The immediate cause of the September 11 disaster was the failure of US border security. Specifically, terrorist attackers succeeded in their suicide missions because U.S. government agencies failed to manage the national watch list that could have easily identified Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 operations.

This date is the reason for the recent releases. report The work of the House Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee deserves serious attention. The report makes clear that U.S. authorities have encountered at least 382 illegal immigrants on the national terrorist watch list since the Biden-Harris administration began opening the border. This alarming data point apparently failed to catch the White House’s attention or convince senior administration officials to re-evaluate border management.

Comparing this moment to the period before 9/11 is stark. Today, as then, Washington’s leadership appears reckless and shortsighted in managing the terrorist threat to the homeland. Today, as before 9/11, the White House’s assumption seems to be that our counterterrorism safeguards are working well enough.

Number 382 in the report is just the tip of the iceberg; the figure represents illegal acts that U.S. authorities actually encountered and identified in the terrorist database. There are also those who “escaped”, I guess 1.9 million illegal immigrants entering the country without any official contact. Unlike legal immigrants, who are normally pre-screened by U.S. consular officials in their home countries, these uninvited border jumpers enter our country as complete unknowns.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who refuses to close the border, accepts this entry because ensuring “social justice” for foreigners who want to enter our country is a priority for him over national security. Such a cavalier approach amounts to intimidating what was once a bipartisan (but now clearly dead) consensus on US counterterrorism strategy. Majorca’s approach appears uniquely impervious to the harsh lesson of the fanaticism and murderous ingenuity of the 9/11 attackers.

Examining the parallels requires a look at the insidious Atta, the indispensable ringleader of 9/11 who successfully entered the United States 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 why the federal government today has undertaken the massive terrorist watchlist program, with all its flaws.

My little 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 commercial passenger jets crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, frantic US investigators concluded that Atta was vital to the success of the hijackings. In those early days of panic, a worldwide request was sent out for all possible information about Atta, focusing on Germany, where the mass murderer had lived for years.

At the US consulate in Leipzig, I received a call from a member of the local American missionary community who explained that he knew Atta. The young Latter-day Saint stated that he clearly recognized the photo of Atta that was recently released to the world. The missionary explained that he met Atta in the university environment of Germany, where their paths often crossed; They argued with each other in chance encounters and proselytized among German and foreign students.

Atta, an Egyptian national, had cleverly used his status as a foreign student in Hamburg to recruit for Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network throughout Germany. Like the rest of the planet, I had seen Atta as a fanatic killer, but in the phone conversation I also learned that he was unusually intelligent, even friendly and persuasive, spoke perfect German, and had an impressive knowledge of world religions.

The horse was tough; He was the kind of kamikaze enemy who literally gave his life to attack the US homeland. His story should remind us of the dangers that a handful of dedicated terrorists can pose to our country due to unmanaged borders. One wonders today whether Mayorkas ever considered that fanatics of Atta’s caliber could be interspersed among today’s waves of unknown immigrants.

In the first days after September 11, the German press pursued the Atta story. Media sources within the German police have made it indisputable that the CIA knew very well who Atta was and kept a close eye on him while he lived in Hamburg and moved around Germany. This inconvenient truth was largely ignored in Congress’ post-mortem of the terrorist disaster because the agency had acted quickly to protect its professional reputation at home.

Subsequently, in reconstructing the horrific events, most observers would rightly expect the CIA to do so explicitly. shared The State Department (which granted Atta a student visa for a flight school) and U.S. immigration officials (who regularly took Atta through airports) provided important information about Atta. Sharing such credentials is the essence of a good watchlist, and although few in Langley took it seriously, there was actually a U.S. terrorist watchlist process in operation before 9/11.

Although Langley officials were acutely aware of Atta’s travels in and out of the United States, the CIA of the day had other institutional priorities. The Agency’s security surveillance was conducted not only on Atta but also on other key 9/11 conspirators. The short explanation for why the CIA didn’t share is probably a combination of bureaucratic incompetence, lack of imagination, and undercover arrogance.

No one in Langley would risk allowing a fanatic like Atta to run amok in our country; The agency’s officers in the field, patriots loyal to one man, no doubt calculated that by not disclosing Atta’s arrival in the United States, they were preserving a future opportunity to infiltrate his network and perhaps recruit an insider. In hindsight, they did not have the imagination to see the serious danger that Atta actually represented.

In the current national period, Majorca’s version of the same official parochialism is its wokeness, namely that ensuring social justice on behalf of millions of foreigners seeking to enter the country is worth the risk of allowing in another Mohammed Atta. Details of 9/11 are being erased with each passing year, and Mayorkas and his team cannot even imagine this scenario.

The clear lesson here is that a US government authorized watch list could easily deter Atta and keep him out of our country. If Atta had not kept the suicide hacker teams together, the September 11 attacks would almost certainly not have been as devastating and likely could have been prevented entirely.

Congress and the White House have done almost nothing to punish the incompetence and failure of the federal bureaucracy. Secretary of State Colin Powell opened fire assistant secretaryprobably the only senior official in the entire federal government to be fired as a result of the 9/11 disaster. The CIA’s George Tenet would survive and thrive, leading the US intelligence community’s “detection” that the dictator in Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Congress and the White House turned the disaster into an opportunity to massively increase spending, expand government surveillance, and launch a war in Iraq; This is all to compensate for a simple government failure: the failed watch list. The irony is that in the wake of the 9/11 panic, even the watch list problem was not fixed efficiently and quickly, but was instead radically redone by a massive FDR-LBJ-style tsunami of big government.

Washington spent billions of dollars and hired thousands of new federal officials. Most relevant to watchlisting, Congress created new security agencies such as the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC). Both were founded to collect and manage the world’s most advanced terrorist database. The idea that failing government operations could be improved by insisting on new efficiencies and better use of existing resources and personnel was probably met with ridicule in the room.

There are more than one today 2.5 million Names on the national terrorist watch list. Foreign figures linked to terrorist activities around the world are being eliminated by U.S. authorities, and these efforts are being strengthened by significant electronic capabilities. Critics argue that too many names have been added to this massive database. This criticism is a justified criticism. The system is a function of the fact that the database includes “known or suspected” terrorists and the “suspect” category is very broad.

Today, this multitude of identities on the monitored list likely contributes significantly to Mayorkas’ cavalier stance that just because an encountered illegal immigrant is in the database does not make that person a “real” terrorist. How else can our DHS secretary reasonably argue that he shouldn’t have closed the border immediately?

It is impossible to know what it is like for Mayorkas and his top team to truly engage in self-delusion through reckless thinking to justify their unprecedented policies that lead to the arrival of literally thousands of illegal immigrants every day. They continue to implement policies that encourage more to come.

Today, as the U.S. presidential election approaches, new waves of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants seeking refuge in Tapachula, Mexico, are beginning to move toward the southern border with the quiet approval of Mexican officials. Whether Vice President Kamala Harris wins or loses the White House, there will be hundreds of thousands of new people trying to enter the country this winter.

Whatever Mayorkas’s motivations, there is good reason to fear that he is involved in the same kind of arrogance and stupidity that underpinned the CIA’s decision not to act on Atta’s presence in our country in the summer of 2001. This is an irresponsible risk. -to take.