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Kenys Galicia worked at a law office on Columbia Pike in Arlington in 2001, where she ran a side business selling notarized forms that enabled people to obtain Virginia driver’s licenses while in the country illegally.
She was in the office on Aug. 2 when two Hispanic men, Victor Lopez-Flores and Herbert Villalobos, showed up with two men witnesses described as Arab-looking, seeking the documents needed to get IDs. The men paid $35 apiece. Ms. Galicia, a legal immigrant from El Salvador, handed over the two forms, and the Arab men were soon on their way to the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles on Four Mile Run Drive in Arlington to get IDs.
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A day earlier and a few miles away at a 7-Eleven on Leesburg Pike, two other Arab men approached Luis Martinez-Flores, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, and paid him $100 to help them falsify documents so they, too, could get licenses — this time at the DMV in Springfield.
The four Arab men were Ahmed al Ghamdi, Abdul Aziz al Omari, Hani Hanjour and Khalid al Mihdhar, who a month later, on Sept. 11, would hijack and crash planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers.
Virginia law at the time allowed people to submit affidavits to prove their identities, making it an easy target for the terrorists. Florida also provided licenses to at least 11 of the hijackers.
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That relaxed approach to identity was critical to the Sept. 11 plot, which took the lives of nearly 3,000 people.
“Driver’s licenses become a major source of identification and, of course, in this case had tragic results, because they enabled two of the people in the Sept. 11 events to have a better cover in American society,” U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said in delivering a sentence to Ms. Galicia in 2002.
Correcting that was one of the major recommendations in the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report, and Congress took that lesson to heart by passing the Real ID Act in 2005.
Yet 25 years after the attack, the consensus around securing IDs is fraying, according to experts who see a renewed apathy toward identity emerging.
The same is true for other lessons of Sept. 11. Those experts see stalled progress on screening people as they enter and exit the U.S., backsliding on breaking down walls between intelligence agencies, and confusion on identifying terrorists and denying them havens.
“We view Sept. 11 as a one-off thing that’s never going to happen again because we’ve taken care of it. But we’re back to Sept. 10, or Sept. 8, in the United States right now,” said Andrew “Art” Arthur, who served as acting chief of the National Security Law Division at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Border checks and Real ID
The 9/11 Commission’s final report was a chronology of how the terrorists got to the U.S., how they prepared for and carried out their attack, and the failures within the U.S. that allowed it all to happen.
Commissioners said terrorists’ ability to travel and enter the U.S. was as important to their schemes as their access to weapons or money. If the immigration system had set a higher bar for verifying a migrant’s identity and purpose, the commission concluded, “several” of the hijackers might have been blocked.
That led to a recommendation for better screening of those coming and going through legal ports of entry. The obvious answer was full risk-based screening at airports, seaports and land border crossings, for both entry and exit.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, biometric checks are nearly everywhere, the one exception being those leaving across the southern land border.
Biometric checks — the gold standard — are conducted only upon arrival at airports and seaports and for pedestrians crossing land borders. Vehicle passengers are still not fully biometrically screened at entry, and none of the exit methods is fully covered yet.
The commission also recommended that the federal government set standards for issuing identification — a major lift, given that states control birth certificates and driver’s licenses.
Still, in 2005, Congress managed to pass the Real ID Act, which set national standards, at least for identification cards used for federal purposes, such as boarding an airplane or entering a federal government building.
Janice Kephart, who served as counsel on the 9/11 Commission and was a key architect of its separate staff report on the terrorists’ travel, said connecting identity to national security was a major victory for the panel.
“We put the line in the sand that states needed to establish minimal information prior to the issuance of an ID is even more critical now than it was then,” she told The Washington Times. “What we got right is that identity needed to be proven and established at the point of issuance.”
The commission also highlighted the information problem leading up to Sept. 11, with agencies sitting on data that, if shared, could have alerted the correct authorities that dangerous people had entered the country.
“I’ll never forget sitting down with INS national security folks and being like, ‘Why aren’t you checking for terrorists at the border — verifying who they are? Their answer was that’s not our job, that’s the FBI’s job,” Ms. Kephart said.
Thanks to the commission, there is now a National Counterterrorism Center and an Office of the Director of National Intelligence, both designed to ensure that more than a dozen intelligence agencies communicate with one another.
The goal was to break down the “silos” of information that kept agencies from understanding one another’s work.
Twenty-two years later, the structures are in place for agencies to share information — but the agencies themselves are becoming parochial again, according to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s 25-year look-back, released late last month.
“This worrying trend minimizes coordination and dampens cross-agency sharing of analytic judgments, rendering potentially poorer assessments and siloed thinking,” the committee concluded.
Worrying trends
For all that, the country has, so far, avoided a repeat of the 2001 attacks and the 3,000 lives claimed that day.
The worst terrorist attack since then was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, which took 49 lives.
That, like many of the others, was a homegrown terrorist.
The most successful foreign-directed attack came in 2019, when a Saudi pilot who had been recruited by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was taking part in a U.S. training program at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida and opened fire in a classroom, killing three and wounding eight before being fatally shot by Escambia County sheriff’s deputies.
Beneath that yardstick, though, there have been some worrying trends.
Those who were at the forefront of counterterrorism in 2001 say the consensus, built on the graves of thousands of Americans, has fractured. President Trump’s expansion of the terrorism designation to include Western Hemisphere drug-smuggling cartels is particularly irksome to those experts.
The global goodwill the U.S. had after the attack has long dissipated, soured in part by American-led wars in the Middle East.
On the identity front, the idea of stricter vetting has led to some notable hiccups.
One such instance occurred five years ago, under President Biden, when the U.S. allowed in thousands of evacuees from Afghanistan — the country where Sept. 11 sponsor Osama bin Laden was harbored — without thorough vetting. Migrants who lacked last names or birth dates were admitted, with U.S. immigration officials assigning them new birth dates.
In a repeat of 2001, the immigration officers did not have access to a critical Defense Department system identifying terrorism risks. As a result, at least two people deemed national security risks and others who were labeled “of concern” managed to reach the U.S., an inspector general found.
States, for their part, continue to issue insufficiently vetted IDs.
A federal-state operation in Oklahoma last year to get dangerous migrant drivers off the roads arrested dozens of truck drivers, including some whose cards had no names. Instead, they read: “No Name Given.”
Mr. Arthur said getting identity right is not a matter of capability but willpower, commitment and politics. Some states, determined to thwart the federal government’s immigration policies, have rebuilt the information silos that the 9/11 Commission blamed for American agencies failing to unravel the plot ahead of time.
“The whole 9/11 report was that we need to know who’s in the United States and we need to identify the people who shouldn’t be here and especially the people who pose a danger to our country,” Mr. Arthur said. “We’re a federal republic. Most of the information about people is held at the state and local level.”
The identity issues go beyond security. The government, during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, paid out hundreds of billions of dollars in bogus claims to fraudsters who gave fake or stolen identities.
Ms. Kephart said the push to streamline communications among agencies — known as interoperability — has also stalled after an initial surge of progress.
The European Union, a collection of countries, is now more interoperable than the federal government, she said.
“We’ve come a long way; we led the world on this, and now we’ve fallen behind because we don’t have our federal act together,” she said.
She blamed a lack of leadership at the top. Ever since the Obama White House nixed a working group that had pushed for standards and protocols, there has been nobody to agitate for action.
“You have serious problems right now in the federal government and a lack of leadership on the issue,” Ms. Kephart said.
The Washington Times reached out to several civil liberties groups for this report but received no responses.
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