The immediate cause of the September 11 disaster was the failure of US border security. Specifically, 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 the leader of the 9/11 operations, Mohamed Atta.

This story is why the recent report of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement deserves special 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. The alarming data apparently failed to capture the attention of the White House or convince senior administration officials to reevaluate their border management.

It is difficult to compare this moment with the period before September 11. As then, Washington’s leaders today appear careless and short-sighted in handling the terrorist threat to the country. As before 9/11, the White House today seems to assume that our safeguards against terrorism are working well enough.

The number 382 given in the report is just the tip of the iceberg; This figure represents illegal immigrants that US authorities have actually encountered and identified in the terrorist database. There are also the “fugitives”, the esteemed 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 crossers enter our country as complete strangers.

Refusing to lock down the border, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accepts this influx because providing “social justice” for foreigners seeking to enter our country is a higher priority for him than national security. Such a cavalier approach is an attack on a once bipartisan (but clearly now dead) consensus on U.S. counterterrorism strategy. Mayorka’s approach seems particularly insensitive to the painful lesson of the fanaticism and murderous creativity of the 9/11 attackers.

Examining the parallels requires returning to the devious Atta, the indispensable ringleader of 9/11 who successfully entered the United States on several occasions while planning the hijackings. The fact that the CIA knew exactly who Atta was before the attack but did not share this information with US immigration authorities and the State Department is the main reason the federal government is undertaking today, with all its imperfections, its massive terrorist surveillance program.

My little part of Mohamed Atta’s story began in the chaotic first days after the September 11 attacks, when I was an American diplomat in Germany. Shortly after the commercial planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, distraught American investigators realized that Atta had played a crucial role in the success of the hijackings. In those early days of panic, a global demand was launched for all possible information about Atta, with a focus on Germany, where the mass killer had lived for years.

At the American consulate in Leipzig, I received a phone call from a contact in the local American mission community explaining that he knew Atta. The Latter-day Saint youth said he clearly recognized Atta’s photo, which was recently broadcast around the world. The missionary explained that he had met Atta on the German academic scene, where the two had often crossed paths; in chance encounters, they had debated and proselytized to German and foreign students.

An Egyptian national, Atta had cleverly used his status as a foreign student in Hamburg to recruit Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network throughout Germany. Like the rest of the planet, I had seen that Atta was a fanatical killer, but during the phone call I also learned that he was exceptionally intelligent and even kind and persuasive, speaking excellent German and possessing an impressive knowledge of world religions.

Atta was formidable, the kind of kamikaze adversary 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 pose to our country due to unmanaged borders. Today, one wonders if Mayorkas ever wonders that fanatics of Atta’s caliber might be found among today’s waves of unknown immigrants.

In the first days after September 11, the German press began reporting Atta’s story. Media sources within the German police have established beyond dispute that the CIA also knew full well who Atta was, having monitored him closely while he lived in Hamburg and during his travels in Germany. This disturbing fact was largely downplayed in Congress’ post-mortem on the terrorist disaster, because at home the agency had acted quickly to protect its professional reputation.

Subsequently, in reconstructing these appalling events, most observers would have rightly expected that the CIA had clearly common their crucial information about Atta from the State Department (which issued Atta’s student visa for flight school) and U.S. immigration officials (who regularly allowed Atta to transit through airports). Sharing this identity information is the essence of a good watchlist, and there was actually a terrorist watchlist process in the United States before 9/11, although few people in Langley took it seriously.

Institutionally, the CIA of the day had other priorities, although Langley officials certainly knew that Atta was flying to and from the United States. The agency’s security oversight took place not only with Atta, but with other key 9/11 conspirators. The short explanation for why the CIA did not share this information is likely a combination of bureaucratic incompetence, lack of imagination, and secret mission arrogance.

No one at Langley thought about the risk of letting a fanatic like Atta run amok in our country; the agency’s agents on the ground, devoted patriots, no doubt calculated that by not revealing Atta’s arrival in the United States, 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 truly posed.

In our current national era, Mayorka’s version of this same official myopia is his wake-up call, which is that delivering social justice on behalf of the millions of foreigners seeking to enter the country is worth taking the risk of allowing the entry of another Mohamed Atta. The details of 9/11 fade with each passing year, and Mayorkas and his team simply can’t imagine the scenario.

The obvious lesson is that a competent US government watchlist could have easily deterred Atta and kept him out of our country. Without Atta assembling the suicide hijacker teams, the 9/11 attacks would certainly not have been as destructive as they were and very likely could have been completely avoided.

Congress and the White House have done virtually nothing to punish the incompetence and failure of the federal bureaucracy. Secretary of State Colin Powell fired a assistant secretaryprobably the only senior official in the entire federal government to be fired because of the 9/11 disaster. George Tenet of the CIA would survive and thrive, and would go on to orchestrate the US intelligence community’s “discovery” that the dictator in Iraq had developed 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 – all to make up for what was in fact a simple government failure: sloppy watch list. The irony is that in the wake of the 9/11 panic, even the watch list problem was not resolved in an efficient and agile manner, but was radically remade by a massive FDR-LBJ type tsunami d ‘a big government.

Washington has spent billions and hired thousands of new federal officials. Regarding the watch list, Congress created new security agencies such as the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the Terrorist Detection Center (TSC). Both were created to collect and manage the world’s most sophisticated terrorist database. The idea that failing government operations could have been improved by emphasizing new efficiencies and better use of existing resources and personnel has probably been ridiculed.

Today there are more than 2.5 million identities on the National Terrorist Watch List. Foreign names around the world linked to terrorist activities are picked up by U.S. officials, and these efforts are amplified by considerable electronic capabilities. Critics say too many names have been added to this huge database. This criticism is fair. The system is based on the fact that the database contains “known or suspected” terrorists and that the category of “suspects” is broad.

Today, this large number of listed identities likely contributes significantly to Mayorkas’ cavalier attitude that just because an illegal immigrant he encounters is in the database does not make that person a “real” terrorist. How else could our DHS Secretary reasonably argue that he should not close the border immediately?

It is impossible to know what real illusion lies in the reckless thinking of Mayorkas and his management team to justify their unprecedented policy of welcoming literally thousands of illegal immigrants every day. They continue to implement policies that encourage more to come.

Today, as the US presidential elections approach, new waves of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, refugees in Tapachula, Mexico, are beginning to head towards the southern border, all with the discreet approval of Mexican authorities. Whether Vice President Kamala Harris wins or loses the White House, new hundreds of thousands of people will appear this winter, all trying to enter the country.

Whatever Mayorkas’ motivations, there is good reason to fear that he is engaging in the same kind of hubris and folly that was behind the CIA’s decision not to act following Atta’s presence in our country in the summer of 2001. This is an irresponsible risk. -socket.