Now, looking back today, is that how it is still viewed?

I, I, I think very much so.

That this was a plot where there, w- we may not have fully understood what Al-Qaeda was plotting toward But we certainly knew that there was a plot underway.

Uh, you know, the CIA knew that Al- known Al-Qaeda operatives, uh, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar were in Los Angeles in the United States in the summer of 2001, information that for various reasons, some of which I believe we still don't know to this day, never made it to the FBI, and that there was a failure to, uh, uh, in the terminology that came up after 9/11, to connect the dots in the lead up.

Um, but remember, uh, uh, Osama bin Laden was very forthright about the plot-

[laughs]

The, the hanging chads.

And that what we saw afterward was this incredible surge of patriotism and unity.

All right, welcome to the Jim Acosta Show on this 9/11, 25 years later.

Uh, of course, if you're tuning in earlier in the day, we were, uh, paying tribute to the heroes of 9/11, remembering the fallen, remembering the family members, remembering the bravery from that day, and I've got the perfect guest to talk about this further.

It's Garrett Graff, uh, author and historian, journalist, uh, author of the book, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11.

It's an invaluable resource.

Uh, and Garrett, it's great to see you.

Thanks for coming back on the show to talk about this.

Right

... uh, special operations raids in American history.

What happened there?

Yeah, there was a very immediate rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States.

And one of the things that is hard for us to remember is how hard George W. Bush tried as president in those first couple of days and weeks and months of the War on Terror to ensure that the War on Terror was not seen as a war against Muslims.

And he goes actually here in Washington a couple of days after 9-11 and gives this remarkable speech that al-Qaeda, he goes to a mosque and he says, you know, al-Qaeda is not representative of Islam.

It is not representative of Muslims.

Islam is a religion of peace.

It is a religion that gives peace and comfort and hope to 1.6 billion people around the world.

How do you can you build that trust back? And if you can't, how do you do it, Garrett?

Powerful memory, your most powerful memory of that day.

I remember, as so many of the voices you just heard from, the surprise and the confusion of that day.

And I have a lot of sort of individual memories of, you know, not understanding how the towers fell, you know, not understanding who this Osama bin Laden was.

person and this Al-Qaeda person that everyone on TV seemed so sure was the force behind the attacks, you know, a person and a group that I had never heard of.

I was a college student at the time.

And to me, though, the part of the day and a couple of your callers that just referenced it here, a couple of those voices, that I keep coming back to is the 17 minutes at the start of the day, the time between 8.46, the first crash, and 9.03, the second crash.

Because, you know, we're at this moment where 40% of the country is too young to remember the 9-11 attacks.

But yet that moment has also shaped the nation and, in fact, the entire world that they grew up in.

... because we felt we had missed so many data points of information.

Yeah.

A- and you know, w- this was a moment where America f- felt for the first time this end of this, you know, decades of innocence, that sort of bad things could happen to us from overseas here at home.

And we saw this huge reaction by the US government in the wake thereof.

Um, the morning after 9/11, George Bush sits with his national security and, you know, this new term homeland security advisors, which was something that really came i- into DC lingo after 9/11, and he tells them the next morning in the Roosevelt Room, "Never again." And that becomes the central organizing principle of the US government in what very quickly comes to be known as the global war on terror.

... we still hear people be very flip about 9/11, and we do hear that in different corners of the internet and different political corners of the internet.

Yeah.

A- and I think it, it is a moment where, in retrospect, we really begin to see the poisoning and the breakdown of our information ecosystem and media ecosystem, that this sort of, uh, America has always had a strain of conspiracism, but in the sort of months and years after 9/11, you saw those initial theories turbocharged by the rise and arrival of social media.

What did, what did you learn about that?

Yeah.

You know, one of the challenges that I think we have as a country is we are very bad at understanding our own even very recent history as Americans.

And if you scratch at almost any subject, i- you know, any topic in domestic politics and geopolitics beyond, I can show you how 9/11 altered the arc and trajectory of that issue.

