(eerie music) - What I've done since the Navy, I started pro wrestling.

And in doing that, it's given me a platform to speak.

So, I've developed, I don't like calling it a character because it's really me.

Everything on TV, every match I do, even the training I put in it, it's all me.

That's why I call myself the Dog of War, because while I was in, I felt like I was a dog.

We did what we were told, no matter what, like we were on a leash, you know?

When I came out, that's when my war started, 'cause I was alone.

I didn't have my shipmates.

I didn't have doctors.

I didn't even have friends.

Every time I close my eyes, I see every single one of their faces.

And nothing makes it better, nothing makes it go away.

(sniffling) (quirky music) - An explosion claimed the lives of at least four sailors on one of our naval vessels.

This was an act of terrorism.

It was a despicable and cowardly act.

- We are operating in a world that is filled with a variety of threats, but that doesn't mean that we can crawl into a ostrich-like mode.

- We are not at war with Islam.

It is not teaching of the Quran or Islam to do this.

These are extremists.

These are radicals that you can find in any religion.

- [Narrator] In 1954, Colonel Nasser seizes power in Egypt.

The deposed King Farouk flees to Monaco.

Nasser becomes president and constantly challenges the West, culminating with nationalizing the Suez Canal.

- [Reporter] Arriving in the Egyptian capital from Alexandria, where he proclaimed his seizure of the Suez Canal Company, President Nasser finds Cairo's population in a veritable nationalistic frenzy.

- [Narrator] But he ignores the wishes of the ultra-right religious Muslim Brotherhood.

Sayyid Qutb, ideologist and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, calls for the destruction of all blasphemers, Muslim and non-Muslim.

Nasser feels threatened, and Qutb is imprisoned and executed in 1966.

In Saudi Arabia, Osama bin-Laden, leader of al-Qaeda, meets Sayyid Qutb's brother and is inspired.

Bin-Laden unleashes a holy war against the presence of the United States in the Arab world.

al-Qaeda attacks American targets in Riyadh, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam.

- An explosion claimed the lives of at least four sailors on one of our naval vessels, the USS Cole, this morning.

If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act.

We will find out who is responsible and hold the accountable.

- [Narrator] Two years after the attack on the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is arrested by the CIA.

For four years, he is detained at various secret locations, so-called black sites.

In 2008, he is brought before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

- I am an attorney and trial defense attorney, and I'm presently assigned to defend Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at the military commission in Guantanamo Bay.

Al-Nashiri is accused of being the mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in October of 2000.

Equal justice under the law.

Innocent until proven guilty.

That's something that we do on a routine basis in uniform as judge advocates in the Navy.

In Mr. al-Nashiri's case, the government concedes that he was questioned with a power drill, he was questioned with a handgun, and he was also subjected to what's called rectal feeding, another heretofore unknown term in American English, which involves essentially sexual assault by object.

And so, the government doesn't dispute that any of that occurred, and he's an incredibly damaged individual as a result of this.

Even government psychologists will say that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of years of abuse at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency.

(pensive music) - They waterboarded him.

They used what they called enhanced interrogation techniques on him.

The confined him to a crate, a small box that has been described like a coffin.

They did all of these things to gain his cooperation in interrogation.

Rather than take him straight to a federal court or some sort of tribunal where he could be charged, they carried him off to the dark sites.

They took him to the CIA black sites.

They were less interested at that moment in having a trial than they were in interrogating him and trying to figure out what he knew about al-Qaeda.

(phone ringing) When you don't take someone from capture to the courts and you derail his trip to justice by, in his instance, four years before he even gets to Guantanamo, I believe five years before he even sees a lawyer, you complicate the possibility of a trial.

- The very reason for the location of those trials was to evade American law.

That's why they were put in Cuba.

That's why they remain in Cuba.

And so, the entire system of justice down there is dedicated and devoted to evading the rule of law.

There isn't gonna be justice for anyone at Guantanamo Bay.

The government has conceded that they will never let Mr. Nashiri go, regardless of the result of his military commission.

And so, in my opinion, this is the very definition of a show trial, an elaborate pageant for which there will neither be justice for Mr. Nashiri nor the victims' family members.

