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[reporter] Across Ground Zero, 

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mountains of debris
still scar the landscape.

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Searching for remains is a priority,
but a harrowing task.

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[Green] I don't know that I had ever
prepared myself to find a body.

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It's not a comfortable feeling…

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when you're digging and you…
you find signs of life,

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and I mean signs of life-- You come
across somebody's family pictures,

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you'll find shoes,
and when you find a shoe

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you're like, "Oh crap, someone's
gonna be connected to this shoe."

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And, again, it's not that
you don't want it, um…

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as much as, at this point,
you're thinking that they're not alive.

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[wistful music plays]

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[woman] I knew the biggest task
at hand for the police department

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was going to be recovering, identifying,

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and then notifying people's families
that you found their loved ones.

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[dramatic music plays]

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One of the hardest things was--
were all the posters of the missing…

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and people not knowing
whether they're dead,

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whether they're trapped.

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They just wanted them to be found.

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My son was Mark Zeppelin.
He worked on the 104th floor.

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I'm just waiting to see if he'll appear.
That's it, and--

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[interviewer]
Do you know if he went to work yesterday?

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Yes. He did. He called me
from there, nine o'clock exactly.

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And he told me that he loved me,
and that was it.

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[crying] If anybody sees him or knows
anything, his name is Andrew Stern.

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So, if anybody knows anything, please,

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his wife and his mother

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and the rest of us
are all waiting to hear.

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[man] Hey, guys. Could you step out
of the way and let these guys get by?

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[woman]
Initially, there were many firefighters

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who were listed as missing, including me.

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[man] Yo!

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And in the beginning, when we thought
people might still be alive,

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of course,
people were taking tremendous risks…

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to try and find people
who might be rescued alive.

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[man] Put yourself in that position.
It was your family.

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Every one of these firefighters in here
are our brothers.

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Every one of these police officers
in here are our brothers,

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and the civilians in here
are people we're sworn to protect.

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[Green] The rescue and recovery teams,
they were standing on mounds

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that were sometimes four,
five, six stories tall.

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And fires were continuing to burn
at-- at Ground Zero for months.

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During the whole time that we're there,

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there were always buildings
in danger of collapsing.

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What you're told when you get there
is that if you hear the whistle blow…

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run, because there's a building
that might be coming down.

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And the whistle blew several times.

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But when the all-clear would be sounded,
everybody came back.

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There'd be dogs,
the cadaver dogs would be there.

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There'd be firefighters, police officers.

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There were a couple guys
that went down with me every day.

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[Melendez] I was one of the supervisors
for the Detective Bureau at the morgue.

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And our job was recovery, identification,

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and then notifications to the family.

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Once they got brought up to the morgue…

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then we would go through
the identification process.

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Most identifications
that were made back 20 years ago

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were through fingerprints,
or dental records, tattoos, or scars

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or any other identifying marks
that we could find.

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DNA came weeks later
if it could be used, back then.

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[wistful music plays]

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[woman] My brother and I were not
officially told that he was missing.

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It was just, I remember, a lot of waiting.

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My father had a habit
of monitoring three radios.

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He would monitor the precinct radio,
the FDNY radio and the SOD radio.

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He heard the call
for September 11th come in,

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and hauled it from Queens to Manhattan.

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My father was assigned with part
of a rescue team to go into Tower Two.

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He said, "See you later,"
runs into Tower Two,

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and then we hear
that the second tower collapses,

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and that's all we know.

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[woman] Bruce was sent out
as soon as the first plane hit.

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It was about midnight.

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I heard a knock on my side kitchen door.

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It was Bruce's lieutenant, Charlie,

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who was also a friend,
and another firefighter.

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And, um…

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Charlie just kind of made, like,
polite conversation,

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and then finally I said to him,
"Just say it. Just say it."

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And he said, um, they're unaccounted for.

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On Easter, they called to say
that they'd found some tools

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that said Squad 41 on them,
and what they believed to be Bruce's body.

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And, um, did I want to come
and see him be carried out?

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I was just like, "No."

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It was an image
I knew I couldn't have in my head.

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You know, because nothing was going
to change the fact he was gone.

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[Langone] Our family decided,
relatively early on, to have a funeral.

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The NYPD will fly helicopters in what
is called a "missing man formation"

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during things like this.

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And when the helicopters flew overhead,

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it kind of hit me
that Dad was gone for good…

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that he was not coming back…

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that it was just all gone forever.

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We never recovered my father or my uncle,
either of them.

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[Hansson] On September 11,
343 firefighters were killed in total.

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Thirty-seven Port Authority
police officers also died.

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And 23 New York City police officers.

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Giving a total of 403 first responders,

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which is the greatest loss of life
of first responders in US history.

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[military tattoo]

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[Melendez] And unfortunately,
you know, to date,

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there's 40% of people
who haven't been identified.

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And they may never be.

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[dramatic music plays]

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[Maguire] The morning of 9/11,
we were there when the second plane hit.

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[emergency sirens wailing]

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And we were able to run into a building,

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and we were in the lobby of the building
getting briefed by one of our supervisors.

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Our squad sort of
got the ticket for this case,

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and we're trying
to coordinate the leads coming in.

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But of course,
every person in the New York office,

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every person in the FBI
in those first days and weeks

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were working on the case.

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We wanted to find out
what happened that day,

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who had committed those attacks,
who was behind it.

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But even more important, we wanted
to make sure there wasn't a second wave,

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that it wasn't going to happen again.

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So we were following up
on every single lead.

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[woman]
Me either. I just want to get out of D.C.

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[Maguire] Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

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I was assigned
to the Flight 77 team to investigate

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the five hijackers on that flight…

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and everything about them.

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Flight 77 took off
from Dulles Airport in northern Virginia.

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And like all the other flights that day,
it was headed to the West Coast.

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And on each flight,
there were pilot hijackers.

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On Flight 77, that was Hani Hanjour.

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There were also what we called

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"non-pilot hijackers"
or "muscle hijackers."

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And they were the ones
who were responsible

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to really use force and power
to subdue the passengers…

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to allow the pilot hijackers
to get access to the cockpit

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and assume control of the plane.

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And on Flight 77,
those muscle hijackers, the non-pilots,

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were Khalid al-Mihdhar, Salem al-Hazmi,
Nawaf al-Hazmi, they were brothers,

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and Majed Moqed.

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The team spent a lot of time
piecing together

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a near-daily timeline
of the hijackers' activities.

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We tried to track
nearly every step along the way.

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Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi
had gone to training camp,

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an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan…

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and were selected by bin Laden

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to participate in what was known then
among al-Qaeda as the "Planes Operation."

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[ominous music plays]

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And they did not have any experience
living in the United States.

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They had never been to the United States.

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They didn't have really
English-language skills.

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But in late-1999, at the direction
of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

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who was the architect of the 9/11 attacks,

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they started their journey
towards the United States.

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And transited to Kuala Lumpur.

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[man] The CIA is increasingly
concerned about the al-Qaeda threat,

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and learns about a meeting in Malaysia,
in Kuala Lumpur, in January of 2000.

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Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi,
the hijackers, attend this meeting,

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which is part of one of the last meetings
that they've been having a number of them

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and training through the year
before they leave for the United States.

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The CIA even learns
that they have US visas.

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Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi

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end up being the first hijackers
who enter the United States.

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[Hoffman] The CIA was tracking
these followers of bin Laden

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as bin Laden declared war
on the United States

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on multiple occasions.

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This meeting in Malaysia
was a key jumping-off point,

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where the actual people
who would be charged

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with carrying out this attack
both received the green light,

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and also had put in place
the various mechanisms,

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or the various arms of the plot

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that they believed were essential
to its success,

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where they concluded
how they could best arrive

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in the United States on visas
as students attending flight academies.

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Information that those individuals,

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shortly afterwards,
arrive in the United States

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is not effectively communicated
to the FBI in a timely fashion.

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[Rotella]
The way the system worked back then,

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you know, the CIA, obviously,
does intelligence work overseas,

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and the FBI does
counterterrorism work in the US.

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And so, strangely,
the information does not necessarily flow.

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There was even a memo
drafted at some point,

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to communicate
from the CIA to the FBI about them.

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And that ends up not happening.

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-[interviewer] They don't send the memo?
-It ends up not sent.

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If the US government functioned
at the time in the way you would think,

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and the FBI systems
and CIA systems were integrated,

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it would've popped up
that these were al-Qaeda people

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who'd been followed
to meetings in Malaysia

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and had come to the US and, you know,
could be in the US, up to no good.

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But that did not happen.

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[Bearden] I'm not sure that,
had something been shared,

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that everybody would've
connected all the dots.

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There was this gap, this lapse,

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this lack of sharing
that some people can point to

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and say, "Had we known,
we could've put a stop to it."

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Okay. Maybe.

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[dramatic music plays]

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It was a missed opportunity.
Had the CIA provided that information

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to the FBI in a timely manner,

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we could have started tracking
these two individuals.

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[Maguire]
We talk about every lead being run down,

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every investigative step exhausted
in terrorism investigations.

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That would've been done
on any piece of information,

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especially knowing
that al-Qaeda operatives

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had arrived in the United States.

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I believe it was
on September 12th, actually,

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a car, a Toyota Corolla,
was recovered at Dulles Airport.

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The car was registered to Nawaf al-Hazmi,
and it had an address in San Diego.

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The FBI followed up
on that address in San Diego.

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[ominous music plays]

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[Rotella] What we know is they arrive
in Los Angeles on January 15th.

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On February 1st, they pop up
at a restaurant in Los Angeles,

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where they meet this Saudi
named Omar al-Bayoumi.

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Omar al-Bayoumi is a mysterious
and strange character.

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He's a graduate student, uh,
who doesn't appear to go to classes.

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He is getting paid by the Saudi government

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through a contractor,
but doesn't really appear to work.

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He doesn't appear to need money.

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Even people who didn't think
he was involved in the attacks

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thought that he was some kind of spy
for the Saudi intelligence service.

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Not a full-fledged intelligence officer,
but some kind of informant or monitor.

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[Maguire] He encounters the hijackers,
tells them that he lives in San Diego.

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If they ever find themselves there
that they should look him up.

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And they do just that.

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And he helps them get settled in.

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He helps them open a bank account.

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He helps them get an apartment
in the same complex

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where he resides with his family.

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He says it's all because,
just out of Islamic hospitality,

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he was looking to help them out.

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But the great suspicion was
that this was not an accidental meeting.

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That this had to be something
that was arranged.

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They also spent time
with another key figure,

232
00:16:21,356 --> 00:16:22,691
who is Anwar al-Awlaki,

233
00:16:22,774 --> 00:16:25,736
who's a Yemeni imam who was based
in San Diego at the time,

234
00:16:25,819 --> 00:16:29,656
and went on to be, some years later,
an important leader of al-Qaeda.

