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9/11, 25 Years Later | What Happened That Day, How We Got There, and How We Missed It
Posted
September 8, 2026
Views
28
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4
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14.29%
September 8, 2026
28
4
14.29%
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1:53:09Now PlayingThis week marks twenty-five years since September 11, 2001. In 2018, Sarah and I made a five-part series about that day — what happened, how we got there, and what our government did next — and we are re-sharing it this week. Today you'll hear parts one through three: a careful walk through the timeline of the morning itself, the long history that produced al Qaeda, from the borders drawn after World War I to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and then how we missed it, with an FBI and CIA built to distrust each other and two future hijackers living in the United States that the CIA never told the FBI about. We made this series because we felt the country had memorialized 9/11 without ever really processing it, and that gap is where the conspiracy theories moved in. We hope you'll sit with it again with us.
*Topics discussed:*
• The timeline of September 11, 2001: four flights, the towers' construction, and why the collapse happened the way it did
• The people who improvised when no plan existed: flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, Rick Rescorla, and the passengers of Flight 93
• The 80 years of history bin Laden kept invoking, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the partition of Israel
• Afghanistan, the Soviet war, and how the mujahideen became al Qaeda (with Middle East expert Kerry Anderson)
• The conditions bin Laden recruited from, and why his message sounds depressingly familiar today
• How we missed it: the FBI, the CIA, the Watergate overcorrection that kept them from talking, and Ali Soufan's investigation of the USS Cole
*Resources mentioned:*
9/11 Memorial & Museum Interactive Timeline
The 9/11 Commission Report
102 Minutes That Changed America (HISTORY)
Betty Ong, Unsung Hero of Sept. 11 (NPR)
The Falling Man, by Tom Junod (Esquire)
Rick Rescorla, the man who saw it coming (NPR)
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
Osama bin Laden's mother speaks (The Guardian)
The AgentAli Soufan (The New Yorker)
—
Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. Produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.
This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws.
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