On the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, the CIA released 71 newly declassified presidential intelligence briefs concerning Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
It is now clear that reports dating from years before the attacks raised the possibility of hijackings and even aircraft laden with explosives being used against American cities. The documents do not show that Washington possessed the blueprint for 9/11, but they do reveal something familiar: Hints of an approaching danger were visible, yet they were not assembled into a coherent picture before catastrophe struck.
After 9/11, America vowed that it would never again confuse the accumulation of information with understanding. A quarter of a century later, has that lesson endured? The question matters because a government can collect every fact and still obscure a pattern by dividing it among agencies, policies and respectable explanations.
The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is so compelling a character because he possesses no supernatural gift. His genius lies in recognizing things others had seen without connecting them. On its own, a footprint means little; arranging it into the correct pattern transforms it into evidence.
In that spirit, consider the Obama administration’s immigration and national security records.
When Obama took office, America was fighting in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda remained at war with the United States, and later, attacks from Fort Hood to Orlando, Fla., showed that Islamist violence was not confined overseas.
During those same years, the White House enlarged its engagement with Muslim constituencies, increased important categories of admission from majority-Muslim countries, dismantled a post-9/11 monitoring framework and narrowed the language through which officials described the threat. Each decision had a plausible explanation. The pattern only emerges when viewed together.
A governing disposition
Five months after taking office, Obama traveled to Cairo and announced a new beginning for the United States and Muslims worldwide. The White House converted that address into programs relating to education, business and science, and fostered strong relationships with Muslim-American organizations.
Outreach extended beyond diplomacy. For example, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that Obama asked him to help predominantly Muslim nations appreciate their achievements in science and engineering. Engagement had become an interagency instinct.
Community outreach is not inherently sinister. A president should distinguish peaceful Muslims from jihadists, and intelligence work often depends upon public trust. The pertinent question is what occurred when engagement began to define how immigration and counterterrorism policy was formulated.
A Senate Judiciary subcommittee analysis of U.S. Department of Homeland Security data has reported about 832,000 green cards issued between fiscal years 2009 and 2014 to nationals from 51 majority-Muslim countries. Nationality does not establish religion, and a green card may represent an adjustment of status rather than a new arrival. A Cato Institute analysis found that immigrant visas issued to nationals of majority-Muslim countries rose from 80,435 in 2009 to 117,444 in 2016. In fiscal 2016, the United States admitted 38,901 Muslim refugees, the largest annual number in the public religion data since 2002.
Refugees underwent extensive screening, and many had fled the movements and organizations Americans feared. Vetting, however, cannot reconstruct destroyed civil registries or discover an allegiance never previously detected. Humanitarian concerns may justify accepting that risk, but they do not make the risk imaginary.
America needs neither the imputation of collective guilt nor religious registries.
Safeguards and vocabulary
The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System arose after 9/11. NSEERS required certain non-citizen males from designated countries to register with the government and provide fingerprints and photographs. Twenty-four of the 25 designated countries were majority-Muslim. Critics called the rule discriminatory, cumbersome and obsolete. The Obama administration stopped using the country-designation component in 2011 and then removed the regulations entirely in December 2016. More than 50 House Democrats and nearly 200 advocacy organizations had urged the White House to do so. So, a safeguard disappeared as admissions from Muslim countries rose. That conjunction deserved greater scrutiny.
Institutions see the world partly through the words they are permitted to use. Obama preferred the term “violent extremism” to “radical Islamic terrorism,” arguing that associating terrorism with Islam conferred religious legitimacy upon criminals and alienated peaceful Muslims.
So, after a government-wide review, the FBI examined approximately 160,000 pages and more than 1,000 videos. It removed nearly 900 documents or presentations it judged inaccurate or stereotypical. Some material deserved removal. The unanswered question was who defined the boundary between prejudice and analytic relevance, particularly when outside organizations sought to influence it.
The CAIR contradiction
The Muslim-American advocacy group CAIR presents the clearest institutional contradiction. The federal government has not designated it a terrorist organization, and CAIR describes itself as a civil rights body that condemns terrorism. However, the Holy Land Foundation case produced evidence of relationships between CAIR’s founders and Hamas. CAIR was not a defendant, yet a federal judge found ample evidence of such associations.
In April 2009, the FBI informed former Sen. Jon Kyl that it had suspended formal contacts with CAIR until questions about continuing ties were resolved. However, other branches of the Obama administration continued to treat CAIR as an influential representative. When the United Arab Emirates placed CAIR on a terrorism list in 2014, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told CAIR executive director Nihad Awad that American officials had repeatedly raised the matter with Emirati officials. One arm warned, another embraced, and the public was expected to consider each action separately.
The pattern
Obama also expanded executive discretion through the DACA and the attempted DAPA programs, and revised enforcement priorities. Those measures overwhelmingly concerned Latin American, not Muslim immigration, but they demonstrated how profoundly an administration could alter immigration through memoranda, deferred action, parole, work authorization and charging decisions without changing statutory text. Immigration courts remained inside the Department of Justice, where judges serve as delegates of the Attorney General. Thus, the political branch directing policy also controlled the system adjudicating it.
To be fair, Obama inherited limited enforcement resources, and Congress failed to enact reform. NSEERS was nationality-based and largely dormant. Counterterrorism training involved genuine errors. Obama tightened the Visa Waiver Program for travelers connected to several high-risk countries, conducted military operations against jihadists and ordered the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. No document ordered officials to import radicals, favor Muslims in immigration adjudication or ignore a known terrorist connection.
However, it seems clear that the Obama administration carried out a coherent transformation in immigration policy that was rarely presented to Americans as a whole. Admissions from majority-Muslim countries rose; Muslim refugee admissions reached a record; a country-specific post-9/11 monitoring framework was abolished; counterterrorism language and training were revised; executive discretion became an instrument of large-scale immigration policy; and advocacy organizations gained access even when one came with an extraordinary FBI warning.
There was no conspiracy involved. This was a publicly visible program obscured by administrative division. Each component arrived with its own rationale, department and press release. Fragmentation protected the whole from examination. Concerns about refugee levels could be cast as hostility to refugees, concerns about Islamism as hostility to Islam and questions about CAIR as attacks on civil rights. Every objection was isolated, answered in an unsympathetic manner and relegated to its bureaucratic box.
America needs neither the imputation of collective guilt nor religious registries. It needs enforceable borders, individual vetting, institutional memory, honest language and immigration courts capable of applying law consistently across administrations. Protecting peaceful Muslims from prejudice and protecting the citizenry from radical Islamism are complementary duties.
The newly released intelligence briefs revive an old warning: A mountain of facts can be rendered politically harmless when institutions refuse to place them in their proper order. Holmes would not have refused. Twenty-five years after 9/11, America should not do so either.
