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Full Transcript After the Break
by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
September 11, 2026
My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Frank and I discuss:
The 9/11 anniversary: 25 years later.
What Bush got right when the unthinkable happened.
Why you can’t defeat an enemy you refuse to name.
How the State Department squandered our military victory in Iraq.
Why Marxists and Islamists unite (and then turn on each other).
Zohran Mamdani’s rise and the lessons New York still hasn’t learned.
It’s a half-hour on one of the most important anniversaries of our time. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!
Our full discussion:
Frank Gaffney: Welcome to Securing America with me, Frank Gaffney, the program that’s a kind of owner’s manual for protecting the country we love against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the glory of God and His kingdom.
We have a very somber occasion to mark with today’s program, and that would be the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: acts of jihad against the United States of America aimed at devastating our financial sector, business sort of operational hub in New York City, of course, and also the Pentagon, and perhaps another seat of government, Capitol Hill or the White House. Not entirely clear.
Fortunately, that fourth plane was taken down by the action of American patriots who prevented it from taking place. But the devastation, the carnage, the costs in lives and treasure that flowed from the three that did attack their targets was simply incalculable.
To note this occasion, to comment on it in his usual insightful way, I’m thrilled that we have our friend and colleague Rod Martin. Rod is a serial entrepreneur, a former policy adviser to then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a man who cut his teeth in the business world with PayPal early on, and also a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention for many years, and now the proprietor of a remarkable online resource. He calls it The Rod Martin Report. You can find it, you can subscribe to it, and I encourage you to do so at RodMartin.org.
He is the author of a forthcoming book, and he will tell us about it because it’s relevant to what we are talking about right now: the reordering of the world order by Donald J. Trump. Rod Martin, welcome back. It’s good to have you with us, sir.
Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.
Frank Gaffney: I wanted to start with, I guess, the question that will be on everybody’s agenda for the day, and that is: Where were you on 9/11, and what were your thoughts on the occasion of this terrible attack?
Rod D. Martin: Well, I was actually in my apartment in Silicon Valley, and I got a phone call from a friend who said, “You’ve got to turn on the TV.” I turned it on just in time to see the plane hit the second tower, and that was not something any of us really expected. Of course, it was a searing moment for all.
We didn’t know what was coming next. The Bush administration certainly didn’t know what was coming next. They had to prepare for all possible eventualities. It’s all easy to look back now and say, “Well, that was kind of all they had.” Well, it was kind of all they had, but we didn’t know it. I mean, for all we knew, it was just going to unleash across the country.
In reality, of course, we know what they were going for. Certainly, they wanted to attack the United States. We are, after all, “the Great Satan.” But what they really wanted was a propaganda extravaganza in the Middle East. Bin Laden in particular, more than anything else, wanted to overthrow the Saudi government and establish a caliphate. And so that failed. But the visuals did not. It was really quite extraordinary
So in your intro, you said we’re not really sure if the fourth plane was going for the White House or the Capitol. I’m guessing probably the Capitol Dome, because it would have made the best television. I also think they thought they would get something as spectacular at the Pentagon as they got at the World Trade Center. But that didn’t work out for them because they actually flew the plane into the one section of the Pentagon that was already reinforced structurally: they were upgrading the entire building. So the terrorists kind of blew that.
But this was all aimed at a huge propaganda victory among the people of the Middle East: if they were powerful enough to destroy the great symbols of American power, they would surely be seen as powerful enough to unite the Islamic world. And I don’t believe Osama bin Laden imagined what Bush would unleash upon him in a billion years.
So as many criticisms as we can validly make of various aspects of the Bush policy over the next seven years, I think we must, must take our hats off to George W. Bush, who handled an incredibly difficult situation better than most would have, and certainly better than Al Gore would have.
Frank Gaffney: Turns out that 2000 was a fateful election in many respects. Some contend that it was decided by Muslim votes, in fact, that 200 non-hanging chads made the difference in Florida, notably, were the result of an effort by a fellow by the name of Sami al-Arian, who was at the time a computer science professor in, I think it’s the University of South Florida. His real job, though, it turned out, was actually running Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was a terrorist and a top figure in the sort of Muslim Brotherhood pantheon at the time.
