- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[Music] - 25 years ago today, the world changed.

In the span of a morning.

Florida was very much a part of that morning in Sarasota classroom, the president learned our country was under attack.

From MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa the response that followed would reach across the world.

A generation has now come of age without witnessing the terror of that morning.

And that makes what we do with this story matter more, not less.

On Florida This Week, we sit with people who were there.

They were not watching from a distance.

They were inside the classroom, on the base, inside the newsroom as history unfolded.

25 years later, we asked them what they saw, what it was like so that we all never forget.

[Music] Welcome back to Florida This Week.

I'm Lissette Campos.

Joining us today is Evelio EJ Otero.

He's a U.S.

Air Force national security consultant and a retired colonel.

In 2001, he was the deputy branch chief of intelligence at U.S.

Central Command at MacDill.

We have Paul Tash, who was the editor of the St.

Petersburg Times on the morning of September 11th, and Arman Mahmoudian, a research fellow at the USF Global and National Security Institute.

We begin, though, in Sarasota, where the president of the United States learned the country was under attack.

Linda, thank you so much for joining us.

- Oh, thank you for having me this morning.

- Describe for us that morning.

Where were you?

In that room when the Chief of Staff comes into view and walks over to the president and whispers in his ear.

- We were right off to the side of the president.

Three stations had been chosen to be in the room with the president and the second grade classroom.

As he read to the children and heard them read, so it was our station, ABC 7 and it was Anne Compton and her photographer from ABC network and a lady from the school system television network.

And they had told us when we came into the room at 5 a.m., hand over your cell phone.

They took up our cell phones.

So we'd been in that room for three hours when the president came in and sat down.

I was I could almost touch him.

I was so close.

And he'd listened to the children read.

He looked like he was approving.

Good job, he said, and he read a little.

And then Andrew Card walked in.

Andrew Card sort of covered his mouth when he was talking.

I thought he said, time to move on, Mr.

President.

So I thought when the president started to get up, I thought, oh, we're just going on to the next step.

- What did you observe in his demeanor?

How did the mood in that room seem to shift at that moment?

- Well, that room was full of second graders and the second grade teacher and the principal and just the three news media representatives.

And we looked at the president's face.

To me, it just went still, like he was thinking about something.

He did not look panicked at all.

It looked like he had been thinking about the reading.

And he looked up and he was sort of thinking about, what will I do next?

We just had Andrew Card here, the Chief of Staff, a couple of months ago, and he talked about that moment.

And he said when he leaned down to tell the president.

He leaned very close to him in case the president jumped up or had some reaction.

So he actually blocked that possibility with his body, which I thought was really funny because the president did not in any way panic.

He stood up calmly, and I thought, we're about to move on to the next room.

But Ann Compton had not given up her second phone.

She had another cell phone.

And she said, Mr.

President, do you know a second plane just hit the World Trade Center?

And he said, yes, we're going to address that right now.

And he started walking out toward the media center.

We had been told as the media, we had to go this direction, but the Secret Service blocked us.

So we had to go right behind the president.

- What did you think at that moment when you realized that something much more serious was going on?

- I knew something had happened.

Had no idea what.

As we went through the media center, these people who were standing there were dignitaries, very important people in town.

They had been waiting 2 or 3 hours to shake the president's hand as he came through.

They stuck out their hands.

Then they saw his face.

They dropped them, and he walked right into the media center and stood beside the television set.

- And that was the moment when he announced to the nation what was going on.

What was the mood at that moment?

What were you feeling and thinking?

- Well, when he stood beside the television set for the first time, we saw what was going on.

We saw what was happening in New York.

The media, of course, already knew, and they had come in on the side of the room that we're on.

So they were standing alongside us.

But the dignitaries too, that had been chosen to be in that room, did not know what was happening.

So when the president walked in, they started to applaude.

They saw his face.

All noise stopped.

It was silent when he addressed the nation and the world, and he said, our country is under attack.

And we saw what was happening.

- Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.

I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI, and I've ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families ,and to conduct a full scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.

- Were you afraid?

- No.

That's very strange.

But that was not the thought that crossed my mind.

I was standing there on the front row, very close to the president, seeing what was happening, listening to him, I grabbed the hands of the people on either side of me.

Had no idea who those people were, but at that moment, listening to the president, I was ready to do whatever it took to protect our country.

I felt no fear, only a great love for our country, a great responsibility.

We're going to protect our people.