235
00:16:32,492 --> 00:16:37,664
Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar end up moving
to a boardinghouse in the summer of 2000,

236
00:16:37,748 --> 00:16:40,709
which is run, ironically enough,
by an FBI informant.

237
00:16:42,127 --> 00:16:46,173
The FBI informant was an elder gentleman,
a widower living alone in a house.

238
00:16:46,673 --> 00:16:50,260
He had a series of young Muslim visitors
who stayed with him as boarders.

239
00:16:52,471 --> 00:16:54,431
[Maguire] They weren't suspicious.

240
00:16:54,514 --> 00:16:59,728
They wouldn't have done anything
that would have caused anyone

241
00:16:59,811 --> 00:17:03,732
to reach out to law enforcement,
or to the authorities.

242
00:17:03,815 --> 00:17:05,567
During the time in San Diego,

243
00:17:05,650 --> 00:17:08,528
Nawaf al-Hazmi seemed
to live a pretty normal life.

244
00:17:08,612 --> 00:17:11,073
He worked at a gas station
for a couple of weeks.

245
00:17:11,156 --> 00:17:13,950
He played soccer with his friends.

246
00:17:14,618 --> 00:17:16,620
[propellers whirring]

247
00:17:18,497 --> 00:17:21,416
[Gore] They attempted to take flying
lessons while they're in San Diego.

248
00:17:21,500 --> 00:17:25,462
And their English was really not good
enough to take the flight instruction.

249
00:17:26,671 --> 00:17:29,257
Because of their language ability,

250
00:17:29,341 --> 00:17:32,552
neither of them was able
to do well in flight training,

251
00:17:32,636 --> 00:17:35,555
and they became muscle hijackers instead.

252
00:17:37,849 --> 00:17:39,559
[Rotella] Zacarias Moussaoui's a Frenchman

253
00:17:39,643 --> 00:17:42,604
who had spent time in the UK,
and had trained in Afghanistan.

254
00:17:43,980 --> 00:17:46,691
He also goes to flight school in the US.

255
00:17:46,775 --> 00:17:49,486
He's a very volatile, talkative guy,
and acted kind of crazy,

256
00:17:49,569 --> 00:17:51,238
and it drew all kinds of suspicion.

257
00:17:51,321 --> 00:17:53,698
Among other things,
it was said that he had said at some point

258
00:17:53,782 --> 00:17:56,284
that he really wasn't interested
in learning how to land.

259
00:17:56,368 --> 00:17:57,828
You know, just in sort of how to fly.

260
00:17:57,911 --> 00:18:00,705
And wanted to go
to the big planes right away.

261
00:18:00,789 --> 00:18:02,791
[plane engine roaring]

262
00:18:08,630 --> 00:18:10,966
[Maguire]
He also had purchased flight deck videos.

263
00:18:11,049 --> 00:18:13,927
And these videos
were the same exact videos

264
00:18:14,010 --> 00:18:18,140
from the same vendor
that some of the hijackers had purchased.

265
00:18:22,018 --> 00:18:25,188
Immigration Service picked him up
and took him into custody.

266
00:18:25,272 --> 00:18:31,444
And it was believed
that he could have been a hijacker on 9/11

267
00:18:31,528 --> 00:18:36,575
if he had not been arrested by INS
in August of that year.

268
00:18:37,742 --> 00:18:39,369
[Rotella] It's another missed opportunity,

269
00:18:39,452 --> 00:18:43,707
because there was information
connecting him to Ramzi bin al-Shibh,

270
00:18:43,790 --> 00:18:46,960
who was one of the coordinators
of the 9/11 plot. A guy back in Germany.

271
00:18:47,752 --> 00:18:50,672
If the FBI would've gotten access
to his computer,

272
00:18:50,755 --> 00:18:52,174
he could have been a doorway

273
00:18:52,257 --> 00:18:54,676
into possibly detecting
the plot ahead of time.

274
00:18:58,388 --> 00:19:01,933
[Hoffman] Mohamed Atta,
sort of the operational commander,

275
00:19:02,017 --> 00:19:03,393
met with Ramzi bin al-Shibh,

276
00:19:03,476 --> 00:19:08,023
and with other logistical support elements
coming from al-Qaeda…

277
00:19:08,523 --> 00:19:11,026
to actually confirm
that everything was in place.

278
00:19:11,109 --> 00:19:13,111
[ominous music plays]

279
00:19:24,414 --> 00:19:26,499
All 19 of the hijackers,

280
00:19:26,583 --> 00:19:28,960
there were 15 muscle and 4 pilots…

281
00:19:30,086 --> 00:19:31,963
they'd been very carefully selected.

282
00:19:32,464 --> 00:19:35,217
They were people
that al-Qaeda had enormous confidence in,

283
00:19:35,300 --> 00:19:39,596
that would not waiver from what seemed
like an impossible operation

284
00:19:39,679 --> 00:19:42,098
to strike at the heart
of the United States.

285
00:19:42,182 --> 00:19:44,476
[ominous music plays]

286
00:19:46,770 --> 00:19:49,814
This entailed at least three years
of detailed plannings,

287
00:19:49,898 --> 00:19:51,358
meetings throughout the world…

288
00:19:52,442 --> 00:19:56,154
handpicked selection
of 19 hijackers and pilots.

289
00:19:56,905 --> 00:19:59,032
Orchestration of their movements.

290
00:20:03,495 --> 00:20:07,082
[Maguire]
In the days prior to September 11th,

291
00:20:07,165 --> 00:20:09,834
we see the hijacking teams
start to relocate

292
00:20:09,918 --> 00:20:12,796
to be closer to their departure cities.

293
00:20:12,879 --> 00:20:16,758
So we see the Flight 77 hijackers relocate

294
00:20:16,841 --> 00:20:21,304
from New Jersey down to Maryland
to be closer to Dulles Airport.

295
00:20:21,805 --> 00:20:25,850
We see the Flight 93 team move closer
to Newark Airport

296
00:20:25,934 --> 00:20:28,103
where Flight 93 departed from.

297
00:20:28,186 --> 00:20:31,856
And we see
the Flight 11 and Flight 175 hijackers

298
00:20:31,940 --> 00:20:33,858
move to the Boston area.

299
00:20:34,442 --> 00:20:36,152
On the morning of 9/11,

300
00:20:36,236 --> 00:20:38,655
all of the hijacker teams
arrive at the airport.

301
00:20:40,156 --> 00:20:43,618
They go through security
at their respective airports.

302
00:20:43,702 --> 00:20:46,830
We believe that they're carrying
short-bladed knives,

303
00:20:46,913 --> 00:20:49,541
which were allowed on board flights.

304
00:20:49,624 --> 00:20:52,794
So they got through security,
uh, with no issue…

305
00:20:53,628 --> 00:20:55,380
and they boarded their flights.

306
00:20:59,384 --> 00:21:02,929
[man] In the '80s and '90s,
there was no political will.

307
00:21:03,013 --> 00:21:05,348
People get blown up by individuals,

308
00:21:05,432 --> 00:21:07,851
planes are hijacked, it's all overseas.

309
00:21:08,435 --> 00:21:11,980
Small amount of casualties. They're nasty,
they're bloody, it's a nuisance,

310
00:21:12,063 --> 00:21:14,941
but it's not a national security issue.

311
00:21:15,692 --> 00:21:18,987
Before 9/11, John Ashcroft,
he said these were our priorities.

312
00:21:19,070 --> 00:21:20,739
This is what we're gonna focus on.

313
00:21:20,822 --> 00:21:25,744
And the priorities were guns, drugs,
civil rights, prisoner protection.

314
00:21:25,827 --> 00:21:26,953
So then you figure,

315
00:21:27,037 --> 00:21:30,623
"Well, we're going to get attacked.
Where's the terrorism?"

316
00:21:30,707 --> 00:21:31,833
And the terrorism slipped.

317
00:21:31,916 --> 00:21:34,794
I've forgotten what number it was.
I think it was like 15.

318
00:21:35,670 --> 00:21:38,340
And I couldn't believe it.
I could not believe this.

319
00:21:38,423 --> 00:21:42,260
[dramatic music intensifies]

320
00:21:44,304 --> 00:21:45,555
[music ends]

321
00:21:46,431 --> 00:21:48,475
-[birds tweeting]
-[water lapping]

322
00:21:52,729 --> 00:21:56,608
[Gonzales] The National Security team
is at Camp David talking about failures.

323
00:21:57,317 --> 00:22:00,570
We had had people living in this country
planning this attack

324
00:22:00,653 --> 00:22:02,072
for some period of time.

325
00:22:02,155 --> 00:22:03,490
Our intelligence had to be better.

326
00:22:03,573 --> 00:22:05,867
We needed to be better
at getting information.

327
00:22:05,950 --> 00:22:07,202
How do we do that?

328
00:22:07,285 --> 00:22:09,454
We talked about when we capture someone,

329
00:22:09,537 --> 00:22:12,374
is there a way we can question them
to get better information,

330
00:22:12,457 --> 00:22:14,042
the most reliable information?

331
00:22:15,710 --> 00:22:17,712
[dramatic music plays]

332
00:22:20,548 --> 00:22:24,010
[Cheney] It would be inappropriate for me
to talk about operation matters,

333
00:22:24,094 --> 00:22:25,720
specific options,

334
00:22:25,804 --> 00:22:30,058
or the kinds of activities
we might undertake going forward.

335
00:22:30,141 --> 00:22:33,728
We do indeed, though, have, obviously,
the world's finest military.

336
00:22:34,437 --> 00:22:37,315
They've got a broad range of capabilities.

337
00:22:37,399 --> 00:22:38,233
Um…

338
00:22:38,733 --> 00:22:42,320
And they may well be given missions
in connection

339
00:22:42,404 --> 00:22:44,614
with this overall task and strategy.

340
00:22:44,697 --> 00:22:47,784
We also have to work,
sort of, the dark side, if you will.

341
00:22:47,867 --> 00:22:51,079
We gotta spend time in the shadows,
in the intelligence world.

342
00:22:51,162 --> 00:22:51,996
Um…

343
00:22:52,080 --> 00:22:53,498
A lot of what needs to be done here

344
00:22:53,581 --> 00:22:56,584
will have to be done quietly
without any discussion,

345
00:22:56,668 --> 00:22:59,295
using sources and methods
that are available

346
00:22:59,379 --> 00:23:02,215
to our intelligence agencies,
if we're going to be successful.