Donald Trump, in many ways, is the result of the forces that are unleashed in American politics in the wake of 9/11 and s- the rise of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim nativism that takes off in the Republican Party, moving from the fringe of the party to the mainstream in the original, you know, first years of Obama's presidency.

And one of the things that's, like, really, it feels really prevalent a- at this moment as we mark the 25th is that the immigration crackdown that we are seeing coast to coast, the, the ICE, Border Patrol, DHS emphasis on mass deportations, the showdowns in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, this is very much downstream of the events of 9/11.

These are the agencies that are created to stop the next 9/11.

To think that even back then there, there were concerns, and to, to see how much has changed and how, how big of a bureaucracy it has become now and just how much this president in particular has, has leaned on, uh, this, this department for, for both practical policy and f- and political purposes, I mean, how much do you think that, that Trump has impacted DHS so- over his second term so far?

When you think back on all the first-person accounts you heard about what unfolded on that day, is there any one quote that stayed with you?

There's a quote in the book from Peter Johansson, who on that morning was one of the commuter ferry captains coming across New York Harbor at 846 when that first crash happens into the North Tower.

And he talks about watching that crash, you know, him and all of his passengers see that plane crash into the North Tower.

And then a few minutes later, the boat continues on to Wall Street Terminal there at the tip of Lower Manhattan, just a few hundred yards away from the World Trade Center.

And as they pull up, there is paper and debris from that crash fluttering down all around them.

And every single person on that boat gets off and walks into Lower Manhattan to begin their workday.

And, you know, of the 500 voices in my book, it to me has always been one of the most haunting because I think you see in that quote just how innocent America actually was at 846 on Tuesday, September the 11th.

In the most charitable picture, what was the Homeland Security Act intended to achieve?

to get our arms around what we were describing, what we were talking

about.

And I think David raises an important point, which is here we are 25 years removed from this world-changing event, what I think is one of the great hinges of American history.

40% of the country is now too young to remember those attacks.

None of us knew that day what comes next.

You know, whether there was a second wave that was coming that afternoon, whether there were more attacks coming on September 12th.

And to really understand why America reacted in the way that we did as a country, as a society, as a government, as a military, you really have to understand the deep fear, chaos, confusion, and trauma that the country experienced living through those events.

What has it meant for this country if that happened?

to get our arms around what we were describing, what we were talking

about.

And I think David raises an important point, which is here we are 25 years removed from this world-changing event, what I think is one of the great hinges of American history.

40% of the country is now too young to remember those attacks.

None of us knew that day what comes next.

You know, whether there was a second wave that was coming that afternoon, whether there were more attacks coming on September 12th.

And to really understand why America reacted in the way that we did as a country, as a society, as a government, as a military, you really have to understand the deep fear, chaos, confusion, and trauma that the country experienced living through those events.

What has it meant for this country if that happened?

They feel the impact and hear the explosion, but some believe it was a small plane, a terrible accident, but not a cause for panic.

Even for a lot of the firefighters and police officers who responded to that first attack and that first crash, there was the sense that this was gonna be bad, but that ultimately this was something that was a handleable emergency.

And in fact, the Port Authority, which was the government agency that actually owned and operated the World Trade Center complex on that morning, made an announcement in the South Tower that people could remain at their desks.

When I was working on my oral history of 9/11, to me, one of the most chilling and captivating quotes I came across was from Peter Johansen, who was the captain of one of the commuter ferries, where he was coming in across New York Harbor and he and all of the passengers aboard the ferry, uh, watched that first plane crash into the North Tower.

And then he pulled the ferry into Wall Street Terminal right there at the base of the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan, and every single passenger got off and walked into Lower Manhattan even as the debris and the papers from that first crash fluttered down around them.

A museum in the bedrock beneath what was once the World Trade Center tells the story of what happened that day in September, while the memorial above commemorates those who lost their lives and welcomes several million visitors every year Though the towers are long gone, 9/11 continues to cast a long shadow over the American psyche for those who experienced that day or grew up in its aftermath.

