
We need to take our country back."
"We oppose anybody who can be cast as the American other."
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: At the White House, Obama was mired
in the nation's escalating frustrations
and the ongoing threats to its security.
There were threats coming in all the time.
Al-Qaeda getting ahold of a nuke
or Al-Qaeda gaining an ability to, to produce
chemical weapons, biological weapons...
President Obama is beginning to see exactly
what the prior president had seen every day.
And he begins to get the intelligence brief,
he begins to see the substance behind,
on the inner workings of government.
All of that influences, then, how he sees the threat
and his own responsibility.
NARRATOR: The president had ordered the end
of the torture program and secret prisons.
But the C.I.A. wanted him to reauthorize
some of the other Bush-era methods.
What he quickly discovered was actually,
these were programs that he was not willing to part with,
because if you get rid of them
and then the United States is attacked again,
then all of a sudden you're going to be the ones to blame.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: One program had particular appeal.
Drone strikes.
Targeted killing.
(radio chatter)
The drone program that started under George Bush
becomes much bigger under Obama.
(explosions)
Not just in terms of the number of drone strikes,
but in terms of the types of people that can be hit.
(radio chatter)
(explosion)
And suddenly, the controversy that accompanied an arrest
and detention and putting them in Guantánamo
no longer mattered,
because you could put them on a kill list,
and very few members of the American public
would be riled up by that.
You are cleared to engage. (explosion)
Whoa, buddy!
Good shot.
NARRATOR: Obama personally reviewed many of the strikes.
Every day, every week, someone would come
from the, from his national security team,
and say, you know, "We've got this band of six terrorists
on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
We have a 45-minute window in which we can kill them.
What do you want to do?"
And very, very often, he would say, "Kill them."
Let me know when you see the target area
and I'll start the bomb down.
(explosion)
NARRATOR: Obama authorized ten times as many drone strikes
as Bush had.
Hundreds during his time in office.
Almost 4,000 people killed, including hundreds of civilians.
Of course, the downside with the drones
was the collateral damage.
Women, children got killed in some of these drone strikes.
The image of the drone becomes a very disturbing
influence over millions of people
all over the Muslim world and even in the West.
(yelling, protesting)
When we start thinking of a drone as the answer
to all problems terrorism...
(cheering)
this is when we failed.
A drone cannot kill an ideology, cannot kill a message,
cannot kill a narrative.
So every time we kill someone,
ten people came to take their position.
(yelling)
(laughter, shouts)
NARRATOR: Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's top national security
advisers, now questions whether the strikes were worth it.
I've made a point of trying to meet people
where they describe the buzz overhead and this feeling
of dread, of just living in a kind of permanent surveillance
of an American killing machine.
What happens when a superpower spends trillions of dollars
over a long period of time figuring out
different ways to kill people?
♪ ♪
You know, think of how many ways the United States has killed
people since 9/11.
Like, how would you look at America?
I mean, I, I... I'm haunted by that.
Yes, yeah.
The reason I'm calling is to tell you that we killed...
Yeah, we killed...
NARRATOR: Almost ten years after 9/11,
an American president finally announced a win
that had been so elusive.
Good evening.
Tonight, I can report to the American people
and to the world that the United States has conducted
an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,
the leader of Al-Qaeda...
(cheering faintly)
and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder
of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
(chanting): U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Obama's legacy, first and foremost,
is that he did kill Osama bin Laden.
For the average American, that was a big deal.
He won reelection in part because he killed
Osama bin Laden... he did something that George W. Bush
didn't do.
Obama! Obama!
We (bleep) killed Osama! Obama! Obama!
It meant a lot to America,
like Saddam's statue coming down.
♪ Oh, say, does that star-spangled... ♪
The killing of Osama bin Laden gave Americans
a sense of closure.
But it really didn't close anything.
It didn't resolve Iraq or Afghanistan.
(chanting): U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
We wanted to believe that once bin Laden was eliminated,
that the threat was over, that we had achieved
what we had set out to do a decade before,
that now the architect of the 9/11 attacks,
the founder and leader of Al-Qaeda, was gone,
the threat would end.
(cheering)
Nothing, unfortunately, could have been further
from the truth... the problem is that the movement had become
larger than one man.
