'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Friday, September 2, 2011

"Day of Destruction: Decade of War"
Hosts: Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel

LAWRENCE O`DONNELL, "THE LAST WORD" HOST: Up next is Rachel Maddow and
Richard Engel with their documentary, "Day of Destruction: Decade of War."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: And now an MSNBC special event.

Anchor Rachel Maddow, NBC news chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel
draws on a decade of reporting from the frontlines on the war on terror.
Together, they examine what America has done for national security since
9/11, to itself and the world.

(MUSIC)

CHYRON: "Day of Destruction: Decade of War"

RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: When you think about
the cost of all the actions that have been taken over the last 10 years, we
often calculated the number of soldiers killed, amount of money spent. In
the region, it counted in the number of dead Muslims, that`s how it`s
counted in the Middle East.

And just do a bit of quick math, in Iraq, about 150,000 Iraqis were killed.
And some of them were killed by U.S. forces. More were killed by Iraqis
themselves. But that doesn`t really matter in the minds in the region
because they all died as a result of the U.S.-led war.

Afghanistan, maybe another 35,000, 40,000. Several thousand more in
Pakistan. When you add it all up, we`re talking about 200,000 dead Muslims
as a result of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Do you make America safer by having that many dead people, that much anger,
that much frustration, that number of graves -- does that really make
America safer? Or does that just create more radicals that the world is
going to have to deal with?

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC ANCHOR: As the Arab world and Muslim war is changing
now, 10 years after 9/11, we see the revolutions, we see populist
uprisings, we see sort of restlessness (ph) of the Islamist movements in
countries where there are populist uprisings that have nothing to do with
them as they try to sort of grasp these things.

ENGEL: Tunisia was a huge blow to al Qaeda. Much more than Iraq was. The
Tunisian fruit vender who set fire to himself and started the Arab spring
did more to harm al Qaeda than the entire war on Iraq, which may have
helped al Qaeda and certainly allowed al Qaeda to attract more recruits.

MADDOW: What`s the next vision for American intervention in Muslim
countries after this?

ENGEL: It will be secret. Lots and lots of small, secretive operations.
Think Pakistan, think Somalia, think Yemen, drones, Special Forces, JSOC,
we`re going to be not hearing about these organizations a lot, but they are
going to be very busy.

(voice-over): Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 2007. The city on the Red Sea
has long been a gateway for pilgrims traveling to Mecca, Islam`s holiest
site.

In Jeddah, we meet Khalid Suleiman. Suleiman was a fighter with Osama Bin
Laden in Afghanistan. He`s just been released from four years in U.S.
detention at Guantanamo Bay.

He shows us his bizarre memorabilia.

KHALID SULEIMAN, FORMER GUANTANAMO DETAINEE: This is my glasses in
Guantanamo.

ENGEL: His personal letters redacted by the military. Anything that
looked like a code was erased.

(on camera): This is blacked out by the U.S. military? Your prison number
on top?

SULEIMAN: Yes.

ENGEL (voice-over): Suleiman admits he was a trained fighter for Bin
Laden.

SULEIMAN: I was getting training on weapons, military, mines, explosives,
electronics.

ENGEL: Suleiman was so dedicated he stayed with Bin Laden in the mountains
in Afghanistan, even as the Americans were bombing.

SULEIMAN: A little dusty here.

ENGEL (on camera): A little dust on Tora Bora?

SULEIMAN: Yes, from Tora Bora. Yes.

ENGEL: So when you were with Bin Laden in his bunker, you were listening
to your news on this radio?

SULEIMAN: Yes.

ENGEL (voice-over): Suleiman says he`s now reformed after graduating from
a unique Saudi rehabilitation program for Islamic radicals, that looks
amazingly like a summer camp.

At a campus outside Riyadh, religious extremists swim to relax, play soccer
and video games. The goal is to wean them off extremism in a friendly,
secure environment. Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi
Arabia.

The government says the rehabilitation program has largely been successful
in diffusing the anger of these men whom Saudi Arabia considers misguided
youths.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We try to find jobs for them, so we are doing our best
that these guys become a normal people, live in this society.

ENGEL: The Saudi government gave Khalid Suleiman $20,000 to furnish his
apartment, and paid for him to get married.

Suleiman also offers a rare look inside al Qaeda.

Suleiman says Bin Laden himself was surprised that 9/11 was so successful.
Bin Laden didn`t think the twin towers would actually go down.

SULEIMAN: Even Bin Laden was shocked when the building fall down.

ENGEL: But Bin Laden miscalculates what happens next.

After 9/11, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces go to war. The operations are
mostly done in secret. It`s America`s first response to the biggest
terrorist attack in its history. The secret missions are successful. Bin
Laden and the Taliban are driven from power quickly and decisively.

This little-known conflict in Afghanistan was led by Hank Crumpton. He
commanded counterterrorism operations at the CIA.

HANK CRUMPTON, FORMER CIA OFFICER: No one else has a plan. And the
president endorsed the CIA`s plan and that`s why the CIA took the lead.

ENGEL: As the Twin Towers are still smoldering, the CIA takes charge of
the biggest clandestine operation in its history.

(on camera): So, within days the CIA had teams on the ground in
Afghanistan?

CRUMPTON: The first teams were only CIA. The first team, the Jaw Breaker
team, less than 10. And the reason for this was we simply did not have
enough men to do more than that.

ENGEL (voice-over): The eight to 10 men team`s first goal was to secure
allies in northern and central Afghanistan, where the Taliban is deeply
unpopular. The CIA teams buy a lot of friends.

CRUMPTON: We had people with great tactical skills, language skills, and
people that understood Afghanistan and the Afghan people.

ENGEL (on camera): They were handing out suitcases full of cash.

CRUMPTON: That was a big part of it, but they wanted the Taliban to be
overthrown. They wanted al Qaeda and those foreign invaders out of their
country.

ENGEL (voice-over): But Crumpton says the suitcases filled with millions
of dollars came with a big commitment. The Afghan allies have to actually
kill Taliban and al Qaeda members to be paid.

CRUMPTON: And it was more than just their word. We expected them to
engage in lethal operations against al Qaeda and those Taliban and other
Afghans that decided not to join us.

ENGEL: The combination of CIA units, U.S. Special Forces, Afghan militias,
and air strikes is devastating. The Taliban start to run and abandon al
Qaeda.

SULEIMAN: You know, all the Taliban, they leave and also said, "We are
sorry."

ENGEL: In November, 2001, Kabul falls just two months after 9/11. Girls
are free to go to school. The repressive regime that hosted Bin Laden is
defeated.

A month later, even Kandahar, the Taliban`s hometown, is overthrown.

CRUMPTON: Kandahar failed, that was the last urban stronghold of the
Taliban and al Qaeda, less than 90 days after 9/11. There were only 410
Americans on the ground in Afghanistan, about 110 CIA and approximately 300
Special Forces.

ENGEL (on camera): Four hundred Americans --

CRUMPTON: Right.

ENGEL: -- on the ground and they toppled the government of the Taliban?

CRUMPTON: Well, 400 Americans that were in partnership with our Afghan
allies. And that was really the key.

ENGEL (voice-over): The cost to America to drive out the Taliban, less
than $1 billion and one U.S. CIA officer killed.

(on camera): Relatively speaking, it was a very cheap and low-risk
victory. What happened after that?

CRUMPTON: Well, I believe that we, as a nation, and as a global community,
failed to secure that victory.

ENGEL (voice-over): The quick victory in Afghanistan wasn`t secured in
large part because of Pakistan and its porous border. Al Qaeda and the
Taliban crossed over and established a new sanctuary next to Afghanistan.
And then, in what has been called an even greater strategic mistake, the
United States found a new mission, a new war, in Iraq. Al Qaeda felt it
was given a second chance.

SULEIMAN: We never thought America would invade Iraq. We never thought
that America would do that, you know, and get involved in that war.

ENGEL (on camera): Was Iraq a gift to al Qaeda?

SULEIMAN: Yes, of course. Yes, a gift.

ENGEL (voice-over): A gift because Iraq would inspire a new generation of
al Qaeda fighters.

Coming up -- inside al Qaeda. We used to think Satan was the enemy of
Islam, now, we know, it`s America, he says.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(GUNFIRE)

ENGEL (voice-over): For many Americans, the Iraq war is counted in troop
deployments. American soldiers killed and injured. Humvees attacked, and
America`s new three-letter nightmare, the IED.

But in the Middle East, the Iraq war is measured very differently.
Sometimes it is counted one girl at a time. On the outskirts of the Syrian
capital of Damascus in 2007 at a nightclub, The Lighthouse, girls parade on
a stage. They are dancers, and some are prostitutes. Some of the girls
are under 13 years old, a few look younger than 10.

They are refugees who escaped the war in Iraq. Their situation is so
desperate some of the girl`s father sit in the audience to negotiate a
price for their daughters.

In a nearby apartment, we meet Dunya (ph), a refugee prostitute from
Baghdad in her mid-20s. She doesn`t want her face to be shown, she seems
terrified. She chain smokes, her hands tremble. Dunya says some of the
Iraqi girls are gang raped by pimps to break them down into accepting
prostitution.

"God punish those who stole Iraq`s dignities," she says.

Syrian authorities close down The Lighthouse. But in Damascus, often said
to be the oldest inhibited city in the world, the damage to America`s image
is already done.

Hisham al-Abadi (ph) doesn`t seem like an al Qaeda supporter. He imports
candy. But he became convinced Muslims need al Qaeda to fight back against
the United States. He points to Abu Ghraib, the daily car bombings in
Baghdad, and the Iraqi refugees as evidence to why al Qaeda is necessary.

"I think 100 percent al Qaeda defends Muslim rights," he says.

To find out how the al Qaeda militants operate, we travel to the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan, in the town of Zarqa, on the edge of the desert.

Here, al Qaeda sells begin with men like Abu Sal (ph), he`s an unassuming
pet shop owner under five feet tall. But Abu Sal fought in Iraq, and then
returned to Jordan.

He brought back a phonebook full of the numbers of other fighters. Abu Sal
is part of a grassroots recruiting network and underground railroad for
Islamic fighters.

"We used to think Satan was the enemy of Islam. Now, we know it`s
America," he says.

In an apartment in the Jordanian capital of Amman, we meet an al Qaeda cell
-- small, secretive, hard to detect. A single fighter named Abu Anaz (ph)
and 19-year-old Jafar (ph), who wants to be a suicide bomber.

"I was watching television and seeing my brothers in Palestine and Iraq
being killed," he says.

Barefoot with a watch that ironically says exit.

"God loves martyrs and loves those who fight for him," he says. His
handler Abu Anaz has huge, scarred hands and red eyes, the color is from
hate, he says.

After five hours, we meet the al Qaeda cell leader, Abdullah Al-Muhajir
(ph). He`s wanted by Jordan police, sentenced in absentia to 15 years in
prison. In hiding, he only agrees to be filmed from behind.

He shows me videos of militants beheading foreigners that he makes and
distributes.

(SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

I ask him how Americans could consider him anything but a terrorist.

"What do Americans say when American planes bomb and kill people? What do
they say about that?" he asks. Al-Muhajir says al Qaeda changed after
9/11, that the group is no longer centrally commanded. It operates more
like a franchise. Al Qaeda has become a brand name.

"Al Qaeda is like a mother company with branches, with their own employees
and their own operations," he says. The branches even raise their own
money.

And this new al Qaeda-incorporated al Qaeda the brand name moves beyond
Iraq in search of other failed states.

Mogadishu, May 2010, al Qaeda has found a new home, operating through local
allies in the most dangerous country on earth.

Flying into the capital of Mogadishu isn`t for the faint of heart. African
Express is one of only two airlines operating in Somalia. It`s easy to see
why so few risk the trip.

Sitting on the runway is the wreckage of a crashed plane. A few thousand
African peacekeepers and a weak U.S.-backed government struggle to maintain
order in Mogadishu. Their enemy, al-Shabaab. It has pledged allegiance to
al Qaeda. It`s part of the al Qaeda brand name.

Al-Shabaab is a terrifying mix of al Qaeda`s ideology and African child
soldiers.

(on camera): The majority of the militiamen terrorizing the city are under
16 years old, teenagers empowered by the chaos to enter people`s homes,
lash women for dressing inappropriately, and chop off the limbs of accused
thieves.

(voice-over): Under a tall tree, we meet two of al-Shabaab`s victims, 20-
year-old Abdel Hadi (ph) and Ishmael Abdullah (ph), 18. Both claim they
were falsely accused of theft. Their punishment is typical of al-Shabaab`s
harsh justice. The boy`s right hands and left feet were amputated as their
parents were forced to watch.

"I tried to call out to my mother and say please, somebody save me," Abdel
says. "One woman had a miscarriage as she watched," says Abdullah. The
young men show me how the Shabaab stretched their wrists and ankles before
slicing them off with a butcher`s knife.

But Somalia is also a threat to the United States. Somalia`s al Qaeda
franchise is attracting American recruits. It has Americans among its
commanders. Alabama native Omar al-Hammami is one of al-Shabaab`s leading
recruiters, a fellow U.S. citizen, using Internet videos and rap songs.

U.S. counter terrorism officials say more than 50 Americans have traveled
to Somalia for training and to fight, including for the first time in U.S.
history, American citizen bombers.

The American connection has raised flags at both the FBI and the CIA.

PHILIP MUDO, FORMER CIA OFFICER: I think you could characterize this as a
grave problem. The reasons are simple, the number of times you get a
substantial number of American kids -- I don`t care whether they are
Somalis or whether they`re kids from Lincoln, Nebraska, travelling overseas
to train with people who are connected with al Qaeda, in these kinds of
numbers, that is very rare.

ENGEL: Somalia is the perfect al Qaeda sanctuary, but it`s not the only
one.

From Yemen to North Africa, Southeast Asia, and across Europe, security
experts say al Qaeda has cells or resources in 100 countries, including in
the United States.

Coming up -- for some, the war on terror is big business.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It could have been that folks were thinking that
whoever was going to handle this contract would just simply be asleep at
the switch.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Once again, Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel.

MADDOW: When you`re in the Dubai airport, which is kind of the Emerald
City, right? And then you --

ENGEL: The hub for the entire Middle East.

MADDOW: The hub for the entire Middle East, massive airport. It`s so
glitzy and so gilded, and then you get to the exit gates for the flights
going to Kabul, going to Afghanistan, and you see, a lot of Afghan people,
what you would expect Afghan people to look like, and then enormous 6`5"
Americans with arms the size the hams.

ENGEL: Yes, tattoos at the arm, or you have the guys who are there as the
engineers and the consultants. What are they doing here? What are these
people doing here?

There are also many more of them than soldiers. We sent a lot of troops,
too.

MADDOW: Yes.

ENGEL: We sent hundreds of thousands of troops rotated through just Iraq
or just Afghanistan and hundreds of thousands of contractors went through.

Is it because these soldiers weren`t able to do things or because it was
good business and that`s what it was, it was huge business.

MADDOW: One of the key strategic issues you have to deal with is supply
lines. You cut somebody off from their supply lines and you`ve isolated a
fighting force to the point of atrophy weakness and eventual defeat.

American supply lines, to a certain extent now, are private. They are run
for profit by multi-national companies.

ENGEL: A lot of the actual setting up of the bases themselves, the
barriers, the walls, the sand bags, that`s done privately. And is that
necessary? Does that really need to be done privately?

MADDOW: The salaries paid to, particularly security contractors, who have
high-level clearances from their days in the military or at the CIA, have
those things created an off-ramp for senior level and highly-trained
personnel out of U.S. government service that is detrimental to U.S.
government service?

ENGEL: Of course, if you`re a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan and you`re
guarding a base and you see a contractor doing pretty much the same job and
he`s making 10 times your salary, why would you stay in the Army, then?

MADDOW: Taxpayers on the hook for the training, and the taxpayers on the
hook for your 10 times salary when you get out from the training. It`s a
great plan for the companies, but doesn`t seem to make much sense for the
country.

(voice-over): In the First Gulf War in 1991, the retreating Iraqi army
sets fire to over 500 Kuwaiti oil wells and connected pipelines, creating
an economic and environmental disaster. As six million barrels burn a day,
four American companies dodge land mines and bombs to extinguish the
flames.

Over a decade later in the lead up to the next war with Iraq, the George W.
Bush administration anticipates similar tactics by Saddam, that he will
once again attack Kuwait`s oil fields or torch his own, to slow down
advancing U.S. forces.

For $2 million, the world`s second largest oil field services corporation,
Halliburton, is hired to draft terms for a contract to fight oil fires
during the war. Days before the invasion, U.S. military officials convene
a high-level meeting at the Pentagon to finalize the arrangements for the
firefighting contract.