(quirky music) - We had to pull in because of the speed that we transited across the eastern Mediterranean and down the Red Sea.

We were below 50% fuel.

Now, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer like USS Cole carries a little over a half-million gallons of fuel, so we were going to be taking on a quarter-million gallons.

At 10:30, the chief engineer came up with the checklist, I signed off on it, and a few minutes after that we started pumping fuel on the ship.

On his way up to see me, the XO had stopped in with the supply officer, checked in, and- - You guys ready?

- Yes sir!

- The galley was ready to feed the noon meal: chicken fajitas.

So, he wanted to tell the crew we were ahead of schedule, get the crew started eating, because about the time that we finished feeding the crew would be about the time that we finished refueling the ship.

Perfect.

Station the sea and anchor detail, back underway, very efficient, back out to sea.

There was no specific intelligence report regarding terrorist threats.

In fact, the morning we pulled in, they had closed the embassy, the US embassy in the capital of Sana'a because of terrorist threats, yet we were never told of that heightened terrorist threat.

When, at 11:18 in the morning, there was a thunderous explosion.

(explosion booming) The shockwave, in fact, hit the sea bottom underneath the ship, reflected up, and lifted us an estimated six to eight feet.

And as we were twisting and flexing and sliding back down in the water, lights went out, ceiling tiles popped out, everything on my desk popped up.

I'm seeing flashes reflecting off the side of the ship.

And down in all that fuel, I'm now hearing (buzzing).

It's live electrical wires dipping in and outta that fuel.

And I'm thinking to myself, not only have we had a devastating explosion, we're about to have a major fire on my hands.

- You feel a 8,500-ton ship lift up outta the water, you hear the explosion, which was deafening.

I remember seeing the bulkheads move.

And the next thing I know is we get by that battle dress station, they had to ax it open to access it, but there's well over 20 crew members there already needing to be triaged.

One of the seaman was actually emptying the garbage when the blast happened, and they found her, part of her.

Another of the cooks, 'cause there was a lotta cooks and food service attendants that were injured because of where it hit, her legs were fractured pretty bad, and (pausing) you knew it was gonna take a lot of surgeries to get her back on her feet.

And the chief's mess, we lost one chief that I put in a body bag that was just made chief that year.

You had to shut the emotion off and be a professional.

(motorcycle engine rumbling) (uneasy piano music) It's what I served my country for for almost 30 years was to see the freedoms that we enjoy here in our country that sometimes we take for granted.

And it's for seeing American flags out flying.

I love it, to see patriotism of my fellow countrymen.

That's very important.

That goes to the core of what we're all about.

If I had my choice when I retire, I'd live in Montana 'cause I'd be so far out there that if there's trouble, you know trouble's coming over the horizon.

You can see it coming.

You could see whoever coming.

And that's just the way I feel.

- I didn't see them approaching our ship, but I heard that, afterwards, obviously, there was two guys on a pilot boat with a thousand pounds of C4.

And literally, they pulled up and was waving at us.

Now, that alone right there I can't even wrap my head around.

What hit me the worst was (pausing) when I found out my...

When I found out my best friend, he was one of 'em that passed away.

(pensive music) - It was my sister who said, "What ship was Cherone on?"

I said, "The USS Cole."

She said, "It's in the news.

"Something has happened."

So...

I immediately hung up the phone and (pausing) went across the hall to the school library and turned on the television in there.

And on CNN, it was the picture of the ship with the hole in the side, and the headline said, "Four killed in the attack on the USS Cole."

And in my heart of heart, I immediately felt that maybe my son coulda been one, but I went back to my office and said, "He'll be okay.

"He's not one."

I got to the base about 12:30.

We all were in the room.

They kept updating us when they could.

We were just frantic and we all had questions to those military officers, how will we find out if, you know, it said four dead, and then it mighta said five, and then is said missing.

And I got up to go and get something to eat.

They had food, refreshments, and that's when someone came with me and said, "Miss Gunn, come with me.

"On behalf of the president of the United States, "we regret to inform you your son was killed."

And of course, they were there to do the best they could to console, but that was my child.