347
00:23:04,676 --> 00:23:07,804
[man] Going back to the Ford White House

348
00:23:07,887 --> 00:23:09,889
when Cheney was Chief of Staff,

349
00:23:09,973 --> 00:23:15,687
at least that far back,
Dick Cheney developed a very robust view

350
00:23:15,770 --> 00:23:17,939
about the president's powers
under the Constitution,

351
00:23:18,022 --> 00:23:22,735
especially as those powers related
to national security and war.

352
00:23:23,570 --> 00:23:26,948
And his basic view is that when it comes
to war and national security,

353
00:23:27,031 --> 00:23:28,700
the president is in charge.

354
00:23:29,367 --> 00:23:31,619
And he can do what he thinks is necessary.

355
00:23:32,328 --> 00:23:34,581
And Congress, basically,
can't get in the way.

356
00:23:34,664 --> 00:23:37,417
And if Congress gets in the way,
the president can ignore it.

357
00:23:37,500 --> 00:23:38,543
That was his legal view.

358
00:23:40,003 --> 00:23:43,256
It was an absolutist view
of the president's powers in wartime.

359
00:23:44,340 --> 00:23:48,720
[Cheney] So it's going to be vital
for us to use any means at our disposal,

360
00:23:48,803 --> 00:23:51,097
basically, to achieve our objective.

361
00:23:53,600 --> 00:23:55,268
[Fallon] That was frightening to me.

362
00:23:55,351 --> 00:23:58,897
It was frightening to hear
the vice president of the United States

363
00:23:58,980 --> 00:24:01,733
publicly on a television show,

364
00:24:01,816 --> 00:24:04,444
where he should have been
calming the nation down,

365
00:24:04,527 --> 00:24:08,198
where he should have been depressurizing,
he was upping the pressure,

366
00:24:08,281 --> 00:24:09,449
upping the ante.

367
00:24:09,532 --> 00:24:13,495
And so, I feared that we would do things
that would be to our detriment.

368
00:24:14,829 --> 00:24:18,708
What I know is that when emotions
are high, rationality is low.

369
00:24:19,250 --> 00:24:21,044
And poor decisions are being made.

370
00:24:23,546 --> 00:24:26,549
[Cheney] We cannot deal with terror.
It will not end in a treaty.

371
00:24:26,633 --> 00:24:29,219
There will be no peaceful co-existence.

372
00:24:29,302 --> 00:24:32,096
No negotiations. No summit.

373
00:24:33,014 --> 00:24:35,225
No joint communique with the terrorists.

374
00:24:38,895 --> 00:24:42,065
[reporter] As American bombs blast away
again today at Taliban front lines,

375
00:24:42,148 --> 00:24:44,943
Pentagon officials report
the number of US special forces

376
00:24:45,026 --> 00:24:48,821
on the ground in northern Afghanistan
has more than doubled over the weekend.

377
00:24:48,905 --> 00:24:50,573
More than 1,000 US Marines

378
00:24:50,657 --> 00:24:54,661
based 60 miles outside Kandahar
are waiting to join the battle.

379
00:24:54,744 --> 00:24:56,037
[gunfire]

380
00:24:56,120 --> 00:24:57,622
[indistinct chatter]

381
00:25:00,583 --> 00:25:04,546
In 2001, a lot of prisoners
started getting captured in Afghanistan.

382
00:25:05,296 --> 00:25:06,464
[man] English.

383
00:25:06,548 --> 00:25:10,677
I am report,
TV reporter from Al Jazeera Report.

384
00:25:12,262 --> 00:25:14,097
Listen to me. Talk to the commander.

385
00:25:14,180 --> 00:25:17,559
I am from Al Jazeera Report,
I come from Kandahar to here,

386
00:25:17,642 --> 00:25:20,436
and I have camera and I lose it in Kunduz.

387
00:25:20,520 --> 00:25:22,355
I am not a mujahid. See?

388
00:25:22,897 --> 00:25:26,150
[woman] The US was offering
large rewards of money,

389
00:25:26,234 --> 00:25:30,029
bounties for people to the Pakistanis
and to the Afghans…

390
00:25:30,530 --> 00:25:34,826
to basically turn over people
who sort of fit a certain profile.

391
00:25:39,497 --> 00:25:44,085
[Fallon] We dropped leaflets
over Afghanistan saying…

392
00:25:44,794 --> 00:25:48,339
"Riches will be upon you
if you turn in these people."

393
00:25:48,423 --> 00:25:49,716
[man speaking Arabic]

394
00:25:50,258 --> 00:25:52,552
[Fallon] "Enough money
to feed your village,

395
00:25:52,635 --> 00:25:56,431
your family, your tribe
for a year should you identify people."

396
00:25:57,348 --> 00:25:59,100
And so we got people.

397
00:25:59,601 --> 00:26:02,061
We got hundreds and hundreds of people.

398
00:26:03,354 --> 00:26:05,064
[Gonzales]
Once you started capturing people,

399
00:26:05,148 --> 00:26:07,317
you have limited options,
and you can't kill them.

400
00:26:08,234 --> 00:26:09,444
You don't want to release them,

401
00:26:09,527 --> 00:26:11,863
because they're gonna come back
and fight against you again.

402
00:26:12,405 --> 00:26:14,449
So, uh, we had to make
some decisions about,

403
00:26:14,532 --> 00:26:16,367
what are we gonna do
with people we capture?

404
00:26:17,243 --> 00:26:20,538
General Tommy Franks was of the view
that we ought to have a limited footprint

405
00:26:20,622 --> 00:26:24,542
as much as possible in Afghanistan
to reassure the Afghan people

406
00:26:24,626 --> 00:26:26,711
that we weren't gonna be there long-term.

407
00:26:26,794 --> 00:26:29,672
The notion of establishing
a large footprint with prisons,

408
00:26:29,756 --> 00:26:32,800
or one large prison,
just didn't make sense.

409
00:26:33,343 --> 00:26:35,136
So we discarded that idea.

410
00:26:35,219 --> 00:26:37,055
We had discussions with other countries.

411
00:26:37,138 --> 00:26:40,892
They weren't interested in receiving back
these terrorists, so that was out.

412
00:26:41,643 --> 00:26:43,436
Then we turned towards the United States.

413
00:26:43,519 --> 00:26:45,647
We actually had some discussions,
very limited,

414
00:26:45,730 --> 00:26:47,899
but we looked at Leavenworth, Alcatraz--

415
00:26:47,982 --> 00:26:51,694
-[interviewer] Alcatraz? As a place--?
-We looked-- Very, very limited.

416
00:26:51,778 --> 00:26:54,280
[laughs]
Someone may have thrown it out as an idea.

417
00:26:54,364 --> 00:26:57,700
Uh, looked at, of course,
supermax in Florence, Colorado.

418
00:26:57,784 --> 00:27:03,373
But we felt that in the end, it was,
again, just weeks after 9/11, politically.

419
00:27:04,415 --> 00:27:06,918
We didn't know whether the American people
would understand that.

420
00:27:10,838 --> 00:27:13,007
We also had concerns about the rights

421
00:27:13,091 --> 00:27:16,219
that would attach to anyone
we brought into the United States.

422
00:27:18,846 --> 00:27:21,474
[woman] Some people in the military
called me up and said,

423
00:27:21,974 --> 00:27:25,478
"We're getting into the prison business.
Would you like to come along?"

424
00:27:25,561 --> 00:27:28,523
We really didn't know what was gonna
happen and what it was gonna be.

425
00:27:28,606 --> 00:27:30,817
[ominous music plays]

426
00:27:37,699 --> 00:27:42,787
The Pentagon decided they were gonna
set up a detention center in Guantanamo.

427
00:27:46,040 --> 00:27:48,584
[Paradis]
Guantanamo is part of Cuban territory.

428
00:27:48,668 --> 00:27:50,878
It's the southeast corner of Cuba.

429
00:27:53,131 --> 00:27:57,719
The treaty ending the Spanish-American War
in 1898 gave Cuba independence.

430
00:27:57,802 --> 00:28:01,222
But the part of the deal was
we got to keep Guantanamo.

431
00:28:01,305 --> 00:28:04,434
The legal formality of it was
under a perpetual lease.

432
00:28:04,517 --> 00:28:07,061
So we technically leased the land
in Guantanamo,

433
00:28:07,145 --> 00:28:08,855
but only we can cancel the lease.

434
00:28:10,106 --> 00:28:11,649
The State Department said they were told

435
00:28:11,733 --> 00:28:14,569
to look for the legal equivalent
of outer space.

436
00:28:14,652 --> 00:28:18,698
That's what Guantanamo was meant to be.
A place where no law applied.

437
00:28:19,282 --> 00:28:22,660
It was this legal "No Man's Land."
This "Devil's Island."

438
00:28:22,744 --> 00:28:24,746
[ominous music playing]

439
00:28:26,789 --> 00:28:28,166
[Rosenberg] We flew into Guantanamo

440
00:28:28,249 --> 00:28:31,627
for what was gonna be, like,
a one- or two-day show tour.

441
00:28:31,711 --> 00:28:34,756
And while we were there,
they put some prisoners in the air.

442
00:28:36,007 --> 00:28:38,468
And what happened was,

443
00:28:38,551 --> 00:28:44,515
some very gritty video came out
of detainees,

444
00:28:44,599 --> 00:28:48,519
maybe those detainees
being put on a flight.

445
00:28:49,228 --> 00:28:52,732
And they were chained up and hooded…

446
00:28:53,483 --> 00:28:56,402
and shackled to each other…

447
00:28:56,903 --> 00:29:02,658
and being sort of marched along,
and it looked… anything but humane.

448
00:29:03,910 --> 00:29:08,247
In the hangar, somebody asked,
"Who are they sending?"

449
00:29:08,748 --> 00:29:11,626
And he said, "They're sending us
the worst of the worst."

450
00:29:12,376 --> 00:29:14,378
And they were talking
about those first 20 men.

451
00:29:14,921 --> 00:29:18,508
[Lehnert] These are not nice people.
Several have publicly stated here

452
00:29:18,591 --> 00:29:21,844
their intent to kill an American
before they leave Guantanamo Bay.

453
00:29:22,386 --> 00:29:24,388
We will not give them that satisfaction.

454
00:29:24,472 --> 00:29:28,142
There was a lot of people who thought
they were bringing Hannibal Lecter types

455
00:29:28,226 --> 00:29:33,856
off of these planes who, you know,
were like suicidal, fanatical terrorists.

456
00:29:33,940 --> 00:29:36,067
These are people that would gnaw
through hydraulic lines

457
00:29:36,150 --> 00:29:38,027
in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.