Representatives from the Halliburton subsidiary KBR attend the meeting.
And the decision is made that in addition to drafting the scope of the
contract, Halliburton will also get the contract itself for up to $7
billion. Without competition, Halliburton is designated uniquely capable
of providing the firefighting services detailed in the contract, uniquely
capable even though other U.S. companies entirely performed the same task
during the previous war.

Also at the Pentagon meeting, pointing out the impropriety of Halliburton
being present while decisions are made about their contract is Army Corps
of Engineers procurement executive Bunny Greenhouse.

BUNNY GREENHOUSE, ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: I said they have to leave
because the group now is getting into things and giving them advantage as
to where our budgets are and what we`re planning to do. I was responsible
in that the Corps of Engineers was going to be doing a lot of that work
that they were talking about, you know, to make sure that we did not give
them any advantage.

MADDOW (on camera): Do you feel like that ethos was undermined in the lead
up to the Iraq war, there was an expectation that good practices and
ethical practices and procurement wouldn`t be followed?

GREENHOUSE: It could have been that folks were thinking that whoever was
going to handle this contract would just simply be asleep at the switch and
look the other way and not highlight, you know, the improprieties. But I
was not going to do that.

MADDOW (voice-over): As a 21-year veteran of government contracting, the
Army Corps of Engineers top civilian official Bunny Greenhouse is troubled
by how some war contracts are being handled.

GREENHOUSE: That was high dollars going to KBR, none competed, or if it
was a contract that was competed, once it came to an end, it would just go
on for another year and another year and so on. So, I send up letters to
Department of the Army to let them know that this kind of thing was going
on. They should not have been able to follow on with the contract, because
it was just like writing their own check.

MADDOW: In the end, oil fires are not set in Saddam`s oil fields or
anywhere else in the region.

But Halliburton convinces the pentagon, again in a sole source framework,
to convert its firefighting contract into a contract for generic logistical
support for the U.S. military. Halliburton eventually becomes the largest
private contractor in Iraq, securing three huge multiyear, multipurpose
contracts.

The concept of a massive combined logistics contract to support U.S.
military operations had been pioneered in the 1990s by the Department of
Defense, headed then by Secretary Dick Cheney.

The U.S. military would no longer peel its own potatoes or its own laundry
or even do the strategically central work of maintaining its own supply
lines. That work would now be done for profit.

Dick Cheney leaves the Pentagon in 1993. By 1995, he`s CEO of the company
granted during the Clinton administration, one of those massive logistics
contracts in the Balkans, Halliburton. Mr. Cheney leaves Halliburton in
2000 to become vice president, but as vice president, he continues to
receive deferred compensation from the company for services rendered before
his departure, valued between a half million and $1 million.

Coming up -- making a killing, the business of the war on terror.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: As large Iraq war contracts are awarded to Halliburton and other
private companies for services ranging from reconstruction to security,
civilian private sector workers flood into the war zone alongside U.S.
troops. In March 2004, four men working for the contractor Blackwater are
attacked and killed in Fallujah. Sent on a supply mission without adequate
maps or convoy protection, the Blackwater employees are ambushed and
killed. Their bodies are hung by insurgents from the bridge.

After that, U.S. and allied forces twice stormed Fallujah. The second
offensive becoming the bloodiest battle of the entire Iraq war.

In September 2007, Blackwater contractors shoot and kill 17 Iraqi civilians
in Nisour Square in Baghdad after they say their convoy came under attack.

Citing eyewitness reports, the Iraqi governments conclude the contractors
fired on civilians without provocation and demands that Blackwater
personnel be banned from the country.

The U.S. military, having shifted to a counterinsurgent strategy of
building support for the Iraqi and against the insurgency among the local
population complains that cowboy tactics by private security contractors
interfere with the overall U.S. military mission.

Brigadier General Karl Horst tells "The Washington Post": "These guys run
loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There`s no authority over them,
so you can`t come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot
people and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all
over the place."

CROWD: We love money, we love war. We love Cheney even more.

MADDOW: Contracting also starts to become a focus of the anti-war and
anti-corruption critics of the George W. Bush administration. It`s a stark
contrast between no competition, cost-plus, guaranteed profit contracts for
politically well-connected firms and the austere combat conditions for U.S.
troops.

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: There is more tonight on the issue of
insufficient armor for U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq.

UNIDENTIFEID SOLDIER: Why do us soldiers have to dig through local
landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-
armor of our vehicles and why don`t we have those resources readily
available to us?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s a matter of production and capability of doing it.
As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might
want or wish to have at a later time.

THEN-SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Thank you.

MADDOW: By the 2007 political primary election season, candidate Barack
Obama has introduced the Transparency and Accountability in Military and
Security Contracting Act of 2007.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proposes eliminating
private security contracts from Iraq altogether.

But by the time the election is over, Obama is president and Clinton is
secretary of state. The contractors are nowhere near gone. Clinton`s
Department of State alone in 2010 more than doubles its roster of private
security contractors from 2,700 to between 6,000 and 7,000.

By the summer of 2011, contractors for the Defense Department alone nearly
equal the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. In Iraq, with U.S. troop
levels drawing down, the number of contractors exceeds the number of
troops.

With the political heat off of them, contractors are usually invisible,
only surfacing in scandal.

In 2007, 21 year old Efraim Diveroli secures a $300 million American
contract to supply munitions to Afghan forces. After repackaging and
selling illegal Chinese weapons, Diveroli is indicted on federal fraud and
conspiracy charges. He pleads guilty to one count of conspiracy and is
sentenced to four years in prison. The other charges against him are
dropped.

In Afghanistan in 2009, these wild pictures surface of private contractors
from armor group that were signed to guard the U.S. embassy in Kabul. The
contract is re-upped, despite the scandal.

A report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction in April
2011 concludes that misspent dollars run into the tens of billions for Iraq
reconstruction alone. But the starkest impact of the huge expansion of
for-profit contracting for national security for 9/11 is the wedge it has
driven between incurring the costs of war and paying that cost.

There remains real debate over the number of U.S. troops needed and serving
in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no real debate over the total number of
contractors the U.S. is paying for as well.

And the human pain and suffering of contractors themselves is also
invisible. There are no official statistics on the number of contractors
killed or wounded in war zones, allegations of human trafficking, forced
labor, and worse among contractors does not merit many American headlines,
and doesn`t stop the contracts flowing.

On the no-bid, no deadline contracts, Bunny Greenhouse continues to
question, warn, and report, as the thorn in the side of the Corps of
Engineers throughout the war, her immediate reward is demotion. But nearly
a decade later in July 2011, a U.S. district court in Washington approves a
settlement awarding Greenhouse $970,000 in full restitution of lost wages,
compensatory damages, and attorneys` fees. Greenhouse remains convinced
she did the right thing.

GREENHOUSE: They got the wrong idea about whistle-blowing. It`s not about
a person gaining any money or gaining anything, and not a snitch, you know,
it`s about making sure that there can be truth and honesty.

MADDOW: Coming up -- taking prisoners in America`s new war.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Slam them face first on to the concrete floor.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: For all of the decisions that America has made since 9/11 about
what we would do as a nation, how we would spend our resources, he we would
react to those 9/11 attacks. For all the things that received no debate,
the things that have been debated are the invasion of Iraq. I guess the
end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well. And torture -- the tactics
the United States turned to in both interrogation and detention.

ENGEL: The enhanced interrogation program.

MADDOW: Enhanced interrogation program but interrogation tactics used
either as an abuse of existing policies or in keeping with policies and the
fact that nobody high ranking was ever prosecuted on those things.

ENGEL: It just fell on the shoulders of the young guys and a few women
involved in these procedures.

MADDOW: To describe people what to do is this particular level of evil and
legal culpability to let people know that they are unhinged from the
existing rules, Geneva doesn`t apply, your training doesn`t apply. Do what
you want. That is not only a different level of legal culpability, I
believe it still a crime and it`s still evil. But it destroys the people
who ends up torturing in those circumstances in a way that no directive
ever could, it destroys them.

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: People who knocked these buildings
down will hear all of us soon.

(CHEERS)

MADDOW (voice-over): After 9/11, America goes to war, war against al
Qaeda, a transnational, sub-national enemy -- war against the tactic of
terrorism.

BUSH: Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign,
unlike any other we have ever seen.

MADDOW: Afghanistan did not attack on 9/11, no nation did, but the U.S.
moves quickly after 9/11 to topple the Afghan government.

BUSH: We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed
these acts and those who harbor them.

MADDOW: A war on terror, a war on terrorism, is a footing, a mindset more
than it is a plan, but toppling a government is the work of soldiers on the
ground.

BUSH: Every nation now has a decision to make.

MADDOW: Putting soldiers on the ground, fermenting war against Afghan
factions means taking prisoners.

BUSH: Either you`re with us, or you`re with the terrorists.

MADDOW: As small and secretive CIA and U.S. military special forces unit
pay and cajole, arm and coordinate Afghanistan`s rebel factions,
allegations surface of atrocities, massacres at the hands of Afghan
warlords.

"Newsweek" reports hundreds of pro-Taliban prisoners are killed in 2001
while being transported in overcrowded industrial shipping containers by
order of a U.S.-backed warlord.

American forces start taking prisoners by the thousands, ultimately by the
tens of thousands. It would soon take the U.S. government and its military
down a path it had never before gone.

America holds prisoners at a former Soviet site called Bagram in
Afghanistan. Later, during the Iraq war, Saddam`s former prisons at places
like Abu Ghraib and Taji (ph), become America`s prison.

The CIA established prisons, black sites, exist for five years before the
president ever admits that they do. There has still been no official
accounting for where they were. One prison, eventually investigated for
multiple deaths of detainees in custody is a reported CIA black site in
Afghanistan called the salt pit.

Beyond the secret facilities, the United States also specially builds a
U.S. military prison not in the United States and not near any physical
battlefield, but offshore, in a U.S.-controlled corner of a hostile
communist country. Nearly 800 foreign captives have passed through its
doors, but only six of its prisoners have been tried. The prison is still
in business today.

(on camera): In your training as a military police officer, were you
trained in how to deal with prisoners of war?

BRANDON NEELY: It was real brief basic training about enemy prisoners of
war.

MADDOW: So, you didn`t have any extensive training at all in terms of how
to deal with people living under your control?

NEELY: No, not at all.

MADDOW (voice-over): Months after 9/11, the U.S. Army sent Military Police
Officer Brandon Neely sent as a guard to what was then referred to as a
temporary detention center Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay in southeastern
Cuba. Neely says he received no specialized training for the deployment.

NEELY: We were actually told that a facility like this had never been run
before. There was no policy. There was no procedure.

MADDOW: With emotions running high and the rules of engagement unclear,
Neely says he`s told by his supervisors to improvise. Brandon Neely takes
custody of the second ever prisoner to arrive at Guantanamo.

NEELY: We started walking with him and he wouldn`t walk. We were
screaming, you need to walk faster. And we placed him on his knees. I
slammed him face-first on the concrete floor and kept pushing his head down
as he kept trying to get up and move and they hog tied him. He laid there
a couple of hours. When I left the camp that day he was still there.

MADDOW: Neely later learns why he recoiled the way he did.

NEELY: He thought he would be executed because he had seen people like
that executed before in his country.

MADDOW: Were there other things you saw you thought were wrong? Things
you participated in or things that you saw as a guard there?

NEELY: They told a detainee turn around, put his hands on head and they
started punching and kicking him. He just laid there and pooled in blood.

MADDOW: Do you feel like if you had been in a command environment which
you had been prepared and sort of given specific procedures for dealing
with people, that things like that would have been less likely to happen?

NEELY: I think more people would have had direction and we would have
trained, a lot of those incidents may not have happened.

MADDOW (voice-over): A response to Neely`s allegations by the U.S.
military reads in part, "The Department of Defense does not tolerate abuse
of detainees and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated and
appropriate disciplinary action taken if allegations are substantiated.
There had been well-documented instances in the past where DOD policy was
not followed and service members have been held accountable for their
actions in those cases," end quote.

Guards, keepers like Brandon Neely in America`s new prison say they are
left to make up some of the rules as they go along. But when it comes to
trying to extract intelligence from America`s post-9/11 prisoners, some
trained U.S. military interrogators say they are told to unlearn the
training that they do have.

TONY LAGARANUS, FORMER INTERROGATOR: We were given what`s called
interrogation rules of engagement bay the Pentagon. It detailed
interrogation methods that would have been against Geneva Conventions.

MADDOW: In 2004, after extensive training as an Army interrogator Tony
Lagaranus spends 10 months interrogating terror suspects in prisons in Iraq

(on camera): Have you been trained in what legal limits you couldn`t cross
during an interrogation?

LAGARANUS: We were taught strictly according to Geneva Conventions.

MADDOW: So, you were taught how to treat people as prisoners of war. But
then when you got to Iraq --

LAGARANUS: After 9/11 and after Afghanistan, we heard from interrogators
coming back that they were crossing lines -- the use of stress positions,
sleep depravation, dietary manipulation.

MADDOW: And those were in the interrogation rules of engagement that were
communicated to you in writing?

LAGARANUS: Yes.

MADDOW (voice-over): According to Lagaranus some but not all harsh tactics
required approval by a superior officer.

(on camera): Did it seem like those orders or directions were legal?

LAGARANUS: If we were told it was legal by the Pentagon, then, of course,
we weren`t going to question that too far. It said specifically that the
interrogator needs to have the freedom to be creative in the interrogation
booth.

MADDOW: Told to make it up?

LAGARANUS: Yes, we were just going to make it up. We wanted to get
intelligence. We were willing to cross these lines.

MADDOW: Did you think of it as torture at the time?

LAGARANUS: I didn`t think of it as torture. I certainly do now.\

MADDOW: According to Lagaranus, prisoners are left cold and wet without
adequate clothing, on purpose, in order to induce hypothermia.

(on camera): What would be the impact on them in terms of the
interrogation?

LAGARANUS: It`s not a good interrogation tactic because they`ve become so
cold that they become confused and they can`t really follow a line of
thought or they are not reasoning very well.

MADDOW: How do you not accidentally kill somebody when you`re playing with
hypothermia?

LAGARANUS: Frankly, I`m surprise we`d didn`t kill somebody?

MADDOW: Were dogs the way you were treating prisoners?

LAGARANUS: We were using military working dogs. This was up in Mosul. We
would agree on a certain cue that I would give. And on that cue, the dog
handler would make the dog bark and jump and lung at the detainee. The
detainee was blind folded. We had a sand bag over his head, so he didn`t
know the level of control the handler had over the dog. The dog was
muzzled and on a leash. So, it was safe but the idea was to scare the
detainee.

MADDOW: It would have that effect?

LAGARANUS: Absolutely.

MADDOW: Had there been a clear command environment about what was expected
of U.S. military personnel in that environment, could torture have been
avoided?

LAGARANUS: I worked in detention facilities all over Iraq, and where there
were clear guidelines, torture didn`t happen. It seemed there was a real
willingness to do it. I don`t know what that says about people. But
people were often enthusiastic about it. Nobody said no.

MADDOW: You didn`t?

LAGARANUS: I didn`t, no. You know, you sort of become isolated there.
You`re in this community. Your morals shift along with the people you`re
working with. And you`re sort of morally confused.

But when you watch it on television and you see the moral outrage happening
in the United States, I was able to see myself in a bit of a different
light.

MADDOW: Did you ever send things up the chain of command or to
investigators either regret at something you had done or your offense at
something you had seen done?

LAGARANUS: About halfway through the year while I was in Iraq, I started
having a crisis of conscience and I didn`t like what we were doing, but
they had stepped up to where they were burning these guys, they were
breaking their bones. I spoke to CID which is the criminal investigations
of the Army. A lot of them had to do with the scandal.

MADDOW (voice-over): In the spring of 2004, reports of Abu Ghraib begin
surfacing, reinforced by photographs depicting physical and psychological
abuse by U.S. military personnel.

LAGARANUS: It became much easier after the scandal broke to refuse to do
any kind of torture at all because people were afraid at that point.

MADDOW: Lagaranus also says the harsh tactics used resulted in little
more than fear and anger.

LAGARANUS: It`s counterproductive to make the person you`re trying to get
talk to you hate you. Torture, in my experience and having used torture
quite extensively as an interrogator, it does not work.

MADDOW: Why do it then?

LAGARANUS: We use torture because we are frustrated, because we are angry
and it`s not about getting intelligence. It`s not about being productive.
It`s about torture for torture`s sake.

MADDOW: Coming up -- building a new American playbook from a surprising
source.

MADDOW: These are the enemy`s techniques. These are written in blood.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC ANCHOR (voice-over): Interrogation techniques,
suggestions from military interrogators had migrated through official
channels. These were techniques that America`s enemies used against us in
wars past. That the U.S. military cataloged and studied to teach American
troops how to survive torture.

