The most disturbing thing in the newly released 9/11 files is not how little the United States knew before September 11, 2001. It is how much it knew and still failed to understand what al-Qaeda was becoming.
The newly released 9/11 Commission summary of the President’s Daily Briefs, or PDBs, shows that years before the attacks, intelligence reaching the president warned that Osama bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States. It reported that his network had infrastructure in North America, warned about hijackings, described operatives testing airport security and, in September 1998, raised the possibility that a group connected to the East Africa embassy bombings might fly an explosive-packed airplane into an American city.
That was three years before American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. The United States did not fail to notice al-Qaeda. It failed to understand what kind of enemy it faced.
Washington knew bin Laden was a threat. The CIA tracked his organization, the United States launched cruise missiles against his camps, the FBI investigated his supporters, and presidents were repeatedly briefed on the risks. But the files released this week show that al-Qaeda was still being viewed largely through the framework of terrorism we already knew: bombings, hostage taking, attacks against American facilities overseas, and hijackings in which terrorists seized an aircraft to make demands.
Reading these documents through an intelligence and targeting lens, the problem was not simply a lack of information. Important pieces were already there. The harder failure was recognizing that those pieces were describing an enemy that was innovating operationally, taking familiar terrorist methods and repurposing them in ways our assumptions did not account for.
The Warning Was There
Intelligence is rarely clean. A report does not become fact because it appears in a classified document. Analysts have to judge sources, weigh reliability, challenge assumptions, and separate credible reporting from rumor. The lesson in these files is not that we should have believed every warning. It is that the reporting changed before our understanding of the enemy did.
A July 1998 PDB summarized reports that bin Laden was planning attacks inside the United States, including possible attacks in Washington. The sources were considered highly questionable, but the possibility of a homeland attack had reached the president.
After the East Africa embassy bombings the following month, the reporting continued. An August 28 PDB said bin Laden’s network remained intact and that he was considering attacks in the United States. On September 1 came UBL’s Infrastructure in North America. Three days later, another PDB reported that bin Laden had associates inside the country.
None of those reports, by itself, predicted September 11. But by the fall of 1998, the reporting was repeatedly raising a different problem than the one Washington had spent years confronting overseas. Bin Laden was not only threatening Americans abroad. Intelligence increasingly pointed toward the homeland. That should have changed how later reporting was viewed.
The Aircraft Was Already In The Reporting
A September 10, 1998 PDB, UBL’s Location and Intentions, reported that bin Laden’s preferred option was to strike the United States on its own soil in Washington. It also contained one of the most significant pieces of intelligence in the files: a walk-in source claimed the group responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa might fly an explosive-packed airplane into an American city.
The assessment cautioned that there was no conclusive information about bin Laden’s future plans. That caveat was appropriate. The reporting did not prove such an operation existed, but it gave analysts a scenario serious enough to test.
The 9/11 Commission later found that the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center did not analyze how a hijacked or explosives-laden aircraft might be used as a weapon. It did not develop indicators for that type of attack, and the intelligence community did not establish collection requirements to look for them. The Commission noted that such analysis could have identified one of the terrorists’ critical operational requirements: finding suicide operatives capable of flying large jet aircraft.
That is where this becomes more than a missed warning. Intelligence does not always tell you exactly what the enemy will do. Sometimes it gives you enough to start working backward from the operation. If al-Qaeda wanted to use an aircraft as a weapon, it would need people who could fly. Those people would need training. They would need access to the United States and its aviation system. The plotters would need to understand airport security and might test it beforehand. Once you identify those requirements, they become things you can look for.
Three months later, more pieces appeared. A December 4, 1998 PDB, Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks, described preparations for attacks inside the U.S. A senior bin Laden operative was expected to meet with counterparts in the U.S. to discuss options, while reporting described plans that could include hijacking an American airliner. Two members of an operational team had apparently evaded security checks during a trial run at an unidentified New York airport. Members of bin Laden’s network had also received hijacking training.
