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