Al-Qaeda is expanding operations
across the Middle East.
NARRATOR: Thousands of fighters...
Each of those dots...
NARRATOR: all over the Middle East and Northern Africa.
Al-Qaeda cells striking out.
Back at the top in Iraq...
Al-Qaeda in Yemen...
Inside of Syria...
So Al-Qaeda, trillions of dollars later,
is more powerful than it used to be.
Attack at a university in eastern Kenya...
It's changed, but it's more powerful than it used to be
on the eve of 9/11.
("Hail to the Chief" playing)
The president makes good on a campaign pledge today.
He'll make his plans public today during a trip
to Camp Lejeune.
A most significant moment... The president...
NARRATOR: Even as he was facing a reinvigorated Al-Qaeda,
Obama was determined to deliver on a campaign promise...
To get out of Iraq.
I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq
by the end of 2011.
There was such a desire, not just at the White House,
but even the country as a whole,
to write an end to this experience and to say,
"We're done with this place that had caused so much hardship
and heartache for Americans."
So we will complete this transition
to Iraqi responsibility and we will bring our troops home
with the honor that they have earned.
Semper Fi! Oo-rah!
(cheers and applause)
NARRATOR: But behind the scenes, again and again,
warnings.
You had a number of people...
Senior American military officers,
diplomats on the ground... Who essentially told him,
"The Iraqi state is not ready for this.
You cannot go to zero, and if, if you go down to zero,
you, you are going to endanger the Iraqi state,
you're going to endanger, essentially, everything
that we've built here."
NARRATOR: Still, Obama was determined.
The last 6,000 U.S. forces in Iraq are packing up.
It marks the end of the war in Iraq.
The last U.S. troops are now leaving Iraq.
NARRATOR: At the end of 2011,
Obama ordered the troops to leave.
It wasn't just the troops that we were leaving,
it was our disengagement from Iraq, as well.
Both of those things coupled together are significant.
Final American soldiers packing up right now.
NARRATOR: It was more than just soldiers.
Over 10,000 State Department employees would leave, too.
We disengaged not only militarily at the end of 2011,
we disengaged politically.
The war was over.
We were out, um...
Let, let the chips fall for, where they may...
Well, I don't think we thought through
exactly how many chips were going to fall
and what the consequences of that would be.
NARRATOR: Iraq... power always teetering between Sunni
and Shia Muslims... was now in the hands
of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The last American Humvees left Iraq in December of 2011.
And within 24 hours of that, Maliki, the prime minister,
the Shiite prime minister, he orders the arrest
of his Sunni vice president.
After the U.S. withdrawal,
the Iraqi government was very emboldened,
and it was free to practice, to carry out sectarian policies.
(chanting)
NARRATOR: In response, huge Sunni protests.
(chanting)
NARRATOR: The Iraqi government
violently cracked down.
(gunfire)
(people shouting)
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: With the Americans gone and the chaos growing...
(horns honking)
yet another opportunity for Al-Qaeda in Iraq,
now operating under a new banner:
the Islamic State... ISIS.
What this did was create the conditions for the Islamic State
to rise up out of the ashes of Al-Qaeda in Iraq
and proclaim itself as the defender of the Sunnis
against Nouri al-Maliki.
They swept into western Iraq and took control
of a third of western Iraq.
The banks that were robbed and stripped,
the assets that were stripped in that entire area, was huge.
It's a threat like no other, a powerful battlefield force
and a commanding online presence.
ISIS has gained ground and is not on the defensive.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria driving toward Baghdad.
Allahu akbar!
(gunfire)
Allahu akbar!
The Iraqi army, which was built
at this incredible expense...
I don't even know what the final price tag was, $30 billion,
largely by the Americans, paid for by the American taxpayer,
you know, all their equipment, everything...
It all came apart.
(explosion)
(sirens)
NARRATOR: As ISIS destabilized the entire region,
Obama had little choice.
The United States of America is meeting them
with strength and resolve.
I ordered our military to take targeted action against ISIL...
NARRATOR: He would reluctantly send
some American forces back to Iraq.
Obama came into office with one very clear objective,
which was to get out of Iraq, bring that war to a close.