Master Chief Parlier did come to visit us after the ship got back.

He was the first one that got to Cherone.

He just told us the whole story, how Cherone was injured and what happened, how he found him thousands of miles away from me.

It tore me up, but I wanted to know the details.

I gave birth to him and I wanted to know how he left.

- I woulda wanted to communicate what had happened to us to the chain of command immediately, but we had no power in the fore two-thirds of the ship and it literally wasn't until the one-hour point when the defense attache was standing down on the pier, having heard the explosion, he was there on leave with his family at the time, that he looked up at me and said, "Have you told Fifth Fleet "or anyone in the chain of command what's happened?"

I said, "No, we have no power, "we have no ability to communicate, nothing."

That's when he held up his cell phone and said, "I've got a cell phone here.

"It's global capable.

"It has the number to the Fifth Fleet Operations Center.

"Do you want me to toss it up?"

I said, "You bet."

So, he backed up and tossed it to me.

As I'm watching it tumble through the air, I'm thinking, "Your two favorite sports "in high school at the Naval Academy were tennis and golf.

"Buddy, you better play catch."

It was a perfect toss.

I flipped the phone open, saw the number, hit the send button, and I told them I had what's called OPREP-3 Pinnacle Front Burner Report.

The first question I got outta the Fifth Fleet was, "Are you sure?"

- I get a phone call early in the morning.

I remember I was on the Brooklyn Bridge.

We had a ship attacked in Yemen.

I was really shocked.

Why do we have a ship in Yemen?

Because Yemen was considered not safe.

I was told that I was the case agent, the lead agent on this investigation.

And the same day, I was on a military plane heading to Aden.

The very first thing we did is go into the ship itself, and it was chaotic.

I think it took us a while to pull all the bodies out.

Some of the bodies were really tangled with the steel and we had to basically cut the steel piece by piece.

And we had a lot of evidence response team and Navy divers and FBI agents assigned to what we called the crime scene, the ship.

(pensive music) - [Narrator] Ali Soufan works for the New York Field Office of the FBI.

Under the direction of John O'Neill, he investigates al-Qaeda.

O'Neill is convinced that al-Qaeda has sleeper cells in America that are preparing a mega-attack on America.

O'Neill sends Soufan to Yemen to conduct forensic investigations and collect evidence against the perpetrators.

A large-scale forensic operation gets underway, aimed at preventing the anticipated attack on American soil.

- And here we are, trying to basically investigate the murder of 17 sailors, an attack on a Navy ship, and figure out what happened, when we knew that elements of the Yemen government is in cahoots with the people who did the attack.

And we're trying to figure out who's good, who's bad, and who's ugly.

- While we were aboard the ship, John O'Neill came aboard, Ali Soufan came aboard.

New York Field Office was going to take charge of this.

They were asking some very probing questions.

And if they're collecting evidence, that's going into the case that is going to lead us to find out who did this, why did they do this, let's go hunt them down, and let's hold 'em accountable in the laws of our land.

(bright trumpet music) - [Narrator] In a large Eastern city, two officers were about to make a routine inquiry in an effort to pick up information concerning a fugitive.

- [Narrator] John O'Neill is old-school.

He believes in slow, meticulous detective work, gathering evidence, hunting down suspects, and preparing indictments.

- We're trying to locate this man.

Have you seen him in here?

- No, can't say that I have.

A lotta guys come in here, you know, and- (bottle smashing) Look out!

- Copper!

(man groaning) - We're FBI agents.

Come on, get up outta there.

Get up.

- [Narrator] The prospect of a potential mega-attack in America exerts enormous pressure, and the promise to relatives that justice will triumph must be kept.

- John O'Neill was one that my husband leaned to right away because he knew that my husband wanted answers, like all of the other family members of the 17.

He felt very good that John O'Neill was on that case because they established that relationship and John promised him, "We're gonna get to the bottom of this.

"We're gonna find out who was responsible."

- Onboard the ship, there was rampant speculation on who may have carried this out.

We weren't sure.

It was only when the FBI walked aboard with some other government agencies that we would learn that based upon the hallmarks that they were picking up in the intelligence channels, that they felt it was an al-Qaeda operation.

