Blindspot: The Road to 9/11
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2021
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Episode 1: The Bullet. The 9/11 attacks were so much more than a bolt from the blue on a crisp September morning. They were more than a decade in the making. Our story starts in a Midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom in 1990. Shots ring out and the extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane, lies mortally wounded. His assassin, El-Sayyid Nosair, is connected to members of a Brooklyn mosque who are training to fight with Islamic freedom fighters in Afghanistan. NYPD Detective Louis Napoli and FBI Special Agent John Anticev catch the case and start unraveling a conspiracy that is taking place in plain sight by blending into the tumult of the city. It is animated by an emerging ideology: violent jihad.
More about the Blindspot: Road to 9/11:
While the devastating images of the 9/11 attacks are seared into our national collective memory, most of the events that led up to that day took place out of public view. Over eight episodes, Blindspot: The Road to 9/11, brings to light the decade-long “shadow struggle” that preceded the attacks. Hosted by WNYC reporter Jim O’Grady and based on The HISTORY® Channel's television documentary Road to 9/11 (produced by Left/Right), this podcast series draws on interviews with more than 60 people — including FBI agents, high-level bureaucrats, journalists, experts, and people who knew the terrorists personally — and weaves them together with original reporting to create a gripping, serialized narrative audio experience. Blindspot: The Road to 9/11 is a co-production of The HISTORY® Channel and WNYC Studios.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, Original Podcast |
| 0:04.0 | Hey history this week fans, 20 years ago today the 9-11 attacks changed the world as we know it. |
| 0:11.0 | So on this anniversary we are bringing you something special, |
| 0:15.0 | Episode 1 of our podcast Blind Spot, The Road to 9-11. |
| 0:19.0 | This series, produced by the History Channel and WNYC Studios, |
| 0:24.0 | explores the lead up to the attacks and the warnings we may have missed along the way. |
| 0:29.0 | After listening to this episode you can find the rest of Blind Spot, The Road to 9-11, |
| 0:33.0 | wherever you get your podcasts. Here is Episode 1, The Bullet. |
| 0:39.0 | There's nothing special about my 9-11 story. Like everyone's story, it depends on chance. |
| 0:46.0 | By chance that morning I was living in a house on a hill at the tip of Staten Island. |
| 0:52.0 | When I heard about the first plane hitting the North Tower, I rushed to the hill |
| 0:56.0 | where there's this perfect view of the World Trade Center. |
| 1:00.0 | I remember standing there and suddenly feeling the second plane flying past me. |
| 1:06.0 | It was a jumbo jet and was coming in loud and low. |
| 1:11.0 | The plane ripped past and went streaking over the water and hit the South Tower at 903. |
| 1:18.0 | I saw the Firewall and the Smoke. |
| 1:22.0 | Back then I was a reporter for the New York Times. |
| 1:26.0 | So I ran down to the waterfront. I pulled out a notebook and my pen and I tried to start interviewing people. |
| 1:33.0 | But nobody had anything to say. |
| 1:36.0 | We all just fell silent and stared at the buildings. |
| 1:40.0 | Then the South Tower disappeared and we all looked at each other like, |
| 1:46.0 | did that? Did that just... there was so much smoke, it was hard to tell. |
... |
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