458
00:29:38,820 --> 00:29:42,031
[Paradis] They were strapped, essentially,
to the floor, required to sit upright,

459
00:29:42,114 --> 00:29:45,117
put hooded and subjected
to various sensory deprivation techniques

460
00:29:45,201 --> 00:29:49,831
like goggles, earmuffs, oven mitts,
and then shackled in multiple places.

461
00:29:49,914 --> 00:29:53,835
And then they were just flown,
essentially like cargo, to Guantanamo.

462
00:29:59,006 --> 00:30:03,135
[Rosenberg] The world would go on to see
those 20 men 10 days later, approximately,

463
00:30:03,219 --> 00:30:05,596
when the Pentagon released
combat camera images

464
00:30:05,680 --> 00:30:07,306
of those 20 men inside a cell.

465
00:30:08,474 --> 00:30:10,434
That's them. That's the day one.

466
00:30:10,518 --> 00:30:13,437
-[interviewer] They're kneeling down.
-[Rosenberg] They're on their knees.

467
00:30:13,521 --> 00:30:15,690
You can find 20 human beings
in that picture.

468
00:30:15,773 --> 00:30:17,316
You can find all 20.

469
00:30:17,400 --> 00:30:20,611
The Pentagon released that photo
for a variety of reasons…

470
00:30:21,279 --> 00:30:26,617
and Europe was repulsed by it
and thought it said "torture."

471
00:30:28,369 --> 00:30:33,291
[Fallon] When the first planeload arrived
and more planeloads arrived,

472
00:30:33,374 --> 00:30:35,585
we realized it wasn't
the worst of the worst.

473
00:30:36,377 --> 00:30:39,338
This wasn't the al-Qaeda suspects
that we had been tracking.

474
00:30:40,089 --> 00:30:43,301
This was what I refer to as dirt farmers.

475
00:30:44,093 --> 00:30:46,178
They were not battlefield captures.

476
00:30:46,262 --> 00:30:47,805
These were bounty babies.

477
00:30:49,432 --> 00:30:51,434
[woman] From the beginning of Guantanamo,

478
00:30:51,517 --> 00:30:53,644
the word that came down from the Pentagon:

479
00:30:53,728 --> 00:30:56,981
"No matter what you do,
do not call them prisoners."

480
00:30:57,064 --> 00:30:59,817
Because if they're called prisoners,
then we have to treat them

481
00:30:59,901 --> 00:31:02,987
under the Geneva Conventions
that protects prisoners of war.

482
00:31:03,070 --> 00:31:06,616
So that's why we have detainees
and not prisoners.

483
00:31:10,786 --> 00:31:14,498
You were sent here because you are
suspected of being high-ranking Taliban,

484
00:31:14,582 --> 00:31:15,917
or members of al-Qaeda.

485
00:31:16,751 --> 00:31:20,212
Some of you have said you are innocent,
and that you are not Taliban or al-Qaeda.

486
00:31:20,713 --> 00:31:23,049
To you I would say
that America is a nation of laws.

487
00:31:23,132 --> 00:31:25,468
Your case will be heard
and you will be judged fairly.

488
00:31:25,551 --> 00:31:27,553
We are being guided
by the Geneva Conventions.

489
00:31:27,637 --> 00:31:30,222
-[interviewer] What does that mean?
-[Lehnert] It means the guidance

490
00:31:30,306 --> 00:31:32,642
we're receiving from Washington, D.C.,
we're following it.

491
00:31:32,725 --> 00:31:35,728
And I think that you'll find that we're
treating them in a humane fashion.

492
00:31:38,397 --> 00:31:40,650
[interviewer] In a leaked memo you wrote…

493
00:31:40,733 --> 00:31:42,276
you used the word "quaint" to talk about

494
00:31:42,360 --> 00:31:44,403
some of the provisions
in the Geneva Convention.

495
00:31:44,946 --> 00:31:47,073
Why'd you write that?
What'd you mean by that?

496
00:31:47,156 --> 00:31:50,201
I used the word "quaint"
to reflect the fact

497
00:31:50,284 --> 00:31:53,120
that the Geneva Convention
was drafted at a time

498
00:31:53,704 --> 00:31:55,581
when wars were between nations,

499
00:31:55,665 --> 00:32:00,461
and not between non-nation states,
like terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda.

500
00:32:04,924 --> 00:32:07,301
We made a determination, the lawyers,

501
00:32:07,385 --> 00:32:11,138
primarily based upon a memo
from the Attorney General John Ashcroft,

502
00:32:11,222 --> 00:32:12,723
that it should not apply,

503
00:32:12,807 --> 00:32:17,103
because al-Qaeda was not a nation-state
that had signed the Geneva Conventions…

504
00:32:17,645 --> 00:32:20,314
and that the Taliban
had forfeited their rights

505
00:32:20,398 --> 00:32:22,108
for prisoner-of-war protection,

506
00:32:22,191 --> 00:32:25,027
because in order
to receive those protections

507
00:32:25,111 --> 00:32:27,154
you have to wear a uniform when fighting,

508
00:32:27,238 --> 00:32:28,656
you have to carry arms openly,

509
00:32:28,739 --> 00:32:30,825
you have to fight
under a hierarchical structure…

510
00:32:31,409 --> 00:32:34,912
and you can't go around
killing civilians indiscriminately

511
00:32:35,454 --> 00:32:38,290
and expect to receive the benefits
of being a prisoner of war

512
00:32:38,374 --> 00:32:39,500
under the Geneva Conventions.

513
00:32:42,211 --> 00:32:45,798
[Paradis] The Bush administration's
decision back in 2002

514
00:32:45,881 --> 00:32:49,385
that detainees in the war on terrorism
have no rights under international law,

515
00:32:49,468 --> 00:32:53,389
they're essentially non-persons
under international law, is not correct.

516
00:32:53,472 --> 00:32:56,350
In fact, they are protected
by the Geneva Conventions,

517
00:32:56,434 --> 00:33:00,021
a specific part of the Geneva Conventions
called "Common Article Three."

518
00:33:01,564 --> 00:33:03,858
They're being denied basic human rights,

519
00:33:03,941 --> 00:33:06,569
access to lawyers,
access to habeas corpus.

520
00:33:08,404 --> 00:33:14,869
The detainees were exposed to the heat,
the sun, the wind, the bugs.

521
00:33:15,786 --> 00:33:17,121
[Fallon] There were two buckets.

522
00:33:17,204 --> 00:33:20,624
One bucket was for your drinking water,
one was for your excrement.

523
00:33:21,792 --> 00:33:23,294
They had a hard top…

524
00:33:24,211 --> 00:33:28,466
and fenced around on three sides
with a gate to get in and out.

525
00:33:29,341 --> 00:33:32,428
It was the equivalent
of a military dog kennel.

526
00:33:35,347 --> 00:33:36,974
[Paradis] There was a simultaneous effort

527
00:33:37,058 --> 00:33:39,226
that was primarily driven
out of the White House

528
00:33:39,310 --> 00:33:43,147
and the Vice President's Office,
specifically, to embrace torture.

529
00:33:43,230 --> 00:33:46,692
I don't think that's an overstatement or
oversimplification of what was going on.

530
00:33:47,401 --> 00:33:49,153
Starting in 2002,

531
00:33:49,236 --> 00:33:53,407
the first high-value detainees
were captured, a guy named Abu Zubaydah,

532
00:33:53,491 --> 00:33:57,119
who ran essentially a guesthouse
that was often a way station

533
00:33:57,203 --> 00:33:59,747
for people who were going
to try and join al-Qaeda,

534
00:33:59,830 --> 00:34:01,749
join the Taliban in Afghanistan.

535
00:34:01,832 --> 00:34:05,044
And so he obviously had the incredible
intelligence of value for that reason.

536
00:34:05,127 --> 00:34:08,172
You know, he knew a lot of people
who were coming and going.

537
00:34:08,255 --> 00:34:12,968
And the FBI starts questioning him
and gets a lot of intelligence out of him.

538
00:34:13,052 --> 00:34:16,514
And the FBI agent, Ali Soufan,
is actually tending to his wounds

539
00:34:16,597 --> 00:34:21,310
and developing rapport-based methods
of interrogation. You get to know them,

540
00:34:21,393 --> 00:34:24,396
the person begins to trust you,
at least to the extent you can.

541
00:34:25,523 --> 00:34:28,609
[Soufan] When we start arresting
these people and talking to them,

542
00:34:28,692 --> 00:34:31,529
it's not a rocket science
to interrogate them.

543
00:34:31,612 --> 00:34:34,740
There are so many different ways
to interrogate individuals

544
00:34:34,824 --> 00:34:38,160
and, you know, in the US government,
we are trained to do something like this.

545
00:34:38,244 --> 00:34:41,413
We are trained
to obtain intelligence information

546
00:34:41,497 --> 00:34:42,998
from human sources.

547
00:34:43,082 --> 00:34:46,502
And law enforcements
in the United States do it every time.

548
00:34:46,585 --> 00:34:49,338
The CIA, the military, the FBI,

549
00:34:49,421 --> 00:34:53,384
we were involved in interrogations
in the East African embassy bombings

550
00:34:53,467 --> 00:34:55,136
and the USS Cole bombings,

551
00:34:55,219 --> 00:34:58,681
and a lot of the different plots
that took place around the world,

552
00:34:58,764 --> 00:34:59,974
and the disruption.

553
00:35:00,057 --> 00:35:01,600
Soufan actually has a lot of success,

554
00:35:01,684 --> 00:35:04,603
including identifying for the first time
who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is.

555
00:35:06,147 --> 00:35:08,983
It's easy to forget now,
because he's so widely publicized

556
00:35:09,066 --> 00:35:10,818
as a mastermind of September 11.

557
00:35:10,901 --> 00:35:14,196
But even as late as the spring of 2002,

558
00:35:14,280 --> 00:35:17,324
we don't know who organized
September 11th.

559
00:35:17,408 --> 00:35:21,787
And so the first person to give
that information up was Abu Zubaydah.

560
00:35:23,581 --> 00:35:26,876
The FBI's success is noticed
in getting intelligence out of him,

561
00:35:26,959 --> 00:35:30,671
and so they take Abu Zubaydah
and begin subjecting him

562
00:35:30,754 --> 00:35:34,383
to, what were then called,
"enhanced interrogation techniques."

563
00:35:36,302 --> 00:35:40,097
This simultaneous effort
that had been really started, you know,

564
00:35:40,181 --> 00:35:42,308
within the first few months
after September 11th

565
00:35:42,391 --> 00:35:44,351
to create a torture program,

566
00:35:44,435 --> 00:35:46,687
seized the opportunity
for their first guinea pig.

567
00:35:48,147 --> 00:35:50,649
[Card]
When we knew we could get Abu Zubaydah,

568
00:35:50,733 --> 00:35:52,484
that was a very big deal for us.