But ISIS forced the United States back in,
and so, you know, all of a sudden, the United States
then has 5,000 U.S. troops back on the ground in Iraq.
What we're talking about here is the beginning
of something that he understands that he's not going to finish.
That, in fact, he's going to leave his successor
an ongoing military conflict with an, with an elusive
and hard-to-beat enemy, just as he felt he was left
when he took over.
The next president is going to be the third president in a row
who finds himself figuring out Iraq,
and what are American interests there,
and how do we solve it.
(bagpipes, drums playing)
NARRATOR: 15 years after 9/11,
on the grounds of what used to be the World Trade Center,
in the midst of a presidential campaign,
Donald Trump would stake out his view of 9/11 and its aftermath.
For Donald Trump the candidate
and then the president, 9/11 is something very different
than it was for George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
9/11 is not an event that is used to create unity.
It's not an awful, awful moment
that, that calls on us to come together.
9/11, for Donald Trump, becomes a wedge issue.
It becomes something he can exploit to further division
and distrust in our society.
NARRATOR: He had been watching.
The rise of ISIS.
We'll begin to smoke your people on your streets.
NARRATOR: Attacks around the world.
Paris is under siege.
Terror attack unfolding in multiple locations...
No one survived after a Russian passenger jet
crashed in Egypt.
Heavily armed, apparently well trained,
arrived at the offices of "Charlie Hebdo"...
NARRATOR: And at home.
A shooting at the Pulse nightclub...
A lone gunman who called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS.
Tashfin Malique, the female attacker in San Bernardino,
she and her husband, Said Farouque,
lived among us, walking this very sidewalk,
lived in this complex...
NARRATOR: Anti-Muslim fear that Trump readily exploited.
They want our buildings to come down,
they want our cities to be crushed.
They are living within our country.
There was this hatred toward Muslims,
as if they just hated Americans
and they wanted to kill Americans.
Calling for a total and complete shutdown
of Muslims entering the United States.
Trump really came in and articulated a lot of the things
that were already whispered.
I think Islam hates us.
There's something, there's something there that,
there's a tremendous hatred.
Trump took all of that anti-Muslim rhetoric,
anti-Muslim hate, and weaponized it
and used it inside of our own country to enact his agenda.
The innovation that Trump used,
like many a great demagogue that preceded him,
was to switch.
The reason we have not been successful abroad
in dealing with our enemies abroad,
is the fact that we have not dealt
with our enemies at home.
That we have enemies within the country who are responsible
for us being weakened on the world stage.
NARRATOR: He stoked the anger that had been building
since 9/11.
The wars.
The failures. The lies.
The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?
They lied.
They said there were weapons of mass destruction.
There were none, and they knew there were none.
NARRATOR: And he incited Americans' fear
of Barack Obama.
ISIS is honoring President Obama.
He is the founder of ISIS.
He's the founder of ISIS.
He was good at utilizing distrust of the establishment
and distrust of Washington.
We are led by very, very stupid people.
"We can't beat ISIS."
Give me a break.
There's no more post-9/11 president than Donald Trump.
It's all the language, all the rhetoric, all the xenophobia,
all the nationalism that is impossible without 9/11.
We have to recognize that it's convenient to say
that Donald Trump broke America.
No, America was broken, and so Donald Trump became president.
(indistinct chatter)
NARRATOR: Barack Obama left the legacy of 9/11
to Donald Trump.
Thousands of troops in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.
Detainees in Guantánamo.
Drones and targeted killing.
American influence waning.
A nation increasingly deeply divided.
Trump didn't really understand the nature
of the Middle East.
He didn't understand the range of threats that we saw.
And he didn't particularly care to learn what they were.
I think you have to understand the things that he says
as relating not to coherent international policies
or domestic policies, but relating to the political future
of Donald Trump.
NARRATOR: From the beginning, he talked tough.
He aimed his decisions at his political base.
Mr. President... Personally...
Mr. President, you told me during one of the debates
that you would bring back waterboarding
and a hell of a lot worse...
I would do, what I would do...
I want to keep our country safe.
NARRATOR: While he railed against his predecessors,
he embraced the dark side methods
of Vice President Dick Cheney.
As far as I'm concerned, we have to fight fire with fire.
I have spoken as recently as 24 hours ago with people
at the highest level of intelligence.