MALCOLM NANCE, FORMER SERE INSTRUCTOR: You can`t do this.

MADDOW: Malcolm Nance was a military instructor at SERE, S-E-R-E, the
military`s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape school.

NANCE: We teach people how to properly behave in captivity and how to
attempt escapes.

MADDOW: Nance traveled the world, researching foreign interrogation
tactics, to better prepare U.S. troops for captivity.

NANCE: When I got my orders to go to SERE, I just leave before that and
went to Cambodia. I wanted to see the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh and found
a killing machine. This was a prison whose sole function was to document
you coming in, document your torture, document your confession and then
document your execution. It was almost like a compendium of everything
that we could do bad to you.

It was the first time I ever saw waterboard. The entire function was to
get you to confess that you work for the CIA, that you work against the
Khmer Rouge government and that was necessary for your death. So, whether
you told the truth, whether you told a lie, it didn`t matter.

And I got to this school and found we had this enormous curriculum which
said exactly the same thing. Torture has nothing to do with whether you`re
establishing your guilt or your innocence at all. It`s just a methodology
of getting to you comply and once you complied, they`ll make you sign a
confession.

MADDOW (on camera): But the confession you`re signing is not necessarily
intelligence.

NANCE: Oh, this is not intelligence. This has nothing to do with
intelligence.

MADDOW (voice-over): But in 2005, Malcolm Nance learned his own government
had been gathering the same information on techniques and torture, not to
learn how to survive those techniques, but to learn how to use some of them
itself.

(on camera): I want to show you a document from Guantanamo that was
declassified after the fact.

NANCE: These guidelines for employing SERE techniques during detainee
interrogations. The interrogation tactics used that U.S. military`s SERE
schools are appropriate for use in real world interrogations. These
tactics and techniques are used at the SERE school to break detainees, the
same tactic and techniques can be used to break detainees during
interrogation operations.

MADDOW: What is your reaction to that?

NANCE: That is horrific. These are the enemies` techniques. These are
written in blood. These are techniques that U.S. service members died for.
Every technique we used, someone died from.

MADDOW (voice-over): Foreign torture tactics redesigned and redirected.

NANCE: They decided that they would mimic our enemies` techniques.

MADDOW: But the new enhanced interrogation program did have its own
advocates.

Richard Engel sat down with John Rizzo, the CIA`s former top lawyer when
enhanced interrogation techniques were introduced. This is John Rizzo`s
first on-camera interview.

RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Your name came up
many times as someone who legalized torture, legalized enhance
interrogation. What`s your opinion on the enhanced interrogation? Did it
work?

JOHN RIZZO, FORMER CIA TOP LAWYER: I don`t think there is in I dispute,
any reasonable dispute it yielded an immense amount of reliable actionable
intelligence. The CIA program was directed at the highest levels of the al
Qaeda leadership -- the most ruthless, most psychopathic, the toughest, and
the most knowledgeable.

ENGEL: Did you feel you were being asked to legalize torture?

RIZZO: No. I think I was asked the way I`ve been asked throughout my
career with my clients at the CIA. Here are some proposed activities that
we think are essential to elicit the information we need from these high-
level al Qaeda figures we believe are stone walling us about a possible new
and imminent attack on the homeland. Are these legal?

ENGEL: How many people knew these practices were going on?

RIZZO: The techniques were authorized, were vetted through the most senior
level of the U.S. national security community -- secretaries of state and
defense, the attorney general and, of course, the vice president and
president.

ENGEL: They knew, vice president and president?

RIZZO: Yes. They knew about the program.

MADDOW: In fact, the Bush administration takes the position that the
exquisite torture techniques of the Khmer Rouge and the North Koreans and
the Japanese during World War II are not torture when they are done by
Americans after 9/11, specifically because Americans studied these
techniques and were trained how to survive them.

Vice President Dick Cheney defends waterboarding.

DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: Waterboarding and all of the other
techniques that were used are techniques that we used training our own
people. This is stuff we`ve done this for years with our own military
personnel.

MADDOW: In 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer Yukio Asano
with war crimes for waterboarding an American.

SEN. TED KENNEDY (D), MASSACHUSETTS: Fifteen years of hard labor when this
was used against Americans in World War II.

MADDOW: Military commission legislation in 2006 retroactively indemnifies
anyone caught committing torture on behalf of the U.S. government. In
2009, a 220-page internal probe by the Justice Department concludes that
Bush administration lawyers committed series of lapses in judgments in
writing memos that authorized harsh interrogation techniques. But it
recommends they not be prosecuted.

President Bush`s successor, President Obama, instructs the Justice
Department to decide whether the Bush lawyers should face charges. They
don`t. The Obama administration pledges interrogators themselves will be
protected and not prosecuted for doing what the Bush lawyers argued was
legal. Ultimately, it is the Obama administration that shuts down the CIA
interrogation program. But that also makes the decision to not prosecute.

The decision not to prosecute policy makers after 9/11 for what America had
previously charged as war crimes is living precedent, legally and morally
and politically.

CHENEY: To call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated
professionals to saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers
as innocent victims.

MADDOW: On FOX News Channel, administration officials and Republican
presidential candidates voice their support for these tactics.

MITT ROMNEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Enhanced interrogation techniques
have to be used.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would do certainly waterboard. I don`t believe that
is, quote, "torture."

DONALD RUMSFELD, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: People are equating water
boarding with torture. I think that`s a mistake.

MADDOW: By 2006, the CIA prohibits the use of waterboarding. And under
new leadership, the Department of Defense imposes new measures to address
abuse in military prison. But it`s what America once pledged to prevent
and prosecute in every instance now becomes a political proving ground.
America`s cross onto territory we had never before tried to justify leaves
its marks.

(on camera): Whether or not people at a high level, people at a command
position are prosecuted for torture, if that ever happens, do you think
that people operating at your level in the military should have been held
more accountable? Do you think there should have been more widespread
prosecution?

TONY LAGARANUS, FORMER INTERROGATOR: I do think there should have been
more widespread prosecution from the bottom level all the way to the top.
I expected to be prosecuted. It never happened. I don`t think they wanted
to follow that trail and get the higher-ups involved.

MADDOW: Do you still think you should have been?

LAGARANUS: Yes.

MADDOW (voice-over): A response to his allegations reads in part, "DOD
personnel working in detention facilities operate under an extraordinary
high level of scrutiny and consistently provide the most humane safe care
and custody of individuals under their control. The suggestion that DOD
personnel, the overwhelming majority of whom serve honorably were or are
engaged in systematic torture or abuse of detainees simply does not
withstand credible scrutiny."

(on camera): It`s been seven years since you`ve been home from Iraq. Does
it still weigh on you?

LAGARANUS: Certainly, it still weighs on me. Yes.

MADDOW: Are you glad you decided to talk about what you did in Iraq?

LAGARANUS: I don`t know. People asked me that before. I`m not sure if it
was a good thing for me to talk about it, for my own mental health.

MADDOW: Coming up --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The camera can pick up a lit cigarette about a mile
away.

MADDOW: One of the most effective counterterrorism forces in the world is
a local police department.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Once again, Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel.

ENGEL: In many ways, New York City has always been the center on New York
terrorism. 9/11 attacks, Washington, but New York was the main focus. The
Twin Towers went down here.

The NYPD, the New York City Police Department, reacted in exceptional ways.
Not only on that day which has been widely documented and celebrated, but
since then.

And the New York City Police Department, which is a giant force, it`s the
size of really army divisions, isn`t just a police force any more. It has
invested in counterterrorism in ways most people have no idea. Most New
Yorkers are not aware of the extensive security and counterterrorism
measures that are taking place in this city.

And for the last several years, we`ve been given access to what New York
has done in the name of security. And I think a lot of people will be
surprised how extensive it is.

MADDOW: The fact this is such an under-told story itself, so politically
important and so key to how America changed since 9/11, the distance of how
we governed and policed ourselves and how much public debate there is about
it.

ENGEL (voice-over): It`s just a few hours until 2009, on one of those
biting cold New York New Year`s Eve. The crowds are waiting for the ball
to drop at midnight, a tradition seen about a billion people worldwide.

What hardly anyone notices are the snipers overlooking Times Square, with
high-powered rifles ready to shot terrorist, or the police with backpack
radiation detectors that will set off an alarm if they pick up traces of a
dirty bomb, sensors that sniff the air for chemical weapons, or armored
vehicles positioned to stop a commando-style raid.

POLICE OFFICER: OK, guys. Happy New Year.

ENGEL: Since 9/11, the New York Police Department, the NYPD, has
transformed into what may be the most elaborate, secretive and most
effective local counterterrorism force in the world.

(on camera): You have to be keenly aware that an event like this is a
major terrorist target.

RAY KELLY, NYPD COMMISSIONER: Absolutely. And, you know, we treat it as
such.

ENGEL: It`s run by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, a former beat cop and
Marine.

KELLY: Police officers now think about terrorism. They know that`s one of
their core functions. This wasn`t the case.

ENGEL: We followed New York City`s counterterrorism and intelligence
divisions for more than two years. As they monitor the waterways, 468
subway stations and Manhattan`s iconic skyline.

At Floyd Bennett Field, once used by Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh,
the NYPD operates a special air unit, we are taken up by Detective Presto
Cevalis (ph) in a surveillance helicopter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There`s the Statue of Liberty. That`s one of our
security checks.

ENGEL: The cameras can see a lot more than the Statue of Liberty. They
can read license plates, see in infrared and take thermal images so precise
they can pick out a single squirrel in Central Park.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This camera could pick up a heat actually a lit
cigarette about a mile away.

ENGEL: Most New Yorkers and tourists have no idea they are being watched
on roof tops or the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

It looks pretty crowded. How far away are we from that?

TZAVELIS: About a mile and a half.

ENGEL: That`s from a mile and a half out.

TZAVELIS: That`s correct.

ENGEL: And I can see what she`s wearing. The red scarf, the red jacket.
Someone with the hat. I bet you not a single person on that observation
took a second notice.

TZAVELIS: The average person didn`t realize what we were doing.

ENGEL: Privacy guidelines don`t allow the cops to look onto individual
apartments, but with the technology they have, it is possible.

But as good as it is, the view from above isn`t nearly enough. Manhattan,
home to 1.5 million people is, after all, an island. Much of its sensitive
infrastructure is on the water, including possible terrorist targets like
the ventilation shafts that secure air into the tunnel, United Nations, the
Brooklyn Bridge and Con Edison power plant.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s a scary thought every day to come up with how we
are going to protect these critical infrastructures.

ENGEL: The biggest challenge could be monitoring all the bridges and
piers. Each one needs to be physically inspected by scuba teams.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We do it every single day, every day of the year, we
are down there looking for any irregularity.

ENGEL: The waters around New York are polluted and cold. The divers wear
vulcanized rubber suits, gloves and full face masks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don`t want any of the water to get in any of the
orifices in your face, especially nose, mouth, eyes and ears.

ENGEL (on camera): You don`t want the water in your ears?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don`t.

ENGEL (voice-over): There`s also a strong current that stirs up the
bottom.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Feel good?

ENGEL: It`s so brown, so murky, the divers almost blindly have to pat the
bottom. Feel the underwater pier abutments. It`s a training exercise to
search for explosives. It`s very slow work.

But eventually, they do find this limpid mine. It`s a training tool, but
it would have been powerful enough to destroy the pier.

Searching the harbor isn`t exactly pleasant. With a sewage plant next
door, the water here is contaminated.

(on camera): I think they have to shower me off. I have to be
decontaminated.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don`t touch face or eat anything.

ENGEL: Lovely New York water, isn`t it?

(voice-over): The NYPD, a police force that after 9/11 became a powerful,
some say, intrusive, counterterrorism division.

Coming up -- the NYPD keeps a close eye on the streets of New York City.

(on camera): If I put on a black overcoat and walked around for half an
hour, do you think in three days you`d be able to find me?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We would definitely be able to find you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENGEL (voice-over): In 1993, the World Trade Center was attacked. The
federal government, including the FBI, took the lead in the investigation.
The 1993 organizers were caught and put in jail. The bombers weren`t
particularly smart. They went back to collect the deposit on a rented van
they turned into a bomb.

But in 2001, the World Trade Center, the same buildings, were attacked
again. Ray Kelly watched the Twin Towers go down and decided that New York
had no choice but to take care of itself.

KELLY: It became obvious that we couldn`t rely solely on the federal
government to protect this city.

ENGEL: Kelly decided to change the NYPD`s focus from only fighting crime
to counterterrorism and intelligence.

KELLY: We wanted to be first preventers. We have to stop something, use
every effort to protect another attack here. That`s what intelligence
gives you.

ENGEL: For that intelligence capacity, Kelly hired David Cohen. Cohen had
35 years experience at the CIA, running clandestine operations and serving
as the CIA`s New York station chief.

DAVID COHEN, NYPD: I think I brought experience in getting things done and
implementing programs.

ENGEL: Cohen created what some people have called New York`s secret CIA.

KELLY: David, among other things, is a terrific recruiter.

ENGEL (on camera): He used to recruit spies in the United States, that was
his job.

KELLY: He did. That`s true.

ENGEL: Why did you reach out to someone with such experience in the
intelligence community? Why not someone else with a law enforcement
background?

KELLY: We had to do things differently. We had to get out of the law
enforcement box, so to speak.

ENGEL (voice-over): Out of the law enforcement box and out of New York,
the NYPD, which once couldn`t even operate in New Jersey, embedded
detectives into 11 international law enforcement agencies, from London to
Tel Aviv to Singapore.

COHEN: Going overseas was number one, we want to establish an NYPD
presence so that the New York City question is never ignored.

ENGEL: Not ignoring the New York City question, meant that when terrorists
took over Mumbai for three days in 2008, the NYPD deployed its own agents
to India. They briefed counterterrorism officers back in New York City.

KELLY: In many ways, the city of Mumbai bears striking similarities to New
York.

ENGEL: The attack in India had a direct impact on New York. Police told
New York hotel managers, if a guest requests a particular room on a high
floor or doesn`t let the maid in for days, the NYPD wants to know.

In Mumbai, Indian police were outgunned by terrorists, so New York put
military-style cops on the transport system. They`re armed almost like
combat troops.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is it intimidating to people? I guess it is. But I`m
here to put their minds at ease.

ENGEL: The special operations division practices assault tactics on old
subway cars. They`re preparing for a Mumbai scenario when terrorists
attacked in small units. But force doesn`t work unless you know where to
focus it. This $100 million command center in lower Manhattan monitors
more than 1,700 cameras installed after 9/11. They`re programmed with
algorithms so they can automatically detect patterns.

If someone leaves a bag in front of a key building or a car circles a block
repeatedly, the cameras here set off an alarm. The images can also be
reviewed with a specificity that might shock New Yorkers who think they`re
anonymous in the big city. We were shown the facility when it first became
operational in 2008 by then deputy commissioner for counterterrorism,
Richard Falkenrath.

(on camera): If I put on a black overcoat and walked around for a half an
hour, do you think in three days you`d be able to find me?

RICHARD FALKENRATH: We`d definitely be able to find you.

ENGEL (voice-over): The data is stored on huge computer hard drive for 30
days, then police erased in line with privacy guidelines.

(on camera): Do you think this is overly intrusive?

FALKENRATH: No, I don`t. This is all public visual data. We are not
prying into anyone`s private domain when we do this. It`s what`s happening
on the streets.

ENGEL (voice-over): Critics do not agree. New York defense attorney, Josh
Gratiel (ph), handles civil liberties cases. He says the NYPD collects too
much private information.

(on camera): You think New Yorkers should be more aware of how much is
being done in the name of security?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think so. It never stops. The history of
surveillance never stops with the principal object of the surveillance.
One reason people say, well, I don`t mind, because they are just going
after Muslims and Islamic terrorists because they don`t identify with them.

ENGEL: The NYPD says it stopped 12 major plots against New York since
9/11.

But why talk about New York`s extensive security program? Two reasons we
were told -- to reassure the public and to let would-be terrorists know New
York is no longer an easy target.

But New York still keeps many secrets in its arsenal like this vehicle. It
accounts for what may be NYPD`s biggest fear, the dirty bomb.

(on camera): It could be a small device.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Could be a small device. Absolutely. It could be
something in a backpack or something in a small box.

Just put the radioactive material with you, now you have a dirty bomb.

ENGEL (voice-over): The vehicle is a mobile radiation detector. It`s
precise enough to pick out a single person who had a medical test that use
radiation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stress test for the heart could last a couple of weeks.
We could detect it.

ENGEL: The cops often disguise this vehicle passing it off as a delivery
truck or a moving van.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It could be anything. Laundry service, linen service,
food service.