569
00:35:52,568 --> 00:35:55,237
When we thought
we could get Khalid Sheikh Mohamed,

570
00:35:55,321 --> 00:35:56,697
that was a very big deal for us.

571
00:35:56,780 --> 00:36:01,702
I mean, so these high-value targets
were very important.

572
00:36:02,953 --> 00:36:06,624
[Gonzales] A decision was made
by the National Security Council

573
00:36:06,707 --> 00:36:10,377
to look at enhanced
interrogation techniques.

574
00:36:10,461 --> 00:36:14,173
George Tenet and the CIA were charged
with, "All right. What do you recommend?"

575
00:36:15,674 --> 00:36:17,593
And so it was important
to get clear guidance

576
00:36:17,676 --> 00:36:19,553
about, "All right. Where is the box?"

577
00:36:19,637 --> 00:36:22,598
And so the Department of Justice
drafted legal opinions

578
00:36:22,681 --> 00:36:24,516
to give guidance to the CIA.

579
00:36:24,600 --> 00:36:26,602
[dramatic music plays]

580
00:36:34,276 --> 00:36:37,238
[Card] I was in the meeting when
the president was given a briefing on it.

581
00:36:37,780 --> 00:36:40,908
But he ended up authorizing
enhanced interrogation techniques

582
00:36:40,991 --> 00:36:43,619
to be used under appropriate supervision…

583
00:36:44,245 --> 00:36:46,121
with the expectation that we would be able

584
00:36:46,205 --> 00:36:48,749
to prevent the next attack
in the United States.

585
00:36:54,046 --> 00:36:55,923
[Paradis]
Those enhanced interrogation techniques

586
00:36:56,006 --> 00:36:58,676
are things like forced
24-hour-a-day nudity,

587
00:36:58,759 --> 00:37:01,887
24-hour-a-day light, 24-hour-a-day cold,

588
00:37:01,971 --> 00:37:03,597
24-hour-a-day darkness.

589
00:37:03,681 --> 00:37:08,227
Waterboarding is one of the most infamous
or publicly-known methods that were used.

590
00:37:09,353 --> 00:37:15,567
[Gonzales] I'm not in any way suggesting
that they're not unpleasant or terrible,

591
00:37:15,651 --> 00:37:17,152
but, like, walling.

592
00:37:17,236 --> 00:37:20,864
Walling was a technique
where you put a hood around their neck

593
00:37:20,948 --> 00:37:24,285
to make sure they don't suffer
any neck injuries.

594
00:37:24,868 --> 00:37:27,329
You hold them against a wall
that's not secure,

595
00:37:27,413 --> 00:37:30,541
it will collapse,
and you push them against that wall.

596
00:37:30,624 --> 00:37:34,128
With respect to the facial slap,
the palm had to be open.

597
00:37:34,211 --> 00:37:37,047
You could only hold the hand
so many inches away from the face,

598
00:37:37,131 --> 00:37:40,092
and it could only strike the face
on the cheek.

599
00:37:40,175 --> 00:37:43,554
The abdominal slap, again, open palm,

600
00:37:43,637 --> 00:37:47,099
you could only be so many inches
from-- from-- from the belly.

601
00:37:47,182 --> 00:37:52,021
You could only strike between,
I think, the navel and the nipples.

602
00:37:52,980 --> 00:37:56,483
So very detailed instructions
about what could be done.

603
00:37:56,567 --> 00:37:59,445
We went back and looked
at the convention against torture,

604
00:37:59,987 --> 00:38:03,198
which was the genesis
of the Anti-Torture statute.

605
00:38:03,282 --> 00:38:06,327
The head of the Criminal Division
of the Department of Justice

606
00:38:06,410 --> 00:38:09,496
wrote that torture is that activity

607
00:38:09,580 --> 00:38:13,000
which the very mention
sends shiver up one's spine,

608
00:38:13,083 --> 00:38:16,295
such as needles under the fingernails,

609
00:38:16,378 --> 00:38:19,590
such as piercing of an eye--
of your eyeball,

610
00:38:19,673 --> 00:38:22,801
such as electric shocks to your genitals.

611
00:38:22,885 --> 00:38:24,762
We weren't anywhere close to that.

612
00:38:29,016 --> 00:38:31,769
[man] I spent
25 and a half years in the FBI.

613
00:38:32,269 --> 00:38:34,021
At the time of 9/11,

614
00:38:34,521 --> 00:38:38,901
I was the first Assistant Director
in charge of Counterterrorism.

615
00:38:40,319 --> 00:38:43,989
Director Mueller, after a briefing
at the White House that-- He was there,

616
00:38:44,073 --> 00:38:45,824
he called me to his office and said,

617
00:38:45,908 --> 00:38:49,203
"We need to send two agents
to this country."

618
00:38:49,828 --> 00:38:54,500
And I said, "Okay. Right.
We'll get right on that. What is it?"

619
00:38:54,583 --> 00:38:56,794
And he said,
"Well, they picked up Zubaydah."

620
00:38:56,877 --> 00:39:00,422
And I said, "That's great." Because I knew
we wanted him to come back here.

621
00:39:00,506 --> 00:39:03,258
"We'll interview him. That's super.
We need more than two agents."

622
00:39:03,342 --> 00:39:06,470
"We'll put together a packet."
"No, no, no. Send two agents."

623
00:39:07,471 --> 00:39:10,057
I said, "We're bringing him back. Right?"

624
00:39:10,140 --> 00:39:12,643
He said, "No.
The agency doesn't want to keep him."

625
00:39:12,726 --> 00:39:15,312
And I said, "Hmm, that's interesting."

626
00:39:15,396 --> 00:39:16,230
[laughs]

627
00:39:16,313 --> 00:39:21,026
"We have no business
assisting the agency around trying--"

628
00:39:21,110 --> 00:39:23,612
"That somebody's not going
to be rendered back here."

629
00:39:23,695 --> 00:39:27,783
I said, "I understand what they can do
and probably will do."

630
00:39:27,866 --> 00:39:29,201
"We don't need any part of that."

631
00:39:29,868 --> 00:39:32,830
And he says, "Yes. We do.
We need to be there to help them."

632
00:39:33,414 --> 00:39:35,499
I said,
"They can't be in the room with this."

633
00:39:35,582 --> 00:39:37,835
And he says,
"No. I told the president we'd help."

634
00:39:37,918 --> 00:39:39,962
And I said,
"You really need to call the president

635
00:39:40,045 --> 00:39:42,840
and tell him we're not gonna do this,
because think about this."

636
00:39:42,923 --> 00:39:46,051
"Our image and the American public.
We're not a bunch of thugs."

637
00:39:46,135 --> 00:39:49,638
"And we can destroy our reputation
by doing something like that."

638
00:39:49,721 --> 00:39:51,723
[dramatic music plays]

639
00:39:59,398 --> 00:40:01,567
[Soufan] They didn't believe
that these guys will talk.

640
00:40:02,151 --> 00:40:04,528
So they wanted to develop a program

641
00:40:04,611 --> 00:40:07,030
that's gonna be
like a cookie-cutter approach.

642
00:40:07,531 --> 00:40:10,534
One, two, three, four,
and the guy's gonna give you everything.

643
00:40:10,617 --> 00:40:14,913
That's not how the world works.
That's not how human nature works.

644
00:40:16,582 --> 00:40:18,959
[Paradis] It was kind of a politics
of fear had set in.

645
00:40:20,669 --> 00:40:24,298
To see that fear,
that I certainly had and everyone had,

646
00:40:24,381 --> 00:40:27,217
just become a poison in the society

647
00:40:27,301 --> 00:40:30,804
that you would just abandon the things
that make the United States unique.

648
00:40:33,474 --> 00:40:35,934
[Soufan]
The CIA Inspector General, in 2004

649
00:40:36,602 --> 00:40:38,979
came with the conclusion
that they cannot prove

650
00:40:39,062 --> 00:40:41,565
one imminent threat was disrupted

651
00:40:42,858 --> 00:40:45,235
because of enhanced
interrogation techniques.

652
00:40:45,319 --> 00:40:47,488
-[interviewer] There's no evidence?
-There's no evidence.

653
00:40:47,571 --> 00:40:50,908
And this is the CIA themselves
saying that, not me.

654
00:40:52,367 --> 00:40:54,703
This is a huge thing about torture.

655
00:40:54,786 --> 00:40:59,249
Torture will give you compliance.
It does not give you cooperation.

656
00:40:59,875 --> 00:41:03,170
The difference between compliance
and cooperation is with compliance

657
00:41:04,463 --> 00:41:09,218
the person will tell you whatever
you wanna hear for the torture to stop.

658
00:41:09,301 --> 00:41:10,719
He won't tell you the truth.

659
00:41:12,221 --> 00:41:14,765
In cooperation, you get the truth.

660
00:41:15,265 --> 00:41:17,267
[ominous music plays]

661
00:41:21,396 --> 00:41:23,649
It produced little useful intelligence

662
00:41:23,732 --> 00:41:27,861
to help us track down
the perpetrators of 9/11,

663
00:41:27,945 --> 00:41:30,864
or prevent new attacks and atrocities.

664
00:41:32,407 --> 00:41:34,868
[Rumsfeld] Anyone who suggests
that the enhanced techniques,

665
00:41:34,952 --> 00:41:37,496
let's be blunt, waterboarding,

666
00:41:37,579 --> 00:41:42,834
did not produce an enormous amount
of valuable intelligence

667
00:41:42,918 --> 00:41:45,087
just isn't facing the truth.

668
00:41:46,630 --> 00:41:50,092
[McCain] I'm deeply concerned
about who we are as a country

669
00:41:50,175 --> 00:41:52,928
and what we stand for and believe in.

670
00:41:53,011 --> 00:41:55,097
America has always been an example

671
00:41:55,180 --> 00:41:58,642
and an inspiration
to other countries throughout the world,

672
00:41:58,725 --> 00:42:01,812
and if we practice, uh, torture

673
00:42:01,895 --> 00:42:04,356
and do things that, uh, diminish

674
00:42:04,439 --> 00:42:07,067
and even harm
the image of the United States

675
00:42:07,150 --> 00:42:08,652
and motivate our enemies,

676
00:42:08,735 --> 00:42:12,406
then it could have profound consequences
in the future.

677
00:42:12,906 --> 00:42:17,077
And think of what would happen if,
in another conflict, an enemy,

678
00:42:17,160 --> 00:42:21,123
not a terrorist organization,
takes Americans prisoners,

679
00:42:21,206 --> 00:42:25,460
then obviously they will feel that they
can do the same thing we have practiced.

