♪ anchor: taking stock of today's terrible events. >> 20 years ago on september 11, 2000 one, terrorist attacks rocked america. on that day, the nation watched the horror unfold. the loss of life was profound. the u.s. would never be the same. >> there's a new security problem in this country. >> u.s. troops invaded afghanistan to hunt down those responsible. they stayed there for 20 years. thousands were killed at war. the war that followed in iraq. in the years since, others

including first responders died from 9/11 related illnesses. nila terry and political leaders scrambled to prevent america from being vulnerable to terror again. i generation came of age with leaders focused on surveillance and secrecy. some also unfairly targeted muslims and people of color. >> donald trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the united states. anchor: we explore how the nation is still really from the impact of 9/11. a special edition of washingtonweek. >> corporate funding is provided by -- consumer cellular. additional funding is provided by -- the estate of arnold adams, who and patricia human, sandra and carl magnuson, rose parshall and andy shreve, the cooperation

for public badcasting, and by contributions to your pba's -- pbs station by viewers like you. thank you. >> from washington, jan michels and door. anchor: good evening and welcome to a special edition of washingtonweek. the 9/11 attacks dramatically chged america. it was a tragic and emotional day. this evening, we look at how the attacks impacted american life, politics, and national security. joining me tonight our five top reporters who cover 9/11 and its aftermath. peter baker, p or thomas, osma lead. -- khalid, martha radix, and

vivian salama. thank you so much for being here. martha, you were here in d.c. when this attack happened. you had a husband who was working in the pentagon. you were working at the state department. what sticks in your mind most personally and professionally? >> first of all, it can't help but be immediately personal when you have an attack on your homeland. you can go through the day, you can be a journalist, you can do your job that we all did. you go home at night, you are a scared american. my husband was in the pentagon that day, a correspondent for npr. i was at the state department for abc that day. tom and i had driven in that morning together right after the first plane hit. we started heading in

immediately. just today, looking at the timeline again and when the plane hits, i remember bei on memorial bridge and i called my daughter who was in college. my son was in the fourth grade. so i immediately called my daughter. i told her to turn on the news. i went to the state department. tom went to the pentagon. the second plane hit. and then the state department was evacuated and there were fears that there was a bomb in the parking lot. there were so many rumors going around. i spent the entire day on the more you'll bridge. when the pentagon was hit, i put on my journalist hat because i couldn't think about tom. i'm not a huge worrier. i know it's a huge building. to see the smoke rise from the building all day and see the fighter jets going down the river, we had walkie-talkies because the cell phones down

that day. hearing that there was another plane headed for d.c. i remember saying to my cameraman, they are going to hit the washington monument. no, they are going to hit the capital. in between, you are trying to manage her personal life. i'm worried about my son, is he ok about school, is my daughter ok. tom finally got through to me. is my mother ok? you through that but you have to keep doing what you're doing. you also think of all the people who've lost their lives and then you just know you can keep doing what you're doing to report on the story. anchor: harrowing to listen to. pierre, you happened to be in new york on the night -- day of 9/11. you found yourself on set with peter jennings.

talk to us about what it was like to report, peter jennings leaning into his instinct. what were you hearing from the fbi? >> just thinking about that day, it brings up a wealth of emotions. i had been in new york to meet some of abc news brass. i had been there for nine months and there were people in new york i had not met. that morning, after a thunderstorm kept us in new york overnight, my wife called me after 9:00 and said, did you see that plane hit the world trade center? immediately, i thought it was a small propeller plane. i turned on theelevision and saw that it was much worse than that. the next thing i know, i'm on the set with peter jennings. john miller was an abc news correspondent and a former public affairs director for the nypd. there's this moment when the

first tower comes down. peter immediately knew that there were no words. he raised his hand on the set just like that, which was a signal to all of us to say nothing. in that moment, you were horrified for the people that were in the building. you just cannot believe what's unfolding. when the first tower came down, it was as if something biblical was happening. the way the smoke moved through the city. my sources were shellshocked. they knew that this was an epic failure. they knew that this was something that they would have to answer for in the law enforcement community. their immediate response was just stunned and anger. among the first tips that i got

was that the fbi was going to descend on the airports. my sources said, the flight manifest will be the key to understanding who did this and who directed them. they immediately were telling me about al qaeda and osama bin laden being their primary suspect. as you recall, the cia director george tenant was worrying about the al qaeda planning something. so they were suspicious that it was al qaeda. my sources said, we have to get to the airports. we have to find out who was on those planes. it was just a searing, grotesque day. that's the best way to describe it. anchor: you weren't a reporter yet. we are around the same age. you experienced something that became distinct.