ENGEL: Also hidden in plain sight is a state-of-the-art office in an
unmarked building outside of Manhattan. The division based here monitors
terrorist activity around the world. A wall here is lined with a somber
reminder, comrades who perished on 9/11. So police call it their Hall of
Fame.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So many officers who worked here responded on 9/11.
They were at the scene. They went to the funerals. They know the family.
These are their friends.

ENGEL: This facility also serves as grim but essential purpose. If New
York were attacked or destroyed, this would become the city`s offsite
control room. It`s effectively a doomsday center to run New York should
the worst happen.

Back in Times Square on New Year`s Eve 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the
first to admit New York City doesn`t just have a municipal police force any
more.

(on camera): How do you respond to critic whose say you brought in a
former chief representative at the CIA?

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, NEW YORK: Absolutely.

ENGEL: A former marine in Commissioner Kelly and you turned your police
force into an intelligence-gathering organization.

BLOOMBERG: That`s exactly the plan. That`s what we`re trying to do. It
is a paramilitary organization. It is run like a paramilitary
organization. It`s not a democracy within that organization. I am where
democracy interacts with the paramilitary organization. I`m the elected
official. And then their job is to keep us safe.

ENGEL (voice-over): New York security has profoundly changed since 9/11.
Critics say it`s too intrusive.

The NYPD says it`s an effective and discreet program. Many security
experts say it`s a far better way of stopping terrorism than sending tens
of thousands of American troops to occupy foreign countries. It`s better,
the police say, to protect the city you`re in.

Coming up -- the race to keep loose nuclear material out of the hands of
terrorist.

MADDOW: And if have material, it`s not hard to build that bomb?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: In terms of terrorism as a tactic, terrorism is asymmetrical
warfare. The only existential threat that can be posted by terrorism is
that a small terrorist operation provokes their target into an existential
crisis of its own making.

ENGEL: You mean, if a small group prompts us to wildly overact and swing
ourselves into exhaustion.

MADDOW: Yes. Spend yourself into oblivion for example.

ENGEL: Which we`ve basically done.

MADDOW: Which we have in some ways done. That`s the dynamic that explains
why terrorists do what they do tactically. Why that terror tactic has
existed.

ENGEL: Which, by the way, associates of Bin Laden said is what he wanted
to do. He wanted us to get involved in all these costly foreign wars in
order to break us.

MADDOW: I feel like America started to grasp that dynamic, that that was
the goal. The risk is a self-imposed existential crisis. The thing
exceptional is the possibility of nuclear terrorism.

ENGEL: That`s when a small group can actually really make a difference, a
small group of people, maybe one person is able to carry out a nuclear
attack or even a dirty bomb attack. The results would be serious.

MADDOW (voice-over): February 2010, an elite team of American scientists
and engineers assemble secretly in the nation of Chile in South America.
Their mission is to secure, shield and transport safely 40 pounds of
radioactive highly enriched uranium -- enough uranium to devastate a U.S.
city in a nuclear bomb blast, enough uranium to contaminate a huge area in
a dirty bomb.

This much bomb grade uranium would be a multimillion dollar black market
prize for terrorists. The Americans have come in secret to keep that prize
off the black market, to bring it to the U.S., to lock it down. Everything
goes according to plan. Specially designed casks with eight inches of lead
and steel will hold the nuclear material after it`s carefully removed from
its storage pools.

But then disaster strikes. Chile is rocked by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake,
the largest quake anywhere in the world in 50 years. The port where the
casks were to be shifted from land to sea is destroyed by the quake and
tsunami that follows.

In the chaos after the disaster, and still in secret, U.S. and Chilean
officials scramble for a plan B. They choose another port 50 miles north
of their original location. So, it`s a 50-mile overland trip, a tense,
dark of night uranium convoy under armed guard through an earthquake-
ravaged countryside. The mission in Chile is hair-raising, but it works.
The uranium arrives safely in the United States.

It`s the latest American success in a project that started nearly a decade
earlier on the other side of the world.

In August 2001, weeks before 9/11 Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda deputy
Ayman al-Zawahiri meet around a campfire in Kandahar, Afghanistan, with one
of Pakistan`s top nuclear scientists. They discuss al Qaeda`s aspirations
to build a nuclear bomb.


ROLF MOWATT-LARSSEN, VETERAN U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFFICER: The two apparently
met in what is referred to as the fireside chat or had a dinner and talked
about al Qaeda`s interest in nuclear bombs where the al Qaeda leader
apparently was trying to gain some basic sense of what it would take.

MADDOW: Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is a veteran U.S. intelligence officer.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: A famous question he apparently asked at the end of that
meeting was after Bashir was trying to tell him how hard this was and how
difficult it was for Pakistan, bin Laden said if I have the material, then
how do I build it?

MADDOW: The Pakistani scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood later confirms
to U.S. official that is the meeting took place and that he gave al Qaeda
leaders a pencil drawing of a crude nuclear bomb design. Just one month
after that meeting in Kandahar, September 11th, 2001.

As the United States reels from the attacks, those who know about that
meeting at that Kandahar campfire reel over what may be about to come next.
Overnight the most important question for the United States government
becomes how far along is al Qaeda in its pursuit of a nuclear bomb and how
can the United States stop them from assembling one?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: That`s a piece of cake if you have enough material. If
you look at the Hiroshima bomb, you know, it was 50 kilograms of HGU. The
Oklahoma City bombing was two tons. If you about back and look at the
devastation of a two-ton bomb, think of 13,000 tons versus two tons. I
mean, it`s inconceivable. Even if you look at the Hiroshima pictures, it`s
inconceivable what a bomb that size could do.

MADDOW (on camera): And if you have the material, it`s not hard to build
that bomb?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: No.

MADDOW (voice-over): Rolf Mowatt-Larssen had been planning on a new CIA
posting in Beijing. But after 9/11, just after 9/11, he is drafted
personally by CIA Director George Tenet to lead a new effort instead.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: That is one of my most vivid memories. He said to me,
we`re behind the eight ball, and the reason he said that, which I didn`t
know what he meant at that precise moment, was because we had information
about this meeting with the Pakistan scientist and bin Laden before 9/11.

MADDOW: November 2001, Mowatt-Larssen and Tenet, at the direction of
President George W. Bush, are dispatched to Pakistan to confront Pakistan`s
President Pervez Musharraf about the fireside chat that`s turned up in U.S.
intelligence reports -- the possibility that Pakistani nuclear scientists
are assisting al Qaeda in pursuing a nuclear bomb.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: President Musharraf`s reaction, initial reaction, was men
in caves can`t do this or incredulity. That`s what we expected. It`s the
same incredulity we all felt.

MADDOW: Tenet and Mowatt-Larssen implore President Musharraf to inventory
all of Pakistan`s nuclear material. Then as now, there is no indication of
anything gone missing, but now as then, Musharraf downplays the threat that
what he calls men in caves might ever even try to acquire such weapons.

ENGEL: The extremists that are in Pakistan, Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda,
Kashmiri groups, you name it -- do you think the extremists in Pakistani
want to acquire nuclear weapons or at least nuclear materials?

PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, FORMER PAKISTAN`S PRESIDENT: Maybe. Maybe they would be
happy with it. Maybe.

ENGEL: Do you think they are trying actively?

MUSHARRAF: I don`t think so. I don`t think they are trying actively to
get nuclear assets. We have no such intelligence. No. We haven`t had
such intelligence at all.

MADDOW: Before 9/11, Pakistan is only one of three countries in the world
that recognizes the Taliban as a legitimate government in Afghanistan.

After 9/11, under pressure, Pakistan nominally abandons them. They ally
themselves uneasily with the United States instead, even as Pakistan`s
military and intelligence service continue to be linked to extremists, and
even as public opinion shows Pakistan to be the most anti-American country
on earth.

After 9/11, USAID starts to flow into Afghanistan by the billions.
Pakistan remains impoverished and unstable and extremist, but as USAID
continues, Pakistan pours money into its nuclear program. This new
facility 140 miles from the capital will host two of the largest plutonium
production reactors in the world.

The plant is not designed to make electricity which Pakistan desperately
needs. It isn`t hooked up to the nation`s grid. It makes plutonium
specifically for nuclear bombs. Pakistan was nuclear-armed before 9/11,
before Taliban and al Qaeda leaders fled from the U.S. war in Afghanistan
to take refuge there.

Since 9/11, Pakistan has built up its nuclear weapons program bigger and
faster than any other country in the world.

(on camera): When you find out about things like Pakistani Taliban,
attacks on military facilities, about the vulnerability of Pakistan`s state
institutions including possibly its military and its intelligence services,
do you worry about nuclear security?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: I worry about nuclear security in Pakistan than anywhere
in the world with the possible of exception of North Korea, which I have
different kinds of concerns.

They have three problems.

Number one problem is they do have a certain instability in the country, as
you referred to the Taliban.

Number two, they have a high ratio of what we call extremists that
represent in nuclear security firms potential insider threats. And we have
seen unfortunately cases, the one we referred to already as Bashiruddin
Mahmood, as well as the A.Q. Khan network which assisted several rogue
states in obtaining nuclear capabilities. So, we have a record of insider
problems.

The third problem they have which is the one the least discussed and
potentially the most alarming, is that their nuclear weapons are
increasing. In this environment, a greater number of facilities and
weapons and production is not a good thing.

MADDOW: That new plutonium production facility where Pakistan is building
the fuel for its nuclear weapons, the former director of that facility is
the same nuclear scientist who met with about with bin Laden around that
Afghan campfire a month before 9/11.

It is with this environment threat that the U.S. government begins a
concentrated to make vivid the threat of nuclear terrorism to the American
people.

Coming up -- at a nuclear black market, America`s enemies could become the
highest bidder.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: Al Qaeda`s goal is to build a nuclear weapon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BUSH: Today, the gravest danger in the war on terror, the gravest danger
facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, that could also give or sell
those weapons to terrorist allies who would use them without the least
hesitation.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly
enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a
nuclear weapon in less than a year. And Saddam Hussein would be in
position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.

CHENEY: We know he`s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons. We
know he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups,
including the al Qaeda organization.

MADDOW: The Bush administration uses the vivid imagery and fear of nuclear
catastrophe to convince the American public that dramatic action is
necessary to protect the country.

BUSH: And to defend the world from great danger.

MADDOW: But the dramatic action the Bush administration takes is to invade
Iraq, which at the time has no active nuclear program or weapons of mass
destruction or any connection to al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, the real work of stopping the real threat of nuclear terrorism
proceeds almost frantically with no public attention at all.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen convenes a joint operations group, the CIA, FBI, the
NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, find out if al Qaeda has a bomb, if
the next attack could be nuclear. Find out how their efforts to get one
can be stopped.

In 2003, a smuggler crosses from Russia into Georgia carrying 170 grams of
very pure bomb-grade uranium. Mowatt-Larssen and the CIA traced its
origins back to an old Soviet nuclear facility in Siberia. Three years
later, another smuggler caught with more nuclear material from the same
facility. There is a pipeline out of Siberia supplying a black market what
it takes to build a nuclear bomb. Find it and shut it down in.

July 2010, in Pretoria, South Africa, during a sting operation caught on a
surveillance camera, five men are arrested to for trying to sell highly
radioactive cesium 137, perfect for a dirty bomb attack. They also say
they have a nuclear device to sell.

There continues to be evidence of kinetic black market activity to get,
smuggle and sell nuclear material. Where are the smugglers getting the
material and who are they getting it for?

This is a black market in global cataclysm.

(on camera): Is there a real black market for terrorists who want to buy a
fissile material to make a nuclear bomb?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: There`s been a material roughly 20 cases in the last 20
years. So, you have roughly one a year of what we call weapons-useable
material. This is weapons that if terrorists got their hands on it could
be put into a bomb that would produce a nuclear yield.

So, this isn`t, we`re not talking dirty bombs. This weapons-useable
material that could create a fissionable device if terrorists got their
hands on it. There are actually some more that the U.S. government and
other countries are aware of than those that I can`t talk about because
it`s classified.

But in every case I`m aware of, the material is not reported missing from
the facility of origin until it was found on the black market. So, that
tells us there is a nuclear security problem that`s the root of the black
market problem.

MADDOW: I feel like the common wisdom is if terrorist groups were able to
get radioactive material what they`d likely be able to do is put
radioactive material into a conventional bomb, exploded it, a dirty bomb.
But the idea that they`d be able to cause a nuclear explosion, set off a
nuclear weapon, set off a mushroom cloud, that`s impossible.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: Well, the common wisdom is wrong. In fact, somebody
better tell al Qaeda that`s the common wisdom. Al Qaeda`s goal, which
we`ve known 15 years at least, is to build a nuclear weapon. Their goal is
not to produce the dirty bomb but to produce the actual Hiroshima-like
bomb.

MADDOW: Building on a non-Lugar initiative of the 1990s to secure nuclear
material in the former Soviet states, the U.S. government scaled up its
effort to physical secure nuclear material for other countries. An agency
within the Energy Department, the National Nuclear Security Administration,
launches a four-year effort to secure the known loose nuclear material
around the world.

Countries like Chile where NNSA officials complete their top-secret task of
recovering 40 pounds of highly-enriched uranium despite a massive
earthquake in a middle of the mission. Over the course of about a decade,
the National Nuclear Security Administration`s efforts to lock up nuclear
material, to keep it out of the hands of terrorists leads to the total
recovery of all weapons-grade uranium in 18 different countries around the
world.

Pulling off a coordinated international nuclear security mission like this
requires a major financial commitment by the United States. Early in his
first term, President Obama ramps these efforts up, adding billions to
their budget.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Today, I am announcing a new
international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the
world within four years.

MADDOW: The fact there has not been an incident of nuclear terrorism since
9/11 is a great success store for the decade since. The persistence of
nuclear material smuggling, the persistence of that black market however
means that there are still paying customers out there trying to take
terrorism nuclear.

How would the last decade had been different if 9/11 had been a nuclear
blast or even a dirty bomb attack? How would the next decade unspool if
that ever does happen?

(on camera): If al Qaeda or another group like it did succeed in
detonating a nuclear device, that would not be the end of the world,
something would happen next. What do you think would happen next in the
United States and around the world?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: That kind of attack would be intended to draw the United
States back in even more, say, for their terms, barbaric way into the
Middle East, which would again prove to everybody, particularly now, as the
world experienced these unprecedented changes in the Middle East, would in
a way favor what al Qaeda`s narrative is all about, which is a U.S.
corrupt, hypocritical democracy that favors certain interests.

MADDOW: How can the U.S. act in ways that doesn`t reinforce their
narrative, particularly in response to violent provocation from them?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: Number one is we have to ensure we do not overreact.
That`s in terms of the desired military response. But more importantly is
to think through what we are doing in terms of the consequences and
avoiding the sorts of things that would play to the extremists` cause.

And to at home ensure that we think real hard about what we are willing to
give up in the aftermath of an attack or how afraid we are.

We don`t have to live in fear. That`s what terrorists want more than
anything to inspire fear. If we do that, they win, we lose.

MADDOW: When we look how we changed in the past decade and we have to
think about what kind of country we want to be for the next decade,
security is never going to go away as a an American concern. The wounds of
9/11 are still fresh to us as a nation. We are still both alert and
concerned about the prospect that there will be another 9/11. That feeling
has not changed at all.

But what have we learned in 10 years about what works and what doesn`t work
toward keeping us safe?

ENGEL: Well, what works it seems is small, focused, pinpoint type
operations -- whether they are against nuclear weapons, whether they are on
a city level like in New York or whether it`s like the CIA hit teams and
military hit teams that went and killed bin Laden. That kind of thing
works.

What doesn`t work is a vague, conceptual battle that we are going to send
in military divisions to spread democracy and fight a war against an
ideology with soldiers -- that kind of thing didn`t work, doesn`t work, and
may have made our country less safe.

MADDOW: The decision that America would wage preemptive war, that we would
not allow threats to materialize, that we would act materially and call
ourselves justified in doing so before a threat materialized, that has
resulted in 10 years of constant warfare and more ahead.

ENGEL: Preemption is good if you`re trying to stop a dirty bomb attack or
you`re trying to stop a specific threat. Preemption is not good when
you`re talking about invading a country and establishing foreign bases with
unknown consequences.

MADDOW: Something that almost by definition you can`t control, you can`t
say how it`s going to end up.

ENGEL: A lot of al Qaeda people were killed, but they weren`t killed by
the conventional wars that were launched in the name of al Qaeda. The
global war on terrorism was, in many ways, a global war on fear.

How do you fight against terrorism? It`s like fighting against evil.
Doing it, we allowed ourselves as a nation to being terrorized.