That was significant reporting: hijacking training, U.S. counterparts and an airport security trial run. Yet the expected purpose of the hijacking remained familiar. The aircraft would be seized to secure the release of imprisoned extremists, including the Blind Sheikh.
That assumption mattered. Al-Qaeda did not have to invent hijacking. It only had to change what hijacking was for. The possibility that the airplane itself could be the weapon had already entered presidential intelligence, but it did not become the framework against which later reporting was tested.
The Assumption That Failed
By 2001, the reporting around bin Laden had grown substantially. The August 6 PDB, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, is now one of the best-known intelligence documents associated with 9/11. Read alongside the files released this week, it looks less like an isolated warning and more like the culmination of a threat stream that had been building for years.
The brief said bin Laden’s followers had been told to “bring the fighting to America.” It reported that al-Qaeda members had lived in or traveled to the U.S. for years and that the organization apparently maintained a support structure that could aid attacks. It also cited FBI information showing suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other attacks, while noting that the FBI was conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considered bin Laden-related.
It was the 36th PDB item that year relating to bin Laden or al-Qaeda, but the first devoted specifically to the possibility of an attack inside the U.S. Five weeks remained before 9/11. The brief also noted that earlier reporting about a possible hijacking had not been corroborated. That caution was warranted, but by then new information was pointing again to possible hijacking preparations. At that point, the older reporting should have been reconsidered in light of the new threat picture.
If the 1998 reporting was wrong about why al-Qaeda wanted an airplane, that did not necessarily mean it was wrong about al-Qaeda’s interest in aircraft. Those are different intelligence questions. New information can change the significance of reporting that once looked weak or incomplete.
Another August 2001 PDB noted that bin Laden’s operational practices had become “expert and flexible.” That phrase deserves more attention. An enemy that is expert and flexible learns. Al-Qaeda had already demonstrated that it could spend years preparing an operation, adjust after setbacks, and give operatives flexibility in how attacks were carried out.
Bojinka is a good example. The 1995 plot to bomb U.S. airliners over the Pacific unraveled, but the idea did not disappear with it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had already been thinking about using aircraft as weapons while working on the plot, and he later carried that concept into the operation that became 9/11.
That is why you cannot hunt that kind of network by asking only what it did last time. You have to ask what it learned from failure, what it kept, what it discarded, and what it might do differently the next time. That was the larger analytic problem. The United States recognized al-Qaeda as a dangerous terrorist organization, but it had not fully adjusted to an adversary that was studying American systems, identifying vulnerabilities and adapting familiar tactics to exploit them.
What September 12 Made Clear
A PDB prepared hours after the attacks described mounting evidence that extremists in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf knew bin Laden-directed attacks were imminent. Extremists reportedly knew a probable operation existed. Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar had also reportedly clashed over bin Laden’s determination to carry out attacks, and bin Laden told Omar that he had operations underway that would cause great damage to the United States.
After the attack, those pieces fit together in a way they had not before. That is why describing 9/11 simply as a failure to warn does not go far enough. America was warned. The deeper failure was understanding the adversary well enough to recognize what those warnings could mean before the operation was complete.
That is what makes these files worth studying beyond another round of anniversary headlines. The United States knew bin Laden wanted to strike America. It knew al-Qaeda could plan operations over years. It had reporting on operatives inside the country, hijacking training, airport security testing, and even the possibility of an airplane being flown into an American city. No single report predicted September 11, but together they described an enemy adapting faster than our assumptions.
That is the lesson worth carrying forward. Intelligence collection gives you pieces of the picture, but collection alone is not enough. Analysis has to determine what those pieces mean, and targeting has to ask what the adversary must do next for an operation to succeed. Before September 11, the U.S. had important pieces of that picture. It did not connect them in time. That was the gap the hijackers flew through.