And I asked them the question, "Does it work?
Does torture work?"
And the answer was, "Yes, absolutely."
NARRATOR: He ordered Gitmo to remain open.
(indistinct chatter)
Dramatically accelerated the drone strikes.
(explosions)
Air strikes.
Targeted killing.
And he ordered a raid that led to the death
of the leader of ISIS.
He will never again harm another innocent man,
woman, or child.
He died like a dog.
He died like a coward.
NARRATOR: And Trump wanted something more.
He sent the secretary of state to negotiate
with America's longtime enemy, the Taliban.
But he couldn't end the war on his watch.
After four years, Donald Trump had discovered something
like what his predecessors had discovered,
which is that it's very easy to announce
that you're going to be able to get out of these wars,
but it's very difficult to actually do it.
And he found himself still embroiled in this war
in Afghanistan, still contending with the remnants of ISIS
and the wars in Syria and Iraq.
And it was, in its own way, grinding on just as it had been
in previous presidencies.
NARRATOR: But by this time, the biggest war wasn't overseas.
(chanting): Hands up! Don't shoot!
Hands up! Don't shoot!
NARRATOR: It was here, in the streets of America.
Our great national wound of race has opened up once again.
The police killing of George Floyd sparked
a massive wave of protests...
People demand justice for George Floyd
and call for an end to racial inequality.
NARRATOR: It was a domestic war that had been building
for years.
One that Donald Trump was ready to fight.
Black lives matter! Black lives matter!
People were rightly upset about what happened
to George Floyd and had taken to the streets in large numbers.
George Floyd! George Floyd!
Some of the protests did turn violent.
(shouting and calling)
But for the most part, people were just exercising
their first amendment rights to, to protest
and to make their feelings known.
NARRATOR: Trump cast the protesters as the enemy.
His war on terror was not a terror of the Middle East,
it was a terror against him.
Anyone who's against him is a terrorist,
because they are trying to stop values
that make America "great again."
I can't breathe! I can't breathe!
NARRATOR: Trump urged a forceful response by police
and National Guard.
I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy
the National Guard in sufficient numbers
that we dominate the streets.
(projectiles firing)
(people yelling)
These images, really not imagining them
in the United States... tanks on the street in the United States.
(sirens)
It seems to be that the wars came home.
(explosions)
You can look at police in America,
and you can see all the kit that they've got.
(shouting)
They've taken all the surplus from Iraq
and Afghanistan... It's come back.
And a lot of these weapons, a lot of the vehicles,
are now being used by law enforcement.
What is going on? Who are you?
You see unnamed, unidentifiable federal agents
being dispatched to the sites of protests.
How are we supposed to know who you are?
And that chilling image of the military helicopter
flying low to intimidate the protesters.
(helicopter hovering)
We have seldom seen this kind of display of military force
used on American soil against American citizens.
NARRATOR: Trump hardened the battle lines.
"The Radical Left Democrats will destroy our Country
as we know it."
(tweet posts)
Donald Trump took the divisive language
that he used against Muslims in 2016...
"ANTIFA is a fascist terror-group committed
to bringing fascism to the United States."
(tweet posts)
That he used against terrorists in 2016...
"The terrorists burn and pillage our cities,
and they think it is just wonderful."
(tweet posts)
The threats were no longer from dangerous
overseas countries as much.
The way Donald Trump talked about it,
the threat was the enemy within.
"Antifa has been engaging in terrorism
and seditious conspiracy for years."
(tweet posts)
It's the same language.
It's the same us-versus-them thing.
You can just slot in Antifa for Al-Qaeda,
slot in the radical left for radical Islam.
It's triggering the same emotions.
"Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle,
run by Radical Left Democrats."
(tweet posts)
In the same way that Bush marshaled the whole country
to kind of take on this generational fight
against terrorism, this war against terrorism,
Trump marshaled his half of the country
to think of itself as literally in an existential war
against the other half of the country.
(paintball gun firing)
The great irony of the Trump administration's use
of the war at home danger
is that they're using tools developed in the war on terror
to try to harass and persecute their political enemies at home,
by exaggerating domestic threats that are relatively small.
Get out of here, you (bleep)!
Get out of here!