I felt feelings I had never felt before in love and responsibility for the people around me, but I did not experience any fear.

I trusted the president and from what he said, I thought he had this under control.

- That's Linda Carson from ABC 7.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you.

- Listening to her, the emotions just wash over me like how I felt that day.

Memories are so vivid.

Where were each of you on that day?

EJ I'd like to start with you.

- Well, I was a division chief for intelligence operations at Central Command, and we had a TV on in the operations room in the military.

You have a TV on to know what's going on and track things as they're happening.

And we saw the airplane hit at 8:00 around 8:00 in the morning, and everybody was gathering around the TV.

And when the second one hit, we looked at each other and said, we're at war.

And sure enough, within an hour and a half, we got a call from General Franks, Tommy Franks, informing the command to get on a warpath.

He was waiting the final word from the president, but everybody had to start taking their roles, whether it's logistics or whether it was plans, whether it was intelligence.

My role was identifying all the intelligence requirements that we were going to need to support any operations in Afghanistan.

We we we knew that it had to do with Al Qaeda because they had attacked the, the, the towers before, years before.

And there was noise always.

Yeah.

There was always noise about Al Qaeda doing something against the United States.

And, uh, we, uh, we knew that we were not going to go home for the next few days.

And of course, we did not.

- Well, I got to the newsroom that morning just as the second plane hit the towers and, uh, the, all the TVs were on in the newsroom.

And at the moment when the first tower fell.

Everyone was transfixed.

It was as if a spell had been cast to see the collapse of such a building, and to know then that the second one would fall, too.

It was such.

It was a staggering moment.

And then almost immediately that moment passed and.

And people just went into action to cover the news.

I felt so grateful that day because much of the country was reeling.

What do we do next?

But in our newsroom for that time, we had a sense of purpose and we knew what our job was, and we went about it.

So we published an Extra Edition that day.

- This was the newspaper.

- The the next day was, uh, was that edition.

We published an Extra.

It was probably the last Extra Edition that we published.

You think about it now, it's such a quaint notion, you know, that in the day of electronic publishing.

- This was your headline you came up.

- With.

I wrote that headline.

Yes.

Uh, as an echo of, uh, President Roosevelt's, uh, speech after Pearl Harbor.

Yes.

A new day of infamy.

- Arman, where were you?

- Well, president was at the second grade school.

I was third grade student myself, but very far from here.

I was in Tehran, in Iran, my hometown.

I remember very well.

We we were...we were going to my uncle's house.

We were in car.

My dad, dad had the radio on and the radio started broadcasting the news.

I don't remember the news.

And to be frank, I didn't catch the news at all.

But I cut my mom's reaction because.

And she was very scared.

She told my dad that.

What if they are behind it?

They why?

Why they she meant the Iranian government because by 2001, the adversarial relationship between Iran and the United States was clear.

The Iranian hostility toward the America from the hostage crisis to the Lebanon crisis.

Series of crisis in Lebanon, the hostage crisis of Lebanon, marine based attacks, embassy attacks.

So there was a general understanding in Iran that the Iranian government tries to sponsor attacks against the United States.

But that specific attack was causing for concern because it was drastic.

It was very large scope, and everybody knew that there would be a response and that respond would wouldn't be similar to any response in the past.

- But as a child you are remembering your mom's reaction.

Yes.

Yes.

- I remember two emotions followed very quickly.

Fear and sympathy.

Thousands of people with no reason.

I mean, like us, they were just having their own big getting by their own day.

And then something else happened.

- And while the nation absorbed what had happened, the military response was already taking shape.

Central command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, directed that response then, and it still plays that same role today.

EJ you said in our pre-interview that 9/11 really changed the book on how we fight wars.

Explain that.

- Absolutely.

It, it there were so many, so many doctrinal matters related to the Army, Navy, Air Force, how we did things.

But it was all based on tank to tank, soldier to soldier, uniform to uniform, country against country.

This is against an organization that nobody knew what they look like.

They were all in civilian clothes and the asymmetric warfare as a concept.

And what became later on a counterinsurgency became the driving force of anything in the military.

So we had to adjust our way of doing things and little, little things like, uh, the Marine Corps, they used, they were trained to do beach and 40 mile, uh, tail, uh, logistical tails for the support after 9/11.

It's like, no, you got to go all the way in.

There's no limit.

And it depends on the, on the plans for the, for the, for the combat.

