Morning Wire XX
[0] Today marks the 20th anniversary of the 9 -11 attacks, the deadliest terror attacks in U .S. history.
[1] Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
[2] The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, moms and dads, friends, and neighbors.
[3] Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.
[4] We'll talk to a first responder who is on the ground that day.
[5] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley.
[6] It's Saturday, September 11th, and this is Morning Wire.
[7] With the growing prospect of the resurgence of al -Qaeda, President Biden is facing new waves of pressure from critics on the subject of 9 -11.
[8] We'll at what's fueling that pressure and what family members of 9 -11 victims are demanding of the president.
[9] And we'll take a closer look at ISIS -K, the terror group behind the latest attacks in Kabul.
[10] How influential are they in the region?
[11] And what role would they play in a Taliban -controlled Afghanistan?
[12] Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.
[13] Stay tuned.
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[21] 20 years ago today, America suffered the deadliest terror attack in U .S. history.
[22] On September 11, 2001, 19 al -Qaeda terrorists carried out four coordinated suicide attacks, using commercial airliners.
[23] The attacks took the lives of 2 ,977 people and injured more than 6 ,000 others.
[24] Among the innocent people who died from the attacks were hundreds of first responders who raced into danger to save others.
[25] We recently talked with one of these first responders, former New York Police Department officer Stephen Dylan.
[26] Dylan, a detective at the time, was called into duty after the second plane struck the World Trade Center.
[27] He and his team worked to identify victims and said they soon found themselves overwhelmed.
[28] There was nobody on the roads except for cops and firemen, first responders.
[29] It was pretty eerie.
[30] There was so much chaos going on and it was unorganized.
[31] And when I say unorganized, I mean, the police department just didn't know what to do.
[32] There was so much going on that they didn't know what direction to send people in.
[33] what do you remember most from that day oddly enough i remember what a beautiful day it was it was clear blue skies crisp it was cool september day and i just remember thinking you know how can this happen on a day like today and then once i got into manhattan and i saw the destruction my next thought was life is not going to be the same for a while here and in the city or as a cop.
[34] And you said you lost some colleagues.
[35] I did.
[36] Yeah, I did.
[37] I lost all.
[38] Buddy of mine, he was, when I was a narcotics, he was an undercover.
[39] His name was Sergio Villanueva.
[40] He then transferred over to the police department.
[41] He was there for two years, and he died in one of the buildings.
[42] And then another guy, Bobby Fasio, a friend of my wife, Forrest Smith, and then this guy named Chris, Krista Dulo.
[43] He was a sergeant.
[44] He actually passed a year ago from brain cancer.
[45] stemming from 9 -11.
[46] So as a detective, you had to try to identify missing persons.
[47] That must have been difficult.
[48] It was very, yeah, very, very emotional.
[49] We had hundreds of detectives in the armory and just taking that information and it would go into a minimal envelope and then that would go to the morgue and then every piece of DNA that came from, ground zero or the landfill was then tested against the thousands of pieces of DNA that we had collected home.
[50] And I still believe until this day they're active in identifying people through DNA.
[51] So looking back now two decades, what's the takeaway?
[52] What's the most important lesson of 9 -11?
[53] I think the most important thing is how everyone came together to help, you know, and people did things even if they weren't first responders.
[54] I mean, the amount of people that came out drinks and food and people set up shop downtown just above canaastery or even on canaastery, set up restaurants for the first responders to come and eat for free.
[55] I think that's the takeaway.
[56] You know, sometimes it takes something like that to bring people together and to help and people find a way to help even if they're not first responders.
[57] That's beautifully said.
[58] We appreciate you talking with us today.
[59] Sure, absolutely.
[60] Thanks for everything you did in that really, really difficult time.
[61] I appreciate it.
[62] That was former NYPD officer Stephen Dillon, with his part in the larger story that we remember on the 20th anniversary of that tragic day.
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[67] President Biden is facing new waves of pressure from critics, this time on the subject of September 11th, the resurgence of al -Qaeda, and persistent accusations of a lack of transparency.
[68] Here to discuss is Daily Wires Ian Howarth.
[69] So, Ian, why is President Biden, There's so much pressure, especially now as we come up on this anniversary.
[70] Well, as we're aware, al -Qaeda terrorists coordinated and carried out the 9 -11 attacks, but one important detail we should note is that U .S. policy at the time drew no distinction between terrorist groups such as al -Qaeda and those who harbored them, such as the Taliban.
[71] Here's President Bush from his famous 2001 national address on the attacks.
[72] The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts.
[73] I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.
[74] We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them.
[75] But now, 20 years on, President Joe Biden is effectively taking the opposite approach.
[76] And he's faced some pretty pointed criticisms.
[77] Can you talk about those?
[78] Yeah, there are actually two layers to this criticism.
[79] The first relates to President Biden's decision to unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan.
[80] This is not only resulted in the complete return of Afghanistan to Taliban control, the group who harbored the perpetrators of 9 -11 in the first place, but the return of other terrorist groups to the region, including al -Qaeda, and many are now condemning the sudden inability of the U .S. to prevent the resurgence of the terrorist group behind 9 -11, especially since the responsibility for preventing terrorism now rests on the shoulders of the Taliban.
[81] U .S. Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, recently admitted as much.
[82] I think the whole community is kind of watching to see what happens and whether or not al -Qaeda has the ability to regenerate in Afghanistan.
[83] You know, we put the Taliban on notice that we expect for them to not allow that to happen.
