After 20 years at war: What was it for? Infantry Captain Crowe remembers what he calls 'the worst day of my life' when his friend was shot and killed on a mission in Kunar. “9/11 Twenty Years Later—The Longest Shadow' airs at 8:30pET on ABCNewsLive.
George Stephanopoulos previews the five-part ABC News Live documentary series,"9/11 + 20: The Longest Shadow," on"This Week."The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke -- and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.
MORE: 'The Longest Shadow' Part 2: A radical post-9/11 government overhaul pits security against liberty"America is under attack," White House Chief of Staff Andy Card whispered into the ear of his boss, President George W. Bush, during a photo-op at a school in Florida. Moments before, hijacked jetliners had careened into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York City.
"My entire adult life has been spent in the shadow of the Twin Towers falling," Crowe told ABC News recently."I gave up my time, my youth, my health."White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispers into the ear of President George W. Bush to give him word that planes crashed into the World Trade Center, during a visit to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., Sept. 11, 2001.
"We really do have to take the time to think, what exactly is our mission? What exactly are we trying to accomplish? I don't think much thought was given to any of those basic principles," said Leon Panetta, the former defense secretary and CIA director who inherited the first years of troubled invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq."Rather than achieving the kind of victory that I think everybody thought would happen, it blew up on all of us.
"There was concern that Saddam Hussein was developing a relationship with al-Qaeda … that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction and might consider sharing those with al-Qaeda," recalled Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel during Bush's first term."And that was a deal breaker. That was a red line."Alberto Gonzales served as U.S. Attorney General under President George W. Bush from February 2005 to September 2007.
"You judge your deployments by -- you're missing what holidays. Are you missing Thanksgiving, Christmas, or are you missing Fourth of July? The ones that mean a lot to veterans, especially, Veterans Day and Memorial Day, of course," said O'Shea, who led hostage recovery efforts in Iraq and later was a counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan.
Critics said that in addition to not being guided by intelligence, the administration made misplaced foreign policy assumptions about Iraq -- and the consequences were immense. Invading Iraq redirected resources such as U.S. Army Special Forces teams from Afghanistan, before al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been fully neutralized and Osama bin Laden had been killed.
"When those photographs came out from the prison, that was an absolute earthquake of an event," said Martha Raddatz, ABC News' chief global affairs correspondent."It changed things. It changed the world's opinion of what the American military was doing there and how they were treating Iraqis.
"Nobody should have died there. Nobody needed to die there. I don't think I ever saw a greater strategic purpose for being there," Crowe said."'Hold on' is not a reason to send people across the world to take gunfire." His oldest son, at age 26, had joined the U.S. Army and volunteered for air assault training, and was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division which deployed to Iraq in late 2007.
Their efforts ultimately led to three Army investigations, which concluded that during a gunfight with al-Qaeda insurgents, Pfc. Sharrett was shot and left for dead -- not by the enemy, but by his own lieutenant, who then left aboard a helicopter. The commander, who claimed not to remember the incident, was later promoted.
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