--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: On the evening of September 11, 2001, while the rubble of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan was still settling, Republicans and Democrats in Washington took a moment to move past their differences. They stood side by side on the Capitol's steps and sang God Bless America.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: God bless America, my home sweet home. When you look at that footage and you hear them sing, you get this overwhelming sense of national unity.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Nearly 20 years later, pro-Trump rioters charged over those same steps at the Capitol. They wanted to overturn the results of a Democratic presidential election.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The rioters were calling for the vice president's death, and members of Congress would later say they worried the mob was going to kill them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's a sort of, to me, a real feeling of not only irony, but an oh my God, we were once this and now we're this.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's filmmaker Michael Kirk. He's the director of the new frontline documentary America After 9-11.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: His film takes us from that coming together after an act of terrorism to an attack on our democracy by American citizens.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This documentary lays out how the U.S.'s response to 9-11 through three administrations contributed to mistrust in the U.S. government and the press, how it led to further political polarization and an upending of what were seen as American values, and how it all came to a head on January 6th.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can watch Kirk's documentary, America After 9-11, on Apple News.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In my conversation with Kirk, he explains why Democrats supported a Republican administration's decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That support, that choice, changed the course of the two decades that would follow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Fear. Fear entered the political mainstream of America on 9-11 and a month later when anthrax is suddenly appearing in a Senate office building and other places when we're all hearing the news, especially cable news out there ringing the bell saying there's going to be a dirty bomb, there's going to be attacks here and there.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You start to feel tremendously insecure as Americans.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And I think from the very beginning, that's when the Democrats and the Republicans recognized they had to come together and support where the young president was, the young Republican president was taking America at the time because division and debate would not do it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The American people were already unsettled enough.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Unsettling the American people would happen slowly but surely over the next 20 years.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When we look at Bush as a president, how did he frame this war? And what role did he see the U.S. playing?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Good and evil, policemen of the world. Remember, for anybody who wasn't yet paying close attention to politics, there was a big debate once the Soviet Union had fallen and it had become Russia again, that we were the superpower in the world.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We were clearly the good guys against what used to be called by Ronald Reagan the evil empire. That's Russia now.
--:-- Michael Kirk: It was easy then to imagine, well, what could we really do? What should we do? What should we be worried about?
--:-- Michael Kirk: And of course, George Bush's administration in those first nine months was not at all worried about terrorism.
--:-- Michael Kirk: The CIA, or at least parts of it, were worried about it. The FBI, or at least parts of it, were worried about it, but not the White House, not the president.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And it was a big surprise when it happened, and we weren't ready for that.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And Bush's response, of course, feeling responsible for the 3,000 people or nearly 3,000 people who died at the World Trade Center.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He bought the option offered to him by the Central Intelligence Agency, which is a fast attack light force, not hundreds of thousands of military troops.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Just we'll go in, we'll cut the head off the snake.
--:-- Michael Kirk: In one case, we'll bring Osama bin Laden's head back on dry ice, is what the head of the CIA counterterrorism task force, Kofor Black, said.
--:-- Michael Kirk: There was a kind of bloodlust going on at the time.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And I think if you would have asked the vast majority of Americans at that moment, they would have agreed that that's what we should have done, that that was the job.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So right after the attacks, we have fear pervading American society.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Bush was insisting we were the good guys in this fight.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But your film shows Vice President Dick Cheney taking a particular approach, one that many people argue undercuts American values.
--:-- Michael Kirk: How would you describe Cheney's response to 9-11?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Yeah, Cheney was terrified. Cheney thought, the sky is falling, and we have to do whatever we can, whatever we have to do, by any means necessary to protect America.
--:-- Michael Kirk: That he swore this was not going to happen on his watch.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And if the president had one perspective, which was, you know, we're going to try to be good people, we're going to try to be the good guys, Cheney didn't care whether we were the good guys or not.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Cheney wanted to protect America at any cost.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He announced it to the people. We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We've got to spend time in the shadows and in the intelligence world.
--:-- Michael Kirk: A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly without any discussion using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we going to be successful
--:-- Michael Kirk: Within hours, it was in play.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Rules were changed at the Justice Department.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Authorizations were granted to military and intelligence groups that would, over the months, allow them to do black site prisons, allow them to begin the process of extraordinary rendition, which means going into sovereign nations and grabbing people who you thought was a terrorist and dragging them out and taking them to Guantanamo and other black site prisons, secret prisons, torturing them to try to get information.