680
00:42:27,212 --> 00:42:29,506
[Rosenberg]
It took me a long time to understand.

681
00:42:29,590 --> 00:42:33,635
Guantanamo Bay,
and the prison there, particularly…

682
00:42:34,219 --> 00:42:40,892
was the first no-exit strategy
military enterprise since the Vietnam War.

683
00:42:40,976 --> 00:42:43,562
[reporter] Hundreds of Taliban
and al-Qaeda suspects

684
00:42:43,645 --> 00:42:45,397
are already in US custody,

685
00:42:45,480 --> 00:42:47,774
including 30 more from Afghanistan,

686
00:42:47,858 --> 00:42:51,111
delivered today to the US Naval Base
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

687
00:42:51,194 --> 00:42:55,991
That brings the total there now to 110,
with many more to come.

688
00:42:57,534 --> 00:42:59,995
[Rosenberg] Nobody would know
how this story would end.

689
00:43:09,338 --> 00:43:11,757
[reporter]
How did they sneak up on us like this?

690
00:43:11,840 --> 00:43:13,300
[indistinct shouting]

691
00:43:13,383 --> 00:43:16,970
[agent] It definitely is a failure
of US intelligence.

692
00:43:18,430 --> 00:43:20,057
[airplane flying]

693
00:43:20,140 --> 00:43:22,643
[reporter 1] Today, just the sight
of a jetliner overhead…

694
00:43:22,726 --> 00:43:23,810
[emergency sirens blaring]

695
00:43:23,894 --> 00:43:25,270
…the sound of a siren…

696
00:43:25,854 --> 00:43:28,690
even the morning mail brings suspicion.

697
00:43:29,983 --> 00:43:32,986
[reporter 2] For New York, it was another
day on the front line of fear

698
00:43:33,070 --> 00:43:35,155
in the trenches of terrorist hysteria.

699
00:43:35,739 --> 00:43:38,659
In Rockefeller Center,
an anthrax case at NBC.

700
00:43:39,159 --> 00:43:40,827
You just feel so vulnerable now,

701
00:43:40,911 --> 00:43:42,746
because you don't know
what's gonna happen,

702
00:43:42,829 --> 00:43:43,955
where it's gonna happen.

703
00:43:50,796 --> 00:43:53,131
[Gonzales]
That weekend after 9/11 at Camp David,

704
00:43:53,840 --> 00:43:57,844
it was about informing the president
where we lack authorities,

705
00:43:58,512 --> 00:43:59,971
where we lack capabilities,

706
00:44:00,055 --> 00:44:03,016
and what was necessary
to prevent this from happening again,

707
00:44:03,517 --> 00:44:06,061
to punish those responsible
for what happened on 9/11.

708
00:44:06,144 --> 00:44:09,564
And it set in motion
certain things like the Patriot Act.

709
00:44:09,648 --> 00:44:11,024
[applause]

710
00:44:12,109 --> 00:44:17,072
The Patriot Act is one piece
of a massive surveillance effort

711
00:44:17,155 --> 00:44:21,535
that starts to grow in the 9/11 aftermath.

712
00:44:24,246 --> 00:44:28,542
[Bush] These acts of violence
against innocents violate

713
00:44:29,584 --> 00:44:32,212
the fundamental tenets
of the Islamic faith.

714
00:44:32,963 --> 00:44:36,717
And it's important for my fellow Americans
to understand that.

715
00:44:38,510 --> 00:44:41,805
America counts millions of Muslims
amongst our citizens.

716
00:44:42,389 --> 00:44:47,686
And Muslims make an incredibly valuable
contribution to our country.

717
00:44:47,769 --> 00:44:53,316
Muslims are doctors,
lawyers, law professors,

718
00:44:53,400 --> 00:44:57,404
members of the military,
entrepreneurs, shopkeepers,

719
00:44:57,487 --> 00:44:58,864
moms and dads,

720
00:44:58,947 --> 00:45:01,199
and they need to be treated with respect.

721
00:45:02,701 --> 00:45:05,954
[woman] Even as President Bush was saying,

722
00:45:06,037 --> 00:45:10,667
"We don't blame an entire religion
for the acts of a few,"

723
00:45:10,751 --> 00:45:13,837
the government started doing exactly that.

724
00:45:15,172 --> 00:45:17,632
[reporter] President Bush
signed the so-called Patriot Act

725
00:45:17,716 --> 00:45:20,427
into law on Friday
in the East Room of the White House.

726
00:45:22,095 --> 00:45:26,057
Following 9/11, we started
to see and hear conversations

727
00:45:26,141 --> 00:45:28,685
about how our country's
intelligence had failed.

728
00:45:28,769 --> 00:45:30,562
Agencies weren't talking to each other.

729
00:45:30,645 --> 00:45:34,107
How did all of these hijackers get in,

730
00:45:34,191 --> 00:45:37,402
get trained,
get on planes and nobody noticed?

731
00:45:37,486 --> 00:45:41,406
As of today, we're changing
the laws governing information-sharing.

732
00:45:42,449 --> 00:45:43,575
And as importantly,

733
00:45:44,701 --> 00:45:47,829
we're changing the culture
of our various agencies

734
00:45:47,913 --> 00:45:49,247
that fight terrorism.

735
00:45:50,457 --> 00:45:55,337
[Billoo] And so what starts to happen
really fast and really frighteningly,

736
00:45:55,420 --> 00:45:59,800
is we're increasing our investments
in law enforcement and surveillance.

737
00:46:00,383 --> 00:46:03,428
The library provision,
so you could access our library records,

738
00:46:03,512 --> 00:46:04,805
see everything we're reading.

739
00:46:05,722 --> 00:46:10,685
And another provision
is the sneak and peek warrants.

740
00:46:10,769 --> 00:46:13,939
The Patriot Act permitted law enforcement
to go into our homes

741
00:46:14,022 --> 00:46:15,482
and leave without telling us.

742
00:46:15,565 --> 00:46:20,195
So come in, look around quietly,
leave behind whatever I want,

743
00:46:20,278 --> 00:46:23,532
take whatever I want,
and there's no documentation I can access.

744
00:46:24,324 --> 00:46:27,410
[reporter] Federal agents swept
through Islamic homes and businesses

745
00:46:27,494 --> 00:46:30,872
in suburban Washington, looking
for ties to terrorist organizations.

746
00:46:33,625 --> 00:46:36,211
[Billoo] It's beyond
personally offensive as a Muslim.

747
00:46:36,294 --> 00:46:38,839
It's offensive as an American.

748
00:46:38,922 --> 00:46:42,592
It goes against the very core
of what we understood

749
00:46:42,676 --> 00:46:45,387
as privacy rights that were
enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

750
00:46:49,683 --> 00:46:51,810
[man] The National Security Agency

751
00:46:51,893 --> 00:46:54,771
is part of the Pentagon,
part of the Defense Department.

752
00:46:54,855 --> 00:46:58,525
And it is the agency
in charge of electronic surveillance

753
00:46:58,608 --> 00:47:03,864
of all kinds of foreign adversaries
of the United States.

754
00:47:03,947 --> 00:47:09,077
It was created in 1952
by President Truman in an Executive Order.

755
00:47:09,786 --> 00:47:13,665
And it was an outgrowth
of the wartime code-breaking

756
00:47:13,748 --> 00:47:16,167
that the US had conducted
during World War II.

757
00:47:16,251 --> 00:47:19,546
And it has grown over the decades

758
00:47:19,629 --> 00:47:23,842
into a massive modern cyber-security,

759
00:47:23,925 --> 00:47:28,930
cyber-offensive, code-breaking,
electronic-eavesdropping organization…

760
00:47:29,556 --> 00:47:31,141
of unprecedented scale.

761
00:47:31,224 --> 00:47:35,103
It's the largest such agency in the world.

762
00:47:38,315 --> 00:47:41,026
[man] There's before 9/11
and there's after 9/11.

763
00:47:43,820 --> 00:47:47,824
I was part of an agency that was supposed
to keep people out of harm's way.

764
00:47:48,992 --> 00:47:52,454
And my first day on the job, and--

765
00:47:53,455 --> 00:47:56,041
Every time I say this, I get goose bumps.

766
00:47:56,124 --> 00:47:59,377
I'm feeling them right now,
because that day is literally frozen.

767
00:47:59,920 --> 00:48:05,675
9/11 was actually my first day reporting
to my new duty station.

768
00:48:07,093 --> 00:48:09,596
And I can play back
that day second by second,

769
00:48:09,679 --> 00:48:12,098
minute by minute, hour by hour.

770
00:48:16,102 --> 00:48:18,939
But what I didn't know in that morning

771
00:48:19,981 --> 00:48:24,027
is the secret decisions that were made
at the highest levels of the government…

772
00:48:24,736 --> 00:48:27,072
and what the government was willing to do…

773
00:48:28,365 --> 00:48:31,368
under the blanket of national security.

774
00:48:33,161 --> 00:48:37,332
What they were willing to do
in going way outside the law.

775
00:48:42,003 --> 00:48:45,507
[man] Jack Goldsmith,
Assistant Attorney General,

776
00:48:45,590 --> 00:48:47,092
office of legal counsel.

777
00:48:47,634 --> 00:48:50,470
I went to the White House to be read into

778
00:48:50,553 --> 00:48:52,639
what was basically
the Stellar Wind program.

779
00:48:52,722 --> 00:48:55,809
I went to David Addington's office.
He was the person who read me in.

780
00:48:55,892 --> 00:48:58,019
Now, this was unusual
that the vice president's counsel

781
00:48:58,103 --> 00:49:00,814
was reading me into a highly classified
intelligence program.

782
00:49:01,314 --> 00:49:04,234
Addington actually had
the original authorities for the program

783
00:49:04,317 --> 00:49:05,944
in his safe in his office.

784
00:49:06,027 --> 00:49:08,029
And he said,
“Prepare for your mind to be blown.”

785
00:49:08,113 --> 00:49:10,991
He basically said, "You're gonna learn
about something you won't believe."

786
00:49:13,326 --> 00:49:16,454
[Drake]
Immediately, I mean within days and weeks,

787
00:49:16,538 --> 00:49:20,709
verbal authorization was being granted
for a program called Stellar Wind…

788
00:49:23,003 --> 00:49:26,381
in which they're turning
the extraordinary power of NSA…

789
00:49:27,674 --> 00:49:31,678
and pointing it,
not just foreign, but also domestic.

790
00:49:32,262 --> 00:49:34,264
[rapid electronic beeping]

791
00:49:35,932 --> 00:49:37,350
[interviewer] What was Stellar Wind?

792
00:49:38,393 --> 00:49:40,687
I have to be careful here.
Parts of it are still classified.

