CNN anchor Chris Wallace grilled comedian Bill Maher in a tense clash over comments he made days after 9/11 where he said the terrorists were ‘not cowardly’.
Wallace was interviewing Maher for this week’s edition of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, discussing his politics, career and his new book.
Bringing up ‘the biggest controversy of your career’ – that resulted in Maher’s show Politically Incorrect being cancelled – Wallace played a 2001 clip of the comic making comments about the terror attacks.
Maher was visibly annoyed to have the clip replayed and snapped at Wallace: ‘This is so old. Really? That’s of interest still?’
But Wallace did not back down, asking: ‘Were you just trying to be contrarian?’
Discussing Maher’s long career, Wallace brought up his old show, Politically Incorrect, which Maher started in 1993.
Wallace said: ‘Years later, the biggest controversy of your career, where you, right, days after 911, you made some kind of a comparison of the U.S. military and the al Qaeda hijackers.’
A frustrated Maher interrupted to say ‘not the US military’.
Wallace then began to play the clip, filmed days after 9/11, in which a younger Maher gestures to himself and says: ‘We have been the cowards, lobbing missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly.
‘Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly’.
After the clip finished, Maher said tersely it ‘wasn’t about the military, I said we. We as a society.’
He then said: ‘First of all, this is so old. Really? That’s of interest still?’
Wallace replied: ‘Well, yeah. I mean, we’re talking about your career. We’re talking about 20 years. Let me just ask you this question and then we’ll move on.
‘Looking back, were you just trying to be contrarian?’
Maher replied: ‘Of course not, I was agreeing with somebody who said that. You skipped that part of it. Somebody said, they the people who did the mission may have been evil, but they were not cowards, which is, I feel like not even controversial. Sticking with the suicide mission — um, not cowardly.’
Wallace then asked if Maher regretted having said it, to which Wallace replied that he regretted having said it ‘that night’.
He added: ‘It was probably, it was six days after 9/11, and the country wasn’t ready to hear the truth.
‘I mean, George Bush said, the cowards, uh the terrorists win, unless we go back to doing what we were doing.
‘So I went back to doing what I was doing, which was telling the truth as I saw it. We never lost ratings. We never lost the audience. What we lost was the sponsors.’
A few months after the controversial comments, Maher’s show was cancelled.
Speaking to Wallace, he said: ‘They definitely cancelled us. And I’m glad they did, because I wound up in so much of a better place.’