America was so deeply affected by 9/11 the subsequent war on terror left profound wounds to scars that have yet to heal in many cases and they're best understood through the experience of individuals who are caught up in the extremism and fear of that time.

Trauma that's reverberated across generations.

The award winning journalist Janet Reitman traces the long shadow of the war on terror in her new book, The Inheritance.

And she's now with Michelle Martin to reflect on what America's response to 9/11 set in motion and what the country and indeed the world has inherited from the choices made over the past 25 years.

Thanks Christiane.

Janet Reitman, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you so much for having me.

Now, you've been reporting on national security, extremism, the war on terror for a long time.

But this book, The Inheritance, is about people.

It's a deep dive into people's lives that have been touched by, let's just say for the sake of conversation, the war on terror.

Is there a through line among these stories?

Like why were these the stories that you wanted to tell?

I mean, I think there's several through lines.

I was particularly interested in the, for lack of a better word, sort of the politics of fear and how fear and, you know, and anxiety and also this kind of divided nature that we are now very used to in our culture, this polarized us versus them sort of mentality, how that began and how that metastasized.

And I've been covering national security and extremism, as you mentioned.

And so I had been, and I'm a narrative writer, I'm a magazine writer.

So I was writing stories about people anyway, who's, who, a lot of times young people who are kind of caught up in this, in these political moments that sometimes they didn't even really understand.

And I began to get really interested in their families and in sort of how they even wound up at this place.

Each of these stories stands on its own.

I mean, there's a suburban military family whose son is drawn into neo-Nazism.

There's a Muslim teenager who tries to join ISIS.

There's a Palestinian American businessman who gets caught up in this post 9/11 terrorism crackdown.

There's an FBI agent who becomes so disillusioned with this war on terror that he actually starts leaking classified documents.

So you've covered a lot of these stories, but I'm just sort of wondering, how did it become a thing where you realize, actually, this fear, this fear is going to ossify, and it's going to turn this country into something that a lot of us aren't going to recognize?

So coming out of the '90s, we were a fairly united country for as many divisions and as much kind of chaos as that era had that maybe sometimes we forget about a little bit.

But there was a sense of Americans being one people.

And you even heard it in President Bush.

His initial rhetoric in the aftermath of 9/11 was to bring everyone together, not to say to divide us.

And so what I would say is that fear element of it, I did not notice initially.

But what I began to notice was, I would say as soon as they created a Department of Homeland Security, as soon as they redefined America as the homeland, and sort of began to utilize rhetoric and create an infrastructure that was going to be able to do that, I think that was the moment that I saw the most of the American people.

And I think that's what made America so special in a lot of ways, was that we were people that were not afraid to speak out.

And so I think that's what made America so special.

And I think that's what made America so special.

And I think that's what made America so special.

And I think that's what made America so special.

In a lot of ways, was that we were people that were supposed to be strong and proud.

And we don't have much of a historic memory in some ways because we're constantly moving forward.

But what happened after 9/11 was we discarded that narrative and we created a new sort of template.

A template became a template of national security, a template of defense, and a template of being on guard.

And what happens to you when you're on guard, I mean, basically a war on terror is a war on fear.

It's not a war on anything.

There is no nation of terror.

There is no ideology even of terror.

It's a feeling.

And when you declare war on something like that, you're basically declaring a state of hypervigilance.

And hypervigilance is traumatic and it has a long-term impact.

And I began to see, I would say, around 2000 and maybe 2002, 2003, certainly after the invasion of Iraq, because I started to see how this war was being sold to young people who went over there thinking that they were fighting a war to avenge 9/11.

Yeah.

So let's talk about some of the stories, starting with the Onishuk family.

Which, I mean, they're kind of like the heart and soul of the book, but there's just a fascinating family.

The dad, Walt, he builds a career in the military, loves it, you know, concludes his military service, then builds a career as the sort of post-9/11 security world.

But his son, Andrew, becomes attracted to the neo-Nazi movement.

Can you explain how that happened?

Walter was a freewheeling, fun-loving, adventure-seeking Navy pilot in the '90s who joined the Navy after college because he wanted to be Top Gun, literally.

