The Rachel Maddow Show, Transcript 09/02/11

"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) 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