And that’s quite a story, actually, including what went on, which I personally observed on 9/11. I was in my office in Washington, D.C., Rod, and was similarly made aware of what was happening en route into town by a friend who called and said, “Are you watching television?” I said, “No, I’m driving.” And he said, this was before the second strike, “Well, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center tower.”
You were mulling what that could possibly be other than terrorism. And as we were speaking, the second one came in. And as I drove into town, the one went into the Pentagon, and it was coming up in horrific smoke at the time as I was driving along the Whitehurst Freeway in Washington, D.C.
It was a moment of profound upset, particularly, I think, to those of us who had been warning of such things for some time, and that it had come to pass in this form, as it became clear in short order, at the hands of Sharia supremacists spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood, I think it’s fair to say.
And all of this is what I fear we have not properly learned the lessons of, Rod. I wanted to talk with you a little bit about what those lessons should be. I would posit that one of them is that our decision to describe what happened as an act of terror, and almost immediately to whitewash the role that Sharia played in what they were doing, actually contributed materially to confusion that persists to this day.
A lack of both clarity, but also, well, constructive steps to prevent those who perpetrated it from taking down our country, which I fear, actually, in these 25 years is an operation that has continued apace and is now perilously close to reaching, at least in parts of our country, critical mass.
Rod D. Martin: It was a lack of clarity that made a lot of sense, I’m sure, to the people who made those decisions at the time. And to be fair to them — and we should be before we rip that all apart — I know that the Bush administration looked at this, wasn’t quite sure what they were dealing with at first — because no one could have been — and knew that they were going to need Arab allies on board.
They also knew that they had this incredible propaganda defeat that had potential to rally revolutionaries across the region that would destabilize governments we needed.
Frank Gaffney: Hold the thought, Rod. We have to take a break. We’ll be right back with more on the other side. Stay tuned.
Naming the Enemy and Assessing the Response
Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and we are visiting with the great Rod Martin, the publisher of The Rod Martin Report and a new book.
Rod D. Martin: Trump’s New World Re-Order.
Frank Gaffney: There it is. Trump’s New World Re-Order. You can order it now, I believe, preorder it, and I hope you will do so. This promises to be, as usual, a very, very engaging, possibly quite contrarian assessment of where we are and where we will be going from here by Rod Martin.
Rod, I had to interrupt you. I apologize for the necessities of taking the breaks. You were talking about, rather sympathetically, the Bush team contending, among other things, with this immense propaganda defeat for us and the need to enlist the help of Arab allies in the fight against these jihadis. Finish your thought, if you would.
Rod D. Martin: Well, it was a huge propaganda defeat, and that was ultimately the aim. It absolutely had an enormous consequence for us economically, and certainly traumatized the nation for at least a while. No question about all that. But they were playing for the television.
There’s a reason no airplanes flew into the mall down the street. They wanted highly important, well-known landmarks in the United States to go down in flames: symbols of American power, financial, governmental, military. And they largely succeeded in that. Again, the Pentagon attack didn’t do anywhere near as much damage as they imagined it might, at least from a television perspective. And the fourth plane didn’t hit either the White House or the Capitol dome. So they didn’t get everything they wanted. But they got a lot.
And the Bush administration looked at that and said, we don’t know exactly what we’re facing here. We also don’t want to antagonize allies in the region, all of whom we know we can’t trust, but many of whom we need. And we certainly don’t want to add to the propaganda defeat we just suffered in a way that causes an uprising in those countries, and suddenly you’ve got bin Laden running Saudi Arabia. I guess that would have been “bin Laden Arabia” if the House of Saud were gone.
So that’s their take, and I don’t want to overly second-guess anything that they did or thought in that first 90 days, when things were still kind of unclear. But it was, in retrospect — and I contended at the time, and I know you did too — it was a mistake. Because there’s no such thing as a war on terror. What does that even mean? Is that like, there’s a hurricane, so we declare a war on wind? That’s just nonsense.
Terror was not the enemy. There were very specific enemies who had actually attacked us, who actually killed roughly the same number of people on 9/11 as died at Pearl Harbor. This is a monstrous attack. It was obviously something that was going to have consequences for a long time after, and it did, and it has. And we needed to actually identify the enemy.
If you don’t actually identify the enemy, eventually the political coalition is just going to fray, and you’re not going to be able to sustain what you need to do. Now, we can argue about whether the way they handled Afghanistan and Iraq was the right thing to do, and whether they conducted it well. And I would certainly say that in Iraq, you had a brilliant military operation that the State Department proceeded to throw away mere weeks after the invasion. And we’ve lived with that debacle for years after.