It has fundamentally changed the nature of our democracy.

It changed our politics.

What do you learn in these oral histories? And is it something where you learn more about how people see these things?

It's a great question.

So as you said, I've done just published my third book length oral history, which was of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.

Did one last year on D-Day, did a previous one on 9-11, have done a bunch of magazine oral histories as well.

And I think the power of oral history to me is that it gives you a chance to go back and live through events in the eyes of the people experiencing them before they know the outcome.

that I think sort of part of the challenge of narrative history, and I love narrative history, I read narrative history, I write narrative history, but narrative history often makes events seem neater, cleaner, simpler, and more preordained than they felt to anyone at the time.

And you guys know this from the intelligence world.

What is a—well, first of all, I don't like the term truther because it's an Orwellian lie, right? These are the basically 9-11 liars or the January 6th liars, right?

What about the fact that he didn't even fly on the old jet after the revelation that the new jet didn't have the defensive capabilities, that he went to a third jet? Would we ever have known about that had the Washington Post not got a tip?

Certainly not in anything close to real time.

And to me, it shows a complete and fundamental misunderstanding by the White House about the value of and importance of the White House press corps, where this is not...

These reporters are not there to just follow the president around and take stenography when he wants to wander back from the bedroom to make a statement to the press.

They are there as an independent source about the status, security, and whereabouts of the president of the United States, which is a matter of immense national security implications as well as as a very serious issue for geopolitical stability.

And so with the president not on this decoy plane, you can have entirely foreseeable and obvious scenarios where something either happened to the decoy plane that everyone thought that the president was aboard, or something happened to the plane that the president was actually aboard and that you could have had, you know, minutes or hours of confusion about the safety and security of the president of the United States, who was in command and control of the U.S. armed forces and nuclear forces, and no ability by the press corps to either confirm or deny rumors about the president's status.

They don't want to call it a war, but we're locked in a war with Iran that it appears we have no strategy for how to get out of.

Yeah, and you know, as with that press conference, so many Donald Trump scandals only begin to make sense as later facts or puzzle pieces fall into place.

Garrett Graff

... and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities.

And FEMA, on a daily basis, is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mountain Weather Bunker, and who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as President of the United States in the event of a nuclear war.

It pooled billions of dollars and top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA, and the FBI.

Uh, if I have this right, basically, you had FBI agents working undercover for FEMA, traveling around the country, visiting warehouses, car shops, casinos, Walmarts, helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city? Y- yes, and often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes.

Mm-hmm

... and museum, that he had the Air Force, uh, retrofit and repaint to become his new Air Force One, his new presidential plane, that was debuted months earlier than it could possibly be securely fitted to fly to this NATO summit at the beginning of July.

And what we now understand is that that plane lacked some of the basic defensive capabilities that are normally part of the presidential fleet, which is how you end up with the president trying to leave, uh, Turkey aboard what was then the backup jet, this longstanding blue and white 747 traditionally known as Air Force One.

How, how seriously should we take that? How dangerous could that make the president's international travel for not just the people on board that old Air Force One, but everybody?

Yeah, uh, and this is sort of one of the parts of this story that I think we're better understanding only in hindsight.

I mean, there is so much in Trump's presidency that is sort of weird in real time that why it's weird and what its significance ends up being really only becomes apparent as future details are known.

This is a situation where we now understand that there was, um, you know, what, what the military and the Secret Service took very seriously as a threat leaving Turkey, and the president comes home after this decoy flight, which again, we didn't know about at the time, and makes this very weird, weekend-

Mm-hmm

... and museum, that he had the Air Force, uh, retrofit and repaint to become his new Air Force One, his new presidential plane, that was debuted months earlier than it could possibly be securely fitted to fly to this NATO summit at the beginning of July.

And what we now understand is that that plane lacked some of the basic defensive capabilities that are normally part of the presidential fleet, which is how you end up with the president trying to leave, uh, Turkey aboard what was then the backup jet, this long-standing blue and white 747 traditionally known as Air Force One.

