Summer of Threat 2024: America's security watchdogs are barking. Are we listening?

“I’d be hard pressed to think of a time where so many threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once. But that is the case as I sit here today.”

The above could easily have been said by any of our nation’s top counterterrorism or law enforcement officials in the summer of 2001 — dubbed the “Summer of Threat” — when intelligence reporting on possible terrorist attacks spiked to unprecedented levels. But it wasn’t. 

The quote is from FBI Director Chris Wray’s recent congressional testimony, and it establishes the summer of 2024 as dauntingly similar to threat levels of 2001, but with a critical difference.

Twenty years ago this July, when the 9/11 Commission Report was published, it was fair to characterize the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,977 people as a “failure of policy, management, capability, and — above all — a failure of imagination.” If the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil emanates from an illegal border infiltration, it certainly will not be “a failure of imagination.”

We are former 9/11 Commission staff members who lived the effects of those attacks — both of us lost friends and acquaintances, and one is a severely burned survivor of the attack on the Pentagon. The reality of just how far our nation’s border security mindset and stance has wandered in recent years cuts us to our core.

In the months leading up to 9/11, only a relatively small number of watchdogs in the classified and compartmentalized world of our government’s counterterrorism network knew that the “system was blinking red” over the threat from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Today, a far more informed public knows that it is blinking red again.

Customs and Border Patrol statistics show that our homeland is now exposed to shockingly grave risks that would have been categorically unacceptable in the painful early years after 9/11.  

Consider the following: Since 2021, more than 300 people on the government’s terrorist watchlist have been encountered entering the United States. That represents more than a 2,000% increase from the prior three years. And there is no way of knowing how many potential terrorists were not encountered. At the same time, however, this administration and Congress have been dithering with the immigration issue, treating it as grist for the partisan mill, and placing politics above border security and genuine reform.

The entire world — including terrorists and nation-state adversaries who desire to do us harm — knows that our borders are glaringly and tantalizingly vulnerable. In just the past month we’ve seen numerous foreigners arrested across the country, who illegally crossed our border and have alleged ties with the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. 

We really should be worried about America's borders

In this Summer of Threat 2024, we find ourselves in an unnerving situation where our borders are woefully unsecured while our counterterrorism watchdogs are barking, loudly and publicly.

Perhaps the loudest public Watchdog bark has come from retired former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who has urged the Biden Administration and Congress to act boldly and urgently — “including the use of national emergency authorities” — to secure the southern border so that terrorists do not exploit “this overwhelmed channel to enter the country.”

Recognizing that some terrorists may already have crossed, Morell further recommends that U.S. intelligence agencies “review all previously collected information related to terrorism” for leads and ask their international partners “to detain and interview — within their legal authority — individuals with ties to terrorism.”

Finally, Morell agues that public awareness of the urgency of the threat must be raised, urging the congressional intelligence committees to hold public hearings and insist to hear the candid threat assessments of the directors of National Intelligence, the CIA, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center.

We agree with Morell’s recommendations, and the administration and Congress should undertake them immediately. But national security officials must go further, and fully alert state and local law enforcement and the general public to the urgency of the moment. The failure to do so prior to 9/11 enabled the hijackers to move freely around the country, and even to encounter local law enforcement, who had no reason to believe that our counterterrorism system was on the highest alert. 

In July 2001, for instance, a South Hackensack, New Jersey, police officer on routine patrol checked the California license plate of a rental car parked at a cheap motel where drug trafficking was common. The renter was Nawaf al Hazmi, and he was staying in room 506 of the motel with a man named Khalid al-Mihdhar. Two months later, both would hijack American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that attacked the Pentagon. For co-author Kevin Shaeffer, then a Navy Lieutenant at the Pentagon, and his friends and colleagues there, this was so much more than a missed opportunity. But the local police had no reason to know that Hazmi was a person of interest because the CIA failed to timely communicate his known arrival in the United States to the FBI, which in turn could have notified state and local law enforcement.

Chance encounter at Ground Zeroon 9/11 helps retired NYPD cop to finally get medical help

The similarities to 2001 are far too eerie

We simply cannot ignore the similarities between the summer months leading up to 9/11, and what we know publicly today about the clear, present and growing threats emanating from our borders. 

Our government must move swiftly, with unique purpose, to secure our borders, and dedicate all resources necessary to educate the public and law enforcement at all levels to detect and disrupt those who are likely in our midst today, and who plot to do us great harm. If we fall short, it will be a tragic and deadly example of an all-too-familiar theme:  a bipartisan failure to govern in a nonpartisan manner. 

“The watch-dogs bark! ... Hark, hark!”

Shakespeare’s "The Tempest," 1610-1611

 John J. Farmer Jr. is a visiting professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and director of the Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience at Rutgers University, was Attorney General of New Jersey on Sept. 11 and served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission. Prior to serving on the 9/11 Commission staff, Kevin Shaeffer was a U.S. Navy Lieutenant. He was severely burned at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Following the 9/11 Commission, he has served in critical roles working on our nation’s highest priority national security mission areas, including against top al-Qaeda leadership.