But the point is, all of this would have been easier if you’d actually called the enemy the enemy. And their failure to do that still lives with us.
Frank Gaffney: I couldn’t agree more, Rod. And what compounded it was that we were sort of deflecting attention to not just terrorism, but to terrorists, or even more opaque, violent extremists. And the message was unmistakable and was exploited powerfully by the Brotherhood and its operatives: that this didn’t have anything to do with Islam.
And I honestly believe that, sort of from that time to this, we have been more or less clueless as a people about the true nature of the contribution made by Sharia to this entire extraordinary attack and what has, again, flowed from it.
So that brings me to this question, Rod. On 9/11, are we learning, even now, the right lessons? Are we even now addressing, as I think we have to, countries like Qatar and Pakistan and Turkey and arguably Saudi Arabia as part of the problem that we are confronting? Obviously, Iran is. But are we still, in the interest, as you suggested, of having those Arab allies, or Turkish aren’t Arabs, but those Muslim Arab allies, going to continue to sort of avert our gaze from the truth?
Rod D. Martin: Well, first of all, we have to be fair. Turkey did not sponsor 9/11. So as many criticisms as you and I have of Erdogan’s regime, we have to keep in mind that all of these things aren’t identical.
So looking at what Bush achieved, just briefly, because fair’s fair: We haven’t had another 9/11. And it’s not because they haven’t tried. Our government has actually gotten quite good at stopping terrorist incidents on this continent. And we should be very thankful, not just for the men and women in uniform, but for their leaders who have achieved that over the last 25 years. So no more 9/11s. That’s great. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t have one today, but so far, so good. A quarter century is a good while.
Second, I wouldn’t want to live in Iraq, but Iraq actually is a functioning democracy now. And that’s way better than when it was a dictatorship that gassed its own people and started wars with its neighbors. The Iran-Iraq War alone, I believe, killed about 2 million people, for no good reason whatsoever.
And we don’t have that problem in Iraq anymore. We don’t have them trying to build nuclear weapons or chemical weapons. And anybody who says there weren’t any such weapons in Iraq is either ignorant or lying, because it is a fact that we found over 500 chemical weapons in Iraq. This was introduced into the congressional record. This was in The New York Times. This is not hidden.
The problem is, it was hidden to a degree because when it ran in The New York Times, it ran on page like Z23 or something. They didn’t want you to be aware of it, but the facts were the facts and technically, they did report them. Those weapons were there.
Were they new weapons? Well, the Bush administration got some of that wrong, but there’s no question what Saddam’s intent was.
The bigger point was, those were exactly the chemical weapons Saddam was required to destroy after the first Gulf War. And instead he hid them. The decision to go to war was made as a matter of enforcement of the 1991 armistice, and that’s exactly what it achieved.
So these are the good things. Obviously, Afghanistan ended up a debacle, but that’s on Joe Biden.
So, yeah, you can critique every detail along the way, pretty much starting with the decision to invade Iraq, or better, with the decision to make Paul Bremer the viceroy of Iraq, which turned out to be a disaster.
Nevertheless, what we have in the aftermath is a continuation of the propaganda loss here. And it comes directly from what you’ve identified in the administration failing to identify the true nature of the enemy. That’s how we have Zohran Mamdani. That’s how we have...
Frank Gaffney: Okay, hold that thought. That’s where we’re coming back to: Zohran Mamdani and where we are today, with Rod Martin, right after this. Stay tuned.
Political Islam, Marxism, and the Domestic Threat
Frank Gaffney: We’re back. And so is Rod Martin. We are visiting with him about the events that took place 25 years ago today, as this program airs. We are, of course, remembering what went down. And I think, Rod, you’ve made a number of important points, as usual, that help put into perspective some of the decisions, some of the choices, some of the actions that were taken.
But I think we fundamentally agree that in the interest of not alienating Muslim putative allies, we pulled punches. And that had both strategic implications as well as sort of tactical ones in a number of places. But you were just at the end of the last block going to where I think we need to go next, which is: So where are we now? And what do we do about the fact that in these 25 years, I don’t know how else to describe it, but the problem has metastasized enormously?
