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> Looking Inside Terrorism

The terrorists who demolished the World Trade Tower and smashed the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 caught American by surprise because their were not typical street bombers but educated middle class Arabs with promising futures in their own countries. Correspondent Hedrick Smith teams with PBS Frontline and the BBC to paint a portrait of the leaders of the plot and examines the forces that transformed their lives into hijackers willing to die to humble America. Tracing their paths from the Middle East to the formation of their Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, this program shows not only the brazen boldness of the terrorists who operated in the open but also their mistakes, which could have enabled Western intelligence and law enforcement to foil their plot. In this program, viewers see how they traveled to Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and then got new passports to slip past U.S. immigration authorities. Their ringleader Mohammad Al Atta was within the grasp of U.S. authorities more than once but managed to get away. The security lapses point to a failure of the U.S. to understand the nature of modern terrorism.