How, how seriously should we take that? How dangerous could that make the president's international travel for not just the people on board that old Air Force One, but everybody?

Yeah, a- and this is sort of one of the parts of this story that I think we're better understanding only in hindsight.

I mean, there is so much in Trump's presidency that is sort of weird in real time that why it's weird and what its significance ends up being really only becomes apparent as future details are known.

This is a situation where we now understand that there was, um, you know, what, what the military and the Secret Service took very seriously as a threat leaving Turkey, and the president comes home after this decoy flight, which again, we didn't know about at the time, and makes this very weird weekend-

So what did he make of the events at Ankara Airport?

As far as I can tell, and I have studied presidential travel pretty well going back decades, it is effectively unprecedented.

And what I mean by that is there are two different things that are different about this.

The first is that no one has been able to come up with an example of when the press itself was kept in the dark about the president's whereabouts during an international travel like this.

And that there are parts of this security procedure that are normal, including the use of decoy planes, sometimes traveling into war zones in unmarked cargo planes or unmarked other smaller jets.

But in all of those previous instances, the press has been briefed on that in advance and has known the president's sort of whereabouts and attempt at travel.

The second thing that is unprecedented about this is is the fact that the White House has continued to keep this a secret since the conclusion of the trip.

I mean, I'm just thinking on board Air Force One, there are therefore journalists there who don't know that there was considered to be a significant enough threat to that plane

The new world is yet to begin, and in the interregnum, there is much morbidity." Is it just over?

That's the heartbreak of this, Brooke.

I think that this world is gone.

We could elect a whole string of presidents going forward who believe in NATO and invest in NATO, who try to restart USAID, who try to lure the best foreign students back to the United States to do research at our universities, to rebuild the trust in the Justice Department.

And I think whether you're a potential immigrant to the United States, whether you're a corporate leader in the United States or abroad, or you're the head of state of a foreign country, in the back of your mind is always going to be the United States is only one election away from a Donald Trump again.

You know, I closed my Wired piece talking about the famous opening of historian Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, her book about World War I.

She opens with the grand funeral of England's Edward VII in May of 1910, this fabulously colorful parade of mourning that brought together nine kings, seven queens, and 40 more imperial and royal highnesses.

To hell with you guys."

even in the worst case scenario, a sort of all-out strike from the Soviet Union-

You know, most of the country would be untouched by the explosions from that.

There would be fallout, uh, a- and radiation that would spread beyond, but nuclear war was thought to be a relatively survivable phenomenon.

[gentle music] And so there was this whole elaborate process across the US government of really imagining what post-nuclear war America looked like.

And looking at one of these, uh, on the backside it reads, quote, "I am/we are safe and can be reached at this address." A- and then it has some blank lines where you are meant to fill in the, quote, "members of family included in this notification."

And you would fill out who survived in your party.

And then beyond the Post Office, the, uh, y- US Department of Agriculture was in charge of figuring out how to feed America after nuclear war.

And so they spent a- an inordinate amount of time figuring out sort of what the most survivable food could be, and they ended up amassing what they called survival crackers, manufactured in enormous quantity by companies like Nabisco.

I have not

... um, uh, living in Normandy, um, and sort of showing, uh, you know, leading tours and leading historical, um-uh, uh, projects ar-around Normandy, and I got the chance to spend a week with him exploring Normandy last year as part of the, the book research.

And it, it was a...

I, I'm a very firm believer as a journalist, as a researcher, like, you always have to go somewhere.

Uh, you know, you never really understand a place until you're there and you're, uh, able to sort of experience it and feel it.

And I had spent, you know, by the time I got, um, to Normandy, I'd spent months working at sort of the high level of D-Day.

You know, looking at the planning, you know, the, the, the Roosevelts, the Churchills, the Eisenhowers, the Montgomerys.

[laughs]

[laughs]

... we think it is, and that, uh, we understand less of the world around us than we likely think.

Now, at the same time, part of what has transpired, particularly over the last 25 or 30 years, is rapidly advancing scientific and astronomical understanding of the size, scale, and scope of the universe that makes clear that life probably exists all over our universe, likely even intelligent life exists all over our universe.