Osama Bin Laden

The 9/11 Files Show America Heard The Warning And Missed The War

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Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the United States still has not fully implemented one of the border-security reforms recommended by the 9/11 Commission.
That’s according to a bipartisan review released this week by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which found that the Commission’s call for a biometric entry-exit screening system to be created “as quickly as possible” is still incomplete.
Air exit is considered nearly complete, according to the committee. Sea exit remains incomplete, as does biometric land exit at both the northern and southern borders. Even biometric exit at the southern border is listed as incomplete and relies in part on re-entry data.
The finding matters because the ability to determine whether a foreign traveler had actually left the United States was one of the problems exposed during the investigation into the 9/11 plot.
Nawaf al-Hazmi entered the United States in January 2000 after attending an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur with Khalid al-Mihdhar. Both men later lived in California. By August 2001, U.S. authorities had finally begun trying to locate them. On August 22, immigration officials told investigators that Mihdhar had entered the United States again on July 4. They also found no record showing that Hazmi had left after entering the country in January 2000.
Investigators assumed he had probably departed with Mihdhar the previous year. He had not.
Hazmi was still in the United States, and on September 11 he and Mihdhar hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.
A Gap 9/11 Exposed
The 9/11 Commission later found that Hazmi had overstayed his authorized stay by nine months. Another hijacker, Satam al-Suqami, had overstayed by four months. Neither violation was detected or acted upon before the attacks.
The problem went well beyond two visa overstays. The Commission found that travel documents and travel patterns might have given authorities an opportunity to intercept between four and 15 of the 19 hijackers. Information existed across intelligence, immigration, and travel systems, but too often it was not connected or acted upon in time.
One of the Commission&#8217;s recommendations was straightforward: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with support from Congress, should complete a biometric entry-exit screening system “as quickly as possible.” The goal was not simply to know who entered the country. It was to connect a person&#8217;s identity to travel records and know when that person left. That recommendation came in 2004.
Much of the system envisioned by the Commission has since been built. Biometric screening is now complete for air entry, sea entry, and pedestrian land entry, according to the House report. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says facial biometrics are used for entry at all international airports and for international departures at 57 airports.
The technology can compare a traveler standing at a checkpoint or departure gate against government-held passport, visa, or previous-entry photographs. That provides something a name and passport number alone cannot: biometric confirmation that the person associated with the travel record is actually the person entering or leaving.
The system is already producing results. In an August 2026 final rule, DHS said facial biometric matching at exit had confirmed more than 516,000 overstays between June 2017 and October 2025. The same filing said CBP had intercepted more than 2,200 impostors using facial biometrics at airports and pedestrian land crossings.
Those numbers are not evidence that hundreds of thousands of terrorists are moving through the country, and they should not be treated that way. They do show why confirming identity and departure has value.
The question is why the system still does not cover every way someone can leave the United States.
Exit Is the Hard Part
The United States has never operated a comprehensive immigration exit-control system.
International travelers can leave through airline gates spread across an airport, while land borders create a much larger infrastructure problem. Thousands of vehicles can move toward Canada or Mexico each day, and collecting biometrics from the people inside them without creating major backups is very different from photographing someone standing at an airport inspection booth.
That helps explain the delay. It does not explain all of it. Congress first directed the federal government to create an automated entry-exit system in 1996, five years before the deadly terror attacks. The system Congress envisioned did not exist when Hazmi and Suqami overstayed their authorized stays, a point the 9/11 Commission later made explicitly.
Congress and successive administrations have returned to the issue repeatedly since then. New laws required integrated arrival and departure databases, biometric technology, and greater interoperability with law enforcement systems. In 2017, President Donald Trump directed DHS to expedite the biometric entry-exit system recommended by the 9/11 Commission.
A major change came last year. In October 2025, DHS finalized a rule allowing photographs to be required from noncitizens entering and departing the United States and removing earlier limits that had confined some biometric exit collection to pilot programs and specific ports. The rule took effect in December.
The legal authority, however, did not mean the system suddenly existed everywhere. In that same 2025 rule, CBP said it was still determining the best approach for biometric exit at sea and land borders, as well as for private aircraft. The agency had not completed cost-benefit analyses for several of those environments because it was still deciding how the systems would actually work.
CBP estimated that a biometric entry-exit system could be fully implemented at commercial airports and seaports within another three to five years. For vehicles and other land-border exits, the agency said it would continue studying and testing possible solutions.
That is where the timing becomes difficult to ignore. The entry-exit requirement began in 1996. The 9/11 Commission called for a biometric system in 2004. More than two decades later, CBP was still determining how parts of it should work.
Finishing the System
The House Intelligence Committee is now calling for a more complete approach. Its new report recommends that foreign nationals pass through control points when both entering and departing the United States. At land borders, the committee says the system should, as much as practical, direct departing foreign nationals through points where CBP can collect biometrics.
That would be a much bigger undertaking than adding more facial-recognition cameras at airport gates. Some land crossings would likely require changes in traffic patterns, infrastructure, and staffing. It would also require money.
DHS raised that issue again just weeks before the House report was released. In an August 2026 final rule dealing with the 9-11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee, the department said inadequate funding threatened both existing biometric operations and continued implementation of entry and exit programs. The statutory fee currently supporting part of that work is itself scheduled to expire in September 2027 unless Congress extends it.
That last part deserves attention because the next phase is not simply about collecting more photographs. A biometric system can confirm who someone is. It cannot tell a border officer that the person is connected to al-Qaeda, ISIS, a foreign intelligence service, or another threat unless the intelligence needed to make that connection has already been collected, shared, and entered into the systems used for screening.
The House Intelligence Committee makes that point directly. It warns that screening and vetting are heavily dependent on foreign intelligence collection. If information about a terrorist suspect does not exist in the relevant databases, even a perfectly functioning biometric system has very little to match against.
That is an important distinction. A completed biometric exit system would not have prevented 9/11 by itself. The attacks involved failures in intelligence collection, information sharing, watchlisting, and analysis that went far beyond immigration records. But the inability to reliably determine whether certain people were still inside the United States was one of those failures.
By August 2001, U.S. authorities had finally uncovered information showing that Hazmi had traveled to Los Angeles and that Mihdhar had recently returned to the United States. Both men were added to the TIPOFF watchlist on August 24. A lead was eventually sent to the FBI&#8217;s New York field office on August 28, but it was marked “Routine,” which gave the office 30 days to respond. The lead was sent just 14 days before September 11, and the search came far too late.
The United States has changed dramatically since then. Intelligence sharing improved, watchlisting expanded, aviation security was rebuilt, and border screening became far more sophisticated where those systems were actually implemented. The new House Intelligence Committee review credits those reforms with helping prevent another attack on the scale of 9/11 so far.
But its report also shows that one of the more basic recommendations remains unfinished. The government is far better today at knowing who enters the United States. The next step is finishing the system that tells us, with the same confidence, who left.