that was targeting of muslims. i want to know from you, what was your experience? how did it rip -- inform your reporting later on? you ended up in pakistan. >> yeah. there's been a lot of talk as we approach the 20th anniversary about the legacy that it has had on muslims in the united states. in conversations that i've had with muslims, i grew up in indiana, it was not very diverse. there's really not a muslim i've come across who will say that they don't see a clear demarcation of a before time and and after time. after 9/11. we were all very aware of that the moment that the towers were hit. i would argue that instinctually, many of us were aware that before we knew who was responsible. there had been a number of terror threats throughout the late 90's.

i think that the challenge is to figure out how to use some of that fear and anxiety and turn it into someing that is actually powerful and useful. i think fear can be very debilitating. i talked about the fact that every muslim knows there was a before and after time. i was thinking back to what life was like. i grew up in a small time -- town in indiana. this is not a unique experience. i remember that our neighbor came and put mounds of dirt up so that he could build a physical barrier so that he would not need to look at the mosque. on top of the dirt, he put an american flag. you would tell folks, he would shoot anyone who would come onto his property. this was a more rural area. these were not isolated experiences.

i always knew i wanted to be a journalist. we went to pakistan after bin laden had been killed. understanding and having some level of cultural fluency is imrtant. we will talk more about this later. overall, 9/11 has a long legacy in terms of the war on terror. look at civilian casualties, u.s. troops lost, the cost of war product -- project estimates that one million people have died in the subsequent 20 years. anchor: former president george w. bush urged world leaders to join the u.s. in fighting terrorism. >> every nation in every region now has a decision to make. either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. [applause] anchor: that call to action led

to the longest war in american history, the war in afghanistan. peter, you are one of the first reporters in afghanistan. talk about what those early days of reporting were like. how did this missing change? the war just ended a few weeks ago. what was the mission and how did it evolve? >> it was next ordinary time. i was based in moscow for th washington post. after 9/11, i decided i would go down to central asia. i was writing about islamic extremism there and their fight to control there. it was the only way to get into afghanistan at that point. pakistan was closed off. the northern alliance was this rebel group that the americans were planning to ally with. they had an embassy so i got in a helicopter there. they flew over in a rickety soviet helicopter.

the northern alliance had a base. i got there a few days after 9/11. the cia wasn't yet -- there yet. it was just me and eventually a group of reporters who were trying to figure out what was going to happen and learn about afghanistan. i didn't know anything about afghanistan. a lot of us were new to the territory. we were learning on the fly. we saw a country of anonymous suffering. it was a biblical scene. it was almost like transporting yourself back to the 1500s or something. it was dusty and no electricity. no running water. people had been brutalized by the taliban for years. young girls weren't allowed to go to school. to then see the american war begin their was this idea that

there would be something better. that the americans would take out the taliban and eventually something better would emerge. that's whe we began 20 years of rather frustrated efforts to remake a country that didn't want to be remade. all the people who have benefited from these last 20 years in terms of more freedom, more opportunity, more economic possibilities are now thrust back into the same kind of repressive regime that we saw there on the ground 20 years ago. that's hard to imagine. it's something that we would not have pictured when we went in there 20 years ago. anchor: you were working in new york city. he later became baghdad chief of the ap. how did what you see that day lead you to covering the middle east? >> i was living and working in

new york. my whole family was there. it was a primary day in new york. we were all going to be working late. i was a producer for the local nbc news. we had planned a late day that day. i was sleeping in and i had to rush to work. i got there before the first tower fell. we were in midtown manhattan, seeing the smoke from downtown. just knowing that this was such an ext ordinary event. i was two years out of college and had my whole future ahead of me. suddenly, it was changed forever. my career took a different direction than i ever would've anticipated because this horrible event opened my eyes to this reality of people out there who want to do bad things to us. all i could think about was, why ? i had to understand. i needed to know. what was also really striking,

i'm an air of a mannequin. i never knew that until 9/11. i'm a new yorker and i never thought of myself as anything else. suddenly, i was a hyphen. my relatives were all adding criticized in public for no reason. just because of their names or the way they look. everything that i knew to be true about who i was seems different. everything about it from my experience as a journalist, havingo rush down as a kid in my early 20's, down to ground zero with people still covered in dust, the smell that will never leave me. having to do that and work around the clock. we were sleeping on couches. 30 rock was a target. we were told to evacuate but we chose to stay. we decided that we were going to go into change my life. anchor: martha, you covered the war extensively and decided to go to a rack and afghanistan.

