Al Qaeda's rise pushed western intelligence agencies into methods they had never used before: drone strikes, secret prisons, and torture. Reporter Peter Taylor, who has covered terrorism for nearly forty years, sits down with the people who authorized those methods, including the former head of MI5 giving her first-ever formal television interview and the former director of the CIA, who defends the interrogation program on camera as necessary given what was known at the time. Taylor lays out the timeline of decisions made after the September 11 attacks, from rendition flights to black sites, and asks the officials directly whether the decade of extraordinary measures actually made anyone safer. The film also weighs the cost to detainees and to the reputations of the agencies involved, without settling the argument for the viewer. What comes through is less a verdict than a record: intelligence chiefs who rarely speak publicly explaining, in their own words, why they chose methods that remain contested a decade later.