--:-- Michael Kirk: All of that was fair game.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So as we are on the hunt for bin Laden and as we are making our way into Iraq, the U.S. press is covering all this.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And when it comes to this media coverage leading up to the evasion of Iraq, The big press, the major papers, the networks, in hindsight, they all look pretty bad.
--:-- Michael Kirk: How did so many reporters get it so wrong, Michael?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Well, they're Americans. You know, in a lot of cases, they're Americans.
--:-- Michael Kirk: The politics of fear not to be underestimated.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Everybody was afraid.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Everybody had been wrong about terrorism.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And now they were not going to be wrong about chemical warfare or a nuclear weapon or whatever.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Saddam Hussein may have cooking out in the desert.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So everybody joined the parade.
--:-- Michael Kirk: If they weren't cheerleading, they were certainly not asking super hard questions.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And in lots of ways, some of their best reporters were succumbing to the lies from their sources at the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the White House.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So when it becomes clear that this claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was false, a lie, how do you think it changed how people saw news media?
--:-- Michael Kirk: The news media itself is the best judge of that because suddenly they realized that their enterprise, their accountability factors had not been, those meters had not been turned on.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And boy, did they turn them on.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Fox News was rising.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Right-wing radio was rising in defense of what was happening.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But in so many other ways, the press went the other way.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And justifiably given how wrong the assertions were.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And when it was all put in the hands of Colin Powell, Secretary of State Colin Powell, you know, the most revered political figure in America, when that was all in his hands to make the sale in front of the United Nations, the world watched, the press watched.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Saddam Hussein already possesses two out of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And when it was wrong, when it was a lie, when his own reputation was so profoundly diminished, I think people in the country, if you want to point to one big moment where everybody said, wait a minute, it was the moment you didn't find weapons of mass destruction.
--:-- Michael Kirk: It's the big beacon that gets turned on where suddenly, oh, my God, everybody, including the press, including regular people, including people in the military are like, oh, my God, what have we got ourselves into here?
--:-- Michael Kirk: And the rest, as they say, is all falling action.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Was he misled or do you think he knew the information he was conveying that he was selling was false?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Well, we asked him, and he said, look, I was misled by the, I believe, the intelligence services, meaning really the CIA.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He had spent a weekend, a bloody weekend, out at Langley with the CIA as they were trying to sell him, they and the vice president's staff trying to sell him the bill of particulars about why we should go to war.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And he was very skeptical, appropriately so.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But in the end, the thing nobody will ever really understand, he goes along, including him.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And when we ask him, so what's up with that? Why was it you? Why were you up there?
--:-- Michael Kirk: He said, look, that's my job.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I'm the salesman on behalf of the administration.
--:-- Michael Kirk: When it didn't work out, I was heartbroken.
--:-- Michael Kirk: When it was wrong, I was heartbroken.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Well, I'll bet he was.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I'll bet he was.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Because an awful lot of the world and an awful lot of Americans lost a lot of trust in the institutions of the government and, of course, in Secretary Powell himself.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I want to move on to this bloodlust that you mentioned earlier.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Your film includes testimony from a Guantanamo Bay detainee.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We now know conditions were horrible in Guantanamo.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Yeah.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But how did the U.S. portray those conditions in the beginning?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Well, Donald Rumsfeld was the spokesman.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And he'd served in the military as a pilot and flown off of the naval station there in Guantanamo.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And he one day is asked, well, what about Guantanamo? My God, these people, the conditions.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He says, come on, Guantanamo, compared to the battlefields of Afghanistan or the rocks and mountains is a paradise.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Guantanamo, you know, he portrayed it almost as a club med almost.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And, of course, when you were there and you saw the conditions people were living in, Essentially, they were outdoor cages like for dogs.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And on a concrete slab, the sanitary conditions were horrible.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And of course, you have young and terrified people there.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Just terrible.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You put a big emphasis on how after 9-11, the U.S. government was apparently more vocal about its willingness to torture people.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: How did we so quickly pivot to waterboarding and black site prisons?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Was our taste for violence new or just uncloaked
--:-- Michael Kirk: This is one of those questions that all things are true
--:-- Michael Kirk: There were some people a lot of FBI agents who were involved in those early interrogations who walked away
--:-- Michael Kirk: The FBI eventually walked away.
--:-- Michael Kirk: One FBI agent we talked to said he, when the prisoners were being interrogated, using the word loosely, actually they would play sounds all night long out into the yard of rabbits being killed, screaming, that terrible scream.