of course, we've had a lot of conversation about the war in afghanistan. what lay since -- lessons should we take away from this? >> i think there are so many lessons learned from iraq. we have gone over them and we have looked at them. there is so much to talk about this week because of what we've learned. iraq was a huge mistake. at the time, i was at the u.n. and thinking, if: powell comes out and supports this, it's done. he came out and supported it. it was shocking. i remember saying, this sounds like circumstantial evidence. once they got into a rack, there was so much joynd we've done it and we've overtaken this place, there was simply no planning. i watched donald rumsfeld for

years perform at these press briefings. i was one of the few really grumpy people in the briefing room because it seemed like a performance to me. there was no way of getting at it. the lessons reporters can learn, we don't have access to supersecret classified reports all the time. hopefully if we had seen them, we would have said, this is a huge mistake. i do think it's our job every day. it's not just lessons from the iraq war. it's our job every day to try to find out the truth. anchor: thinking about the truth , billions of dollars re poured into homeland security and the departments focused on immigration and security. vast powers were granted to surveillg americans. that set off a wave of hate crimes targeting muslims in particular. pierre, how do you connect these

two? there's the issue of the way that the law enforcement agencies in this country change. there was also surveilling of muslim americans. how do they connect? >> one of the things that haened as a result of 9/11 is the law enforcement and intelligence community admitting that they were caught completely flat-footed. i can recall a meeting with a very senior official at the justice department in the days just after 9/11. this official admitted that the united states had no sense of what other al qaeda operatives might be inside the country. there was this desperate attempt to figure out, we know the countries we think that al qaeda operates from. we need to figure out all the people that came from those countries. there was a huge issue of over stays in people who he stayed in the country longer than was

allowed by their visas. the fbi and the justice department were saying, we don't know if there's another wave. there was great fear of another wave. i think those were the seeds of the patriot act in terms of the government being granted these vast powers of surveillance in the name of protecting. it was out of fear that those things developed. but you know what they say in the south, haste makes waste. critics would say that they were granted too many powers, people were rounded up, soon to be terrorists when there was not much evidence indicating that they were. i can tell yo that it was born out of a sense that the united states government had no clue as to whether there would be other wave. they had a very clear sense that al qaeda was not done. you recall a few months later,

richard read tried to blow up a plane with the shoe bomb. i remember law enforcement saying over and over, these terrorists are incredibly creative. who would ever thought that they would use a plane and turn it into a missile? part of what your question belies is this notion that there was fear and the government started acting very quicklto resolve what it thought was a huge full mobility. -- vulnerability. anchor: the idea of civil liberties and fear. it turned into a political issue when you think about modern politics. the rise of donald trump. talk about how the patriot act and the fear of americans turned into a political movement. >> it's really remarkable when you think about it. what a difference we've seen over the last 20 years. for all of the excesses there were in the post-9/11 time in

terms of targeting muslims who had nothing to do with anything in the united states, you had a president who said that that was the wrong thing to do. george w. bush went to a mosque three or four days after 9/11 to make the point that this was not a war on islam or muslims. it was a war against extremism and violence. not against the american public. that was a theme he repeated throughout his presidency even if there were examples of his administration taking actions that would seem to belie that. he at least believed or spoke to the notion that this was not supposed to divide us in the may -- way that it ultimately would. fast to donald j trump. in that clip, speaking during his campaign in 2015, saying that we should ban all muslims coming into the country. what a radical change in message from the very top leadership of america. 2001 to 2015.

rather than the other way around. rather than taking the rhetoric too far at first and then moderating it. we've gone the other direction. it became more fashionable later in the 20 year cycle to target muslims who had nothing to do with anything that was violent whatsoever. suddenly rewarded politically by the election opresident trump who enacted this travel ban that he had talked about in the campaign. that's a remarkable evolution. i don't know if we will see -- where will this go from here? where will this attitude take us in terms of our views of each other, the notion of other? it was so taken by trump as a political tool. anchor: taken by republicans as a political tool. there's a poll from npr and pbs

that shows americans are split on how the threat of terrorism presents itself. republicans see it as an international threat. democrats see it as a domestic threat. what does that tell us about the way that americans see this? >> real quick. i think there's a clear partisan divide. that is established and developed and metastasized. publicans were no different than democrats in terms of how they thought of terrorism immediately after. marginally different. anchor: you were here 20 years ago. reporters feel that this made them look at the talk of war and peace differently. give us a couple seconds of what you think of that. >> i think it should. i think all americans should look at why we go to war when we go to war and how we go to war

and ask themselves questions all the time. we don't want this to happen again. anchor: we don't. we will have to leave it there. thank you so much for sharing your reporting. take you for joining us. it's hard to believe it's been 20 years since this attacks. my hrt breaks for every person and family touched by this tragedy. tune in monday to the pbs newshour for fresh faces, a report on the mayoral race in boston. our conversation on how 9/11 changed american life will continue on the washingtonweek extra. find it on our social media. good night from washington. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> corporate funding for

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