What Would Happen if 9/11 Happen Again

An American flag at footing zero on the evening of Sept. eleven, 2001, afterward the terrorist attacks on the Earth Merchandise Eye in New York City. Mark Lennihan/AP hide caption

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An American flag at footing zero on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, subsequently the terrorist attacks on the Earth Trade Center in New York City.

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In the fall of 2001, Aaron Zebley was a 31-yr-old FBI agent in New York. He had just transferred to a criminal squad after working counterterrorism cases for years.

His beginning day in the new task was Sept. eleven.

"I was literally cleaning the desk-bound, I was like wiping the desk when Flight 11 hit the north tower, and information technology shook our building," he said. "And I was like, what the heck was that? And later that day, I was transferred back to counterterrorism."

Information technology was a natural motion for Zebley. He'd spent the previous 3 years investigating al-Qaida's bombings of U.Due south. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And he became a cadre fellow member of the FBI team leading the investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

It quickly became clear that al-Qaida was responsible.

The hijackers had trained at the group's camps in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. They received money and instructions from its leadership. And ultimately, they were sent to the U.South. to carry out al-Qaida'due south "planes operation."

President George Westward Bush gives an accost in front of the damaged Pentagon following the Sept. eleven terrorist attack at that place as Advisor to the President Karen Hughes and Secretarial assistant of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stand by. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images hide caption

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President George West Bush gives an accost in front of the damaged Pentagon post-obit the Sept. eleven terrorist attack there every bit Counselor to the President Karen Hughes and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stand up by.

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As the nation mourned the virtually 3,000 people who were killed on 9/xi, the George Westward. Bush-league administration frantically tried to detect its footing and prevent what many feared would be a second wave of attacks.

President Bush ordered members of his administration, including top counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, to imagine what the next assault could look like and take steps to preclude it.

"We had and then many vulnerabilities in this country," Clarke said.

At the fourth dimension, officials were worried that al-Qaida could apply chemical weapons or radioactive materials, Clarke said, or that the group would target intercity trains or subway systems.

"Nosotros had a very long listing of things, systems, that were vulnerable because no one in the U.s. had seriously considered security from terrorist attacks," he said.

That, of form, apace changed.

Security became paramount.

And over the next ii decades, the federal government poured money and resources — some of it, critics say, to no expert apply — into protecting the U.S. from another terrorist set on, fifty-fifty as the nature of that threat continuously evolved.

The response to keeping the U.Due south. secure takes shape

The regime built out a massive infrastructure, including creating the Department of Homeland Security, all in the name of protecting against terrorist attacks.

The Bush-league administration as well empowered the FBI and its partners at the CIA, National Security Bureau and the Pentagon to take the fight to al-Qaida.

The military machine invaded Afghanistan, which had been a haven for the group. The CIA hunted down al-Qaida operatives around the world and tortured many of them in secret prisons.

The Bush administration also launched its ill-fated war in Republic of iraq, which unleashed two decades of bloodletting, shook the Eye E and spawned another generation of terrorists.

On the homefront, FBI Director Robert Mueller shifted some 2,000 agents to counterterrorism work equally he tried to transform the FBI from a offense-fighting start organization into a more intelligence-driven one that prioritized combating terrorism and preventing the next assault.

Part of that involved centralizing the bureau's international terrorism investigations at headquarters and making counterterrorism the FBI's top priority.

Chuck Rosenberg, who served as a top aide to Mueller in those early years, said the changes Mueller imposed amounted to a paradigm shift for the agency.

Robert S. Mueller, then-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, talks to reporters on Aug. 17, 2006, in Seattle. Ted Due south. Warren/AP hide explanation

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Robert S. Mueller, so-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, talks to reporters on Aug. 17, 2006, in Seattle.

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"Mueller, God bless him, couldn't be all that patient about it," Rosenberg said. "It couldn't happen at a normal pace of a traditional cultural alter. It had to happen yesterday."

Information technology had to happen "yesterday" considering al-Qaida was yet plotting. Overseas, its operatives carried out horrific bombings in Bali, Madrid, London and elsewhere.

In the U.S., al-Qaida operative Richard Reid was arrested in December 2001 after trying to accident up a trans-Atlantic flight with a bomb hidden in his shoe. More plots were foiled in the ensuing years, including one targeting the Brooklyn Bridge.

Over fourth dimension, the FBI and its partners amend understood al-Qaida, its hierarchical structure, and how to unravel the various threads of a plot.

That stemmed to large degree, Zebley says, from the U.S. getting better at pulling together various threads of intelligence and by upping the operational tempo.

"If you have a little thread that could potentially tell you most a terrorist plot, not merely were we much improve at integrating the intelligence, but nosotros did it at a pace that was tenfold what we were doing before," he said.

Just critics warned that the government's new anti-terrorism tools were eroding ceremonious liberties, while the American Muslim customs felt information technology was all as well oftentimes the target of an overzealous FBI.

The digital world helps transform terrorism

By the early days of the Obama assistants, the U.S. had to a large extent hardened the homeland confronting 9/xi-style plots. Simply the terrorism landscape was evolving.

At that time, Zebley was serving equally a senior aide to Mueller. Each morning, he would sit in on the FBI managing director's daily threat briefing.