(END VIDEOTAPE)






and the world.>


LAWRENCE O`DONNELL, "THE LAST WORD" HOST: Up next is Rachel Maddow and
Richard Engel with their documentary, "Day of Destruction: Decade of War."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: And now an MSNBC special event.

Anchor Rachel Maddow, NBC news chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel
draws on a decade of reporting from the frontlines on the war on terror.
Together, they examine what America has done for national security since
9/11, to itself and the world.

(MUSIC)

CHYRON: "Day of Destruction: Decade of War"

RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: When you think about
the cost of all the actions that have been taken over the last 10 years, we
often calculated the number of soldiers killed, amount of money spent. In
the region, it counted in the number of dead Muslims, that`s how it`s
counted in the Middle East.

And just do a bit of quick math, in Iraq, about 150,000 Iraqis were killed.
And some of them were killed by U.S. forces. More were killed by Iraqis
themselves. But that doesn`t really matter in the minds in the region
because they all died as a result of the U.S.-led war.

Afghanistan, maybe another 35,000, 40,000. Several thousand more in
Pakistan. When you add it all up, we`re talking about 200,000 dead Muslims
as a result of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Do you make America safer by having that many dead people, that much anger,
that much frustration, that number of graves -- does that really make
America safer? Or does that just create more radicals that the world is
going to have to deal with?

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC ANCHOR: As the Arab world and Muslim war is changing
now, 10 years after 9/11, we see the revolutions, we see populist
uprisings, we see sort of restlessness (ph) of the Islamist movements in
countries where there are populist uprisings that have nothing to do with
them as they try to sort of grasp these things.

ENGEL: Tunisia was a huge blow to al Qaeda. Much more than Iraq was. The
Tunisian fruit vender who set fire to himself and started the Arab spring
did more to harm al Qaeda than the entire war on Iraq, which may have
helped al Qaeda and certainly allowed al Qaeda to attract more recruits.

MADDOW: What`s the next vision for American intervention in Muslim
countries after this?

ENGEL: It will be secret. Lots and lots of small, secretive operations.
Think Pakistan, think Somalia, think Yemen, drones, Special Forces, JSOC,
we`re going to be not hearing about these organizations a lot, but they are
going to be very busy.

(voice-over): Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 2007. The city on the Red Sea
has long been a gateway for pilgrims traveling to Mecca, Islam`s holiest
site.

In Jeddah, we meet Khalid Suleiman. Suleiman was a fighter with Osama Bin
Laden in Afghanistan. He`s just been released from four years in U.S.
detention at Guantanamo Bay.

He shows us his bizarre memorabilia.

KHALID SULEIMAN, FORMER GUANTANAMO DETAINEE: This is my glasses in
Guantanamo.

ENGEL: His personal letters redacted by the military. Anything that
looked like a code was erased.

(on camera): This is blacked out by the U.S. military? Your prison number
on top?

SULEIMAN: Yes.

ENGEL (voice-over): Suleiman admits he was a trained fighter for Bin
Laden.

SULEIMAN: I was getting training on weapons, military, mines, explosives,
electronics.

ENGEL: Suleiman was so dedicated he stayed with Bin Laden in the mountains
in Afghanistan, even as the Americans were bombing.

SULEIMAN: A little dusty here.

ENGEL (on camera): A little dust on Tora Bora?

SULEIMAN: Yes, from Tora Bora. Yes.

ENGEL: So when you were with Bin Laden in his bunker, you were listening
to your news on this radio?

SULEIMAN: Yes.

ENGEL (voice-over): Suleiman says he`s now reformed after graduating from
a unique Saudi rehabilitation program for Islamic radicals, that looks
amazingly like a summer camp.

At a campus outside Riyadh, religious extremists swim to relax, play soccer
and video games. The goal is to wean them off extremism in a friendly,
secure environment. Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi
Arabia.

The government says the rehabilitation program has largely been successful
in diffusing the anger of these men whom Saudi Arabia considers misguided
youths.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We try to find jobs for them, so we are doing our best
that these guys become a normal people, live in this society.

ENGEL: The Saudi government gave Khalid Suleiman $20,000 to furnish his
apartment, and paid for him to get married.

Suleiman also offers a rare look inside al Qaeda.

Suleiman says Bin Laden himself was surprised that 9/11 was so successful.
Bin Laden didn`t think the twin towers would actually go down.

SULEIMAN: Even Bin Laden was shocked when the building fall down.

ENGEL: But Bin Laden miscalculates what happens next.

After 9/11, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces go to war. The operations are
mostly done in secret. It`s America`s first response to the biggest
terrorist attack in its history. The secret missions are successful. Bin
Laden and the Taliban are driven from power quickly and decisively.

This little-known conflict in Afghanistan was led by Hank Crumpton. He
commanded counterterrorism operations at the CIA.

HANK CRUMPTON, FORMER CIA OFFICER: No one else has a plan. And the
president endorsed the CIA`s plan and that`s why the CIA took the lead.

ENGEL: As the Twin Towers are still smoldering, the CIA takes charge of
the biggest clandestine operation in its history.

(on camera): So, within days the CIA had teams on the ground in
Afghanistan?

CRUMPTON: The first teams were only CIA. The first team, the Jaw Breaker
team, less than 10. And the reason for this was we simply did not have
enough men to do more than that.

ENGEL (voice-over): The eight to 10 men team`s first goal was to secure
allies in northern and central Afghanistan, where the Taliban is deeply
unpopular. The CIA teams buy a lot of friends.

CRUMPTON: We had people with great tactical skills, language skills, and
people that understood Afghanistan and the Afghan people.

ENGEL (on camera): They were handing out suitcases full of cash.

CRUMPTON: That was a big part of it, but they wanted the Taliban to be
overthrown. They wanted al Qaeda and those foreign invaders out of their
country.

ENGEL (voice-over): But Crumpton says the suitcases filled with millions
of dollars came with a big commitment. The Afghan allies have to actually
kill Taliban and al Qaeda members to be paid.

CRUMPTON: And it was more than just their word. We expected them to
engage in lethal operations against al Qaeda and those Taliban and other
Afghans that decided not to join us.

ENGEL: The combination of CIA units, U.S. Special Forces, Afghan militias,
and air strikes is devastating. The Taliban start to run and abandon al
Qaeda.

SULEIMAN: You know, all the Taliban, they leave and also said, "We are
sorry."

ENGEL: In November, 2001, Kabul falls just two months after 9/11. Girls
are free to go to school. The repressive regime that hosted Bin Laden is
defeated.

A month later, even Kandahar, the Taliban`s hometown, is overthrown.

CRUMPTON: Kandahar failed, that was the last urban stronghold of the
Taliban and al Qaeda, less than 90 days after 9/11. There were only 410
Americans on the ground in Afghanistan, about 110 CIA and approximately 300
Special Forces.

ENGEL (on camera): Four hundred Americans --

CRUMPTON: Right.

ENGEL: -- on the ground and they toppled the government of the Taliban?

CRUMPTON: Well, 400 Americans that were in partnership with our Afghan
allies. And that was really the key.

ENGEL (voice-over): The cost to America to drive out the Taliban, less
than $1 billion and one U.S. CIA officer killed.

(on camera): Relatively speaking, it was a very cheap and low-risk
victory. What happened after that?

CRUMPTON: Well, I believe that we, as a nation, and as a global community,
failed to secure that victory.

ENGEL (voice-over): The quick victory in Afghanistan wasn`t secured in
large part because of Pakistan and its porous border. Al Qaeda and the
Taliban crossed over and established a new sanctuary next to Afghanistan.
And then, in what has been called an even greater strategic mistake, the
United States found a new mission, a new war, in Iraq. Al Qaeda felt it
was given a second chance.

SULEIMAN: We never thought America would invade Iraq. We never thought
that America would do that, you know, and get involved in that war.

ENGEL (on camera): Was Iraq a gift to al Qaeda?

SULEIMAN: Yes, of course. Yes, a gift.

ENGEL (voice-over): A gift because Iraq would inspire a new generation of
al Qaeda fighters.

Coming up -- inside al Qaeda. We used to think Satan was the enemy of
Islam, now, we know, it`s America, he says.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(GUNFIRE)

ENGEL (voice-over): For many Americans, the Iraq war is counted in troop
deployments. American soldiers killed and injured. Humvees attacked, and
America`s new three-letter nightmare, the IED.

But in the Middle East, the Iraq war is measured very differently.
Sometimes it is counted one girl at a time. On the outskirts of the Syrian
capital of Damascus in 2007 at a nightclub, The Lighthouse, girls parade on
a stage. They are dancers, and some are prostitutes. Some of the girls
are under 13 years old, a few look younger than 10.

They are refugees who escaped the war in Iraq. Their situation is so
desperate some of the girl`s father sit in the audience to negotiate a
price for their daughters.

In a nearby apartment, we meet Dunya (ph), a refugee prostitute from
Baghdad in her mid-20s. She doesn`t want her face to be shown, she seems
terrified. She chain smokes, her hands tremble. Dunya says some of the
Iraqi girls are gang raped by pimps to break them down into accepting
prostitution.

"God punish those who stole Iraq`s dignities," she says.

Syrian authorities close down The Lighthouse. But in Damascus, often said
to be the oldest inhibited city in the world, the damage to America`s image
is already done.

Hisham al-Abadi (ph) doesn`t seem like an al Qaeda supporter. He imports
candy. But he became convinced Muslims need al Qaeda to fight back against
the United States. He points to Abu Ghraib, the daily car bombings in
Baghdad, and the Iraqi refugees as evidence to why al Qaeda is necessary.

"I think 100 percent al Qaeda defends Muslim rights," he says.

To find out how the al Qaeda militants operate, we travel to the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan, in the town of Zarqa, on the edge of the desert.

Here, al Qaeda sells begin with men like Abu Sal (ph), he`s an unassuming
pet shop owner under five feet tall. But Abu Sal fought in Iraq, and then
returned to Jordan.

He brought back a phonebook full of the numbers of other fighters. Abu Sal
is part of a grassroots recruiting network and underground railroad for
Islamic fighters.

"We used to think Satan was the enemy of Islam. Now, we know it`s
America," he says.

In an apartment in the Jordanian capital of Amman, we meet an al Qaeda cell
-- small, secretive, hard to detect. A single fighter named Abu Anaz (ph)
and 19-year-old Jafar (ph), who wants to be a suicide bomber.

"I was watching television and seeing my brothers in Palestine and Iraq
being killed," he says.

Barefoot with a watch that ironically says exit.

"God loves martyrs and loves those who fight for him," he says. His
handler Abu Anaz has huge, scarred hands and red eyes, the color is from
hate, he says.

After five hours, we meet the al Qaeda cell leader, Abdullah Al-Muhajir
(ph). He`s wanted by Jordan police, sentenced in absentia to 15 years in
prison. In hiding, he only agrees to be filmed from behind.

He shows me videos of militants beheading foreigners that he makes and
distributes.

(SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

I ask him how Americans could consider him anything but a terrorist.

"What do Americans say when American planes bomb and kill people? What do
they say about that?" he asks. Al-Muhajir says al Qaeda changed after
9/11, that the group is no longer centrally commanded. It operates more
like a franchise. Al Qaeda has become a brand name.

"Al Qaeda is like a mother company with branches, with their own employees
and their own operations," he says. The branches even raise their own
money.

And this new al Qaeda-incorporated al Qaeda the brand name moves beyond
Iraq in search of other failed states.

Mogadishu, May 2010, al Qaeda has found a new home, operating through local
allies in the most dangerous country on earth.

Flying into the capital of Mogadishu isn`t for the faint of heart. African
Express is one of only two airlines operating in Somalia. It`s easy to see
why so few risk the trip.

Sitting on the runway is the wreckage of a crashed plane. A few thousand
African peacekeepers and a weak U.S.-backed government struggle to maintain
order in Mogadishu. Their enemy, al-Shabaab. It has pledged allegiance to
al Qaeda. It`s part of the al Qaeda brand name.

Al-Shabaab is a terrifying mix of al Qaeda`s ideology and African child
soldiers.

(on camera): The majority of the militiamen terrorizing the city are under
16 years old, teenagers empowered by the chaos to enter people`s homes,
lash women for dressing inappropriately, and chop off the limbs of accused
thieves.

(voice-over): Under a tall tree, we meet two of al-Shabaab`s victims, 20-
year-old Abdel Hadi (ph) and Ishmael Abdullah (ph), 18. Both claim they
were falsely accused of theft. Their punishment is typical of al-Shabaab`s
harsh justice. The boy`s right hands and left feet were amputated as their
parents were forced to watch.

"I tried to call out to my mother and say please, somebody save me," Abdel
says. "One woman had a miscarriage as she watched," says Abdullah. The
young men show me how the Shabaab stretched their wrists and ankles before
slicing them off with a butcher`s knife.

But Somalia is also a threat to the United States. Somalia`s al Qaeda
franchise is attracting American recruits. It has Americans among its
commanders. Alabama native Omar al-Hammami is one of al-Shabaab`s leading
recruiters, a fellow U.S. citizen, using Internet videos and rap songs.

U.S. counter terrorism officials say more than 50 Americans have traveled
to Somalia for training and to fight, including for the first time in U.S.
history, American citizen bombers.

The American connection has raised flags at both the FBI and the CIA.

PHILIP MUDO, FORMER CIA OFFICER: I think you could characterize this as a
grave problem. The reasons are simple, the number of times you get a
substantial number of American kids -- I don`t care whether they are
Somalis or whether they`re kids from Lincoln, Nebraska, travelling overseas
to train with people who are connected with al Qaeda, in these kinds of
numbers, that is very rare.

ENGEL: Somalia is the perfect al Qaeda sanctuary, but it`s not the only
one.

From Yemen to North Africa, Southeast Asia, and across Europe, security
experts say al Qaeda has cells or resources in 100 countries, including in
the United States.

Coming up -- for some, the war on terror is big business.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It could have been that folks were thinking that
whoever was going to handle this contract would just simply be asleep at
the switch.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Once again, Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel.

MADDOW: When you`re in the Dubai airport, which is kind of the Emerald
City, right? And then you --

ENGEL: The hub for the entire Middle East.

MADDOW: The hub for the entire Middle East, massive airport. It`s so
glitzy and so gilded, and then you get to the exit gates for the flights
going to Kabul, going to Afghanistan, and you see, a lot of Afghan people,
what you would expect Afghan people to look like, and then enormous 6`5"
Americans with arms the size the hams.

ENGEL: Yes, tattoos at the arm, or you have the guys who are there as the
engineers and the consultants. What are they doing here? What are these
people doing here?

There are also many more of them than soldiers. We sent a lot of troops,
too.

MADDOW: Yes.

ENGEL: We sent hundreds of thousands of troops rotated through just Iraq
or just Afghanistan and hundreds of thousands of contractors went through.

Is it because these soldiers weren`t able to do things or because it was
good business and that`s what it was, it was huge business.

MADDOW: One of the key strategic issues you have to deal with is supply
lines. You cut somebody off from their supply lines and you`ve isolated a
fighting force to the point of atrophy weakness and eventual defeat.

American supply lines, to a certain extent now, are private. They are run
for profit by multi-national companies.

ENGEL: A lot of the actual setting up of the bases themselves, the
barriers, the walls, the sand bags, that`s done privately. And is that
necessary? Does that really need to be done privately?

MADDOW: The salaries paid to, particularly security contractors, who have
high-level clearances from their days in the military or at the CIA, have
those things created an off-ramp for senior level and highly-trained
personnel out of U.S. government service that is detrimental to U.S.
government service?

ENGEL: Of course, if you`re a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan and you`re
guarding a base and you see a contractor doing pretty much the same job and
he`s making 10 times your salary, why would you stay in the Army, then?

MADDOW: Taxpayers on the hook for the training, and the taxpayers on the
hook for your 10 times salary when you get out from the training. It`s a
great plan for the companies, but doesn`t seem to make much sense for the
country.

(voice-over): In the First Gulf War in 1991, the retreating Iraqi army
sets fire to over 500 Kuwaiti oil wells and connected pipelines, creating
an economic and environmental disaster. As six million barrels burn a day,
four American companies dodge land mines and bombs to extinguish the
flames.

Over a decade later in the lead up to the next war with Iraq, the George W.
Bush administration anticipates similar tactics by Saddam, that he will
once again attack Kuwait`s oil fields or torch his own, to slow down
advancing U.S. forces.

For $2 million, the world`s second largest oil field services corporation,
Halliburton, is hired to draft terms for a contract to fight oil fires
during the war. Days before the invasion, U.S. military officials convene
a high-level meeting at the Pentagon to finalize the arrangements for the
firefighting contract.

