September 10, 2021

On the morning of 9/11, FDNY Assistant Chief Joe Pfeifer led his firefighters to investigate a possible gas leak reported in downtown Manhattan. He had no idea what was coming. Pfeifer documented his experience as the first fire chief to reach Ground Zero in his memoir, "Ordinary Heroes." He spoke to Hari Sreenivasan about the day everything changed.

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, as chief of staff to the Secretary of State, helped prepare the now infamous 2003 speech at the U.N. Security Council in which Secretary Powell falsely claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The speech led the U.S. into Iraq and left Wilkerson with a lifetime of regrets. Wilkerson joins the program to discuss.

Twenty years on from the September 11th attacks, the Taliban are in power in Afghanistan. How did it turn out this way? And what, if anything, was accomplished by American intervention? Roya Rahmani, Afghanistan's first female ambassador to the United States, left her post in July. She joined Christiane from Washington.