How 9/11 changed everything

Jon (0:02)

This is a Global Production.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

This just in, you are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.

Jon (0:16)

And it wasn't until the second plane went in that you realized that America was under attack in a way that it hadn't seen since Pearl Harbor.

SPEAKER_3 (0:26)

We have serious news of a major possible air crash in the United States.

Emily Maitlis (0:31)

He has to keep reading, he finishes the book, he doesn't want to alarm the children.

SPEAKER_5 (0:35)

States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.

Jon (0:41)

Which side would you rather be on? The side of terrorists who will do this without compunction or the side of freedom loving America? I know exactly which side I'm on in this debate.

SPEAKER_6 (0:53)

Today, jury selection begins in a critical phase of the trial of Andrea Yates accused of drowning her five children. But how will she be able to save her own life? Plus superstar Michael Jordan in the news, the strongest words yet from Jordan, that he will be back.

Good morning America, I'm Charles Gibson.

SPEAKER_2 (1:14)

I'm Diane Sawyer and it's Tuesday, September 11th, 2001

SPEAKER_6 (1:18)

Michael may be back.

Emily Maitlis (1:20)

Good morning America. That is what the news sounded like on American television on the morning of 9-11, just 45 minutes before the first plane would hit the World Trade Center and the world would change forever.

Jon (1:35)

The preoccupation was Michael Jordan returning to the NBA.

45 minutes later, thousands would die in the World Trade Center and in subsequent attacks. There's no doubt the world changed on 9-11. It was the first attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, the first time that Article 5 of the NATO Treaty was invoked. The world changed, but are we still living with the repercussions of it? Welcome to The News Agents.

SPEAKER_6 (2:10)

The News Agents.

Jon (2:13)

It's Jon.

Emily Maitlis (2:13)

It's Maitlis.

Jon (2:14)

And joining us as well for this edition of The News Agents is Miles Taylor, who you will hear regularly on The News Agents USA, who served in the first Trump administration, although subsequently fell out. And this is an episode we're devoting to the 25th anniversary of 9-11 and the unique perspectives that each of us has on that dreadful day, but also the year itself, 2001, which kind of started as such a year of hope. And by September, it felt like it was a different place.

Emily Maitlis (2:47)

Well, it started, didn't it, in a place of absolute confusion, because people were still arguing over the hanging chads in Florida. I mean, for the first three weeks of January, people didn't know whether George Bush or Gore, Al Gore, would actually end up being the president. And so you could argue that, you know, one of the biggest counterfactuals of our lifetime is what would have happened if Gore had been president, would Obama, would Osama have struck the towers? If Gore had been president, would he have responded in the same way? Unanswerable. But I just put that out there because in the US, they essentially were just getting round to George Bush as president. He'd just taken office. And he swore, of course, that he would be committed to domestic issues. Didn't want to be the internationalist, didn't want to be the man who started wars, if you heard that before, didn't want to look to where Clinton had been with attacks and the Somalia and the-

Miles Taylor (3:48)

The USS Cole and all the rest of it.

Emily Maitlis (3:50)

All the rest of it. He wanted to be the domestic guy. In the UK, it was very strange that year because not an awful lot was happening. We had foot and mouth, so I remember the burning pile. I mean, it's extraordinary, these funeral pyres of lambs and cows. But that was the big thing, that we had foot and mouth disease amongst our livestock, terrible for farmers, didn't really affect that many people. But as a result, the election that would have been a May election, got pushed back to June and people called it, I don't know if you remember, they called it the Hapathy election. People were like, weren't that bothered? Yeah. It was fine.

Blair had come in on this absolute landslide in 97 and what happened in 2001? I think he lost one or two seats.

Jon (4:34)

He got another landslide?

Emily Maitlis (4:35)

Yeah. He got another landslide. Nothing happened. So I sort of put this in the context of it being just an ornery sort of day, an ornery sort of year for a lot of Brits who were kind of, we could say obviously nobody saw this coming.