I’ve seen data that suggests that we had 500,000 Muslims in the entire United States in 2001. It’s up to about 5 million today. And it appears that most of those, not all, but most of those, are following the sort of Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia supremacist line, at least are attending their mosques. And you don’t see much evidence of pushback. I’m sure that some Muslims are not aligned with all this, but you just don’t see them, as I’m fond of saying, putting their head above the parapet because they would be deemed apostates. And that could result in them losing their head.
So Zohran Mamdani, as a Marxist jihadist elected in the city that was particularly hard hit by 9/11, is a stunning indication of something seriously wrong, is it not?
Rod D. Martin: Well, it absolutely is. We didn’t identify the enemy. And we have to understand that not all Muslims want to blow people up. But on the other hand, a higher percentage of Muslims want to blow people up than Baptist Sunday School ladies. So it’s not an insignificant thing. It’s something you’ve got to pay attention to.
And, of course, the Marxism is typical. We saw that all through the Middle East during the Cold War and even after. But it is also a mechanism of control of the population, and the Islamists are able to make that alliance with the increasingly socialist, if not communist, Democrats because they’re all of one mind on that. And then they figure once they win, they will do what they’ve done in every other country in which they’ve won: they will start killing each other, and the most ruthless group will come out on top.
Usually that’s the communists. Sometimes, as in Iran, it’s the Islamists. Either way, it ain’t good for you and me.
Frank Gaffney: That’s for sure. Or anybody else, really, at the end of the day.
Rod, I do want to come back to something you touched on there a moment ago, because it’s not a minor point. The reason that we focus on Sharia in our BanSharia.com project, notably of the Institute for the American Future, of which you are, of course, our chairman, is because I think it is much more clear that what that is about, yes, there’s a veneer, if you will, of pietistic practice, but the vast preponderance of it is about power.
Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely.
Frank Gaffney: How do you get it? How do you use it to stay in power? What the object of the exercise ultimately is, is to, as you say, have it spread worldwide. And this idea that, well, there’s this political Islam and then there’s this religious Islam, I don’t personally buy. I think that to the extent that it is really defined by Sharia, it’s not a religion. But Sharia is a political, military, legal strategy for war.
And whatever one thinks of Islam, whatever you want to call Islam, that’s what we’re up against. Because the people that are the majority of that community in the United States, I think, as well as elsewhere, are dead set on emulating the perfect man and practicing Sharia in the most, well, demonic way imaginable.
And that’s something that I think this Islam versus Islam, and I made a movie with some colleagues of that name, ironically. So I’ve come a long way, baby. But I really believe this is a place where we have to, as you say, have clarity and have the facts properly marshaled.
Rod D. Martin: Well, I think it’s no different than what we see on the left. You’ve got the actual party members, and you’ve got the fellow travelers, and then you’ve got this vast horde of what Lenin called useful fools. They buy into superficial aspects of socialism/communism. They don’t actually adopt the idea that we should have gulags and kill everybody, like Stalin.
And they’ll go along later because it’ll be sold to them. And did we mention they’re idiots? So they get swept up in it. But by the time they get swept up in it, they don’t really have a choice anymore.
I think that general outline is true of virtually every movement involving humans.
You have a lot of people who are really true believers, and then you have a lot of people who are true believers who don’t let on who they really are. And then you have this vast majority that they’re all just lying to, telling them what they want to hear until they no longer have to. And that’s as true of Islam as it is of the Democratic Party.
The rank-and-file Democrat probably does not believe in communism. But on the other hand, if somebody riles up a crowd, as the leader of the DSA did the other week at the DSA National Convention, and says, “Our goal is communism!”, well, the room cheers. They know not what they do, in much in the same way that I saw a lot of conservatives who really didn’t know anything about Mises or Hayek suddenly became “libertarians” a few years ago because it sounded like a harder-core version of conservatism, without actually understanding that idea or ideology.
Those people are easy to manipulate. The Muslims manipulate them, the Marxists manipulate them. They tell them what they want to hear, they use them to gain the power they want, and then they toss them away. Or just kill them.
That’s what we’re dealing with. That’s what Bush was trying to parse. I think he was really thoughtful on these points. I think he just got the balance wrong.
Frank Gaffney: Well, it’s a topic for a longer conversation on another occasion. It’s important that we make clear what went wrong, but also what we better be doing about it in the present and future. And we’ll talk more about that in future with Rod Martin, among many other things.