And meanwhile, however, ignoring the genuine
terrorism threat that they are actually helping
to foster and encourage.
(distant yelling) (people gasp and laugh)
That's for everything that you (bleep) did to me, bitch!
Told you I'd get you!
I'm sorry!
(chanting): Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!
NARRATOR: It all came to a head two months
after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
By the time you get to January the 6th,
so much doubt has been sown in the system,
so much fear, that how this opposition is described
by Trump and Trump supporters, it looks terrifying.
(cheers)
It was impossible not to recognize that the people
were dressed very similarly to the Americans
who had been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They were wearing the same kinds of flak jackets
and helmets and the earpieces.
There was a visual language of the war on terror.
(chanting) U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
NARRATOR: Trump rallied them with a lie.
Make no mistake, this election was stolen from you,
from me, and from the country.
(cheers)
After 9/11, and Iraq, after torture,
after all of these things have happened,
there's a part of America that doesn't trust its leadership.
And Trump has tapped into them.
We will never give up.
We will never concede.
It doesn't happen.
You don't concede when there's theft involved.
Our country has had enough.
We will not take it anymore.
It was kind of a culmination of two decades
of growing mistrust in the government,
feeling like the government doesn't listen to you,
that your voice, that your opinion doesn't matter.
People on every side of the political issues
and every side of the spectrum felt they had been lied to,
they had been betrayed.
It sort of helped create the atmosphere
in which January 6 could happen.
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault
on our democracy.
And after this, we're going to walk down...
And I'll be there with you... We're going to walk down
to the Capitol...
(shouting)
♪ Stand beside her and guide her through the night ♪
♪ With the light from above ♪
NARRATOR: They swarmed over the steps where Congress
had sung "God Bless America" on the evening
of September 11, 2001.
That's quite a juxtaposition, isn't it?
These two scenes in the Capitol:
a moment of solidarity and unity,
us against our enemies around the world.
♪ God bless America, my home sweet home ♪
Suddenly, 20 years later, it's us against ourselves.
♪ God bless America ♪
This mob rampaging through the Capitol
trying to stop democracy.
(screaming)
And coming closer in some ways than Al-Qaeda did.
Stand aside and let us in, you traitors!
(explosions)
(chanting): Trump won! Trump won! Trump won!
(chanting continues)
To see them going and attacking the temple
of democracy in order to change a result of an election...
Chanting that they want to kill the vice president.
(chanting): Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!
It was a sad moment.
This threat is way more dangerous because...
They are us.
They are in our towns, in our cities.
If we look at January 6 as one measure
of where we are as a nation, did bin Laden succeed
in some way in fundamentally dividing us
and bringing pain to us
in ways that we couldn't see at the time?
If we don't take a proper accounting of what we did
in these past 20 years and what the impact has been,
not just half a world away,
but what the impact has been within our own borders,
then we have fundamentally misunderstood
the legacy of 9/11.
♪ ♪
It's time to end America's longest war.
It's time for American troops to come home.
The significance of Biden's decision
is that we have given up.
We do not believe that we can win there,
and we don't believe we should try.
The last 20 years has been an exercise in failure.
Let's be frank, it's a failure.
They are leaving Afghanistan and they can't say,
"Mission accomplished."
At one level, you could say yes, at last,
it's been 20 years, these forever wars had to end.
But at another level, the war doesn't end.
What's going to happen to Afghanistan?
Those who helped America, those who stood alongside America
will have their lives destroyed.
And that hundreds of thousands more Afghans
will become refuges.
So, America's war may end in Afghanistan,
but the Afghan war might not end.
Go to pbs.org/frontline to explore 25 interviews
from the film, as part of "Frontline's"
Transparency Project.
Putting country over party at a moment of crisis.
I so wanted to believe those pictures were not real.
We had gone to war thinking of our better selves.
And watch documentaries from our 9/11 archive.
Connect with "Frontline" on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
and TikTok and watch anytime on the PBS Video App
or pbs.org/frontline.
♪ ♪
For more on this and other "Frontline" programs,
visit our website at pbs.org/frontline.
♪ ♪
To order "Frontline's" "America After 9/11" on DVD,
visit ShopPBS or call 1.800.PLAY.PBS.
This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.
♪ ♪