Frontline

The Dark Side

Season 24, Episode 14 of 14

On September 11, 2001, deep inside a White House bunker, Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering U.S. fighter planes to shoot down any commercial airliner still in the air above America. At that moment, CIA Director George Tenet was meeting with his counter-terrorism team in Langley, Virginia. Both leaders acted fast, to prepare their country for a new kind of war. But soon a debate would grow over the goals of the war on terror and the decision to go to war in Iraq. Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others saw Iraq as an important part of a broader plan to remake the Middle East and project American power worldwide. Meanwhile Tenet, facing division in his own organization, saw non-state actors such as Al Qaeda as the highest priority. FRONTLINE's investigation of the ensuing conflict includes more than 40 interviews, thousands of pages of documentary evidence and a substantial photographic archive. It is the third documentary about the war on terror from the team that produced "Rumsfeld's War" and "The Torture Question."

Previously Aired

Day
Time
Channel
2/24/2009
9:30 p.m.
2/27/2009
10 p.m.
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