- When we get the agreement to rent the first safehouse that they use, the names on the agreement were Nashiri's three middle names backwards.

So, when I looked at it and I was, "Where did I read these names before," I had a big photo book for al-Qaeda suspects, and then I saw Nashiri's name.

The only thing that were missing was Abd al-Rahim and Nashiri, and all the middle names were backward.

Is this a coincidence?

So, I went to John.

But John at the time, he said, "But that's not enough.

"We need something else."

An analyst started doing research, and she came back and she said, "Guess what.

"This is a guy that the suicide bomber who survived "from the East Africa embassy bombing told us "he's planning to attack a ship in Aden."

In the East Africa embassy bombing, almost every single individual, from the bomb-maker, who was an Egyptian, to the coordinator, who was an Egyptian, to the suicide bombers, each and every one of these guys had a Yemeni passport.

We start showing Nashiri's photos to witnesses.

A lot of the witnesses said, "Yep, he was here.

"He was here."

So many witnesses who were involved in the plot, and everybody knew Nashiri.

Everybody knew Mullah Bilal.

- The FBI is acting as a salesman for the story that the Yemeni government wanted to sell.

When the FBI arrived, Yemeni authorities took them to a police headquarters where they had gathered up physical evidence, co-mingled it on a table.

And when the FBI discovered this, they asked the Yemenis to put it back.

And that's where the FBI then takes what are known as crime scene photos in our case.

It's literally stagecraft is what the government is trying to whitewash.

- Yes, the Yemenis found it, but they are on the ground.

We don't have the capacity that they have on the ground, and it's their country.

When you have a receipt of the engine, when you have the paperwork for the boat, when you have registration vehicles with a person using a totally fake name like al-Monsoori, but then you look at the photo and it's Nashiri, when you sit down with witnesses who rented their apartment to some of the terrorists who were involved in the attack and you show them the photo book and they identify these people, when you sit down with suspects and you have a really long and tough interrogation and they give you intelligence that you did not know before, all these things we collected in Yemen.

And everything, everything goes back to the same individuals, the same Qaeda members, the same people who were involved in the plot.

So, I think, overall, I'm very pleased with the evidence that we were able to get.

And we helped the Yemenis prosecute some of these guys in Yemen and they were found guilty, even in a Yemen court.

- There's a reason why in the American system we test evidence in what's called the crucible of cross-examination.

We don't allow hearsay in American courts.

And in this case, there's gonna be more than 80 hearsay statements that were taken either by the Yemenis or by the FBI in the wake of the bombing of the USS Cole, men that I will never be able to speak to, men that I will never be able to cross-examine, and yet that is gonna be the purported evidence in Mr. al-Nashiri's case and may ultimately put him to death.

(motorcycle engine rumbling) - When I sat in that courtroom, the first day I saw that son of a bitch, he looked back there and laughed.

He acted like a rock-and-roll star walking in there, looking at us, looking at the Gold Star families that lost their kids like it was funny.

That s**** got to my heart and my head.

And it was my goal and my sole purpose to go as much as I could down there with others and show the court, show the judge that we're not giving up.

We're sitting in the back and we're gonna watch until that son of a bitch is in jail for life or hung.

He doesn't deserve to be on this Earth, not what he did to, and the destructive I've seen and the death he caused to people I loved.

No.

Justice needs to happen.

- [Narrator] In early 2001, agent John O'Neill decides to leave the FBI for personal reasons.

The man who, with Ali Soufan, pursued al-Qaeda becomes head of security at the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001.

♪ There's so much g******** weight on your shoulders ♪ ♪ That you can't just live your m************ life ♪ ♪ The story's getting old and my heart is getting cold ♪ ♪ I just wanna be Jekyll, but I'm always fighting Hyde ♪ ♪ You've got rocks in your head ♪ ♪ I can hear them rolling 'round ♪ ♪ You can say that you're above it ♪ ♪ But you're always falling down ♪ ♪ Is there a method to your madness, is it all about pride ♪ ♪ Everyone I know, they've got a demon inside ♪ ♪ I'm trying to do is live my m*********** life ♪ (car lock beeping) (soft ethereal music) (man groaning) (man yelling) - Ultimately, we try to do the right thing.

