Don’t Hype the Terror Threat

Testifying in Congress a few months ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the terrorism “threat environment,” already quite intense, had been further “heightened” when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. “We’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level,” he argued. Citing Wray’s warning and those of other U.S. officials, Graham Allison and Michael Morell (“The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again,” June 10, 2024) contend that “the United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist attack in the months ahead.”

But the country has heard such alarms many times before, and they have proved unjustified. This was particularly true, of course, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In those years, Morrell and Allison sometimes joined the chorus of concern. Morell, who was the CIA official in charge of briefing the U.S. president at the time of the 9/11 attacks, recalled the atmosphere vividly in a book he wrote in 2015. “We were certain we were going to be attacked again,” he wrote, a conclusion supported by “thousands of intelligence reports.” In a 2004 book, Allison concluded that “on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.”

Morrell and Allison were hardly alone. As Jane Mayer observed in her book The Dark Side, “The only certainty shared by virtually the entire American intelligence community in the fall of 2001 was that a second wave of even more devastating terrorist attacks on America was imminent.” Rudolph Giuliani, New York City’s mayor at the time, remarked later that any security expert would have concluded that “we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multiyears of attacks like this.”

In 2002, U.S. intelligence officials were telling reporters that there might be up to 5,000 operatives trained abroad by al Qaeda inside the United States. After a few years of intensive sleuthing, the FBI found no al Qaeda cells at all in the country. But the agency’s director, Robert Mueller, was not assuaged, telling a Senate committee in 2005 that he was “very concerned about what we are not seeing.”

In 2003, John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, claimed that there was “a high probability that Al Qaida will attempt an attack using a [biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear] weapon within the next two years.” Later that year, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly warned that “al-Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months,” that it would “hit the United States hard,” and that preparations for such an attack might be 90 percent complete. No such assaults ever materialized, of course: indeed, after the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda never managed to carry out another major strike on the U.S. homeland.

Even after the 2011 U.S. raid in Pakistan that killed the al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, experts continued to hype the threat the group posed. In the wake of bin Laden’s death, the political scientist Bruce Hoffman predicted that the raid would lead to “acts of retribution, vengeance, frustration and punishment” directed at the United States. The scholar John Arquilla, meanwhile, contended that any “lack of ‘spectaculars’” in attacks al Qaeda carried out after bin Laden’s death “should not be seen as a sign of a weakening al Qaeda, but rather as an indicator of a shift in strategy.”

Evidence seized in that raid, however, strongly suggested that the central al Qaeda organization was little more than an empty shell, harassed by U.S. drone strikes and starved of funds. In the words of the al Qaeda expert Nelly Lahoud, by that point, the group had become notable mainly for its “operational impotence.”

Al Qaeda did inspire would-be jihadis in the United States, and its quasi-successor, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), inspired even more during its heyday from 2014 to 2017. In the two decades after 9/11, some 125 plots by Islamist extremists targeting the United States were either carried out or were disrupted by the authorities. (Many of the latter were in embryonic stages.) In total, these resulted in the deaths of about 100 people—about five per year, on average. The deaths were tragic, of course, but scarcely monumental; consider that on average, more than 300 Americans die every year from drowning in bathtubs.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

Despite the dire official warnings that Allison and Morrell cite, it is not at all clear that the threat to the United States from international terrorism has increased of late. There continue to be jihadi plots, but the authorities have managed to roll them up with familiar tactics. For example, a recent effort from Iran to enlist someone in the United States to assassinate John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in the Trump administration, was foiled by the FBI.

It is true that jihadi organizations around the world urge like-minded Americans into action, but this is scarcely new. Twenty years ago, bin Laden and other al Qaeda operatives were given loudly to proclaim that the United States “needs further blows” and warned that they could come at any moment. For the most part, however, such blows failed to materialize.

Wray and others are concerned that terrorists will join the large numbers of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexican border. Yet of the hundreds of millions of foreign visitors who were admitted legally into the United States in the two decades after 2001 and the millions more who entered illegally, few if any were agents smuggled in by al Qaeda or ISIS. In recent years, some migrants seeking entry have shown up among the two million names in the FBI’s terrorism watch list, but this seems to reflect the fact that the list itself is overly inclusive rather than suggesting constant attempts by jihadis to penetrate the U.S. homeland.

Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of outrage worldwide over American complicity in Israel’s destructive response to the vicious Hamas raid. But nearly a year later, that anger has yet to produce the increase in terrorist activity in the United States that Wray and others have cited as a potential threat.

More generally, the post-9/11 experience suggests that despite official alarm, even if such an increase did occur, it would be manageable without extraordinary actions. Allison and Morrell, however, call for significant policy steps: a review of “all previously collected information related to terrorism,” the use of “national emergency authorities” to prevent terrorists from entering via the southern border, and stepped-up covert U.S. actions all over the world to disrupt jihadi groups. In reality, there is little reason to believe that such measures are necessary.