793
00:49:40,770 --> 00:49:43,773
I'll just call it
a warrantless wiretapping program

794
00:49:43,857 --> 00:49:47,318
that involved large metadata collection

795
00:49:47,402 --> 00:49:52,949
and also collection of content,
much of it happening in the homeland.

796
00:49:54,075 --> 00:49:55,744
[phone line ringing]

797
00:49:56,286 --> 00:49:59,539
[reporter] Imagine you have a computer
that's tracking every time a call is made,

798
00:49:59,622 --> 00:50:02,042
when it's received,
where it was made and received,

799
00:50:02,125 --> 00:50:03,835
and how long it lasted.

800
00:50:03,918 --> 00:50:05,545
That is metadata.

801
00:50:06,588 --> 00:50:08,673
[Gonzales] The Stellar Wind program
had three baskets,

802
00:50:08,757 --> 00:50:10,216
if I could describe it that way.

803
00:50:10,300 --> 00:50:13,303
The first basket is
the collection of the contents

804
00:50:13,386 --> 00:50:15,680
of telephone communications

805
00:50:15,764 --> 00:50:18,516
where a senior operative at the CIA

806
00:50:18,600 --> 00:50:22,979
believes one person on that call
is a member of al-Qaeda

807
00:50:23,063 --> 00:50:24,814
or some way affiliated with al-Qaeda.

808
00:50:25,774 --> 00:50:28,693
The other two baskets did not
have to do with content collection.

809
00:50:28,777 --> 00:50:30,028
It had to do with metadata,

810
00:50:30,111 --> 00:50:32,655
the second basket
being telephone metadata.

811
00:50:32,739 --> 00:50:34,866
You don't see on there
the contents of the call,

812
00:50:34,949 --> 00:50:38,536
but you see the number you called
and perhaps the length of the call.

813
00:50:39,329 --> 00:50:42,332
Basket three is a collection
of email metadata.

814
00:50:42,415 --> 00:50:44,793
It's who you sent the email to and from.

815
00:50:45,919 --> 00:50:47,587
[Goldsmith] The basic idea was that

816
00:50:47,670 --> 00:50:50,048
through massive collection
of this metadata,

817
00:50:50,131 --> 00:50:52,383
even of people who weren't suspected…

818
00:50:53,301 --> 00:50:55,637
that you could have a network
that would allow you

819
00:50:55,720 --> 00:50:58,264
to put the pieces together
with little pieces of evidence

820
00:50:58,348 --> 00:51:00,225
that you have about terrorists.

821
00:51:00,308 --> 00:51:02,602
You would have a pool
of information that, it was hoped,

822
00:51:02,685 --> 00:51:03,978
would prevent the next 9/11.

823
00:51:04,062 --> 00:51:05,522
That was always the theory.

824
00:51:08,066 --> 00:51:10,944
[Drake] It's the digital age.
We're drowning in data.

825
00:51:11,027 --> 00:51:14,989
So the NSA said, "Why don't we just take
as much as we can?"

826
00:51:15,073 --> 00:51:18,159
"Wow. Look how easy it is.
We'll just take it all."

827
00:51:19,327 --> 00:51:23,331
The government entered into
these extended special arrangements,

828
00:51:23,414 --> 00:51:25,083
which were super secret,

829
00:51:25,166 --> 00:51:28,044
with certain companies
like the Verizons of the world,

830
00:51:28,128 --> 00:51:31,172
like AT&T and others, for data.

831
00:51:31,881 --> 00:51:34,300
So they're just sweeping it all in,
claiming,

832
00:51:34,384 --> 00:51:37,428
"Well, hey. Until we look at it,
we're not in violation."

833
00:51:38,596 --> 00:51:42,016
This is turning the Fourth Amendment
inside out and upside down.

834
00:51:45,019 --> 00:51:48,439
[Risen] In the Bill of Rights,
the Fourth Amendment grants us the right

835
00:51:48,523 --> 00:51:50,733
to privacy in our own homes,

836
00:51:51,234 --> 00:51:55,405
the ability to avoid
having government agents

837
00:51:55,488 --> 00:51:58,741
barge into our homes without any approvals

838
00:51:58,825 --> 00:52:03,121
or without any authorization,
and take whatever they want from us.

839
00:52:04,038 --> 00:52:06,082
And this was the electronic version

840
00:52:06,791 --> 00:52:11,421
of an unauthorized
government raid on your house.

841
00:52:14,174 --> 00:52:16,759
[Watson] Director Mueller came back
from a briefing one morning.

842
00:52:16,843 --> 00:52:20,638
He called me and he said, "Dale,
there's a special program going on."

843
00:52:20,722 --> 00:52:22,974
"I want you to-- No one knows about it."

844
00:52:23,057 --> 00:52:25,852
"Probably there's only four or five
or six of us in the US government."

845
00:52:25,935 --> 00:52:30,148
I said, "Yeah? What's that about?"
And he said, "I can't tell you. Go."

846
00:52:30,231 --> 00:52:32,525
So I went over
to the Pentagon the next morning,

847
00:52:32,609 --> 00:52:36,571
in a secure space over there,
and had a meeting and was briefed on it.

848
00:52:36,654 --> 00:52:41,534
And so I went back and told the director,
I said, "I'm not sure this is gonna work."

849
00:52:41,618 --> 00:52:44,746
And I didn't feel comfortable about it.
I said, "This is not going to last."

850
00:52:45,288 --> 00:52:47,540
He said, "Well, you're not authorized
to tell anybody."

851
00:52:49,417 --> 00:52:53,421
I saw the product of it.
I saw the results of it.

852
00:52:54,214 --> 00:52:57,425
I'm here to tell you, I saw
nothing productive that came of that.

853
00:52:58,009 --> 00:53:00,511
[dramatic music plays]

854
00:53:01,888 --> 00:53:03,890
[Goldsmith]
My office, I didn't realize at the time,

855
00:53:03,973 --> 00:53:06,809
but it was charged
with approving its legality

856
00:53:06,893 --> 00:53:08,394
every six or seven weeks.

857
00:53:09,938 --> 00:53:15,026
The main problem with the program
was it seemed to fly in the face

858
00:53:15,109 --> 00:53:17,612
of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act.

859
00:53:18,112 --> 00:53:20,323
And it's a very complicated statute,

860
00:53:20,406 --> 00:53:25,453
but basically on its face, it didn't seem
to allow what was going on.

861
00:53:26,913 --> 00:53:30,041
Rather than go to Congress
and get those laws changed…

862
00:53:30,750 --> 00:53:32,794
the Bush administration
blew through some of them

863
00:53:32,877 --> 00:53:36,839
and interpreted some of them in a way
that they just were able to sidestep them.

864
00:53:39,092 --> 00:53:41,094
[ominous music plays]

865
00:53:43,888 --> 00:53:46,140
[Gonzales]
In March of 2004, Jack Goldsmith,

866
00:53:46,224 --> 00:53:47,767
who was the new head of OLC,

867
00:53:48,518 --> 00:53:52,814
expressed concerns
about aspects of Stellar Wind.

868
00:53:52,897 --> 00:53:56,818
He says, "I cannot find legal support
for this aspect of Stellar Wind,

869
00:53:57,360 --> 00:53:59,487
and we may have to discontinue this."

870
00:53:59,570 --> 00:54:02,240
-[interviewer] Discontinue the program?
-Discontinue something.

871
00:54:04,325 --> 00:54:08,663
[Goldsmith] I basically had decided that
approximately half of it could continue

872
00:54:08,746 --> 00:54:11,708
and approximately half of it
I thought couldn't continue.

873
00:54:11,791 --> 00:54:14,168
That I couldn't find
any legal justification for.

874
00:54:16,713 --> 00:54:19,465
When I informed the White House

875
00:54:21,175 --> 00:54:26,306
that I couldn't approve a large chunk
of the surveillance program,

876
00:54:26,389 --> 00:54:30,852
that's when David Addington
got angriest at me he ever got, and said…

877
00:54:32,020 --> 00:54:34,689
“If you roll that way,
you'll have the blood of 100,000 people

878
00:54:34,772 --> 00:54:36,983
who die in the next attack on your hands.”

879
00:54:38,818 --> 00:54:42,905
I think that he thought, A: I was wrong,
and B: that's what would happen.

880
00:54:42,989 --> 00:54:45,241
And by the way,
he didn't have to tell me that.

881
00:54:45,325 --> 00:54:48,995
I had the same feeling,
and it weighed on me a lot, obviously.

882
00:54:50,330 --> 00:54:52,498
[Gonzales] I remember calling Andy Card.

883
00:54:52,582 --> 00:54:54,584
Andy came back from vacation early.

884
00:54:55,293 --> 00:54:56,544
We met with the vice president.

885
00:54:56,627 --> 00:54:58,713
I think George Tenet
and Michael Hayden were there.

886
00:54:58,796 --> 00:55:00,006
And we talked about this.

887
00:55:00,089 --> 00:55:02,717
This was a very important,
very significant program.

888
00:55:02,800 --> 00:55:05,511
Probably one of the most important
and effective programs

889
00:55:05,595 --> 00:55:07,847
that our government had
in collecting information.

890
00:55:07,930 --> 00:55:11,267
And so, the notion that
we would discontinue something,

891
00:55:11,351 --> 00:55:12,435
that was serious.

892
00:55:16,105 --> 00:55:18,900
[Goldsmith] Attorney General Ashcroft
approved my decision,

893
00:55:18,983 --> 00:55:22,487
which was an amazing thing
since Ashcroft had been approving

894
00:55:22,570 --> 00:55:26,240
the broader program
on advice of the Office of Legal Counsel.

895
00:55:26,324 --> 00:55:29,452
It was a brave thing for him to do,
because it was a back-down for him.

896
00:55:29,535 --> 00:55:33,247
And he wasn't happy about it,
but he went along and was persuaded.

897
00:55:33,331 --> 00:55:35,333
[distant emergency sirens]

898
00:55:36,250 --> 00:55:40,088
[Goldsmith] Within hours after Ashcroft
signed off and said he agreed with it,

899
00:55:40,588 --> 00:55:43,466
he went into the hospital
with acute pancreatitis.

900
00:55:47,220 --> 00:55:50,515
And he had to have
his gallbladder removed,

901
00:55:50,598 --> 00:55:51,933
he had to have surgery.

902
00:55:52,433 --> 00:55:56,437
And he was very sick, and it wasn't clear
if he was gonna survive.

903
00:55:58,981 --> 00:56:02,485
[Gonzales] We were running up against…
I think March 11th was the time

904
00:56:02,568 --> 00:56:06,072
that the existing authorization
was gonna expire.