Military is not there just to take over.

We're here to protect America.

That's what our job is to do.

And we felt that we did do that in our own way.

Now, 9/11 is something different because they brought the war to us.

I was on base, Norfolk, Virginia, and we seen it on the TV screen, and the whole base went on lockdown.

It was almost replaying exactly what happened in my head when the Cole hit.

And honestly, I felt (pausing) that we were at war, not just over there, but here in America.

We've never seen that.

My generation's never seen that.

- A former captain of mine who is now working at the CIA said, "My boss would love to have you come up here "and we would like to show you what we knew about bin-Laden "before, during, and after your attack."

And I got a briefing for an hour-and-a-half, listening to what we knew about bin-Laden, how he was maneuvering, how we thought he planned it, how he had executed the attempt and failed and then finally succeeded in the attack on us.

Then I had to say, "Sir, America doesn't understand.

"I believe it is gonna take a seminal event, "probably in this country, "where hundreds if not thousands die "before Americans realize we're at war with this guy."

20 minutes after I said that, the first plane hit the North Tower.

It was the morning of 9/11.

- I tried to call John many times.

The call went straight to voicemail.

We know that he made a call early on to his girlfriend at the time, but then she didn't hear from him either, so we knew that he was, he's not with us anymore.

- In that attack, that terrorist attack again, John O'Neill was killed.

The man that we knew that was gonna find out who killed our son, who was responsible for their attack was now gone.

- I went down, exited the building, got in my car, drove down to the Pentagon.

And as I was coming down the George Washington Parkway, I'm a mess.

I'm in tears.

In my eyes, I'd been given the gift of command, and my ship had been attacked and 17 sailors were dead.

Now my nation is under attack.

And I'm thinking to myself, "What could I have said, "what could I have done, "what should I have been pushing on that I didn't?"

I came through this stone overpass.

And as I went underneath, I looked up and saw the top of the black cloud coming from the building.

Pentagon's been hit.

I'm going into the building to see what I can do, helped evacuate people.

And that night at 5:30, I finally left the Virginia Highway Patrol and Arlington Police and drove down the highway all by myself.

One of the most eerie feelings in the world.

- It was such a dark time because we thought a lot of our colleagues died that day.

We need to figure out who did 9/11.

We need to give evidence to our political leadership and the world that al-Qaeda was involved.

We had a mission.

We stumbled into informations regarding a meeting that took place in Southeast Asia.

And that information came out because of the USS Cole investigation.

During questioning, they provided evidence and information about a mission that they were given to go to Southeast Asia and deliver money.

So, it was surprising at the time for us why money will go from Yemen to a more affluent area in the world, specifically Malaysia.

It did not make sense.

Every step of the way, the CIA told us, "We don't have any information."

September 12th, I was handed a manila envelope, and I opened it, and it was the answers for the question that I'd been asking for November of 2000.

At that moment, I realized that 9/11 could've been stopped.

At that moment, I realized that we're not on the same team.

At that moment, I realized that their people held information (pausing) that could've been used to hunt individuals who were involved in the murder of 17 American soldiers.

It's totally against US law.

At that moment, I realized that all this us working together and Team America kumbaya is just b*******.

("I Refuse" by Five Finger Death Punch) ♪ I don't wanna die alone ♪ ♪ I don't wanna live forsaken ♪ ♪ I refuse to let this go ♪ ♪ Because my soul is breaking ♪ - I'm really confused about who actually really did it.

I mean, the two guys that were driving the pilot boat, we found pieces of them all over our ship.

Did I smile a bit inside when I found those?

Of course.

I'm being honest here.

That was our home.

They were my brothers and sisters.

There's a spot in hell for people like that.

But almost 18 years later, they're still in court.

They're still in Guantanamo Bay.

Why?

That's what I wanna know.

Why?

(soft ethereal music) - Who killed my son?

We have no idea who those two men were that were in that little boat that they rammed in the side of the ship that caused that explosion.

We have no idea.

We're told that they were terrorists, but the casualty report that was prepared said murder because they were killed, at peacetime.