--:-- Michael Kirk: or Marilyn Manson music, you know, at full volume.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Guys were sleep deprived and chained up.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And then they're brought into this room and somebody's asking them lots of questions.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And there were FBI agents we talked to who said, I had to get out of there.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I wasn't going to, I think this is illegal behavior.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I didn't want to have anything to do with it.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And by the way, we were never going to get a case made in front of any jury if these people got any kind of lawyers because of the way they were being treated.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But there was no intention of trials or anything else.
--:-- Michael Kirk: That's why they were being kept off U.S. soil.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: By the time Bush is getting ready to leave the White House, Americans are feeling disillusioned with these wars.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We all learned about the steps the American government took that went against its core values.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Many people are feeling like the USA entered Iraq, in particular under false pretenses, and that the government misled its citizens.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People are being killed, and many Americans just want these wars to end.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So they elect Barack Obama.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Michael, in your film, someone you spoke with says, Barack Obama wouldn't have been elected president without 9-11.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Explain that.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Yes, that quote comes from Ben Rhodes, who was one of his top aides with him at all times.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Wrote speeches for him, was at the National Security Council, a very high-ranking and devoted employee of Barack Obama, who says he knows that if Bush and America hadn't turned toward Iraq, Obama would not be president.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He says America would have not elected a black man president of the United States under other circumstances.
--:-- Michael Kirk: This was the moment where a man who steps up, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, his primary opponent in the primaries, who was in favor of the war and had stood up, and we show her statement in the film, stood up and said, you know, we've got to go to war.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We've got to do these things in Iraq. We've got to stop Saddam Hussein.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So here's Barack Obama, the one guy who back in 2002 said, absolutely not, publicly said, we're not going to do that.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So everybody thinks Barack Obama is the anti-war candidate.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He is elected, obviously for many other reasons as well.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But Ben said primarily he thought it was the fact that Americans, at least Democrats, and those people who were called Republican Obama supporters, the independents, went with Obama rather than McCain, who feels much more like a member of the Republican war establishment.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So Obama takes office, and there's all this hope and expectation that he's going to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Why didn't it work?
--:-- Michael Kirk: I mean, in the first place, he was not what everybody thought he was, which was an anti-war candidate.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He was going to come in and shut the wars down.
--:-- Michael Kirk: In the first place, that would have been practically, apparently, impossible.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You can't just turn the spigot off.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And remember, fear is driving Americans.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So if there's the slightest chance that coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq, even as much as you hate the war, there will be a terror attack that would take down Dallas or something, you as president of the United States would be done.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Your political career would be over.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So you've got to carefully peel it all back, roll it off.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He kind of puts Iraq in the hands of the generals and keeps it over to the side and says, I have a plausible reason to believe we should turn our attention back to Afghanistan.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He brings in General Stanley McChrystal, one of the toughest guys.
--:-- Michael Kirk: His staff called themselves the snake eaters.
--:-- Michael Kirk: They went in and they made an assessment of what it would take to win in Afghanistan.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And they came back and said, 80,000 troops.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He was shocked.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He said, I can't do that, the American people.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But he says, I'll give you 30,000, but I'll add a caveat, which is we've got to be out of there in 18 months.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So you send a signal to the Taliban, we're coming in, but we're not really in for very long, just wait us out.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And you send 30,000 Americans in the face of that, not enough to do whatever McChrystal thought it was possible to do, but certainly enough to get a lot of them hurt.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And maybe your reputation as a war president sullied.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And McChrystal at one moment calls it a bleeding ulcer.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I'm not winning there.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I'm losing guys.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I'm not winning there.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And Obama shakes his head and says, oh my God, we can't walk away, but I don't want to do this anymore.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We also can't win.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So that's when the phrase mow the lawn gets started, because
--:-- Michael Kirk: Because that's when Obama is advised and realizes, if I leave and an attack comes from there, some future terrorist attack comes from there, my presidency's done it.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I've got a big domestic agenda I want to get done.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So what we'll do is we'll mow the lawn.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We'll get enough CIA in there.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We'll get enough military in there.
--:-- Michael Kirk: They'll be watching closely.
--:-- Michael Kirk: That's the Obama experience of it.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And he decides to settle for drones to do most of the killing.
--:-- Michael Kirk: the so-called sanitized, over-the-sky drone warfare.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He ramps that up in a way that's like 10 times as many as Bush.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And in other words, he's got just a mess on his hands after a couple of years of the first two couple of years of his presidency.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Your film makes the point that many people in the U.S. feel betrayed by the Obama administration.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Then Trump takes office.
--:-- Michael Kirk: How does Trump use 9-11 to his advantage?