And also it was really the first war that was special operations war and, and all the concept of using horses in the mountains of, of, uh, aligning ourselves with the, with the warlords Dostum at the time.

And, uh, and, uh, the air power, the air power was very challenging because of the mountains were very high.

Uh, the aircraft couldn't stand that long to, to be that high.

And when the first battle started, it changed the whole doctrine of how, how the military does things.

So, um, we saw it, we watched it.

And when we were told, dust off the Afghanistan plans, we did, uh, we started looking at them and they were not all, but for the most part, they were outdated.

So we had to come up with a new plan.

So we had brilliant planners.

We had brilliant officers in the headquarters at the time, and we were briefing a General Franks at 4:00 in the morning, and he was briefing, uh, Secretary Rumsfeld at five.

And all of us were in the room in case there were any corrections to any of the plans.

It was brilliant.

- Paul, how were your reporters covering what was going on at Centcom?

- Uh, well, because we were so close physically at Centcom, I do think we had some access that would be not typical for a regional big, even a big regional newspaper.

And so we were covering that.

But there were also other Florida angles as well.

Remember that the Saudi terrorists had trained and lived in Sarasota for a while.

Everything comes back to Florida.

And so we were trying, obviously as well to tell the story of what the consequence was locally in terms of business and travel and life here in the Tampa Bay area, which was tremendously affected by what had happened on the morning of September 11th.

- Armand so much of the way our country does national security operations procedures, um, has a tie back to 9/11 that a lot of folks don't, don't really realize that or don't know about that.

What would you say was the biggest change in our national security operations.

- I want to focus on US national security in regard to the Middle East, rather than the grand scheme of affairs when it comes to the Middle East.

Since the United States emergence as a superpower, post-World War II.

US doctrine keeps changing, I mean, at the beginning, we have the buck passing approach that the US was relying on.

The French and British didn't work because of the Suez Canal.

Iran oil crisis then tries to have a kind of allegiances that regional cooperation, which the peak of it was the Nixon Doctrine, which basically forming alliances with the friendly countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Iranian revolution changes that.

And then we have an era that the United States just tries to contain.

And that was from the 1979 to 2001.

Which brings us to the 9/11.

Up until that moment, from the actually the very beginning, from the end of the Cold War, World War Two, the United States largely has a reactive model when it comes to the Middle East.

I don't want to change things, but I want to keep things as order.

I want to block the spread of the Communism.

I want to block the hostile actions.

But I don't want to be an action or active.

Actively change the Middle East from the 9/11 this model changed and reactive model.

The reactive doctrine changes to something very action, very initiatory.

United States was wants to actively change the Middle East.

It was military policy.

It was political policy changing the regimes, democratizing the regimes.

We have seen it in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have seen it in Iraq.

We have seen it specifically with the devastation of Iraq, which was something bigger.

And later on we have seen with the containment of Iran.

So I think that would be the biggest transformation of the US national security when it comes to the Middle East from a reactive stance to a reactionary one.

- Paul, you know, there are so many changes, ripple effects of 9/11 in the military industry, in the national security industry, in the news industry.

So many questions about how we cover an event like this the first time that everyone saw a terror attack on live TV.

What were some of the questions that you were asking as a leader in that newsroom?

- Well, how could we best serve our audience and the public's understanding?

And I think the for example, on that first day, rumors were flying, news was happening.

It wasn't just the Twin Towers.

I remember being on the wire desk when the report first came in that a plane had hit the Pentagon.

What?

What?

Two already at the World Trade Center.

And now a plane is hit the Pentagon as well.

So the information was just cascading.

Most of it true, some of it false.

But I thought what we could do every day, especially in those early days, was to provide a record as of midnight.

This is our best understanding of what happened, dear readers, so that when you picked up the St.

Petersburg Times the next morning.

You got a, I hope, a thoughtful and comprehensive report, rather than just a collection of headlines and bulletins from one source or another.

And I think, especially in those early days, that was worthwhile.

- When we look at this story, it's surprising to many that it's a story that's not finished yet.

We do have unfinished business.

The alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks is, uh, has a new trial date, a military trial, June of 2028.

Um, some important developments by the courts.

EJ, I'd like to ask you, as you look ahead to that moment, what can we expect?

- I don't think there's going to be much of a change in the final result for this gentleman.

He was uh he's been tied by witnesses and by documents that we have retrieved from Afghanistan that he was tied to Daniel Pearl beheading to Mr.

Berg's beheading.