Representatives from the Halliburton subsidiary KBR attend the meeting.
And the decision is made that in addition to drafting the scope of the
contract, Halliburton will also get the contract itself for up to $7
billion. Without competition, Halliburton is designated uniquely capable
of providing the firefighting services detailed in the contract, uniquely
capable even though other U.S. companies entirely performed the same task
during the previous war.

Also at the Pentagon meeting, pointing out the impropriety of Halliburton
being present while decisions are made about their contract is Army Corps
of Engineers procurement executive Bunny Greenhouse.

BUNNY GREENHOUSE, ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: I said they have to leave
because the group now is getting into things and giving them advantage as
to where our budgets are and what we`re planning to do. I was responsible
in that the Corps of Engineers was going to be doing a lot of that work
that they were talking about, you know, to make sure that we did not give
them any advantage.

MADDOW (on camera): Do you feel like that ethos was undermined in the lead
up to the Iraq war, there was an expectation that good practices and
ethical practices and procurement wouldn`t be followed?

GREENHOUSE: It could have been that folks were thinking that whoever was
going to handle this contract would just simply be asleep at the switch and
look the other way and not highlight, you know, the improprieties. But I
was not going to do that.

MADDOW (voice-over): As a 21-year veteran of government contracting, the
Army Corps of Engineers top civilian official Bunny Greenhouse is troubled
by how some war contracts are being handled.

GREENHOUSE: That was high dollars going to KBR, none competed, or if it
was a contract that was competed, once it came to an end, it would just go
on for another year and another year and so on. So, I send up letters to
Department of the Army to let them know that this kind of thing was going
on. They should not have been able to follow on with the contract, because
it was just like writing their own check.

MADDOW: In the end, oil fires are not set in Saddam`s oil fields or
anywhere else in the region.

But Halliburton convinces the pentagon, again in a sole source framework,
to convert its firefighting contract into a contract for generic logistical
support for the U.S. military. Halliburton eventually becomes the largest
private contractor in Iraq, securing three huge multiyear, multipurpose
contracts.

The concept of a massive combined logistics contract to support U.S.
military operations had been pioneered in the 1990s by the Department of
Defense, headed then by Secretary Dick Cheney.

The U.S. military would no longer peel its own potatoes or its own laundry
or even do the strategically central work of maintaining its own supply
lines. That work would now be done for profit.

Dick Cheney leaves the Pentagon in 1993. By 1995, he`s CEO of the company
granted during the Clinton administration, one of those massive logistics
contracts in the Balkans, Halliburton. Mr. Cheney leaves Halliburton in
2000 to become vice president, but as vice president, he continues to
receive deferred compensation from the company for services rendered before
his departure, valued between a half million and $1 million.

Coming up -- making a killing, the business of the war on terror.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: As large Iraq war contracts are awarded to Halliburton and other
private companies for services ranging from reconstruction to security,
civilian private sector workers flood into the war zone alongside U.S.
troops. In March 2004, four men working for the contractor Blackwater are
attacked and killed in Fallujah. Sent on a supply mission without adequate
maps or convoy protection, the Blackwater employees are ambushed and
killed. Their bodies are hung by insurgents from the bridge.

After that, U.S. and allied forces twice stormed Fallujah. The second
offensive becoming the bloodiest battle of the entire Iraq war.

In September 2007, Blackwater contractors shoot and kill 17 Iraqi civilians
in Nisour Square in Baghdad after they say their convoy came under attack.

Citing eyewitness reports, the Iraqi governments conclude the contractors
fired on civilians without provocation and demands that Blackwater
personnel be banned from the country.

The U.S. military, having shifted to a counterinsurgent strategy of
building support for the Iraqi and against the insurgency among the local
population complains that cowboy tactics by private security contractors
interfere with the overall U.S. military mission.

Brigadier General Karl Horst tells "The Washington Post": "These guys run
loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There`s no authority over them,
so you can`t come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot
people and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all
over the place."

CROWD: We love money, we love war. We love Cheney even more.

MADDOW: Contracting also starts to become a focus of the anti-war and
anti-corruption critics of the George W. Bush administration. It`s a stark
contrast between no competition, cost-plus, guaranteed profit contracts for
politically well-connected firms and the austere combat conditions for U.S.
troops.

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: There is more tonight on the issue of
insufficient armor for U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq.

UNIDENTIFEID SOLDIER: Why do us soldiers have to dig through local
landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-
armor of our vehicles and why don`t we have those resources readily
available to us?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s a matter of production and capability of doing it.
As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might
want or wish to have at a later time.

THEN-SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Thank you.

MADDOW: By the 2007 political primary election season, candidate Barack
Obama has introduced the Transparency and Accountability in Military and
Security Contracting Act of 2007.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proposes eliminating
private security contracts from Iraq altogether.

But by the time the election is over, Obama is president and Clinton is
secretary of state. The contractors are nowhere near gone. Clinton`s
Department of State alone in 2010 more than doubles its roster of private
security contractors from 2,700 to between 6,000 and 7,000.

By the summer of 2011, contractors for the Defense Department alone nearly
equal the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. In Iraq, with U.S. troop
levels drawing down, the number of contractors exceeds the number of
troops.

With the political heat off of them, contractors are usually invisible,
only surfacing in scandal.

In 2007, 21 year old Efraim Diveroli secures a $300 million American
contract to supply munitions to Afghan forces. After repackaging and
selling illegal Chinese weapons, Diveroli is indicted on federal fraud and
conspiracy charges. He pleads guilty to one count of conspiracy and is
sentenced to four years in prison. The other charges against him are
dropped.

In Afghanistan in 2009, these wild pictures surface of private contractors
from armor group that were signed to guard the U.S. embassy in Kabul. The
contract is re-upped, despite the scandal.

A report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction in April
2011 concludes that misspent dollars run into the tens of billions for Iraq
reconstruction alone. But the starkest impact of the huge expansion of
for-profit contracting for national security for 9/11 is the wedge it has
driven between incurring the costs of war and paying that cost.

There remains real debate over the number of U.S. troops needed and serving
in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no real debate over the total number of
contractors the U.S. is paying for as well.

And the human pain and suffering of contractors themselves is also
invisible. There are no official statistics on the number of contractors
killed or wounded in war zones, allegations of human trafficking, forced
labor, and worse among contractors does not merit many American headlines,
and doesn`t stop the contracts flowing.

On the no-bid, no deadline contracts, Bunny Greenhouse continues to
question, warn, and report, as the thorn in the side of the Corps of
Engineers throughout the war, her immediate reward is demotion. But nearly
a decade later in July 2011, a U.S. district court in Washington approves a
settlement awarding Greenhouse $970,000 in full restitution of lost wages,
compensatory damages, and attorneys` fees. Greenhouse remains convinced
she did the right thing.

GREENHOUSE: They got the wrong idea about whistle-blowing. It`s not about
a person gaining any money or gaining anything, and not a snitch, you know,
it`s about making sure that there can be truth and honesty.

MADDOW: Coming up -- taking prisoners in America`s new war.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Slam them face first on to the concrete floor.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: For all of the decisions that America has made since 9/11 about
what we would do as a nation, how we would spend our resources, he we would
react to those 9/11 attacks. For all the things that received no debate,
the things that have been debated are the invasion of Iraq. I guess the
end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well. And torture -- the tactics
the United States turned to in both interrogation and detention.

ENGEL: The enhanced interrogation program.

MADDOW: Enhanced interrogation program but interrogation tactics used
either as an abuse of existing policies or in keeping with policies and the
fact that nobody high ranking was ever prosecuted on those things.

ENGEL: It just fell on the shoulders of the young guys and a few women
involved in these procedures.

MADDOW: To describe people what to do is this particular level of evil and
legal culpability to let people know that they are unhinged from the
existing rules, Geneva doesn`t apply, your training doesn`t apply. Do what
you want. That is not only a different level of legal culpability, I
believe it still a crime and it`s still evil. But it destroys the people
who ends up torturing in those circumstances in a way that no directive
ever could, it destroys them.

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: People who knocked these buildings
down will hear all of us soon.

(CHEERS)

MADDOW (voice-over): After 9/11, America goes to war, war against al
Qaeda, a transnational, sub-national enemy -- war against the tactic of
terrorism.

BUSH: Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign,
unlike any other we have ever seen.

MADDOW: Afghanistan did not attack on 9/11, no nation did, but the U.S.
moves quickly after 9/11 to topple the Afghan government.

BUSH: We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed
these acts and those who harbor them.

MADDOW: A war on terror, a war on terrorism, is a footing, a mindset more
than it is a plan, but toppling a government is the work of soldiers on the
ground.

BUSH: Every nation now has a decision to make.

MADDOW: Putting soldiers on the ground, fermenting war against Afghan
factions means taking prisoners.

BUSH: Either you`re with us, or you`re with the terrorists.

MADDOW: As small and secretive CIA and U.S. military special forces unit
pay and cajole, arm and coordinate Afghanistan`s rebel factions,
allegations surface of atrocities, massacres at the hands of Afghan
warlords.

"Newsweek" reports hundreds of pro-Taliban prisoners are killed in 2001
while being transported in overcrowded industrial shipping containers by
order of a U.S.-backed warlord.

American forces start taking prisoners by the thousands, ultimately by the
tens of thousands. It would soon take the U.S. government and its military
down a path it had never before gone.

America holds prisoners at a former Soviet site called Bagram in
Afghanistan. Later, during the Iraq war, Saddam`s former prisons at places
like Abu Ghraib and Taji (ph), become America`s prison.

The CIA established prisons, black sites, exist for five years before the
president ever admits that they do. There has still been no official
accounting for where they were. One prison, eventually investigated for
multiple deaths of detainees in custody is a reported CIA black site in
Afghanistan called the salt pit.

Beyond the secret facilities, the United States also specially builds a
U.S. military prison not in the United States and not near any physical
battlefield, but offshore, in a U.S.-controlled corner of a hostile
communist country. Nearly 800 foreign captives have passed through its
doors, but only six of its prisoners have been tried. The prison is still
in business today.

(on camera): In your training as a military police officer, were you
trained in how to deal with prisoners of war?

BRANDON NEELY: It was real brief basic training about enemy prisoners of
war.

MADDOW: So, you didn`t have any extensive training at all in terms of how
to deal with people living under your control?

NEELY: No, not at all.

MADDOW (voice-over): Months after 9/11, the U.S. Army sent Military Police
Officer Brandon Neely sent as a guard to what was then referred to as a
temporary detention center Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay in southeastern
Cuba. Neely says he received no specialized training for the deployment.

NEELY: We were actually told that a facility like this had never been run
before. There was no policy. There was no procedure.

MADDOW: With emotions running high and the rules of engagement unclear,
Neely says he`s told by his supervisors to improvise. Brandon Neely takes
custody of the second ever prisoner to arrive at Guantanamo.

NEELY: We started walking with him and he wouldn`t walk. We were
screaming, you need to walk faster. And we placed him on his knees. I
slammed him face-first on the concrete floor and kept pushing his head down
as he kept trying to get up and move and they hog tied him. He laid there
a couple of hours. When I left the camp that day he was still there.

MADDOW: Neely later learns why he recoiled the way he did.

NEELY: He thought he would be executed because he had seen people like
that executed before in his country.

MADDOW: Were there other things you saw you thought were wrong? Things
you participated in or things that you saw as a guard there?

NEELY: They told a detainee turn around, put his hands on head and they
started punching and kicking him. He just laid there and pooled in blood.

MADDOW: Do you feel like if you had been in a command environment which
you had been prepared and sort of given specific procedures for dealing
with people, that things like that would have been less likely to happen?

NEELY: I think more people would have had direction and we would have
trained, a lot of those incidents may not have happened.

MADDOW (voice-over): A response to Neely`s allegations by the U.S.
military reads in part, "The Department of Defense does not tolerate abuse
of detainees and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated and
appropriate disciplinary action taken if allegations are substantiated.
There had been well-documented instances in the past where DOD policy was
not followed and service members have been held accountable for their
actions in those cases," end quote.

Guards, keepers like Brandon Neely in America`s new prison say they are
left to make up some of the rules as they go along. But when it comes to
trying to extract intelligence from America`s post-9/11 prisoners, some
trained U.S. military interrogators say they are told to unlearn the
training that they do have.

TONY LAGARANUS, FORMER INTERROGATOR: We were given what`s called
interrogation rules of engagement bay the Pentagon. It detailed
interrogation methods that would have been against Geneva Conventions.

MADDOW: In 2004, after extensive training as an Army interrogator Tony
Lagaranus spends 10 months interrogating terror suspects in prisons in Iraq

(on camera): Have you been trained in what legal limits you couldn`t cross
during an interrogation?

LAGARANUS: We were taught strictly according to Geneva Conventions.

MADDOW: So, you were taught how to treat people as prisoners of war. But
then when you got to Iraq --

LAGARANUS: After 9/11 and after Afghanistan, we heard from interrogators
coming back that they were crossing lines -- the use of stress positions,
sleep depravation, dietary manipulation.

MADDOW: And those were in the interrogation rules of engagement that were
communicated to you in writing?

LAGARANUS: Yes.

MADDOW (voice-over): According to Lagaranus some but not all harsh tactics
required approval by a superior officer.

(on camera): Did it seem like those orders or directions were legal?

LAGARANUS: If we were told it was legal by the Pentagon, then, of course,
we weren`t going to question that too far. It said specifically that the
interrogator needs to have the freedom to be creative in the interrogation
booth.

MADDOW: Told to make it up?

LAGARANUS: Yes, we were just going to make it up. We wanted to get
intelligence. We were willing to cross these lines.

MADDOW: Did you think of it as torture at the time?

LAGARANUS: I didn`t think of it as torture. I certainly do now.\

MADDOW: According to Lagaranus, prisoners are left cold and wet without
adequate clothing, on purpose, in order to induce hypothermia.

(on camera): What would be the impact on them in terms of the
interrogation?

LAGARANUS: It`s not a good interrogation tactic because they`ve become so
cold that they become confused and they can`t really follow a line of
thought or they are not reasoning very well.

MADDOW: How do you not accidentally kill somebody when you`re playing with
hypothermia?

LAGARANUS: Frankly, I`m surprise we`d didn`t kill somebody?

MADDOW: Were dogs the way you were treating prisoners?

LAGARANUS: We were using military working dogs. This was up in Mosul. We
would agree on a certain cue that I would give. And on that cue, the dog
handler would make the dog bark and jump and lung at the detainee. The
detainee was blind folded. We had a sand bag over his head, so he didn`t
know the level of control the handler had over the dog. The dog was
muzzled and on a leash. So, it was safe but the idea was to scare the
detainee.

MADDOW: It would have that effect?

LAGARANUS: Absolutely.

MADDOW: Had there been a clear command environment about what was expected
of U.S. military personnel in that environment, could torture have been
avoided?

LAGARANUS: I worked in detention facilities all over Iraq, and where there
were clear guidelines, torture didn`t happen. It seemed there was a real
willingness to do it. I don`t know what that says about people. But
people were often enthusiastic about it. Nobody said no.

MADDOW: You didn`t?

LAGARANUS: I didn`t, no. You know, you sort of become isolated there.
You`re in this community. Your morals shift along with the people you`re
working with. And you`re sort of morally confused.

But when you watch it on television and you see the moral outrage happening
in the United States, I was able to see myself in a bit of a different
light.

MADDOW: Did you ever send things up the chain of command or to
investigators either regret at something you had done or your offense at
something you had seen done?

LAGARANUS: About halfway through the year while I was in Iraq, I started
having a crisis of conscience and I didn`t like what we were doing, but
they had stepped up to where they were burning these guys, they were
breaking their bones. I spoke to CID which is the criminal investigations
of the Army. A lot of them had to do with the scandal.

MADDOW (voice-over): In the spring of 2004, reports of Abu Ghraib begin
surfacing, reinforced by photographs depicting physical and psychological
abuse by U.S. military personnel.

LAGARANUS: It became much easier after the scandal broke to refuse to do
any kind of torture at all because people were afraid at that point.

MADDOW: Lagaranus also says the harsh tactics used resulted in little
more than fear and anger.

LAGARANUS: It`s counterproductive to make the person you`re trying to get
talk to you hate you. Torture, in my experience and having used torture
quite extensively as an interrogator, it does not work.

MADDOW: Why do it then?

LAGARANUS: We use torture because we are frustrated, because we are angry
and it`s not about getting intelligence. It`s not about being productive.
It`s about torture for torture`s sake.

MADDOW: Coming up -- building a new American playbook from a surprising
source.

MADDOW: These are the enemy`s techniques. These are written in blood.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC ANCHOR (voice-over): Interrogation techniques,
suggestions from military interrogators had migrated through official
channels. These were techniques that America`s enemies used against us in
wars past. That the U.S. military cataloged and studied to teach American
troops how to survive torture.