--:-- Michael Kirk: He sees it as a wedge issue.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Trump who remember in this process division and distrust are growing in America
--:-- Michael Kirk: There a real anti feeling and not just by liberal elite Democrats but by people who fought the war people whose children fought the war, and wives and husbands fought the war, and mothers and fathers who fought the war.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Many three, four terms over there.
--:-- Michael Kirk: There's an anger in the society that Trump absolutely recognizes.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He sees it as a wedge issue.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He wants what he wants to do more than anything is say, I'm going to do something completely different.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He claims that Obama is the father of ISIS.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He tags Obama with all of the bad things about the war and says, I'm going to go in and clean it up.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Don't tell me we can't defeat ISIS.
--:-- Michael Kirk: That's ridiculous.
--:-- Michael Kirk: I'm going to do that.
--:-- Michael Kirk: But he, of course, doesn't do that.
--:-- Michael Kirk: He gets ensnared like everybody else.
--:-- Michael Kirk: What his real plan was, was to bring the war home, to capitalize on the division, the distrust, the polarization in the society, and to start using the language in the first place, the sort of anti-Muslim, makes it a racial issue, makes it a religious issue, talks about the insecurity of our borders, starts to play on the politics of fear again, but in a different way, aiming those politics of fear at groups like Antifa, Black Lives Matter, especially after the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter people and many, many, many, many, many more hitting the streets, themselves distrustful and unhappy with the government.
--:-- Michael Kirk: So there's Trump encouraging governors to roll out the National Guard, making it look like a war on the streets of America.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And that all coincides with his re-election campaign in 2020.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And that is what Donald Trump brought to America after 9-11 events.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Trump loses.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And on January 6th, we have this insurrection.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You mentioned earlier how Al-Qaeda was aiming to take the capital, but it ends up being the insurrectionists.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Is there an irony there?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Well, yes, irony for sure.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Maybe more than that.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Maybe a real signal.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You know, we went out into the world to, and said we were bringing democracy to authoritarian regimes, to countries and regular people who had never experienced it.
--:-- Michael Kirk: That we have the taste of freedom, and America was going to bring it with us.
--:-- Michael Kirk: That's who we were.
--:-- Michael Kirk: The greatest irony is that there they are.
--:-- Michael Kirk: There it is.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Our democracy, not their democracy, not the one we were exporting, but our own democracy is in unbelievable peril at the moment that Donald Trump issues the big lie about the results of the election and says it was stolen.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Make no mistake, this election was stolen from you, from me, and from the country.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We will never give up.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We will never concede.
--:-- Michael Kirk: It doesn't happen.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You don't concede when there's theft in God.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Our country has had enough.
--:-- Michael Kirk: We will not take it anymore.
--:-- Michael Kirk: The phrases of the politics of fear are designed to tap distrust, disenfranchisement, ring those bells that had been ringing all the way back to weapons of mass destruction and Colin Powell, the torture memos, the Abu Ghraib photos, the world walking away from us.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And there it was on display that afternoon in Washington as his supporters, many decked out in battle fatigues, and they were dressed for war.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And they walked up Pennsylvania Avenue and history would unfold and would unfold in a way that, as I said earlier, and I think our film really reveals, it's like knowing what happened on January 6th and watching the events that I think we roll out in the film, it's almost impossible not to believe that this was brewing, that the democracy was increasingly in peril, and that this moment when these insurrectionists did what Al-Qaeda couldn't do, and were inside the building hunting to kill the vice president of the United States of America, that that would be the logical conclusion of all of our adventures for 20 years in the Middle East.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Astonished me enough that we ask everybody we interviewed, did it happen? Do you feel the connection?
--:-- Michael Kirk: Because it seems almost implausible.
--:-- Michael Kirk: And they say, yes, yes, absolutely.
--:-- Michael Kirk: There it is.
--:-- Michael Kirk: This is the manifestation of what you do when for 20 years you lie to people.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You don't follow the order.
--:-- Michael Kirk: The things about the society that you believe in, your values have been diminished.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You don't believe the politicians.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You don't believe the press.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You believe that something totally nefarious can happen.
--:-- Michael Kirk: A presidential election can be stolen and 80 million votes can come out of thin air.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You believe it because you've seen such astonishing other things pass before your field of vision in the last 20 years.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Michael Kirk is a documentarian whose latest film examines the link between September 11th attacks and the Capitol insurrection.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Michael, thank you so much for being on Apple News today.
--:-- Michael Kirk: You're very welcome.
--:-- Michael Kirk: Thanks for the great questions.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Michael Kirk's documentary, America After 9-11, can be viewed now on the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find the link by typing Apple News Today in the search bar and then tapping on the show notes page for this episode.
