United States Department of State

And we should point out, at that point, there were not just this fire on the...

There were rumors the Supreme Court building had been hit, the State Department had been a car bomb.

You name the Washington landmark, there, there was rumors that it had been hit by some sort of terrorist attack.

All people knew that we were under attack, and nobody knew where the next attack was coming from.

Well over 100 nations have signed it, and it's been ratified.

Uh, but the Artemis Accords are bilateral treaties, bilateral agreements, and that's between the United States or between NASA and the State Department and every individual signatory.

So all these other countries, so th- uh, think there's about 54, 55 countries at the moment that have signed the Artemis Accords, they are all with the US.

They're, they're bilateral.

Uh, so the first is you, I think correctly noted an uptick in how the US has viewed the importance of the Pacific that's played out over the last decade, starting under Trump One.

Uh, continuing and, and accelerating and broadening under the Biden administration, but then came to a screeching halt at the beginning of the second Trump administration, not only with the blowing up of USAID before it got folded into the US State Department, with the tariffs that have hit around the region, with the fuel crisis, uh, that the war in Iran, uh, has brought on, and, uh, of course, the downgrading of climate.

All of which are huge concerns around the Pacific from every conversation, uh, that I've had.

But there's also, that was, if we were going to, say, putting aside the Iran war, if those were kind of year one effects, there are some green shoots in US policy here.

Mr. Trump, frustrated with the lack of progress, halted the operation on May fifth.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department attorney who advised on the law of war, said there are more significant civilian casualty incidents over the Rough Rider campaign than all the previous attacks during the Biden administration.

He added that the Trump administration launched two to three times the number of strikes Biden did.

Trump was also willing to bomb targets in more densely populated areas than Biden was, he added.

But there's just so much news floating around at that period of time, and it is kind of hard to filter out exactly what's true and what was just misinformation.

you know, a bomb on the State Department, which obviously turned out to be false.

Right.

Sure.

And

there's been no public messaging from Trump or Rubio, nothing on Truth Social, no statements from the State Department.

Well, Rubio actually, he

didn't condemn the UK's move.

What were you doing on 9-11, and what do you remember most about it?

Well, I had an office at the top floor of the State Department with a view of the Pentagon, and I was watching Fox & Friends, and our Newsmax's Edie Hill was leading the coverage of what was happening, and we all thought it was an accident.

and then the second plane hit and we knew it was an accident and then we saw smoke rising from the pentagon and my staff and i we fled the building as soon as possible before they locked the state department down for almost eight hours there was chaos in washington there were reports of explosions outside the state department i live about an hour away from d.c and my family was panicking because the cell phone system went down friends of mine on the hill said there was chaos as they tried to find members of congress bring them to secure locations This really was the end of a period of innocence, a period where we thought we were invulnerable to attacks like this from around the world.

I think we're stronger now, but man, that was a horrible, horrible day.

How have you changed as a nation for the better since that day?

that an airplane was going to crash into the World Trade Center, and then a second airplane, and that these would be deliberate acts aimed at taking down the World Trade Center and killing thousands of people.

So there's an element of shock and awe of surprise for everybody in the system.

There's always the fog of war, a lot of false reports coming in, car bombs gone off at the State Department, those kinds of things, airplanes headed for Camp David.

Mr. Trump, frustrated with the lack of progress, halted the operation on May 5th.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department attorney who advised on the law of war, Trump was also willing to bomb targets in more densely populated areas than Biden was, he added.

Additionally, the migrant detention facility that was bombed in April 2025 had routinely been visited by officials from the Red Cross and should have been understood by Central Command as off-limits for attack.

A Defense Department report on military operations for 2025 said, acknowledged the civilian death toll from the attacks on the port and the migrant detention facility, along with a strike in Sana, the capital, on April 6th that killed five civilians and wounded 25.

It's raining this morning at the Pentagon where groups have gathered to remember those who died there in the 9-11 attacks.

One thing to remember about this place, and I watched it burning from the State Department, a huge cloud over the city of Washington, of course, aircraft, fighter jets going down the Potomac River.

But everybody here who had to continued to work.

They worked overnight because they all knew they were going to war.