MALCOLM NANCE, FORMER SERE INSTRUCTOR: You can`t do this.

MADDOW: Malcolm Nance was a military instructor at SERE, S-E-R-E, the
military`s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape school.

NANCE: We teach people how to properly behave in captivity and how to
attempt escapes.

MADDOW: Nance traveled the world, researching foreign interrogation
tactics, to better prepare U.S. troops for captivity.

NANCE: When I got my orders to go to SERE, I just leave before that and
went to Cambodia. I wanted to see the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh and found
a killing machine. This was a prison whose sole function was to document
you coming in, document your torture, document your confession and then
document your execution. It was almost like a compendium of everything
that we could do bad to you.

It was the first time I ever saw waterboard. The entire function was to
get you to confess that you work for the CIA, that you work against the
Khmer Rouge government and that was necessary for your death. So, whether
you told the truth, whether you told a lie, it didn`t matter.

And I got to this school and found we had this enormous curriculum which
said exactly the same thing. Torture has nothing to do with whether you`re
establishing your guilt or your innocence at all. It`s just a methodology
of getting to you comply and once you complied, they`ll make you sign a
confession.

MADDOW (on camera): But the confession you`re signing is not necessarily
intelligence.

NANCE: Oh, this is not intelligence. This has nothing to do with
intelligence.

MADDOW (voice-over): But in 2005, Malcolm Nance learned his own government
had been gathering the same information on techniques and torture, not to
learn how to survive those techniques, but to learn how to use some of them
itself.

(on camera): I want to show you a document from Guantanamo that was
declassified after the fact.

NANCE: These guidelines for employing SERE techniques during detainee
interrogations. The interrogation tactics used that U.S. military`s SERE
schools are appropriate for use in real world interrogations. These
tactics and techniques are used at the SERE school to break detainees, the
same tactic and techniques can be used to break detainees during
interrogation operations.

MADDOW: What is your reaction to that?

NANCE: That is horrific. These are the enemies` techniques. These are
written in blood. These are techniques that U.S. service members died for.
Every technique we used, someone died from.

MADDOW (voice-over): Foreign torture tactics redesigned and redirected.

NANCE: They decided that they would mimic our enemies` techniques.

MADDOW: But the new enhanced interrogation program did have its own
advocates.

Richard Engel sat down with John Rizzo, the CIA`s former top lawyer when
enhanced interrogation techniques were introduced. This is John Rizzo`s
first on-camera interview.

RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Your name came up
many times as someone who legalized torture, legalized enhance
interrogation. What`s your opinion on the enhanced interrogation? Did it
work?

JOHN RIZZO, FORMER CIA TOP LAWYER: I don`t think there is in I dispute,
any reasonable dispute it yielded an immense amount of reliable actionable
intelligence. The CIA program was directed at the highest levels of the al
Qaeda leadership -- the most ruthless, most psychopathic, the toughest, and
the most knowledgeable.

ENGEL: Did you feel you were being asked to legalize torture?

RIZZO: No. I think I was asked the way I`ve been asked throughout my
career with my clients at the CIA. Here are some proposed activities that
we think are essential to elicit the information we need from these high-
level al Qaeda figures we believe are stone walling us about a possible new
and imminent attack on the homeland. Are these legal?

ENGEL: How many people knew these practices were going on?

RIZZO: The techniques were authorized, were vetted through the most senior
level of the U.S. national security community -- secretaries of state and
defense, the attorney general and, of course, the vice president and
president.

ENGEL: They knew, vice president and president?

RIZZO: Yes. They knew about the program.

MADDOW: In fact, the Bush administration takes the position that the
exquisite torture techniques of the Khmer Rouge and the North Koreans and
the Japanese during World War II are not torture when they are done by
Americans after 9/11, specifically because Americans studied these
techniques and were trained how to survive them.

Vice President Dick Cheney defends waterboarding.

DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: Waterboarding and all of the other
techniques that were used are techniques that we used training our own
people. This is stuff we`ve done this for years with our own military
personnel.

MADDOW: In 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer Yukio Asano
with war crimes for waterboarding an American.

SEN. TED KENNEDY (D), MASSACHUSETTS: Fifteen years of hard labor when this
was used against Americans in World War II.

MADDOW: Military commission legislation in 2006 retroactively indemnifies
anyone caught committing torture on behalf of the U.S. government. In
2009, a 220-page internal probe by the Justice Department concludes that
Bush administration lawyers committed series of lapses in judgments in
writing memos that authorized harsh interrogation techniques. But it
recommends they not be prosecuted.

President Bush`s successor, President Obama, instructs the Justice
Department to decide whether the Bush lawyers should face charges. They
don`t. The Obama administration pledges interrogators themselves will be
protected and not prosecuted for doing what the Bush lawyers argued was
legal. Ultimately, it is the Obama administration that shuts down the CIA
interrogation program. But that also makes the decision to not prosecute.

The decision not to prosecute policy makers after 9/11 for what America had
previously charged as war crimes is living precedent, legally and morally
and politically.

CHENEY: To call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated
professionals to saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers
as innocent victims.

MADDOW: On FOX News Channel, administration officials and Republican
presidential candidates voice their support for these tactics.

MITT ROMNEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Enhanced interrogation techniques
have to be used.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would do certainly waterboard. I don`t believe that
is, quote, "torture."

DONALD RUMSFELD, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: People are equating water
boarding with torture. I think that`s a mistake.

MADDOW: By 2006, the CIA prohibits the use of waterboarding. And under
new leadership, the Department of Defense imposes new measures to address
abuse in military prison. But it`s what America once pledged to prevent
and prosecute in every instance now becomes a political proving ground.
America`s cross onto territory we had never before tried to justify leaves
its marks.

(on camera): Whether or not people at a high level, people at a command
position are prosecuted for torture, if that ever happens, do you think
that people operating at your level in the military should have been held
more accountable? Do you think there should have been more widespread
prosecution?

TONY LAGARANUS, FORMER INTERROGATOR: I do think there should have been
more widespread prosecution from the bottom level all the way to the top.
I expected to be prosecuted. It never happened. I don`t think they wanted
to follow that trail and get the higher-ups involved.

MADDOW: Do you still think you should have been?

LAGARANUS: Yes.

MADDOW (voice-over): A response to his allegations reads in part, "DOD
personnel working in detention facilities operate under an extraordinary
high level of scrutiny and consistently provide the most humane safe care
and custody of individuals under their control. The suggestion that DOD
personnel, the overwhelming majority of whom serve honorably were or are
engaged in systematic torture or abuse of detainees simply does not
withstand credible scrutiny."

(on camera): It`s been seven years since you`ve been home from Iraq. Does
it still weigh on you?

LAGARANUS: Certainly, it still weighs on me. Yes.

MADDOW: Are you glad you decided to talk about what you did in Iraq?

LAGARANUS: I don`t know. People asked me that before. I`m not sure if it
was a good thing for me to talk about it, for my own mental health.

MADDOW: Coming up --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The camera can pick up a lit cigarette about a mile
away.

MADDOW: One of the most effective counterterrorism forces in the world is
a local police department.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Once again, Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel.

ENGEL: In many ways, New York City has always been the center on New York
terrorism. 9/11 attacks, Washington, but New York was the main focus. The
Twin Towers went down here.

The NYPD, the New York City Police Department, reacted in exceptional ways.
Not only on that day which has been widely documented and celebrated, but
since then.

And the New York City Police Department, which is a giant force, it`s the
size of really army divisions, isn`t just a police force any more. It has
invested in counterterrorism in ways most people have no idea. Most New
Yorkers are not aware of the extensive security and counterterrorism
measures that are taking place in this city.

And for the last several years, we`ve been given access to what New York
has done in the name of security. And I think a lot of people will be
surprised how extensive it is.

MADDOW: The fact this is such an under-told story itself, so politically
important and so key to how America changed since 9/11, the distance of how
we governed and policed ourselves and how much public debate there is about
it.

ENGEL (voice-over): It`s just a few hours until 2009, on one of those
biting cold New York New Year`s Eve. The crowds are waiting for the ball
to drop at midnight, a tradition seen about a billion people worldwide.

What hardly anyone notices are the snipers overlooking Times Square, with
high-powered rifles ready to shot terrorist, or the police with backpack
radiation detectors that will set off an alarm if they pick up traces of a
dirty bomb, sensors that sniff the air for chemical weapons, or armored
vehicles positioned to stop a commando-style raid.

POLICE OFFICER: OK, guys. Happy New Year.

ENGEL: Since 9/11, the New York Police Department, the NYPD, has
transformed into what may be the most elaborate, secretive and most
effective local counterterrorism force in the world.

(on camera): You have to be keenly aware that an event like this is a
major terrorist target.

RAY KELLY, NYPD COMMISSIONER: Absolutely. And, you know, we treat it as
such.

ENGEL: It`s run by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, a former beat cop and
Marine.

KELLY: Police officers now think about terrorism. They know that`s one of
their core functions. This wasn`t the case.

ENGEL: We followed New York City`s counterterrorism and intelligence
divisions for more than two years. As they monitor the waterways, 468
subway stations and Manhattan`s iconic skyline.

At Floyd Bennett Field, once used by Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh,
the NYPD operates a special air unit, we are taken up by Detective Presto
Cevalis (ph) in a surveillance helicopter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There`s the Statue of Liberty. That`s one of our
security checks.

ENGEL: The cameras can see a lot more than the Statue of Liberty. They
can read license plates, see in infrared and take thermal images so precise
they can pick out a single squirrel in Central Park.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This camera could pick up a heat actually a lit
cigarette about a mile away.

ENGEL: Most New Yorkers and tourists have no idea they are being watched
on roof tops or the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

It looks pretty crowded. How far away are we from that?

TZAVELIS: About a mile and a half.

ENGEL: That`s from a mile and a half out.

TZAVELIS: That`s correct.

ENGEL: And I can see what she`s wearing. The red scarf, the red jacket.
Someone with the hat. I bet you not a single person on that observation
took a second notice.

TZAVELIS: The average person didn`t realize what we were doing.

ENGEL: Privacy guidelines don`t allow the cops to look onto individual
apartments, but with the technology they have, it is possible.

But as good as it is, the view from above isn`t nearly enough. Manhattan,
home to 1.5 million people is, after all, an island. Much of its sensitive
infrastructure is on the water, including possible terrorist targets like
the ventilation shafts that secure air into the tunnel, United Nations, the
Brooklyn Bridge and Con Edison power plant.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s a scary thought every day to come up with how we
are going to protect these critical infrastructures.

ENGEL: The biggest challenge could be monitoring all the bridges and
piers. Each one needs to be physically inspected by scuba teams.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We do it every single day, every day of the year, we
are down there looking for any irregularity.

ENGEL: The waters around New York are polluted and cold. The divers wear
vulcanized rubber suits, gloves and full face masks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don`t want any of the water to get in any of the
orifices in your face, especially nose, mouth, eyes and ears.

ENGEL (on camera): You don`t want the water in your ears?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don`t.

ENGEL (voice-over): There`s also a strong current that stirs up the
bottom.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Feel good?

ENGEL: It`s so brown, so murky, the divers almost blindly have to pat the
bottom. Feel the underwater pier abutments. It`s a training exercise to
search for explosives. It`s very slow work.

But eventually, they do find this limpid mine. It`s a training tool, but
it would have been powerful enough to destroy the pier.

Searching the harbor isn`t exactly pleasant. With a sewage plant next
door, the water here is contaminated.

(on camera): I think they have to shower me off. I have to be
decontaminated.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don`t touch face or eat anything.

ENGEL: Lovely New York water, isn`t it?

(voice-over): The NYPD, a police force that after 9/11 became a powerful,
some say, intrusive, counterterrorism division.

Coming up -- the NYPD keeps a close eye on the streets of New York City.

(on camera): If I put on a black overcoat and walked around for half an
hour, do you think in three days you`d be able to find me?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We would definitely be able to find you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENGEL (voice-over): In 1993, the World Trade Center was attacked. The
federal government, including the FBI, took the lead in the investigation.
The 1993 organizers were caught and put in jail. The bombers weren`t
particularly smart. They went back to collect the deposit on a rented van
they turned into a bomb.

But in 2001, the World Trade Center, the same buildings, were attacked
again. Ray Kelly watched the Twin Towers go down and decided that New York
had no choice but to take care of itself.

KELLY: It became obvious that we couldn`t rely solely on the federal
government to protect this city.

ENGEL: Kelly decided to change the NYPD`s focus from only fighting crime
to counterterrorism and intelligence.

KELLY: We wanted to be first preventers. We have to stop something, use
every effort to protect another attack here. That`s what intelligence
gives you.

ENGEL: For that intelligence capacity, Kelly hired David Cohen. Cohen had
35 years experience at the CIA, running clandestine operations and serving
as the CIA`s New York station chief.

DAVID COHEN, NYPD: I think I brought experience in getting things done and
implementing programs.

ENGEL: Cohen created what some people have called New York`s secret CIA.

KELLY: David, among other things, is a terrific recruiter.

ENGEL (on camera): He used to recruit spies in the United States, that was
his job.

KELLY: He did. That`s true.

ENGEL: Why did you reach out to someone with such experience in the
intelligence community? Why not someone else with a law enforcement
background?

KELLY: We had to do things differently. We had to get out of the law
enforcement box, so to speak.

ENGEL (voice-over): Out of the law enforcement box and out of New York,
the NYPD, which once couldn`t even operate in New Jersey, embedded
detectives into 11 international law enforcement agencies, from London to
Tel Aviv to Singapore.

COHEN: Going overseas was number one, we want to establish an NYPD
presence so that the New York City question is never ignored.

ENGEL: Not ignoring the New York City question, meant that when terrorists
took over Mumbai for three days in 2008, the NYPD deployed its own agents
to India. They briefed counterterrorism officers back in New York City.

KELLY: In many ways, the city of Mumbai bears striking similarities to New
York.

ENGEL: The attack in India had a direct impact on New York. Police told
New York hotel managers, if a guest requests a particular room on a high
floor or doesn`t let the maid in for days, the NYPD wants to know.

In Mumbai, Indian police were outgunned by terrorists, so New York put
military-style cops on the transport system. They`re armed almost like
combat troops.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is it intimidating to people? I guess it is. But I`m
here to put their minds at ease.

ENGEL: The special operations division practices assault tactics on old
subway cars. They`re preparing for a Mumbai scenario when terrorists
attacked in small units. But force doesn`t work unless you know where to
focus it. This $100 million command center in lower Manhattan monitors
more than 1,700 cameras installed after 9/11. They`re programmed with
algorithms so they can automatically detect patterns.

If someone leaves a bag in front of a key building or a car circles a block
repeatedly, the cameras here set off an alarm. The images can also be
reviewed with a specificity that might shock New Yorkers who think they`re
anonymous in the big city. We were shown the facility when it first became
operational in 2008 by then deputy commissioner for counterterrorism,
Richard Falkenrath.

(on camera): If I put on a black overcoat and walked around for a half an
hour, do you think in three days you`d be able to find me?

RICHARD FALKENRATH: We`d definitely be able to find you.

ENGEL (voice-over): The data is stored on huge computer hard drive for 30
days, then police erased in line with privacy guidelines.

(on camera): Do you think this is overly intrusive?

FALKENRATH: No, I don`t. This is all public visual data. We are not
prying into anyone`s private domain when we do this. It`s what`s happening
on the streets.

ENGEL (voice-over): Critics do not agree. New York defense attorney, Josh
Gratiel (ph), handles civil liberties cases. He says the NYPD collects too
much private information.

(on camera): You think New Yorkers should be more aware of how much is
being done in the name of security?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think so. It never stops. The history of
surveillance never stops with the principal object of the surveillance.
One reason people say, well, I don`t mind, because they are just going
after Muslims and Islamic terrorists because they don`t identify with them.

ENGEL: The NYPD says it stopped 12 major plots against New York since
9/11.

But why talk about New York`s extensive security program? Two reasons we
were told -- to reassure the public and to let would-be terrorists know New
York is no longer an easy target.

But New York still keeps many secrets in its arsenal like this vehicle. It
accounts for what may be NYPD`s biggest fear, the dirty bomb.

(on camera): It could be a small device.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Could be a small device. Absolutely. It could be
something in a backpack or something in a small box.

Just put the radioactive material with you, now you have a dirty bomb.

ENGEL (voice-over): The vehicle is a mobile radiation detector. It`s
precise enough to pick out a single person who had a medical test that use
radiation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stress test for the heart could last a couple of weeks.
We could detect it.

ENGEL: The cops often disguise this vehicle passing it off as a delivery
truck or a moving van.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It could be anything. Laundry service, linen service,
food service.

