9/11: The Full Story, 25 Years On with Richard Miniter

Richard Miniter (0:02)

What were they trying to accomplish? They were trying to get the attention of the United States. They wanted a war. They didn't understand us and come to hate us. They have a very rudimentary idea of who we are.

People say, oh, they were making a political statement, but the captured notebooks tell us they really didn't know that much about us. So they had studied our system, found a weak point, took advantage of it. They looked at the FAA's website and found the airports with the largest number of security violations. They did go to these flight schools, where chillingly they said they didn't need to learn how to take off or land. They just needed to know how to operate the aircraft in the air.

You suddenly realize that your country is crowded with heroes wearing ordinary faces.

Francis Foster (0:51)

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Konstantin Kisin (1:12)

Richard Miniter, welcome back to TRIGGERnometry. We have you here on the 25th anniversary of 9-11, which for those of us who lived through it was a moment of great tragedy. It was a moment that changed the world. But more importantly, actually, there is now a whole generation, maybe two generations of people who don't even remember it because they either weren't alive at all, or they were too young to really understand the significance of what was going on. So on this day, what we thought would be fantastic is to have someone like you who's written a bunch of New York Times bestsellers about various aspects of this event, to come back on the show and talk to us about actually the basics, the sort of cover up or to questions, the what, when, why.

So welcome back again and let's talk about it. What happened on 9-11-2001?

Richard Miniter (2:09)

On the day itself, 25 years ago today, four planes were hijacked and unlike normal hijacking, they did not communicate with the outside world. They did not demand ransom. And instead, they purposely flew these planes into buildings. On what everyone describes as a clear, perfect Tuesday sky, they crashed into the towers within 15 minutes while they got each other, two jumbo jets collided with the World Trade Center towers. Another plane went into the Pentagon, and we have horrifying voice recordings of people on the phone inside the plane as it slams into the Pentagon. And then there's the story of Flight 93, the fourth plane, which is hijacked somewhere over Cleveland after having left Maine and was believed headed toward the US. Capitol building itself. If they had reached that target, roughly 5,000 people would have died, including members of the House and the Senate and their key staffs, other dignitaries who were visiting on that day. And the death toll would have been much higher than in the World Trade Center itself.

3,000, rough almost 3,000 people died from more than 100 countries.

There are conspiracy theories saying that the Jews were warned in advance. In fact, for the Orthodox Jews, there was a religious holiday that they had been following for thousands of years, and they stayed home on that day due to a religious holiday, not due to any advance warning, but that is one of those malicious Internet rumors. But let's not forget about the heroism of the people on Flight 93, because it tells us something distinctive about that day and about Americans in general. When the plane was seized by four hijackers over Cleveland and redirected from its intended destination of San Francisco, south towards, south and east towards the US. Capitol, immediately one passenger was killed, apparently scuffling with the hijackers, and the rest were herded to the back of the plane. And these ordinary Americans who were encouraged to use their phones by the hijackers, because part of the Al-Qaeda plan, Al-Qaeda being the terrorist group that had organized and planned these attacks, rehearsing them for years, by the way, wanted them to use the phones to magnify the terror across the American population, to harness the social networks of people who love those people who are about to die, to spread the sense of terror and pain. But on those calls, people didn't just talk, they also listened and they learned that other planes had been hijacked. And because they were uniquely American, these ordinary people said, when they were herded to the back of the plane, we have to make a plan to retake this or they will kill us and whoever we ram this plane into. So they began boiling water, which is used in the back of the plane, to make coffee and tea. They began assembling whatever they could for weapons. We know just fragmentary bits from the cockpit voice recorder and from the transcripts of the phone calls.