905
00:56:06,155 --> 00:56:09,992
And any time there's a hole in collection,
you don't know what you might miss.

906
00:56:11,369 --> 00:56:13,329
And so I talked to the president.

907
00:56:13,413 --> 00:56:16,374
He was concerned,
because we were starting to hear chatter

908
00:56:16,457 --> 00:56:19,252
that perhaps something big
is about to happen.

909
00:56:19,335 --> 00:56:22,588
And if we don't have
the Department of Justice signature

910
00:56:22,672 --> 00:56:24,590
on that authorization,
the telecom carriers

911
00:56:24,674 --> 00:56:26,592
are probably not gonna cooperate with us.

912
00:56:27,635 --> 00:56:29,178
We should call John Ashcroft.

913
00:56:29,262 --> 00:56:32,306
-[interviewer] Gonna go to the hospital.
-We're gonna go to the hospital.

914
00:56:34,684 --> 00:56:38,062
The president asked me and Alberto
to go to the hospital

915
00:56:38,146 --> 00:56:40,440
and tell him what was going on,

916
00:56:40,523 --> 00:56:44,652
and bring a document he had signed before,
wondered if he'd be willing to sign it.

917
00:56:46,404 --> 00:56:49,574
[Goldsmith]
I sped to the hospital, ran up the steps,

918
00:56:49,657 --> 00:56:51,075
and I walked into the hospital room.

919
00:56:51,159 --> 00:56:54,871
Ashcroft was in intensive care.
He had all these tubes in him.

920
00:56:54,954 --> 00:56:59,041
His eyes were almost closed,
and he was very gray.

921
00:56:59,125 --> 00:57:01,127
And he didn't look well at all.

922
00:57:03,629 --> 00:57:05,840
I wasn't in there five or ten minutes

923
00:57:05,923 --> 00:57:11,053
before Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card,
the White House Chief of Staff, walk in.

924
00:57:12,722 --> 00:57:15,600
And they had the Stellar Wind approval,

925
00:57:15,683 --> 00:57:18,269
and they were basically
asking Ashcroft to sign off on it.

926
00:57:19,520 --> 00:57:23,983
Andy and I went up to John Ashcroft's
room, and John was laying in the bed.

927
00:57:24,066 --> 00:57:28,279
Now, clearly,
he looked weak and he was pale-looking.

928
00:57:28,362 --> 00:57:31,491
It wasn't obvious to me that he understood
what we were talking about.

929
00:57:31,574 --> 00:57:32,909
[interviewer] He's not coherent?

930
00:57:32,992 --> 00:57:35,369
[Goldsmith] He didn't say much,
and he looked terrible.

931
00:57:35,453 --> 00:57:37,455
And I just wasn't sure
what was gonna happen.

932
00:57:38,164 --> 00:57:42,418
So, they come in and make this request,
and the most extraordinary thing happened.

933
00:57:42,502 --> 00:57:44,712
Ashcroft, to my surprise,

934
00:57:44,795 --> 00:57:49,759
kind of lifted himself up
just a little bit off the back of the bed…

935
00:57:50,384 --> 00:57:51,385
and he said…

936
00:57:52,762 --> 00:57:56,265
"I agree with the decision that was made
by the Justice Department."

937
00:57:56,349 --> 00:58:02,230
He made it clear he didn't appreciate them
coming to his Intensive Care room

938
00:58:02,730 --> 00:58:04,398
and bothering him.

939
00:58:04,482 --> 00:58:06,442
And then he collapsed back into his bed.

940
00:58:07,777 --> 00:58:09,946
And I was sure
he was gonna expire right then.

941
00:58:10,029 --> 00:58:12,073
[monitors beep]

942
00:58:12,198 --> 00:58:14,200
The considered view
of the Justice Department

943
00:58:14,283 --> 00:58:15,826
was that this thing…

944
00:58:16,452 --> 00:58:19,080
this program
had not been operating lawfully.

945
00:58:19,163 --> 00:58:22,875
And this was an effort by the White House
to get him to change his mind.

946
00:58:25,169 --> 00:58:27,296
[Gonzales]
We just thanked him and we left.

947
00:58:27,380 --> 00:58:32,343
When we get back into the Suburban,
we tell Addington it didn't go well.

948
00:58:32,885 --> 00:58:34,011
We don't have a signature.

949
00:58:36,722 --> 00:58:39,350
[Goldsmith] President Bush
reapproves the entire program.

950
00:58:39,433 --> 00:58:41,769
He defies our advice,
which is his prerogative to do.

951
00:58:41,852 --> 00:58:43,521
He's the president of the United States.

952
00:58:43,604 --> 00:58:45,606
[distant siren wailing]

953
00:58:47,024 --> 00:58:49,068
The whole Executive Branch
was about to melt down.

954
00:58:49,151 --> 00:58:52,613
There was gonna be massive resignations
in the Justice Department.

955
00:58:53,739 --> 00:58:55,116
The program would've come out then.

956
00:58:55,199 --> 00:58:57,702
Everything would've been worse
for the White House and president,

957
00:58:57,785 --> 00:58:59,829
including on the national security front.

958
00:59:00,788 --> 00:59:02,540
And I think that's why they backed down.

959
00:59:06,586 --> 00:59:09,755
Nothing like that, as best I can tell,
has ever happened in American history,

960
00:59:09,839 --> 00:59:11,424
on so many levels.

961
00:59:11,507 --> 00:59:14,969
And I basically was just immensely furious

962
00:59:15,052 --> 00:59:19,765
with the excessive secrecy
and control of the White House.

963
00:59:19,849 --> 00:59:22,893
I felt like they really
didn't want us to do a thorough

964
00:59:22,977 --> 00:59:24,812
and real vetting of the program.

965
00:59:24,895 --> 00:59:29,483
They got the answer they wanted early on,
and they didn't want it vetted after that.

966
00:59:30,568 --> 00:59:32,653
I didn't feel like
the White House was candid with me.

967
00:59:37,700 --> 00:59:41,245
[Drake] I started blowing the whistle
internally, through multiple channels.

968
00:59:42,288 --> 00:59:46,500
I confronted the lead attorney
who had the access to the program.

969
00:59:46,584 --> 00:59:49,545
I reported it
to the Inspector General of NSA.

970
00:59:50,004 --> 00:59:53,507
In February 2006, I went to the press
with unclassified information

971
00:59:53,591 --> 00:59:56,260
regarding the mass
domestic surveillance regime.

972
00:59:58,387 --> 01:00:00,806
They decided
to make life very difficult for me.

973
01:00:03,100 --> 01:00:05,645
But we all have moral agency.

974
01:00:05,728 --> 01:00:07,772
We all have the ability
to make our choices.

975
01:00:07,855 --> 01:00:12,068
We also can choose in how we respond
to things that do happen.

976
01:00:14,612 --> 01:00:17,823
You know, I witnessed a history.
It was an extraordinary period.

977
01:00:17,907 --> 01:00:20,743
And I just-- I came out of the dark.

978
01:00:20,826 --> 01:00:24,538
I wasn’t gonna just sit by
and watch it all happen.

979
01:00:25,373 --> 01:00:27,249
I would've regretted it
for the rest of my life.

980
01:00:29,126 --> 01:00:32,421
[Goldsmith] The Stellar Wind program
was controversial,

981
01:00:32,505 --> 01:00:34,590
but the law didn't change. And, in fact,

982
01:00:34,674 --> 01:00:37,218
Congress ended up
renewing the surveillance law

983
01:00:37,301 --> 01:00:39,720
and, in some respects,
expanding surveillance powers.

984
01:00:40,554 --> 01:00:43,099
The Obama administration
changes some policies and stuff,

985
01:00:43,182 --> 01:00:45,184
but the essential law didn't change.

986
01:00:49,730 --> 01:00:54,193
Basically, the massive surveillance powers
of the government have continued,

987
01:00:54,276 --> 01:00:58,406
and have been reapproved largely
even after the revelations.

988
01:01:00,574 --> 01:01:04,203
It's quite clear that they acted
super aggressively after 9/11,

989
01:01:04,286 --> 01:01:06,080
and that they were really fearful.

990
01:01:07,039 --> 01:01:10,376
They felt blind
about what the enemy was up to.

991
01:01:11,210 --> 01:01:14,672
And they, in a panic, did everything
they could to collect information.

992
01:01:15,464 --> 01:01:20,136
And they did so in ways
that pretty clearly broke laws.

993
01:01:20,219 --> 01:01:22,221
[dramatic music plays]

994
01:01:24,724 --> 01:01:29,186
Any power without constraint
always leads to abuse.

995
01:01:33,482 --> 01:01:37,486
[Paradis] 9/11 certainly just
made people want to not be soft.

996
01:01:38,195 --> 01:01:40,489
And probably more, you know, prosaically,

997
01:01:40,573 --> 01:01:42,575
they just wanted
to beat the shit out of people.

998
01:01:43,075 --> 01:01:46,787
It was anger. Right? Wouldn't you want
to beat the shit out of someone who,

999
01:01:46,871 --> 01:01:50,374
you know, murdered 3,000 people?
Who wasn't angry?

1000
01:01:51,333 --> 01:01:54,211
But that's why we elect leaders:
to be the cooler heads,

1001
01:01:54,295 --> 01:01:56,672
to have the longer vision
to protect the values

1002
01:01:56,756 --> 01:02:01,594
that we claim to treat as the organizing
principle of our society.

1003
01:02:01,677 --> 01:02:03,095
To actually protect those things,

1004
01:02:03,179 --> 01:02:07,266
so that the world we're living in
after the current crisis passes

1005
01:02:07,349 --> 01:02:10,895
is not so radically different
than the one that we came from.

1006
01:02:11,687 --> 01:02:13,230
-[man] All right.
-[woman] Give Dad hugs.

1007
01:02:13,314 --> 01:02:14,231
[baby coos]

1008
01:02:14,315 --> 01:02:16,400
[reporter]
Thousands more in America's military

1009
01:02:16,484 --> 01:02:18,068
heading now to distant points.

1010
01:02:18,152 --> 01:02:19,528
[helicopter blades thumping]

1011
01:02:19,612 --> 01:02:23,616
[man] Ten days after I graduated
high school, I got into the Marine Corps.

1012
01:02:24,492 --> 01:02:25,618
[artillery fire]

1013
01:02:27,745 --> 01:02:29,288
What have I gotten myself into

1014
01:02:29,371 --> 01:02:31,707
would not become clear
until my first day in combat.

1015
01:02:31,791 --> 01:02:33,334
[explosion]

1016
01:02:34,418 --> 01:02:36,462
[dramatic music plays]

1017
01:03:31,976 --> 01:03:33,978
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