JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Twenty-four years ago, the 9/11 attacks launched an unprecedented focus in the U.S. on terrorism and how to protect the country from it. But over the years, the threat landscape has become much more complex. And those who study counterterrorism say that the work that was underway to meet that challenge is being dismantled. NPR's domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef reports.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: When the planes hit the twin towers, Jason Blazakis was perhaps one of a very small number of Americans who actually had some clue what might have happened.
JASON BLAZAKIS: And immediately, as somebody who's written already at that point a lot about extremism and terrorism, my mind did turn to Osama bin Laden.
YOUSEF: That morning, Blazakis was actually on an Amtrak train from New York to D.C. He was obtaining a graduate degree in New York, intending to go into law, but that day changed everything. Blazakis resolved, instead, on government service. He was part of a wave of Americans whose career trajectories were fundamentally shaped by that day's events. He started in the world of intelligence.
BLAZAKIS: But then the last 10 1/2 years of my government service specifically was in that world of counterterrorism, where I headed up an office at the State Department that's responsible for sanctioning terrorists, pursuant to U.S. law.
YOUSEF: Across the ocean, Colin Clarke was a college senior studying abroad in Ireland when the towers came down. He was researching the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the 30-year conflict known as the Troubles. But the 9/11 attacks turned his focus toward transnational terrorism.
COLIN CLARKE: I grew up in New York, not too far from Queens, and immediately, I became obsessed with this group called al-Qaida, and who were they? And why did they attack the United States? And what was Salafi jihadism? And what the hell was going on in Afghanistan?
YOUSEF: Clarke went on to study and work on the topic of terrorism with think tanks. Clarke says, at that time, Americans' notions of what terrorism was were largely shaped by then-President George W. Bush.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GEORGE W BUSH: We will do everything we can to achieve our objective, which is to rout out and destroy global terrorism.
YOUSEF: But Clarke says that messaging, in retrospect, was facile.
CLARKE: What a poorly named military campaign to call something the global war on terrorism because terrorism's a tactic. It never ends.
YOUSEF: Clarke says this framing of the conflict led to open-ended wars in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. Also, that conception of terrorism centered on a single ideology - Salafi jihadism - and Blazakis says that led to missteps.
BLAZAKIS: We all remember NYPD, for instance, using its intelligence functions in the early days, in the aftermath of 9/11, trying to infiltrate mosques, right? Completely inappropriate behavior and really doesn't speak to prevention in the sense that we think of prevention today.
YOUSEF: The shift to prevention has been a major change in the counterterrorism field, and it was, in part, forced by the reality that Americans are also targeted by other Americans for ideological and political reasons.
CLARKE: The Tree of Life attack in Pittsburgh was very personal.
YOUSEF: Seventeen years after the 9/11 attacks, Colin Clarke was getting his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. Right in his neighborhood, there was a mass shooting at a Jewish synagogue.
CLARKE: I remember it clearly. It was my wife's first day back at work after maternity leave, so I was taking care of a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old. And as usually happens after a horrific terrorist attack, my phone started ringing off the hook with reporters and journalists and, you know, analysts wanting to know what happened.
YOUSEF: What happened was a white nationalist had bought into an antisemitic conspiracy theory that characterized refugees in the U.S. as invaders. He went to a synagogue and killed 11 people. And just a year earlier, white nationalists and neo-Nazis had rallied openly in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a counterprotester.
CLARKE: You know, I think it led me to kind of then jump in with both feet into studying the far-right and the great replacement theory and neo-Nazis, white supremacists and this very kind of broad patchwork of, you know, violent extremists.
YOUSEF: Today, practitioners and researchers largely agree that the ideology of terrorists is less important than addressing the vulnerabilities that make some people susceptible to them. It's a view that is supported by instances where, for example, some extremists have swung from affiliation with neo-Nazi groups to militant jihadist movements.
The Biden administration's groundbreaking national strategy for countering domestic terrorism was a major step in recognizing and funding prevention work. Blazakis says that work was only just getting started, but prevention was always a trickier sell than, say, arguments for increased government surveillance or law enforcement.
BLAZAKIS: There was always an agreement, though, in government circles that this is a really thorny issue, one that's very difficult to measure in way of success, because how do you measure something that never happened? And that's what prevention ultimately is trying to do, is to prevent people from ever joining extremist groups and to walk away from the path of violence.
YOUSEF: In the last eight months, much of the prevention infrastructure of the Biden administration has been eliminated. And now the very definition of what terrorism even is is becoming increasingly blurred. Trump has defended a military strike on what he has called a, quote, "drug-carrying boat" off the coast of Venezuela with the claim that those on the boat were terrorists. Blazakis says drug cartels are a different thing from terrorists. They are motivated by financial gain, not by political or ideological goals. The tools needed to fight these things are different.
BLAZAKIS: In conflating these two things, it moves personnel away from those more traditional terrorism threats, like ISIS and al-Qaida, towards focusing on drug cartels that may not pose quite the same level of political threat to U.S. interests.
CLARKE: I would argue it's not well thought out, and it could be a slippery slope.
YOUSEF: Colin Clarke is also concerned about this attempt to reorient national resources for counterterrorism toward other issues that haven't fallen under the ambit of national security.
CLARKE: And so for a lot of folks in the counterterrorism field, this is a real crossroads moment of, like, what is our strategy and where are we going?
YOUSEF: Odette Yousef, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF TIWA SAVAGE SONG, "LOST TIME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