And so in the aftermath of September 11, he saw, "Well, I have a security clearance.

How can I make a living using what I have?"

And so he got involved in doing R&D for military contractors.

So he worked for government-funded R&D assets that did -- oversaw designs of a variety of technologies that were part of the national security infrastructure.

And that set a lifestyle that was both a very profitable, comfortable lifestyle.

It also continued his ability to have ventures all over the world because he would deploy to Afghanistan, or he deployed -- he once deployed to Iraq as a reservist, but he made many, many, many trips to Afghanistan as a contractor, and leaving his family for weeks or months, sometimes many, many months.

One time it was almost a year.

And so his son grows up in a kind of -- you know, he grows up a little bit in a vacuum without his father.

He grows up like worshiping his dad's lifestyle and freedom and adventure.

And also the sort of -- they were a particular family that I would say -- I hate this term normalization, but it's a good term for this.

They normalized guns.

They normalized a military lifestyle and a kind of a -- well, this is just who we are.

So he grew up with a kind of unique situation.

And I think that what I felt in terms of his becoming a neo-Nazi was that, like, something entered the water in that -- in the 2000s.

Again, it's that sense of, like, the way that Americans sort of defined -- redefined themselves in a militaristic manner.

Well, Andrew went crazy on this.

He loved video games.

He loved guns.

He joined an airsoft forum.

He started to, you know, want to be even more of a big he-man type dude than his dad.

And I think that led him down a road, particularly online, that took him into communities that were very militarized or militant, I would say, and also quite extreme in their rhetoric, and were really, really invested in the divisions.

Well, he wanted, it's like he wanted to be somebody, you know, like his dad wasn't around, so he, you know, his dad was doing something honorable, but he was kind of creating an identity for himself.

And then, you know, he goes down this rabbit hole.

This does not end well, I'll just say.

It does not end well.

And here's one of the reasons I wanted to bring this up is that you also profile a young girl, a young woman named Maryam Khan, who was a child when 9/11 happened.

She grows into a deeply religious teenager.

She becomes increasingly focused on the suffering of Muslims abroad.

And she then connects with ISIS supporters online and then she tries to leave the United States.

So it just, you know, it just fascinated me in reading this is that, oh my goodness, it's like, it's like, she's like Andrew, like in the sense that she wants to be part of something bigger than herself.

And she's searching for something.

I just found that fascinating.

They both interpreted sort of these ideological movements, for lack of a better word, as being giant causes.

The neo-Nazi white supremacist, white nationalist movement framed especially for young people.

They were very active online.

During the time that our country was very focused on ISIS and on trying to find radicalized teens like those who tried to go off and join the Islamic State, the number of white supremacist accounts on Twitter was a far greater number.

And they had this very specific outreach to young people that was very similar to the Muslim world's outreach, which was that your country sucks.

Your country sucks.

Either it sucks, because you as a Muslim kid grew up with parents who've been afraid of being, you know, arrested or deported, and they've had to shut their mouths and be quiet and be good Muslims, as they said, so that they won't get in trouble with the United States government and won't get, you know, arrested or prosecuted for terrorism.

And so they're fearful and they forgotten who they are.

That was the messaging that some of these Muslim kids got.

And then the white kids were like, your country is sucks because it's too politically correct.

It didn't win the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's still fighting this endless war in Afghanistan.

It didn't win in Iraq.

You're too woke.

You're you're you, you know, you've opened up your military to women to, you know, so they can be in combat.

I mean, there's a long list of things that were pushed on young white men to give them an outlet for their own dissatisfaction and alienation and teenage whatever they were feeling, which is kind of typical teenage stuff.

In a lot of cases, in fact, writing about Andrew and having written about Mariam, I began to see that they were mirror images of each other.

And that this very interesting, in particular as well, because the FBI paid very close attention to the Khan kids and that they got they were arrested because they wanted to join ISIS.

And the FBI was looking very specifically at people who wanted to join the Islamic State.

So they were arrested.

And Andrew was not monitored at all because the FBI did not monitor domestic actors and domestic groups.

They did not look at white supremacist groups as in the same vein as they would have an ISIS or an al-Shabaab or an al-Qaeda or something like that.

