Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. This Saturday marks 20 years since the September 11th terrorist attacks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there were serious questions about the why and the who. Over the years, we've asked fewer questions and settled on a widely shared narrative about that day and how it happened.

Re-examining collective complacency that emerged over two decades is part of the focus of the podcast, Blindspot: The Road to 9/11. It's a co-production of the History Channel and WNYC Studios. The podcast chronicles the events that led up to the 9/11 attacks with a reporter who was on the ground when it happened.

Jim O'Grady: I was living in Staten Island, and when I heard about the first plane, I rushed to a hill with a clear view of the World Trade Center. The second plane suddenly flew over me, coming in loud and low and when it hit, I saw the fireball and the smoke.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jim O'Grady is a reporter at WNYC and host of Blindspot: The Road to 9/11. Jim, it's great to have you here.

Jim O'Grady: Same here, Melissa. Thanks for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk about why a podcast like this is necessary 20 years later.

Jim O'Grady: We know what happened after 9/11. We know about the wars. We know about the bulking up of Homeland Security in the United States, but what is less well-known, and this came as a surprise even to me, is the 11 years leading up to 9/11. I reported on 9/11 like a lot of other people and I thought I knew the story.

The way an ideology crossed the ocean after the war between Afghanistan rebels and the Soviet Union, and then metastasized, and then led to this chain of events that ultimately gave us 9/11. A lot of it happening on the streets of New York, I was not as familiar with that story. That's the story we sought out to tell from two points of view from investigators trying to puzzle out this novel threat that was emerging and from jihadists who saw the United States as an Imperium that interfered in Muslim politics and needed to be attacked in some way.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There are historians who will maintain that we can't really have a clear view on history, as long as that history is living, right? That is as long as there is a substantial portion of the population with the living memory, that we don't have clear vision and view. You are really working in this podcast to help us to collectively re-engage our memories.

Jim O'Grady: Isn't that what the 20th anniversary is for? It's an artificial marker, but 20 years is a decent amount of time. We still have the eyewitnesses that we could interview as we did for the podcast. Players in the CIA, the FBI, The White House, The Pentagon, childhood friends of Osama bin Laden, leading Arab journalists who knew that world and know that world. That's who we talked to do this first draft of history with some of the key primary sources. It's worth doing. Future historians will no doubt have more perspective, but we have a vivid story of the development of this clash of really-- It's been called a clash of civilizations, but this conflict that led to nearly 3000 lives being lost on the day of 9/11.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Without giving it all away, Jim walk us through some of those critical moments that led to September 11th.

Jim O'Grady: We can now see the chain of events over the 11 years leading up to 9/11 and how they connect. We start our story with an assassination in 1990 in a Midtown hotel, an assassin called Sayyid Nosair, a Muslim extremist guns down rabbi Meir Kahane, a Zionist extremist. We can now see that Sayyid Nosair was part of a terror cell based in a mosque in Brooklyn, who's a member of the cell then went on to pull off the 1993 World Trade Center bombing where six people died.

The mastermind of that bombing Ramzi Yousef got away with a plan in his head for flying planes into buildings. He got caught, but that plan was passed on to his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who eventually connected with Osama bin Laden and the plot moves forward and the tragedy occurs. We can see that chain now, and it has so many twists and so many surprises, and so many moments when American law enforcement almost stopped it. There's debates to this day about what should and shouldn't have been done, and that's the story we tell in the podcast.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One of the episodes focuses on a Egyptian security expert who's undercover for the FBI. Can you talk a little bit about what happened there and his ongoing role?

Jim O'Grady: This is one of the major surprises for me, this amazing compelling man named Emad Salem. He's an immigrant from Egypt to America in the early 1990s. He's just a security guy at a hotel when the FBI approaches him and says, "Look, there's a guy in Jersey City named the Blind Sheikh, an extremist who was involved in the Sadat assassination." The president of Egypt, Anwar el-Sadat, "We think he might be coalescing a terror cell, and we want you to risk your life to go undercover and tell us what's going on."

That's what Emad Salem did out of patriotism for his new country. He was honest with us, a sense of revenge about the Blind Sheikh killing who he called his president Anwar el-Sadat when Salem was in the Egyptian military. What Salem uncovered was amazing. Unfortunately, his supervisor at the FBI pulled him out of his undercover operation at exactly the wrong time when he was about to discover the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot. That was just a catastrophic mistake, but he went back in and then he later prevented an even deadlier plot that was well on the way to unfolding. Emad Salem, an amazing character. He's the star of the first four episodes of the podcast.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've reminded us a couple of times now of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. I have a daughter who is almost 20 and just for her, those centers are just maybe something in the intro to an old television show or something they don't have quite that same power. Let's listen to a clip for just a moment from a Professor Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University about the towers.

Professor Haykel: There was no greater symbol of America's material, prowess, and dominance than those buildings. The World Trade Center in particular became an obsession for radical Islamists who believed that they could bring down the United States just as they had done the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say a bit more about that symbol of those towers?

Jim O'Grady: They soared, they were muscular, they were on Manhattan islands, the beating heart of global capitalism. Professor Haykel also made the point that because these jihadists had tried to take them down in 1993 with a truck bomb in the basement and failed, they became even more of an obsession to go back and try again as occurred on 9/11. They really had this magnetic presence in New York and in America, and it certainly provoked the animus, the murderous animus of people like Osama bin Laden who wanted to deal, not just symbolic, but economic blows against the United States.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was thinking of this morning, that there's a way that as we're marking this moment, and as we have over 20 years often The Pentagon is spoken about less often the attack there. I'm wondering if you think that is in part simply about the architecture of it, the particular ways that the tower and the horror, particularly of watching the second plane hit the south tower. If the architecture is part of why that is the moment that most stands out.

Jim O'Grady: Ironically the architect of the twin towers was inspired by Islamic architecture, by buildings in Saudi Arabia, which was why at the base of the twin towers you saw these pointed arches, which is a common feature of Islamic architecture. Another expert we talked to speculated that it would not have been hard for Osama bin Laden to see the sacred architecture of Islam being bent toward commercialism, toward capitalism in the very architecture of the twin towers which could have also driven his decision to take them down.

If I could just make this point really quickly, we talked to a childhood friend of Osama bin Laden, who said he was not just rich, he was Rockefeller rich growing up. His father was the richest man in the Persian Gulf. Just as it took David Rockefeller to have the hubris, to clear a neighborhood and put those towers up, it took the mirror image hubris of Osama bin Laden. When you're that rich automatically have power and the assumption that you get to decide how the world is made and what lives and what dies in effect.

It took a Rockefeller rich megalomaniac like bin Laden to conceive of taking them down, which is when you think about it, is an extraordinary thing. I can take those things down and I can kill all of the people in there, or at least try.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jim O'Grady is a reporter at WNYC and host of the podcast Blindspot: The Road to 9/11. Jim, thank you for being here.

Jim O'Grady: Thanks so much, Melissa, go Takeaway.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You can listen to the full nine-episode series at blindspotpodcast.org.

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