The Biden-Harris Administration Risks Another 9/11?

The immediate cause of the September 11 disaster was the failure of U.S. border security. In particular, the terrorist attackers succeeded in their suicide mission because U.S. government agencies failed to manage the national watch list that would have easily identified September 11 operational leader Mohamed Atta.

That history is why it was recently released report of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, 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 on the national terrorist watch list. This alarming data point has apparently failed to get the attention of the White House or convince senior administration officials to reevaluate their border management.

It is sobering to compare this moment to the period before September 11th. Today, as then, Washington’s leadership appears careless and shortsighted in managing the terrorist threat against the homeland. Today, as before September 11, the White House assumption seems to be that our protective measures against terrorism are working well enough.

The 382 number in the report is just the tip of the iceberg; the figure represents illegal aliens that US authorities have actually encountered and identified in the terrorist database. There are also the ‘get-aways’, it is estimated 1.9 million illegal migrants entering the country without any official contact. Unlike legal immigrants, whom U.S. consular officials normally pre-screen in their home countries, these uninvited border jumpers enter our country as complete strangers.

The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, refuses to close the border and accepts this influx because providing “social justice” to foreigners who want to enter our country is a higher priority for him than national security. Such an arrogant approach is a poke in the eye to the once bipartisan (but now clearly dead) consensus on America’s counterterrorism strategy. Mayorka’s approach seems uniquely insensitive to the painful lesson of the fanaticism and deadly creativity of the September 11 attackers.

As we examine the parallels, we must look back to the cunning Atta, the indispensable leader of 9/11 who successfully entered the US several 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 why the federal government today, with all its imperfections, continues its massive program responsible for keeping an eye on terrorists.

My own piece of the Mohamed Atta story began in the first chaotic days after the September 11 attacks, when I was an American diplomat in Germany. Shortly after the commercial airliners crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, frantic American investigators concluded that Atta had been crucial to the success of the hijackings. In those first panicky days, there was a worldwide demand for any possible information about Atta, with an emphasis on Germany, where the mass murderer had lived for years.

At the American consulate in Leipzig, I received a call from a contact person from the local American missionary community, explaining that he knew Atta. The young Latter-day Saint indicated that he clearly recognized Atta’s photo, which was recently broadcast to the world. The missionary explained that he had met Atta in the German university community, where the two had often crossed paths; at chance meetings they had debated each other and proselytized among German and foreign students.

Atta, an Egyptian national, had cleverly used his status as a foreign student in Hamburg to recruit recruits across Germany for bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terror network. Like the rest of the planet, I had seen that Atta was a fanatical murderer, but during the phone conversation I also learned that he had been extremely smart and even personable and persuasive, spoke excellent German and had amassed an impressive knowledge of world religions.

Atta was formidable, the kind of kamikaze opponent who literally gave his life to attack the American homeland. His story should remind us of the dangers that a handful of dedicated terrorists can inflict on our country due to uncontrolled borders. Today, one wonders whether Mayorkas ever considers that fanatics of Atta’s caliber could be sprinkled among today’s waves of unknown immigrants.

In the first days after September 11, the German press chased the Atta story. Media sources within the German police made it indisputable that the CIA also knew full well who Atta was, having kept close tabs on him while he lived in Hamburg and as he traveled through Germany. That troubling fact was largely downplayed in Congress’s postmortem on the terrorist catastrophe, as the agency at home had taken swift action to protect its professional reputation.

In the aftermath, in reconstructing the terrifying events, most observers rightly expected that the CIA, of course shared their crucial information about Atta to the State Department (which issued Atta’s student visa for a flight school) and US immigration officials (who regularly cleared Atta through the airports). Sharing such identifying information is the essence of a good watchlist, and before September 11 there was in fact a functioning US terrorist watchlist process, although few at Langley took it seriously.

Institutionally, the CIA of the time had other priorities, although Langley officials were certainly aware that Atta was flying in and out of the US. The agency’s security surveillance took place not only at Atta, but also at other key plotters of September 11. The short explanation for why the CIA didn’t share this is probably a combination of bureaucratic incompetence, a lack of imagination, and the arrogance of covert missions.

No one in Langley thought about the risk of unleashing a fanatic like Atta into our country; The agency’s agents on the ground, committed patriots to a person, no doubt calculated that by not disclosing Atta’s arrival in the US, they were protecting a future opportunity to penetrate his network and perhaps 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, Mayorkas’ version of this same official shortsightedness is his wokeism, which is to say that delivering social justice on behalf of millions of foreigners trying to enter the country is worth risking another Mohamed Atta to allow. The details of September 11 fade every year, and Mayorkas and his team simply cannot imagine the scenario.

The clear lesson is that a competent US government watchlist could have easily deterred Atta and kept him out of our country. Without Atta holding the suicide hijackers together, the September 11 attacks almost certainly would not have been as destructive as they were and very likely could have been prevented altogether.

Congress and the White House did virtually nothing to punish the incompetence and failure of the federal bureaucracy. Secretary of State Colin Powell fired a shot assistant secretaryprobably the only senior official in the entire federal government to be fired over the September 11 disaster. The CIA’s George Tenet would survive and prosper, then orchestrate the US intelligence community’s “finding” that the dictator had developed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Congress and the White House turned the disaster into an opportunity to massively increase spending, expand government snooping, and unleash a war in Iraq—all to compensate for what was essentially a simple government failure: failed watchlisting. The irony is that in the aftermath of the September 11th panic, even the watchlist problem was not solved efficiently and deftly, but was instead radically recreated with a massive FDR-LBJ-style tsunami of big government.

Washington has spent billions and hired thousands of new federal officials. Most relevant to watchlisting, Congress has created new security agencies such as the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC). Both were created to collect and manage the most advanced terrorist database in the world. The idea that failed government operations could have been improved by pushing for new efficiencies and better use of existing resources and personnel was likely laughed out the door.

Nowadays there are more than 2.5 million identities on the national terrorist watchlist. Foreign names around the world linked to terrorist activities are being picked up by U.S. officials, and those efforts are being augmented with significant electronic capabilities. Critics claim that too many names have been put into that enormous database. That criticism is justified. The system is a function of the fact that the database contains “known or suspected” terrorists, and the “suspect” category is vast.

Today, this enormous number of identities on the watchlist likely contributes significantly to Mayorkas’ cavalier attitude that just because an illegal immigrant found is in the database does not make that person a “real” terrorist. How else could our DHS Secretary rationally argue that he shouldn’t close the border immediately?

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

As we approach the U.S. presidential election, new waves of tens of thousands of illegals seeking refuge in Tapachula, Mexico, are beginning to make their way to the southern border, all with the silent approval of Mexican authorities. Whether Vice President Kamala Harris wins or loses the White House, hundreds of thousands more will appear this winter, all trying to enter the country.

Whatever motivates Mayorkas, there is good reason to fear that he is guilty of the same kind of hubris and folly that fueled the CIA’s decision not to take action against Atta’s presence in our country in the summer of 2001 It is an irresponsible risk. -to take.