Much has been written about 9/11 on the 25th anniversary of this attack on our soil. To my mind, the most prescient was by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Tablet Magazine.
Before I get to it (and I hope you will take time to read more than I can summarize here), we need to review failures that led to the attack and failures that followed.
In this regard, we are aided by this week’s CIA declassification of 71 Presidential Daily Briefs from 1998 through December 2001.
SHOCKING DECLASSIFIED CIA FILES PROVE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAD MANY CHANCES TO STOP 9/11. Newly declassified CIA files reveal something absolutely chilling. 1998: Intelligence warns Bin Laden may fly an explosives-packed airplane into an American city. 1998: CIA warns: “BIN LADEN PREPARING TO HIJACK US AIRCRAFT.” 1998: Intelligence reports members of his network had received hijacking training, and operatives reportedly conducted a TRIAL RUN at a NEW YORK AIRPORT. 2001: Bin Laden appeared in at least 18 Presidential Daily Briefs. August 6: “BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN US.” September 11: America was attacked. These documents do not show the government knew the exact 9/11 plan in advance. But 25 years later, Americans can finally see just how many warning lights were flashing before nearly 3,000 people died.
To G.W. Bush’s discredit, he acceded to the Muslim Brotherhood and others, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (run by Sami-Al-Arian, who was later tried and convicted of terrorism-related charges, imprisoned, and deported), and claimed against all evidence that Islam was a religion of peace and otherwise muddied the waters about the threats we face.
Apparently, Moslem election assistance in Tampa and Michigan blinded him to the obvious dangers. Also hamstringing our defense was the wall Clinton’s appointee Jamie Gorelick slammed down between the FBI and CIA, which prevented the agencies from sharing information critical to defense.
Bush pushed for and got the Patriot Act, which substantially weakened some citizen liberties even as it finally removed the idiotic Wall between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
The Wall was the legal barrier between U.S. Intelligence and Law Enforcement agencies that prevented the sharing of information gathered by intelligence agencies via methods that might not have conformed to the Fourth Amendment.
Not only did such a wall exist between the FBI and CIA, but inside the FBI there was a wall between the Counterintelligence Division and the Criminal Division.
The kind of information that is now coming out from the CIA is almost certainly collected in a fashion that violated the law if it was going to be use[d] in a court.
So we can't look at it through the rear-view mirror and say "Why didn't somebody do something?"
Here’s a valuable summary of critical information which could not be shared because of the Wall:
January 5, 2000. Al-Qaeda holds a planning summit in Kuala Lumpur. The CIA knows about it, watches it, and photographs the men walking in. Two of them are Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The agency has a photocopy of Mihdhar's passport. Stamped inside is a valid multiple-entry visa for the United States.
That same morning, an FBI agent detailed to the CIA's bin Laden unit named Doug Miller drafts a cable to FBI headquarters saying exactly that. A CIA supervisor tells him to put it on hold. A week later Miller follows up in writing: "Is this a no go or should I remake it in some way." He never gets an answer. The cable sits in draft until after the towers fall. The Justice Department's inspector general later went looking for someone who could explain why. Nobody could.
January 15, 2000. Hazmi and Mihdhar fly United into Los Angeles. In March, CIA officers in Bangkok confirm in a cable that Hazmi boarded that flight to LA. The FBI is still not told.
By February they are in San Diego, and they make no effort to hide. Real names on the apartment. Real names on the California driver's licenses, the bank accounts, the credit cards, the used car. They buy phone service and let the company print Hazmi in the local directory. In May they rent a room from a man they met at their mosque. He is an active FBI informant. His handler never learns who is sleeping down the hall.
They try flight school that spring and wash out. Their English is too poor to follow the instructor.
So the plot brings in a pilot. Hani Hanjour arrives in December 2000. In January and February 2001 his flight school in Phoenix calls the FAA three separate times because something is wrong with him. The manager, Peggy Chevrette, put it plainly: "I couldn't believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had." An FAA inspector comes out, verifies the license is genuine, and closes it. Eight months later Hanjour flies American 77 into the Pentagon.
July 4, 2001. Mihdhar walks back into the country at JFK. Nobody stops him, because nobody ever put him on a list.
July 10. An FBI agent in Phoenix writes a memo warning that bin Laden may be sending men to American flight schools. It dies in the building.
August 6. The President's Daily Brief carries the title "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US."
August 16. Zacarias Moussaoui is arrested in Minnesota. Agents there beg headquarters for a warrant to open his laptop and are refused.
August 23. The CIA finally watchlists Hazmi and Mihdhar. Nineteen days left.
August 27. A headquarters agent accuses the Minneapolis supervisor of writing his request to get people "spun up." The supervisor answers that yes, he was trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center. Headquarters tells him that is not going to happen.
Days later, Steve Bongardt, the New York agent running the USS Cole investigation, is told he cannot join the hunt for Mihdhar because his case is criminal and the lead is intelligence. He writes back: someday someone will die, and wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective.
The hunt for Mihdhar goes to a new agent on his first counterterrorism case, filed at routine precedence, which gave the office thirty days to respond. He is still checking New York hotel records on the morning of the eleventh.
And that morning the system touched them one last time. At Dulles, the screening software flagged Hanjour, Mihdhar, and Moqed. A ticket agent pulled both Hazmi brothers aside because one had no photo ID and could not understand English. The only consequence of being flagged in 2001 was that your checked bag was held until you boarded the plane. They boarded. The bags went with them.
Here is the part people get wrong. The Commission found no plot to let it happen, and I have seen nothing that changes that. What it found was worse in a way, because it is so ordinary. A wall between two agencies. A cable left in draft. A lead marked routine. A hundred people each doing the narrow job in front of them, correctly, and nobody holding the whole picture.
We know it could be done, because it had been done. In December 1999 a customs inspector in Port Angeles named Diana Dean thought a man coming off the ferry looked nervous. She asked him a few more questions. The trunk was full of explosives meant for LAX.
That is the whole answer. Stopping it never required a secret nobody had. It required one person with the standing to be believed.
The actor James Woods reported an obvious test flight by some of the 9/11 hijackers, only to have the FAA ignore his warning.
You all probably know that I was on a "test flight" with four of the actual Islamic attackers a few months before they brought down the World Trade Center. I was told by the journalist who investigated my story that the FAA had ignored the reports filed by both the first officer and head flight attendant of my flight, because my description of the men as "Palestinian terrorists" was racial profiling. And now here we are, standing helpless on the edge of the abyss yet again. And as we leap off the cliff, will the final words we scream in our minds be...
WHY DID WE LET THEM DO IT AGAIN?
Instead of sensible profiling of Middle Eastern military-age men, we made flying a miserable experience for everyone. Under Bush, women in hijabs hired by TSA were patting down nuns in order to prove we were not anti-Moslem. Quotas were set on security searches of Americans. For every Middle Eastern man whose baggage was searched, a number of Americans had to be. (I was regularly targeted, probably because they assumed from age and demeanor they need not fear iguanas jumping out of the bag, that everything would be neatly organized in see-through bags, and the check would take minutes.) In many airports, we still have to remove shoes and walk barefoot on airport floors through security and carefully weigh and pack or lose any liquids. New facial recognition systems are being put in place, another surveillance measure which raises privacy dangers.
Since 9/11, Moslem terror attacks have greatly increased:
- There have been over 65,000 Islam terror attacks since 9/11 across 70 countries
- The world’s 4 other major religions, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism make up 2% of all religiously motivated terror attacks
- Muslims are responsible for the other 98%
This is what we need to remember on September 11th. The world doesn’t really have a terrorist problem, the world has a Muslim problem. The problem is Islam.
A breakdown of the over 65,000 million [sic] terrorist attacks:
Top countries by attack count:
- Afghanistan 17,075
- Somalia 10,768
- Iraq 8,209
- Nigeria 3,950
- Syria 3,421
Deadliest groups by deaths attributed:
- Taliban 71,965
- Islamic State and branches 69,641
- Boko Haram 26,081
- Al-Shabaab 21,784
- Al-Qaeda 14,856
- Those five account for 82% of deaths Average deaths is about 3.7 deaths per attack
This is Islam. Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization.
So has the number of Moslem entrants to the U.S.:
- The Muslim population is up 145% since 9/11
- Over 5.5 million Muslims are now in America
- 59% of adult Muslims in America are foreign born
- 202,000 are from Afghanistan
- 201,000 are from Pakistan
- 119,000 are from Iran
- 66,000 are from Yemen
- 65,000 are from Syria
Any efforts to install pragmatic screening of visitors and immigrants is dubbed “racist” or Islamophobic,” a convenient dodge for those who wish to reshape our country into a tyrannical Seventh Century slough (and for politicians whose only concern is Moslem organizational support for their elections.)
Terrorist acts will certainly increase, but they are not the biggest danger, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali so brilliantly explains. Moslem culture is incompatible with ours. It is not an “Abrahamic faith” like Judaism or Christianity. It does not accept a separation between church and state, nor the notion of individual freedoms and rights, including most specifically freedom of religion. "In the frame in which both ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed political spokesmen see the world, America and the wider West are not just geopolitical rivals. They are civilizational obstacles… which Islamists seek to overcome.” It is a culture which today seeks control “through institutions. Mosques, schools, centers, charities, advocacy groups, and cultural bodies can serve as the primary sites where Muslims encounter religious authority and are socialized into a comprehensive civilizational understanding of Islam.” They strategize settling in, embedding, and using Western freedoms “to advance Islamic rule and weaken Western civilization from within.” Migration and fertility are tools to transform Western society. Worse yet, Russia and China rely on migration-related destabilization, inter alia, as more useful than conventional military confrontation alone. This left-Islamist union is a very great threat. Looking at cities like Dearborn and New York, she observes, “the union of Islamists and the left opens a fertile channel for foreign propagandists who aim to widen the fractures in American society for their own gain.”
Her conclusion is, I think, hard to argue against: If we can’t redesign our protections to shelter citizens “rather than adversaries,” “resist civilization subversion without abandoning liberty itself,” and wall out these people, it doesn’t matter how effective we are on the battlefields.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/we-can-kill-our-enemies-abroad-and-fail-to-save-ourselves/
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