Ceremonies At The Pentagon Mark 20th Anniversary Of The September 11th Attacks

Congress Just Admitted A Key 9/11 Security Gap Remains

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Sarah Adams spent years in the CIA, working to disrupt terror attacks and protect the United States. Now, she’s warning that the next 9/11 is being planned right now — and we may not be prepared for it.
We asked Sarah to work with us to make sure our readers know what’s happening. Last week, she <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-terrorist-on-campus-rhf-popup">exposed a loophole</a> that allowed a terrorist to execute his deadly mission even after he was caught. Today, she offers a timely warning on how artificial intelligence is potentially radicalizing. — Tim Rice, D.C. Bureau Chief
***
On August 21, Canadian authorities arrested a Montreal teenager suspected of planning an attack on a school. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police say the investigation began weeks earlier after receiving intelligence from the FBI. Authorities allege the teenager had posted threatening messages on Telegram, and reporting has connected him to neo-Nazi ideology.
But there is another detail in this case that deserves our attention: According to the Canadian police, the suspect allegedly used artificial intelligence in the potential planning of an attack.
We do not yet know which AI system he used, what he asked it, or what it told him. The teenager has not been charged, and because he is a minor, Canadian law protects his identity. We should not get ahead of the investigation by claiming AI radicalized him or made an attack possible.
But this isn&#8217;t the first time AI has come up in a case like this. Artificial intelligence is beginning to show up in school attacks and disrupted plots involving young people in different countries and across very different ideologies. In some cases, investigators found the AI conversations after people were already dead. In others, authorities got there first.
We Have Already Seen This In The United States
On April 17, 2025, Phoenix Ikner opened fire at the Student Union at Florida State University. Robert Morales, a longtime university employee, and Tiru Chabba, who was on campus for work, were killed. Six other people were injured.
What investigators later found on Ikner&#8217;s ChatGPT account is now at the center of a federal wrongful death lawsuit brought by Chabba&#8217;s family and a criminal investigation launched by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. According to the lawsuit, Ikner asked ChatGPT about firearms, ammunition, mass shootings, schools, the media attention mass killers receive, and when the Florida State University Student Union would be busiest.
OpenAI disputes allegations that ChatGPT encouraged the shooting and says its responses consisted of publicly available information rather than encouragement to commit violence. But Florida is taking the issue seriously. In April, Uthmeier announced that the state&#8217;s Office of Statewide Prosecution had opened a criminal investigation after prosecutors reviewed the conversations between Ikner and ChatGPT. The state also subpoenaed OpenAI for records related to threats of harm, cooperation with law enforcement, and the Florida State shooting.
The courts will determine whether there is any legal responsibility for the role an AI system played before the attack. But parents, schools, and law enforcement have a more immediate problem. Someone contemplating a school attack can now spend weeks or months asking an artificial intelligence system questions that once might have required another human being to answer. And that conversation may become the one place where all those questions can be seen together.
Florida State Was Not An Isolated Case
A month after the Florida State shooting, a 16-year-old student attacked three girls at Vähäjärvi School in Pirkkala, Finland. Before the attack, the teenager sent a manifesto to a Finnish newspaper that researchers say was written with the assistance of ChatGPT. Analysis of the case found that the manifesto included the date, location, and intended targets of the attack.
Then came Tumbler Ridge. On February 10, 2026, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed eight people in British Columbia, including victims at a secondary school, before taking her own life. OpenAI later acknowledged that it had banned a ChatGPT account associated with Van Rootselaar months before the attack for violating its policies on violent content.
OpenAI did not report Van Rootselaar to law enforcement at the time because the activity did not meet the company&#8217;s threshold for an imminent threat. After the shooting, the company disclosed another account and cooperated with investigators. OpenAI has since said that under its updated procedures, the earlier activity would have been referred for additional threat review.
There is no public evidence that ChatGPT planned the Tumbler Ridge attack or told Van Rootselaar how to carry it out. But the case raises another part of this problem that we cannot ignore. Sometimes the warning may be in what the person is telling the machine.
This Is Not About One Ideology
