Sasha Pfeiffer

speaker

201 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6d ago

Sasha Pfeiffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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Consider This from NPR · 25 years after the 9/11 attacks, where does the trial stand? · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

Correct. matched

And that has resulted in all sorts of fights over what evidence can be admitted, what's classified. matched

And that gets to the other main reason this case is so hard to try, which is torture. matched

The black sites, they were called. matched

They were in countries like Afghanistan, Romania, Thailand, Morocco. matched

mock burials, aggressive cavity searches. matched

In fact, one of the defendants has been declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. matched

And his lawyers say that's due to him having been tortured. matched

The U.S. matched

was trying to punish them, and it was also trying to get information out of them. matched

There is still a debate, as you know, about how effective that torture was at getting any valuable intelligence. matched

But once you torture someone, you make it very difficult to successfully prosecute them. matched

I want to play a piece of audio from a live taping this week of NPR's national security podcast, Sources and Methods, hosted, of course, by our colleague Mary Louise Kelly. matched

I attended that taping, and a panel of national security experts reminded the crowd how terrified the United States was right after the September 11th attacks. matched

We thought more attacks were coming, maybe nuclear attacks. matched

So as one of the panelists put it, the gloves did come off. matched

Here's a different panelist, Stephen Hadley. matched

He's a former advisor to President George W. Bush. matched

And that tradeoff, right or wrong, has had consequences. matched

As an example, if a confession is coerced, it cannot be used as evidence. matched

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