[84] And there's been some transparency concerns as well.
[85] Yes, the second layer of criticism relates to an ongoing push by hundreds of family members of 9 -11 victims for the U .S. government to release information regarding the attacks.
[86] Specifically, information which many argue is being hidden by the Department of Justice and the FBI regarding the alleged involvement of Saudi government officials in the attacks.
[87] That's a serious charge.
[88] It is.
[89] The group called members of the 9 -11 community actually wrote an open letter saying that President Biden is not welcome at all to three 9 -11 memorials he will be visiting today, unless he fulfills his commitment to, quote, seek full truth and accountability.
[90] Here's one excerpt from their letter.
[91] As we approached the 20th anniversary of 9 -11 and having been used as a political bargaining chip for two decades, our patience has expired.
[92] We had great hope that President Biden, who campaigned on bringing truth and trust back to the Oval Office, would value the lives and sacrifices of America's citizens over diplomatic relations with a country accused of mass murder.
[93] So, on the 20th anniversary of the deadliest terror attack American history, it's a combination of the apparent resurgence of those responsible for 9 -11 and what is being seen as a refusal to adhere to campaign promises that is driving the latest waves of criticism against President Biden.
[94] 20 years later and still a lot of frustration.
[95] Ian, thanks for the update.
[96] Thanks for having me. Daily Wires, Ian Howarth.
[97] The terror group, ISIS -K, has been discussed a lot lately after they took responsibility for the recent attack on the Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
[98] that killed at least 13 U .S. service members and over 100 Afghans.
[99] Here to tell us more about the group is Daily Wire's Charlotte Pince -Bahn.
[100] Charlotte, what do we know about ISIS -K?
[101] So the group is a branch of the Islamic State technically called Islamic State Corrassan, which refers to its region.
[102] Corrassan is a wider historical region that includes parts of Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
[103] According to Catherine Zimmerman, who is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, The group was officially recognized in early 2015.
[104] Zimmerman told me that the group started to form in fall of 2014 from disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban in the Afghanistan -Pakistan region.
[105] She says they were accusing the Taliban of compromising with the West and not pursuing global jihad.
[106] Okay, so they peeled off from the Taliban over differences in ideology.
[107] Right.
[108] This can get confusing with several competing groups in the country and with overlapping ideologies.
[109] can you run us through the main groups?
[110] Yeah, so the main ones we hear about are the Islamic State, the Taliban, and Al -Qaeda.
[111] And Zimmerman told me that one of the main differences between these groups actually has to do with how each one treats fellow Muslims.
[112] The Taliban and Al -Qaeda believe that other Muslims need to be taught true Islam in order to then be held accountable for their actions.
[113] The word Taliban actually means students in Pashtow, which is one of the official languages of Afghanistan.
[114] However, since the Taliban is in control now, they will be strictly enforcing Sharia law.
[115] The Islamic State, however, is more extreme and fringe, and they believe any individual, especially Muslims, who haven't yet answered the call to jihad and joined the Islamic State, are not actually Muslims.
[116] She said this distinction is extremely important.
[117] She told me the Islamic State sees it as a duty to enforce its interpretation of Islam with force.
[118] Muslims who resist or reject it must be killed.
[119] The Taliban, by contrast, believes, they need to teach Muslims their interpretation of Islam, and that people will adjust once they're exposed to it.
[120] Experts say that the Islamic State is actively recruiting, and that ISISK has worked to expand its network into more urban areas like Kabul, which obviously we saw from the recent terrorist attack.
[121] So ISISK appears to be expanding.
[122] What does that mean in terms of terror threats?
[123] Well, it's hard to predict, but a 2018 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that.
[124] Islamic State Khorasan disregards international borders and envisions its territory transcending nation states.
[125] The same report said that the group's global aspirations include raising the banner of al -a -cab above Jerusalem and the White House.
[126] And of course, the Islamic State isn't the only terror group for the U .S. to be watching right now.
[127] There's also concern that Al -Qaeda will reemerge.
[128] A U .N. report from June of this year referred to an even earlier report, so prior to the complete withdrawal of U .S. forces and said that the Taliban and al -Qaeda remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties.
[129] It also said that al -Qaeda was present in 15 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.
[130] Okay, so that was prior to the Taliban takeover.
[131] Do we have any sense of how things have changed since then?
[132] It's hard to know for sure, but Zimmerman explained to me that while the Taliban doesn't support transnational terror attacks, 20 years ago, the Taliban didn't prevent al -Qaeda from attacking the U .S. on September 11th, and then they didn't turn Osama bin Laden into the U .S. afterwards.
[133] So the concern is that the Taliban isn't going to break ties with al -Qaeda or be able to prevent the Islamic State from having some type of safe haven inside of Afghanistan.
[134] She also said that the U .S., for a lot of reasons, may not have the intelligence that it needs in order to support the over -the -horizon approach that the Biden administration has discussed as a future counterterrorism strategy.
[135] Right, as in us trying to keep eyes on the region from afar.
[136] That's right.
[137] Thanks for the reporting, Charlotte.
[138] Thanks for having me. Daily Wires, Charlotte Pence -Bond.
[139] Those are our big stories for the day.
[140] If you like this episode and are interested in hearing more, subscribe to MorningWire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening, and give us a five -star review.
[141] That's all the time we've got this morning.
[142] Thanks for waking up with us.
[143] We'll be back next week with the news you need to know.
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