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14 September 2024

Don’t Hype the Terror Threat

John Mueller

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.”


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