Um, that, you know, as late as the 1990s, we did not know that there was a single planet outside our own solar system, and we now understand that potentially, uh, you know, effectively every star likely has, uh, planets orbiting it.

Uh, some chunk of those, uh, would be in what are known as the habitable zone for scientists, and that potentially the, uh, that there are something on the order of one sextillion habitable planets across our universe.

So you can think life is unlikely, you can think intelligent life is unlikely, but do you really think Earth is a one in sextillion chance across-

They seem to be indicating there is something here.

Yeah.

[laughs]

... we think it is, and that, uh, we understand less of the world around us than we likely think.

Now, at the same time, part of what has transpired, particularly over the last 25 or 30 years, is rapidly advancing scientific and astronomical understanding of the size, scale, and scope of the universe that makes clear that life probably exists all over our universe, likely even intelligent life exists all over our universe.

Um, that, you know, as late as the 1990s, we did not know that there was a single planet outside our own solar system, and we now understand that potentially, uh, you know, effectively every star likely has, uh, planets orbiting it.

Uh, some chunk of those, uh, would be in what are known as the habitable zone for scientists, and that potentially the, uh, that there are something on the order of one sextillion habitable planets across our universe.

So you can think life is unlikely.

You can think intelligent life is unlikely.

They seem to be indicating there is something here.

Garret Graff

... and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities.

And FEMA, on a daily basis, is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mount Weather bunker, and who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as President of the United States in the event of a nuclear war.

The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece, though, was news that Giuffrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law and putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government, and not just in the case of a nuke, but also in a so-called national crisis, like a war.

A bunch of this comes out in the late 1980s amid the Iran-Contra hearings and investigations.

It turns out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who is the central figure at the White House of Iran-Contra, was also one of the planners for Project 908.

Garret Graff

... and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities.

And FEMA, on a daily basis, is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mount Weather bunker, and who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as President of the United States in the event of a nuclear war.

And not just in the case of a nuke, but also in a so-called national crisis, like a war.

A bunch of this comes out in the late 1980s amid the Iran-Contra hearings and investigations.

It turns out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who is the central figure at the White House of Iran-Contra, was also one of the planners for Project 9-0-8.

What does that first hour behind the scenes actually look like?

So under the US presidential system of succession, the presidency automatically passes to the next survivor in the line of presidential succession.

In, uh, normal circumstances, that would be Vice President JD Vance, who would sort of symbolically take the oath of office, but under the Constitution, the power actually automatically transfers h- to him at the time of the death of the president.

The challenge of the presidential line of succession is that after the president and vice president, the next person in the line of succession is actually the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and then followed by the president pro tem of the US Senate.

And then it's all of the US Cabinet officials in descending order of when their departments were actually created by Congress.

So it actually has nothing to do with the theoretical importance of one cabinet versus another.

So in, in fact, you actually have the, you know, Secretary of Agriculture much higher in that, uh, presidential line of succession than the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Just generally, though, what can you tell us about the designated survivor protocol? I mean, some of us might have seen it on a particular Netflix series, um, but where does it come from and, and how seriously does the government take it day to day?

Mm-hmm

... that he is planning to build in that now deconstructed East Wing.

But what we know from him is a greater level of detail than any president has ever talked about the presidential bunker, or that, that Presidential Emergency Operations Center, uh, before.

And in the way that he is talking about building this massive bunker, to use his words, with medical facilities, special communications systems, it certainly sounds something larger than we have ever seen that White House bunker before.

The, the PEOC, as it is known, uh, i- is a relatively small facility.

It's set up for, you know, on the order of dozens of staff, um, not scores.

As, you know, certainly not 100 or more.

And Garrett, uh, your point about how small r- compared only, uh, to the Washington-Hildén Ballroom, uh, the Trump ballroom would be, uh, shows that the any possibility of having that be a location for White House Correspondents', uh, Dinner size event is ridiculous.