We weren't at war.

- I can remember reading Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" at a very young age.

Was a story about an African-American man in the segregated South that was wrongly accused of sexual assault.

And a lawyer stood against popular sentiment in that small town in a racially-charged environment and stood for the rule of law.

It instilled in me at a very early age just a basic sense of justice and an impression on the role of lawyers in society and standing up for what is right.

In that case, the man wasn't guilty, and it was only a lawyer that stood between him and the state that was out to convict him regardless of whether he was guilty or not.

Nashiri's been confined since the fall of 2002, and there's nowhere else in American justice, state or federal, where a criminal defendant would have been confined for 17 years without a trial.

And in his case, a trial's not even on the horizon.

That doesn't comport with traditional notions of military justice, much less civilian justice that would be afforded any member of the public or a foreign national in this country.

(audience applauding) - Accepting the Silver Gavel are Carol Rosenberg, military affairs reporter, and Dave Wilson, senior editor.

- [Carol] I can get rid of that, right?

- And you're not gonna throw a bone to your new boss?

- Well, how?

Thanks to Mark Seibel for sending me to write this first if incomplete draft of history.

- I was there the day the first prisoners arrived, 20 men in shackles and orange jumpsuits with (pausing) blinders on their eyes, and there were no photographers there.

The military forbade photography.

They decided that they were going to control the imagery.

So, thank you to the Miami Herald and McClatchy for their extraordinary commitment to this unpopular story and then insisting that I stay until the story of Guantanamo is over.

Lifetime sentence.

(audience laughing) They pick people up from Afghanistan and move them thousands and thousands of miles to Cuba.

They put them in cages.

They lock out the press.

The transcripts come out with redactions, blacked out, blacked out, blacked out.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was charged with the Cole attacks.

The years in which they programmed him to answer questions, the years in which the CIA subjected him to what they call learned helplessness would forever contaminate anything he would ever say later in what were considered to be voluntary confessions or statements.

He knows things that the public doesn't know, and the CIA has decided that parts of these trials have to be secret, and so there's an interest certainly by the CIA in knowing what everybody is talking about down there.

I know this kind of reporting is important.

This Silver Gavel demonstrates that you do too.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - Carol and I have often talked about, mused about, "So, what's the endgame for detention "for these particular people, for the 40 that are there?

"Is there an endgame?"

We don't see one.

I mean, the process to trial for the ones who face charges on the capital crimes, the death penalty crimes, those pretrial proceedings have been going on for years.

I don't see an endgame for them.

They're not going anywhere.

Ever.

- I was wrestling, playing my superhero dream, and I hear that we got him, that we got Osama bin-Laden, the man that was behind it all.

I gotta be honest, I felt really good.

That was just the natural feeling.

Boom, it hit me, and I'm like, "Justice."

As soon as I heard that we finally got him, America's finally doing what we're supposed to do, we got a bad guy- (hard rock music) (audience cheering) This is what it's about, right here!

Right here!

Right now!

And I didn't speak publicly about it until I got to TV.

And it was live, and a microphone in my hand, and it was so emotional.

- [Crowd] USA, USA, USA, USA, USA!

- Everybody in the back came out, all the wrestlers.

They didn't have to.

They came out to stand there and applaud me and respect me.

We saved as many people as we could, and we did.

And we came home.

- [Crowd] USA, USA, USA, USA, USA!

- I am Jesse Neal.

- [Crowd] Thank you, Jesse!

Thank you, Jesse!

- We gave in to the darkest impulses of our character after 9/11, and I don't think that Americans are unique in that.

Other countries have been struck by calamitous events and regressed, if you will.

But I think that there is something about that event where you have politicians openly supporting torture, I mean, something that has never been acceptable in American history.

(pensive music) Unlike the English, who have no written Constitution, ours is in black and white.

Essentially, they were written down because of the abuses of the English Crown, prison ships.

I mean, if you read the Declaration of Independence, one of the chief complaints against George III was, "He hauls us across the seas "to answer for pretend offenses."

And that's precisely what Guantanamo Bay is: hauling individuals across the seas to answer for pretend offenses.