The Biden-Harris Administration Risks Another 9/11?

Politics

The Biden-Harris Administration Risks Another 9/11?

The administration refuses to reevaluate its easy-admission border policies, despite the identification of hundreds of terrorist suspects in the waves of illegal immigrants entering the country. 

Credit: image via Shutterstock

The proximate cause of the 9/11 catastrophe was the failure of U.S. border security. Specifically, the terrorist attackers succeeded in their suicide mission because U.S. government agencies failed to manage the national watchlist that would have easily identified the 9/11 operational ringleader, Mohamed Atta.

That history is why the recently released report of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement deserves serious attention. The report makes clear that since the Biden-Harris administration began opening the border, U.S. authorities have encountered at least 382 illegal immigrants listed on the national terrorist watchlist. This alarming datapoint has apparently failed to capture the White House’s attention or convince senior administration officials to reevaluate their border management. 

It is sobering to compare this moment with the period before 9/11. Like then, Washington’s leadership today appears heedless and shortsighted in managing the terrorist threat to the homeland. As before 9/11, the White House assumption today appears to be that our counterterrorism protective measures are working well enough. 

The 382 number in the report is just the tip of the iceberg; the figure represents illegals that U.S. authorities actually encountered and identified in the terrorist database. There are also the “got-aways,” the estimated 1.9 million illegal migrants who entered the country without any official contact whatsoever. Unlike with legal immigrants, whom U.S. consular officials normally pre-screen in their home countries, these uninvited border-jumpers enter our country as complete unknowns. 

Declining to lock down the border, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas accepts this inflow because rendering “social justice” for foreigners who seek to enter our country is a higher priority for him than national security. Such a cavalier approach is a poke in the eye to a once bipartisan (but clearly now stone-cold dead) consensus on U.S. counterterrorism strategy. The Mayorkas approach appears uniquely impervious to the painful lesson of the fanaticism and death-dealing creativity of the 9/11 attackers.

Examining the parallels requires a look back at the devious Atta, the indispensable 9/11 ringleader who successfully entered the U.S. multiple times while planning the hijackings. The fact that the CIA knew exactly who Atta was before the attack but did not share that information with U.S. immigration authorities and the State Department is the main reason the federal government today undertakes, with all its imperfections, its massive terrorist watchlisting program. 

My own small piece of the Mohamed Atta story began in the first chaotic days after the 9/11 attacks, when I was an American diplomat in Germany. Soon after the commercial passenger jets crashed into the Twin Towers and Pentagon, frantic U.S. investigators pieced together that Atta had been crucial to the success of the hijackings. In those first panicky days, a worldwide request went out for all possible information on Atta, with a focus on Germany, where the mass killer had lived for years. 

In the U.S. consulate in Leipzig, I received a telephone call from a contact in the local American missionary community explaining he knew Atta. The young Latter-day Saint indicated he clearly recognized Atta’s photo, recently broadcast to the world. The missionary explained he had met Atta in Germany’s university scene, where the two had often crossed paths; in happenstance encounters they had debated each other and proselytized among German and foreign students. 

An Egyptian national, Atta had cleverly used his status as a foreign student in Hamburg to recruit for Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda’s terrorist network all across Germany. Like the rest of the planet, I had seen that Atta was a fanatical killer, but in the phone call, I also learned he had been unusually smart and even personable and persuasive, speaking excellent German and mustering an impressive knowledge of world religions. 

Atta was formidable, the kind of kamikaze adversary who literally gave his life to attack the U.S. homeland. His story should remind us of the dangers that a handful of dedicated terrorists can inflict on our country because of unmanaged borders. Today, one wonders if Mayorkas ever ponders that fanatics of Atta’s caliber could be sprinkled in among today’s waves of unknown immigrants.

In the first days after 9/11, the German press chased the Atta story. Media sources inside the German police made it indisputable that the CIA also knew perfectly well who Atta was, having thoroughly surveilled him when he lived in Hamburg and as he moved around Germany. That disquieting fact was largely downplayed in Congress’s post-mortem on the terrorist catastrophe, because back at home the agency had moved swiftly to protect its professional reputation.  