ENGEL: Also hidden in plain sight is a state-of-the-art office in an
unmarked building outside of Manhattan. The division based here monitors
terrorist activity around the world. A wall here is lined with a somber
reminder, comrades who perished on 9/11. So police call it their Hall of
Fame.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So many officers who worked here responded on 9/11.
They were at the scene. They went to the funerals. They know the family.
These are their friends.

ENGEL: This facility also serves as grim but essential purpose. If New
York were attacked or destroyed, this would become the city`s offsite
control room. It`s effectively a doomsday center to run New York should
the worst happen.

Back in Times Square on New Year`s Eve 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the
first to admit New York City doesn`t just have a municipal police force any
more.

(on camera): How do you respond to critic whose say you brought in a
former chief representative at the CIA?

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, NEW YORK: Absolutely.

ENGEL: A former marine in Commissioner Kelly and you turned your police
force into an intelligence-gathering organization.

BLOOMBERG: That`s exactly the plan. That`s what we`re trying to do. It
is a paramilitary organization. It is run like a paramilitary
organization. It`s not a democracy within that organization. I am where
democracy interacts with the paramilitary organization. I`m the elected
official. And then their job is to keep us safe.

ENGEL (voice-over): New York security has profoundly changed since 9/11.
Critics say it`s too intrusive.

The NYPD says it`s an effective and discreet program. Many security
experts say it`s a far better way of stopping terrorism than sending tens
of thousands of American troops to occupy foreign countries. It`s better,
the police say, to protect the city you`re in.

Coming up -- the race to keep loose nuclear material out of the hands of
terrorist.

MADDOW: And if have material, it`s not hard to build that bomb?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: In terms of terrorism as a tactic, terrorism is asymmetrical
warfare. The only existential threat that can be posted by terrorism is
that a small terrorist operation provokes their target into an existential
crisis of its own making.

ENGEL: You mean, if a small group prompts us to wildly overact and swing
ourselves into exhaustion.

MADDOW: Yes. Spend yourself into oblivion for example.

ENGEL: Which we`ve basically done.

MADDOW: Which we have in some ways done. That`s the dynamic that explains
why terrorists do what they do tactically. Why that terror tactic has
existed.

ENGEL: Which, by the way, associates of Bin Laden said is what he wanted
to do. He wanted us to get involved in all these costly foreign wars in
order to break us.

MADDOW: I feel like America started to grasp that dynamic, that that was
the goal. The risk is a self-imposed existential crisis. The thing
exceptional is the possibility of nuclear terrorism.

ENGEL: That`s when a small group can actually really make a difference, a
small group of people, maybe one person is able to carry out a nuclear
attack or even a dirty bomb attack. The results would be serious.

MADDOW (voice-over): February 2010, an elite team of American scientists
and engineers assemble secretly in the nation of Chile in South America.
Their mission is to secure, shield and transport safely 40 pounds of
radioactive highly enriched uranium -- enough uranium to devastate a U.S.
city in a nuclear bomb blast, enough uranium to contaminate a huge area in
a dirty bomb.

This much bomb grade uranium would be a multimillion dollar black market
prize for terrorists. The Americans have come in secret to keep that prize
off the black market, to bring it to the U.S., to lock it down. Everything
goes according to plan. Specially designed casks with eight inches of lead
and steel will hold the nuclear material after it`s carefully removed from
its storage pools.

But then disaster strikes. Chile is rocked by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake,
the largest quake anywhere in the world in 50 years. The port where the
casks were to be shifted from land to sea is destroyed by the quake and
tsunami that follows.

In the chaos after the disaster, and still in secret, U.S. and Chilean
officials scramble for a plan B. They choose another port 50 miles north
of their original location. So, it`s a 50-mile overland trip, a tense,
dark of night uranium convoy under armed guard through an earthquake-
ravaged countryside. The mission in Chile is hair-raising, but it works.
The uranium arrives safely in the United States.

It`s the latest American success in a project that started nearly a decade
earlier on the other side of the world.

In August 2001, weeks before 9/11 Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda deputy
Ayman al-Zawahiri meet around a campfire in Kandahar, Afghanistan, with one
of Pakistan`s top nuclear scientists. They discuss al Qaeda`s aspirations
to build a nuclear bomb.


ROLF MOWATT-LARSSEN, VETERAN U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFFICER: The two apparently
met in what is referred to as the fireside chat or had a dinner and talked
about al Qaeda`s interest in nuclear bombs where the al Qaeda leader
apparently was trying to gain some basic sense of what it would take.

MADDOW: Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is a veteran U.S. intelligence officer.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: A famous question he apparently asked at the end of that
meeting was after Bashir was trying to tell him how hard this was and how
difficult it was for Pakistan, bin Laden said if I have the material, then
how do I build it?

MADDOW: The Pakistani scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood later confirms
to U.S. official that is the meeting took place and that he gave al Qaeda
leaders a pencil drawing of a crude nuclear bomb design. Just one month
after that meeting in Kandahar, September 11th, 2001.

As the United States reels from the attacks, those who know about that
meeting at that Kandahar campfire reel over what may be about to come next.
Overnight the most important question for the United States government
becomes how far along is al Qaeda in its pursuit of a nuclear bomb and how
can the United States stop them from assembling one?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: That`s a piece of cake if you have enough material. If
you look at the Hiroshima bomb, you know, it was 50 kilograms of HGU. The
Oklahoma City bombing was two tons. If you about back and look at the
devastation of a two-ton bomb, think of 13,000 tons versus two tons. I
mean, it`s inconceivable. Even if you look at the Hiroshima pictures, it`s
inconceivable what a bomb that size could do.

MADDOW (on camera): And if you have the material, it`s not hard to build
that bomb?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: No.

MADDOW (voice-over): Rolf Mowatt-Larssen had been planning on a new CIA
posting in Beijing. But after 9/11, just after 9/11, he is drafted
personally by CIA Director George Tenet to lead a new effort instead.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: That is one of my most vivid memories. He said to me,
we`re behind the eight ball, and the reason he said that, which I didn`t
know what he meant at that precise moment, was because we had information
about this meeting with the Pakistan scientist and bin Laden before 9/11.

MADDOW: November 2001, Mowatt-Larssen and Tenet, at the direction of
President George W. Bush, are dispatched to Pakistan to confront Pakistan`s
President Pervez Musharraf about the fireside chat that`s turned up in U.S.
intelligence reports -- the possibility that Pakistani nuclear scientists
are assisting al Qaeda in pursuing a nuclear bomb.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: President Musharraf`s reaction, initial reaction, was men
in caves can`t do this or incredulity. That`s what we expected. It`s the
same incredulity we all felt.

MADDOW: Tenet and Mowatt-Larssen implore President Musharraf to inventory
all of Pakistan`s nuclear material. Then as now, there is no indication of
anything gone missing, but now as then, Musharraf downplays the threat that
what he calls men in caves might ever even try to acquire such weapons.

ENGEL: The extremists that are in Pakistan, Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda,
Kashmiri groups, you name it -- do you think the extremists in Pakistani
want to acquire nuclear weapons or at least nuclear materials?

PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, FORMER PAKISTAN`S PRESIDENT: Maybe. Maybe they would be
happy with it. Maybe.

ENGEL: Do you think they are trying actively?

MUSHARRAF: I don`t think so. I don`t think they are trying actively to
get nuclear assets. We have no such intelligence. No. We haven`t had
such intelligence at all.

MADDOW: Before 9/11, Pakistan is only one of three countries in the world
that recognizes the Taliban as a legitimate government in Afghanistan.

After 9/11, under pressure, Pakistan nominally abandons them. They ally
themselves uneasily with the United States instead, even as Pakistan`s
military and intelligence service continue to be linked to extremists, and
even as public opinion shows Pakistan to be the most anti-American country
on earth.

After 9/11, USAID starts to flow into Afghanistan by the billions.
Pakistan remains impoverished and unstable and extremist, but as USAID
continues, Pakistan pours money into its nuclear program. This new
facility 140 miles from the capital will host two of the largest plutonium
production reactors in the world.

The plant is not designed to make electricity which Pakistan desperately
needs. It isn`t hooked up to the nation`s grid. It makes plutonium
specifically for nuclear bombs. Pakistan was nuclear-armed before 9/11,
before Taliban and al Qaeda leaders fled from the U.S. war in Afghanistan
to take refuge there.

Since 9/11, Pakistan has built up its nuclear weapons program bigger and
faster than any other country in the world.

(on camera): When you find out about things like Pakistani Taliban,
attacks on military facilities, about the vulnerability of Pakistan`s state
institutions including possibly its military and its intelligence services,
do you worry about nuclear security?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: I worry about nuclear security in Pakistan than anywhere
in the world with the possible of exception of North Korea, which I have
different kinds of concerns.

They have three problems.

Number one problem is they do have a certain instability in the country, as
you referred to the Taliban.

Number two, they have a high ratio of what we call extremists that
represent in nuclear security firms potential insider threats. And we have
seen unfortunately cases, the one we referred to already as Bashiruddin
Mahmood, as well as the A.Q. Khan network which assisted several rogue
states in obtaining nuclear capabilities. So, we have a record of insider
problems.

The third problem they have which is the one the least discussed and
potentially the most alarming, is that their nuclear weapons are
increasing. In this environment, a greater number of facilities and
weapons and production is not a good thing.

MADDOW: That new plutonium production facility where Pakistan is building
the fuel for its nuclear weapons, the former director of that facility is
the same nuclear scientist who met with about with bin Laden around that
Afghan campfire a month before 9/11.

It is with this environment threat that the U.S. government begins a
concentrated to make vivid the threat of nuclear terrorism to the American
people.

Coming up -- at a nuclear black market, America`s enemies could become the
highest bidder.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: Al Qaeda`s goal is to build a nuclear weapon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BUSH: Today, the gravest danger in the war on terror, the gravest danger
facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, that could also give or sell
those weapons to terrorist allies who would use them without the least
hesitation.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly
enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a
nuclear weapon in less than a year. And Saddam Hussein would be in
position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.

CHENEY: We know he`s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons. We
know he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups,
including the al Qaeda organization.

MADDOW: The Bush administration uses the vivid imagery and fear of nuclear
catastrophe to convince the American public that dramatic action is
necessary to protect the country.

BUSH: And to defend the world from great danger.

MADDOW: But the dramatic action the Bush administration takes is to invade
Iraq, which at the time has no active nuclear program or weapons of mass
destruction or any connection to al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, the real work of stopping the real threat of nuclear terrorism
proceeds almost frantically with no public attention at all.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen convenes a joint operations group, the CIA, FBI, the
NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, find out if al Qaeda has a bomb, if
the next attack could be nuclear. Find out how their efforts to get one
can be stopped.

In 2003, a smuggler crosses from Russia into Georgia carrying 170 grams of
very pure bomb-grade uranium. Mowatt-Larssen and the CIA traced its
origins back to an old Soviet nuclear facility in Siberia. Three years
later, another smuggler caught with more nuclear material from the same
facility. There is a pipeline out of Siberia supplying a black market what
it takes to build a nuclear bomb. Find it and shut it down in.

July 2010, in Pretoria, South Africa, during a sting operation caught on a
surveillance camera, five men are arrested to for trying to sell highly
radioactive cesium 137, perfect for a dirty bomb attack. They also say
they have a nuclear device to sell.

There continues to be evidence of kinetic black market activity to get,
smuggle and sell nuclear material. Where are the smugglers getting the
material and who are they getting it for?

This is a black market in global cataclysm.

(on camera): Is there a real black market for terrorists who want to buy a
fissile material to make a nuclear bomb?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: There`s been a material roughly 20 cases in the last 20
years. So, you have roughly one a year of what we call weapons-useable
material. This is weapons that if terrorists got their hands on it could
be put into a bomb that would produce a nuclear yield.

So, this isn`t, we`re not talking dirty bombs. This weapons-useable
material that could create a fissionable device if terrorists got their
hands on it. There are actually some more that the U.S. government and
other countries are aware of than those that I can`t talk about because
it`s classified.

But in every case I`m aware of, the material is not reported missing from
the facility of origin until it was found on the black market. So, that
tells us there is a nuclear security problem that`s the root of the black
market problem.

MADDOW: I feel like the common wisdom is if terrorist groups were able to
get radioactive material what they`d likely be able to do is put
radioactive material into a conventional bomb, exploded it, a dirty bomb.
But the idea that they`d be able to cause a nuclear explosion, set off a
nuclear weapon, set off a mushroom cloud, that`s impossible.

MOWATT-LARSSEN: Well, the common wisdom is wrong. In fact, somebody
better tell al Qaeda that`s the common wisdom. Al Qaeda`s goal, which
we`ve known 15 years at least, is to build a nuclear weapon. Their goal is
not to produce the dirty bomb but to produce the actual Hiroshima-like
bomb.

MADDOW: Building on a non-Lugar initiative of the 1990s to secure nuclear
material in the former Soviet states, the U.S. government scaled up its
effort to physical secure nuclear material for other countries. An agency
within the Energy Department, the National Nuclear Security Administration,
launches a four-year effort to secure the known loose nuclear material
around the world.

Countries like Chile where NNSA officials complete their top-secret task of
recovering 40 pounds of highly-enriched uranium despite a massive
earthquake in a middle of the mission. Over the course of about a decade,
the National Nuclear Security Administration`s efforts to lock up nuclear
material, to keep it out of the hands of terrorists leads to the total
recovery of all weapons-grade uranium in 18 different countries around the
world.

Pulling off a coordinated international nuclear security mission like this
requires a major financial commitment by the United States. Early in his
first term, President Obama ramps these efforts up, adding billions to
their budget.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Today, I am announcing a new
international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the
world within four years.

MADDOW: The fact there has not been an incident of nuclear terrorism since
9/11 is a great success store for the decade since. The persistence of
nuclear material smuggling, the persistence of that black market however
means that there are still paying customers out there trying to take
terrorism nuclear.

How would the last decade had been different if 9/11 had been a nuclear
blast or even a dirty bomb attack? How would the next decade unspool if
that ever does happen?

(on camera): If al Qaeda or another group like it did succeed in
detonating a nuclear device, that would not be the end of the world,
something would happen next. What do you think would happen next in the
United States and around the world?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: That kind of attack would be intended to draw the United
States back in even more, say, for their terms, barbaric way into the
Middle East, which would again prove to everybody, particularly now, as the
world experienced these unprecedented changes in the Middle East, would in
a way favor what al Qaeda`s narrative is all about, which is a U.S.
corrupt, hypocritical democracy that favors certain interests.

MADDOW: How can the U.S. act in ways that doesn`t reinforce their
narrative, particularly in response to violent provocation from them?

MOWATT-LARSSEN: Number one is we have to ensure we do not overreact.
That`s in terms of the desired military response. But more importantly is
to think through what we are doing in terms of the consequences and
avoiding the sorts of things that would play to the extremists` cause.

And to at home ensure that we think real hard about what we are willing to
give up in the aftermath of an attack or how afraid we are.

We don`t have to live in fear. That`s what terrorists want more than
anything to inspire fear. If we do that, they win, we lose.

MADDOW: When we look how we changed in the past decade and we have to
think about what kind of country we want to be for the next decade,
security is never going to go away as a an American concern. The wounds of
9/11 are still fresh to us as a nation. We are still both alert and
concerned about the prospect that there will be another 9/11. That feeling
has not changed at all.

But what have we learned in 10 years about what works and what doesn`t work
toward keeping us safe?

ENGEL: Well, what works it seems is small, focused, pinpoint type
operations -- whether they are against nuclear weapons, whether they are on
a city level like in New York or whether it`s like the CIA hit teams and
military hit teams that went and killed bin Laden. That kind of thing
works.

What doesn`t work is a vague, conceptual battle that we are going to send
in military divisions to spread democracy and fight a war against an
ideology with soldiers -- that kind of thing didn`t work, doesn`t work, and
may have made our country less safe.

MADDOW: The decision that America would wage preemptive war, that we would
not allow threats to materialize, that we would act materially and call
ourselves justified in doing so before a threat materialized, that has
resulted in 10 years of constant warfare and more ahead.

ENGEL: Preemption is good if you`re trying to stop a dirty bomb attack or
you`re trying to stop a specific threat. Preemption is not good when
you`re talking about invading a country and establishing foreign bases with
unknown consequences.

MADDOW: Something that almost by definition you can`t control, you can`t
say how it`s going to end up.

ENGEL: A lot of al Qaeda people were killed, but they weren`t killed by
the conventional wars that were launched in the name of al Qaeda. The
global war on terrorism was, in many ways, a global war on fear.

How do you fight against terrorism? It`s like fighting against evil.
Doing it, we allowed ourselves as a nation to being terrorized.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY
BE UPDATED.
END

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