Several terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East.

Not just those events in the war.

And of course, he's mentioned in some videos by by individuals that helped him plan 9/11.

So yeah, it's a, it's, it, it, it's a little obstacle.

But at the end of the day, he did it.

Uh, it's, it's kind of hard to erase.

You can, uh, you can forgive, but you cannot forget.

- So when the military judge ruled a few days ago that the confession that he made to FBI agents in 2007 needed to be tossed out cannot be used.

Um, that does not concern you.

- And it really doesn't.

He had made many confessions before and after that.

So the method in which they got that one confession, uh, is what the, the, the, the judge does not agree with, but the military, the Uniform Code of Military Justice also has an appeal process, and that's why they're looking at 2028, because there will be an appeal process of all of that evidence and other forms of evidence that will be appealed if we can bring it again.

But even if it even if it doesn't go again, there is enough.

There is millions of documents that tie him to directly to the 9/11 attacks.

- On the national security stage.

Will this trial trigger or increase any extra activity in terms of dangers, threats in your in your experience?

- Well, that's a very good question.

Look, our records suggest that there is a change of nature and dynamic in terrorist attacks, specifically when it comes to the America directly, the attacks are no longer coordinated, and hopefully they would no longer be coordinated because coordinated attacks usually come with a large casualty.

They're no longer coordinated.

They won't.

They won't happen in a large volume on a scope.

But they are changing and their nature is transforming to be the inspired one.

The lone wolf one.

Someone who has a sympathy with a specific group or a specific ideology.

Picks up a gun or sword or any sort of weapon and goes after the civilians.

Well, the good part of it, not the good part of it, the lesser evil part of it, that is those kind of attack comes with low casualty, with any human casualty, any human life is a tragedy itself.

But the bad part of it is that the worst part of it, I'm sorry, is that they are harder to track because they are not coordinated, they are not communicated.

It's hard to survey them.

It's hard to pick up them by wiretapping.

So especially that specific cohort, uh, I think while he's going to resume some level of sympathy inside the United States and across the world, which I think is a good thing because specifically speaking young people and Generation Z, the students that I deal with them in the class, I sometimes feel that.

And it saddens me that they are losing their touch with the 9/11.

So I believe that court is going to bring that memory back.

This happened and this is something that you shouldn't forget.

But on the other side, it might fuel those, inspire those lone wolves to want to pursue another attacks.

Would it be a large would it be something major?

I doubt that I hope not would be something minor or isolated.

I wouldn't rule it down.

- Paul, you.

We have newsrooms that are filled with young reporters who weren't born during 9/11 or reporters who were children.

How do we impart the importance of that day and make sure that the coverage and the significance of that day is deposited into this next generation of reporters?

- Well, I, I think it starts even before they arrive in the newsroom.

I think it, you know, it starts with schools and, and, uh, teaching about this chapter of history, which as you point continues to unfold, uh, we've had, uh, you know, some other major events both before and, and certainly after that would resonate with that generation.

But I think, uh, episodes like this, anniversaries like this, remembrance, like this, I mean, I'm sure our parents felt the same way about Pearl Harbor.

How do, how do we, how do we keep that memory alive?

And how do we, uh, commemorate that importance and let it transfer to a new generation?

So it's the same obligation for us now.

- Thank you so much to all three of you for taking time on this important day to help us remember and honor the memories of those folks who lost their lives.

Thank you so much.

Again.

Special thanks to our panel, Evelio Otero, Paul Tash, and Arman Mahmoudian.

We close tonight with one more voice retired Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann.

He was at Fort Bragg on September 11th, surrounded by fellow Special Forces soldiers as the day unfolded, right before their eyes on television.

- You're talking about some of the most professional soldiers on the planet.

Most of these men had already been to war in some fashion in Central and South America.

And so watching that imagery, imagery in our orderly room of those towers, and then one tower collapsing, followed by the next, uh, you could feel the anger simmering up in these men, but no one spoke.

No one spoke they just stared at the at the television but you could feel the room vibrating.

- Colonel Mann's full interview is available on our YouTube channel.

You can hear how he helped coordinate the rescue of an Afghan ally and those family members during the 2021 withdrawal of U.S.

troops from Afghanistan.

All you have to do to see it is go to youtube.com/wedupbs.

25 years ago, Tampa Bay, our nation and the world changed.

Tonight, we hope we honored that by remembering it together.

Thank you for watching Florida This Week.

[Music]