"I was thinking about al-Qaida for years leading up until that moment," he said. "And now I'm sitting in these morning threat briefings and I'g seeing al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa, al-Shabab. ... One of my beginning thoughts was 'the map looks very different to me at present.' "

Robert Mueller (left) and Aaron Zebley testify on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 24, 2019, earlier the House Intelligence Commission hearing on his report on Russian election interference. Susan Walsh/AP hibernate caption

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Robert Mueller (left) and Aaron Zebley show on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 24, 2019, before the House Intelligence Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference.

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Ultimately, AQAP — al-Qaida'southward branch based in Yemen — emerged as a significant threat to the U.Southward. homeland.

That became clear in Nov 2009 when U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. A month later, on Christmas Day, a immature Nigerian man tried to accident up a passenger jet over Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear.

It quickly emerged that both men had been in contact with a senior AQAP figure, an American-built-in Yemeni cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki.

"My sense when I outset heard about him was 'well, he's some charismatic guy, born in the U.South., fluent English speaker and all that. But how big a threat could he exist?" said John Pistole, who served as the No. 2 official at the FBI from 2004 until 2010 when he left to lead the Transportation Security Assistants.

"I think I failed to recognize and appreciate his ability to influence others to action."

Awlaki used the internet to spread his calls for violence against America, and his lectures and ideas influenced attacks in several countries. Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011, a movement that proved controversial considering he was an American citizen.

A few years later, a different terrorist group emerged from the cauldron of Syria and Republic of iraq — the Islamic State, or ISIS, a group that would build on Awlaki'due south savvy utilize of the digital world.

"When ISIS came onto the scene, peculiarly that summer of 2014, with the beheadings and the prolific utilise of social media, it was off the charts," said Mary McCord, who was a senior national security official at the Justice Department at the time.

Like al-Qaida more than a decade before, ISIS used its stronghold to plan operations abroad, such as the coordinated attacks in 2015 that killed 130 people in Paris. Merely it besides used social media platforms such every bit Twitter and Telegram to pump out slickly produced propaganda videos.

"They deployed engineering science in a much more sophisticated way than we had seen with virtually other strange terrorist organizations," McCord said.

ISIS produced materials featuring idyllic scenes of life in the caliphate to entice people to move there. At the same time, the group pushed out a torrent of videos showing horrendous violence that sought to instill fear in ISIS' enemies and to inspire the militants' sympathizers in Europe and the U.South. to conduct attacks where they were.

"The threat was much more horizontal. It was harder to corral," said Chuck Rosenberg, who served every bit FBI Director James Comey'southward chief of staff.

People inspired past ISIS could become from watching the grouping's videos to activeness relatively quickly without setting off alarms.

"It was clear likewise that there were going to be attacks we just couldn't stop. Things that went from left of blast to correct of blast very quickly. People were more discreet, the thing nosotros used to refer to as solitary wolves," Rosenberg said. "A lot of bad things could happen, perchance on a smaller scale, simply a lot of bad things could happen more speedily."

Bad things did happen

Europe was hit past a serial of deadly one-off attacks. In the U.Southward., a gunman killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016. A twelvemonth later, a human being used a truck to plough through a group of cyclists and pedestrians in Manhattan, killing viii people. Both men had been watching ISIS propaganda.

A makeshift memorial stands outside the Tree of Life Synagogue in the aftermath of a deadly shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018. Matt Rourke/AP hide caption

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A makeshift memorial stands outside the Tree of Life Synagogue in the aftermath of a deadly shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.

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The group's allure waned later on a global coalition led by the U.South. managed to retake all the territory that ISIS once claimed.

By then, America'due south well-nigh lethal terror threat already stemmed non from foreign terror groups, merely from the country's own domestic extremists.

For nearly two decades, the FBI had prioritized the fight against international terrorists. Simply in early 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that had changed.

"Nosotros elevated to the height-level priority racially motivated violent extremism and so information technology's on the same footing in terms of our national threat banding as ISISI and homegrown fierce extremism," he testified before Congress.

The move came in the wake of a series of high-profile attacks past people espousing white supremacist views in Charlottesville, Va., Pittsburgh, Pa., Poway, Calif., and El Paso, Texas.

At the aforementioned time, anti-government extremist groups and conspiracy theories like QAnon were attracting more than adherents.

Those diverse movements converged in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, in the storming of the U.S. Capitol equally Congress was certifying Joe Biden's presidential win.

Rioters climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on January. 6. Jose Luis Magana/AP hide explanation

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Rioters climb the due west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6.

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The FBI has since launched a massive investigation into the assault, and Wray has frankly described the Capitol riot as "domestic terrorism."

McCord, who is now the executive director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at the Georgetown Academy Constabulary Center, says domestic extremist groups are using many of the same tools that foreign groups have for years.

"You run across that in the use of social media for the same kind of things: to recruit, to propagandize, to plot, and to fundraise," she said.

The Capitol riot has put a spotlight on far-right extremism in a style the result has never received in the by two decades, including in the media and the highest levels of the U.S. authorities.

President Biden, for ane, has called political extremism and domestic terrorism a looming threat to the land that must be defeated, and he has made combating the threat a priority for his administration.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/10/1035588542/9-11-fight-terrorist-attack

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