In the aftermath, reconstructing the frightful events, most observers would rightfully have expected that the CIA should have obviously shared their crucial information on Atta with the State Department (which issued Atta’s student visa for a flight school) and U.S. immigration officials (who regularly cleared Atta through the airports). Sharing such identity information is the essence of good watchlisting, and there was in fact a functioning U.S. terrorist watchlist process before 9/11, although few at Langley took it seriously. 

Institutionally, the CIA of that day had other priorities, although Langley officials were certainly aware that Atta flew in and out of the U.S. The agency’s security oversight happened not only with Atta, but with other key 9/11 plotters. The short explanation on why the CIA did not share is likely a combination of bureaucratic incompetence, a lack of imagination, and secret mission arrogance.  

No one in Langley thought through the risk of letting a fanatic like Atta run loose in our country; the agency’s officers in the field, devoted patriots to a person, were doubtless calculating that, by not disclosing Atta’s arrival in the U.S., they were protecting a future opportunity to penetrate his network and maybe recruit an insider. In retrospect, they simply did not have the imagination to see the grave danger that Atta actually represented. 

In our current national moment, the Mayorkas version of this same official shortsightedness is his wokeism, i.e., that rendering social justice on behalf of millions of foreigners who seek to enter the country is worth running the risk of allowing in another Mohamed Atta. The 9/11 details fade with each passing year, and Mayorkas and his team simply cannot imagine the scenario.

The clear lesson is that competent U.S. government watchlisting could have easily deterred Atta and kept him out of our country. Without Atta holding the suicide hijacker teams together, the 9/11 attacks almost certainly would not have been so destructive as they were and very probably could have been prevented altogether.  

Congress and the White House did almost nothing to punish the federal bureaucracy’s incompetence and failure. Secretary of State Colin Powell fired an assistant secretary, probably the only senior official across the entire federal government to get sacked for the 9/11 disaster. The CIA’s George Tenet would survive and thrive, going on to orchestrate the U.S. intelligence community’s “finding” that the dictator in Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction. 

Congress and the White House turned the disaster into an opportunity to massively increase spending, expand government snooping, and launch a war in Iraq—all to compensate for what was in fact a simple government failure: botched watchlisting. The irony is that in the wake of the 9/11 panic, even the watchlisting snafu was not efficiently and nimbly fixed, but was instead radically remade with a massive FDR-LBJ-style tsunami of big government. 

Washington spent billions and hired thousands of new federal officials. Most pertinently to watchlisting, Congress created new security agencies such as the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC).  Both were established to collect and manage the world’s most sophisticated terrorist database. The idea that failed government operations could have been improved by insisting on new efficiencies and better use of existing resources and personnel was probably laughed out of the room.

Today there are more than 2.5 million identities on the national terrorist watchlist. Foreign names around the world linked to terrorism activities are hoovered up by U.S. officials, and those efforts are amplified with considerable electronic capabilities. Critics argue that too many names have been put into that massive database. That criticism is a fair one. The system is a function of the fact that the database contains “known or suspected” terrorists, and the “suspected” category is vast.  

Today, this sheer volume of watchlisted identities probably contributes considerably to Mayorkas’s cavalier attitude that just because an encountered illegal immigrant is in the database does not make that person a “real” terrorist. How else could our DHS secretary rationally argue that he should not immediately seal the border?  

It is impossible to know what actual self-deception is running through the reckless thinking of Mayorkas and his senior team to justify their continued unprecedented policies of ushering in literally thousands of unlawful immigrants each day. They continue to implement policies that encourage more to come.  

Today, as we approach the U.S. presidential elections, new waves of tens of thousands of illegals, sheltering in Tapachula, Mexico, are starting to make their way to the southern border, all with the quiet approval of Mexican authorities. Whether Vice President Kamala Harris wins or loses the White House, fresh hundreds of thousands will appear this winter, all attempting to enter the country.

Whatever motivates Mayorkas, there is good cause to fear that he is engaged in the same kind of hubris and foolishness that was at the root of the CIA’s decision not to act on Atta’s presence in our country in the summer of 2001. It is irresponsible risk-taking. 

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