Meanwhile, these groups are exploding online.

Many people forget now that there was actually a group of white supremacists who were trying to kill President Obama just as he was being nominated for the when he was about to receive the Democratic nomination.

In fact, the FBI disrupted a plot of and he was in fact the candidate who received the earliest Secret Service protection in history because of the level of threats being directed at him.

Another fascinating character, a person named Terry Albury, who is an African American man who joins the FBI, super gung ho, and really believes in the mission.

And then so explain what happens to him.

So Terry begins very idealistically as a person who is he's a he's an African American guy who is really believes when he joins the FBI two things.

One that the FBI and this is legitimate the FBI was incredible in the 90s in particular at finding missing and exploited children.

And this is one of the things he really wanted to do is help children.

The other thing he believes is that the FBI was cracking down on local police forces that were you know in like like in Los Angeles or in other parts of California that were involved in police brutality.

They were opening investigations on the LAPD and things like that.

So he saw the FBI as the good guys.

They're gonna stop racist cops and they're gonna find missing children.

So he joins the FBI and it just so happened right after graduating college was just in 2001 and then 9/11 happens and now he has shifted his mission entirely to become a foot soldier in the war on terror as he was called and what happens to him over these years is that he gets in at the ground floor of an ever expanding FBI in terms of its power and a complete shift in the mission of the FBI from being an organization devoted to investigating crime and finding criminals to more of an intelligence operation.

And so he gets in at this very root level of spying on people, trying to make cases by linking a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of somebody who might have known somebody who committed an act of terror.

Literally, this was the kind of 25-degree separation of people that would be investigated at times.

And he was involving himself in that.

And he began to think increasingly that this was sort of killing him soul-wise.

This was not accomplishing, it wasn't actually catching terrorists.

He never caught any terrorists.

He didn't know anybody that caught terrorists.

He didn't, he stopped one plot, I believe.

But most of what they were doing was just building cases for the sake of building cases and building a budget for the sake of building a budget.

And this budget got huger and huger and huger.

And he started to look at it as he's described to me many times as a Ponzi scheme, which is very interesting because the tremendous expansion of the FBI is what I think is responsible for a lot of what we are seeing today when we look at, like, you know, ICE.

And you could draw a direct line from all of the stuff that you might have an issue with ICE doing to what the FBI did in the 2000s.

>> And say more about that.

Why do you say that?

>> Well, I mean, I think if you look at what -- some of the behavior that, for example, rounding people up on expired visas or questionable immigration status or whatnot and just getting rid of them, just deporting them, just -- you know, people disappeared like this in the early 2000s.

We didn't know about it because -- in the same way that we know about it now because we didn't have social media.

But certainly the attorneys knew about it and the FBI agents that arrested these people knew about it.

I mean, I think that the sort of impunity that we see with ICE is a direct result of these lengthy investigations and this kind of repeated outing actually of the FBI by journalists who were like calling them on this behavior and then nothing really changed and their power kept expanding, which is kind of fascinating.

But that, I think, you know, it kind of numbs people in this culture to a lot of this stuff.

And so now you see ICE and you see them wearing masks and you see them behaving like, I mean, the guys I used to see in Iraq, they behave like them.

And there's a real continuum, I think.

- And there's just so many fascinating stories that you tell and so many sort of fascinating details.

But I do want to sort of ask you, because I think some people may question this, they say, "Well, you picked the most broken, damaged people to sort of tell the story of the country in a post-9/11 world."

And I just think some people may wonder if that's really fair.

And what would you say to that?

I mean, I think we're a pretty broken damaged country.

And you know, we see it playing out constantly, you know, and everything.

And so I wanted to look at the roots of that.

And in order to do that, you do have to, you do chase back people who have had a lot of either damaged themselves or who are grappling with the unraveling of some of these institutions, the unraveling of some of their ideals and their morals.

I mean, these are all things that happened.

And I think that, you know, we're at a moment in our history where it's time to look pretty honestly at our past and reckon with some of these things in order to move forward.

You know, in the process of writing a story that will take us forward, and I hope, you know, we write a good story.

But in order to write a good story, you have to look at your past and be honest about where we've come from.

Janet Reitman, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.