9/11: Unanswered - Part One - EP 165

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Twenty-five years later, The Conspiracy Podcast is finally tackling it. "9/11: Unanswered" kicks off with the day itself — minute by minute, four flights, one morning that changed everything.

It starts like any other Tuesday. Nineteen men move through four different airports — Portland, Boston, Newark, Washington Dulles — carrying box cutters and knives with blades under four inches, which was perfectly legal at the time. Ten of them get flagged by CAPPS, the era's passenger screening system, before they even board. Flagged, and let through anyway. Hosts Eric , Sean and Jorge pull apart exactly how that happened, working straight from the 9/11 Commission Report to keep the timeline accurate rather than relying on secondhand retellings.

From there it's real time. Flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney calling it in from the air as it's happening. Daniel Lewin, a former Israeli special forces officer, trying to stop his own hijacker before anyone on the ground even knows what's unfolding. The first plane hits the North Tower and the world assumes it's an accident — until the second one hits live on television, and there's no more room for that assumption. Then the Pentagon. Then United 93, where the passengers find out, mid-flight, exactly what happened to the other three planes and make a decision most of them never get the chance to think twice about.

The episode also follows President Bush's morning at a Florida elementary school — the seven minutes in that classroom people are still arguing about twenty-five years later — through Air Force One and into the address that ended up shaping the next two decades of American foreign policy.

This one ran long. Long enough that the hosts split it into two parts rather than cut corners on any of it. Part 2 picks up exactly where this one leaves off. Later episodes in the series get into what's still unresolved after twenty-five years — the Commission's own gaps, the disputed collapse of Building 7, and the questions around the Pentagon that never fully went away.

New episodes of "9/11: Unanswered" drop every Tuesday through September 28th. Patreon members get early access to every episode in the series plus the full, extended After Hours cut. www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast