Before 9/11, there were several indications and warnings such an attack could happen. But the US lived in denial. Some CIA staffers scoffed at the idea of using passenger airliners to attack targets in the US. The post-mortem 9/11 Commission Report, among other things, cited a failure of imagination by the US Intelligence Community (USIC). Imagination is the capacity to think in new ways, and it’s needed in intelligence threat analysis to identify new dangers so America doesn’t get blindsided like we did on 9/11.
Most Americans think the USIC learned lessons from the 9/11 Commission Report and acted on them, making America safe. However, running counter to lessons learned and knowledge gained, a presidential administration can have a powerful suppressive effect on the accuracy and insights of the intelligence reporting produced by the USIC. Last week, a whistleblower claimed the initial CIA analysis of the origins of COVID indicated a laboratory origin. However, leadership applied pressure and payoffs to the analysts to alter their evaluations. Compulsion like this can only come from members of the political class who will benefit from falsifying research. Such political pressure on the USIC is disturbing because it quashes clear intelligence understanding and yields deadly mistakes in averting threats.
The major current vulnerability for terrorist attacks against the US is that the Biden administration has neglected to protect the US border. Since President Joe Biden took office, approximately 200 individuals on terrorism watchlists have been caught attempting to illegally enter the US. Some estimate the same number haven’t been caught. However, given the enormous increase in the volume of illegal immigrants crossing the border and the consequent chaos, that number is too low.
The drug cartels that are in operational control of the southern border have a strategy. They flood points of entry with run-of-the-mill, economic, illegal immigrants to overwhelm and distract border protection. Then, at other locations, the cartels smuggle across illegal immigrants that need to avoid Border Protection—terrorists and other criminals. This tactic and others have been used to successfully move 1.6 million of these “gotaways” into the US. In light of this, I would be surprised if less than 1,000 terrorists are currently operating within the nation.
This influx of terrorists has produced no solitary instances of shootings or bombings. That means they are devising larger-scale terrorist attacks. We need perceptive threat analysis to identify our vulnerabilities, both new and old, and vectors by which those weaknesses could be exploited.
The Biden administration’s compulsion of groupthink increases our jeopardy of strikes from these terrorists. Just as it did with the COVID lab research, the administration’s modus operandi is to censor any information that makes them look bad. Among other things, the administration has worked hard to muzzle opposing knowledge about the best treatments for COVID, the failure of masks to prevent the spread of COVID, inflation, and the retreat from Afghanistan. The pattern is to use the bureaucracy to promote a false narrative, coerce the media to blackout differing voices, deny what is accurate, and punish dissenters. The imaginative thinking necessary for threat analysis cannot be robust in an environment like this that throttles honest evaluation. Analysts learn to keep their heads down and conform.
Today, the Biden administration’s groupthink is denying our southern border is a sieve and scoffing at the idea that hundreds of unidentified terrorists are active in America—recognition of this peril exposes their errors.
It took only 19 terrorists to carry out 9/11. What death and destruction could be wreaked by 1,000, or 500, or even the minimalist 220? Given the current administration’s disregard for the risk of its border policy, the question isn’t if, it is when.
Dave Hoover is a writer, editor, analyst, and author of, “A Failure of Imagination in the US Intelligence Community,” American Intelligence Journal. He has an MA in Intelligence and an MA in Religion. https://rethink1.substack.com
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