It would be easy to look at Montreal and make this about neo-Nazi radicalization. But that would miss what is happening. In 2025, French authorities arrested a 17-year-old student in the Le Mans area on suspicion of preparing jihadist attacks in the name of ISIS. Investigators found a pledge of allegiance to ISIS and lists of potential targets that included schools. Subsequent reporting, confirmed by his attorney, revealed that the teenager had repeatedly used ChatGPT while developing his plans.
Singapore has seen the same intersection between youth radicalization and AI. Its Ministry of Home Affairs says a 17-year-old ISIS supporter detained in 2024 used an AI chatbot to generate his pledge of allegiance to ISIS and an attack manifesto. Authorities said he had completed significant preparations for a stabbing attack against non-Muslims and was only weeks away from carrying it out when he was arrested.
These cases are not the same. Their ideologies, targets, and motivations differ. What connects them is that young people moving toward serious violence are beginning to use the same AI technology.
AI Is Changing the Timeline
Singapore&#8217;s Coordinating Minister for National Security, K. Shanmugam, recently warned that artificial intelligence is compressing the time between criminal intent and action. Planning that once required days can increasingly be completed in minutes, leaving law enforcement less time to recognize what is happening and intervene. That is the problem.
AI does not have to create someone&#8217;s violent intent to change what he is capable of doing with it. Someone no longer has to know exactly what to search for. He can ask a question, ask a follow-up, request clarification, organize information, draft material, translate something, or continue refining what he is working on. He can do it without another human being ever hearing what he is asking.
For most people, that is part of what makes AI so useful. For someone already moving toward violence, it may also remove barriers that previously slowed the process down. Those barriers matter because every additional person someone has to approach and every additional step he has to take creates another opportunity for someone to see what is happening.
After nearly every school attack, investigators go backward. They find the social media accounts, read the manifesto, talk to classmates, interview parents and teachers, examine searches and purchases, and find previous threats or a fixation on earlier attackers. Then we try to determine who knew what and when.
Afterward, the picture often looks much clearer than it did before the attack. A question about a firearm does not make someone a school shooter. Neither does asking when a building is busy or reading about previous school attacks. But what happens when the same person is asking about weapons, mass shooters, casualties, targets, timing, security, manifestos, and the attention an attack would receive?
At some point, those individual pieces start telling us something different. That is what makes Florida State so important. If the allegations in the lawsuit are borne out, the significance may not be any single question Ikner allegedly asked ChatGPT. It may be what those questions looked like when viewed together. That is a problem schools, law enforcement, parents, and technology companies need to start thinking about before the next attack.
Which brings us back to Montreal. The FBI identified information concerning enough to pass to Canadian authorities, who investigated, placed the teenager under surveillance, and arrested him before the alleged school attack could take place. We do not know whether the teenager&#8217;s alleged AI activity had anything to do with how authorities found him, and we should not suggest that it did. But the difference in outcomes matters.
At Florida State University, investigators are examining AI conversations after Robert Morales and Tiru Chabba were killed. At Tumbler Ridge, OpenAI and investigators examined what had happened inside ChatGPT after eight people were dead. In Montreal, authorities allege AI had entered the potential planning of a school attack, but law enforcement got there first. That is where we should want these cases to end.
Figuring out how to recognize those warning signs without turning every AI conversation into a government surveillance device will not be easy. There are real privacy and civil-liberties concerns, and millions of teenagers use artificial intelligence every day without posing a threat to anyone. But the difficulty of drawing that line cannot become an excuse for ignoring what is already happening.
We have spent decades trying to identify the moment when grievance becomes intent and intent begins moving toward capability. Artificial intelligence may be changing how quickly someone can travel that distance. It may also hold a collection of warning signs that no individual parent, teacher, police officer, or friend can see on his own.
The next school shooter may have an AI assistant. We cannot wait until after the next attack to find out what he was asking it.

Boy using Ai to generate something or help solve work problems.

The Next School Shooter May Have A Secret Assistant

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Sarah Adams was a targeting officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s as cool as it sounds. She was in charge of disrupting terrorist attacks by identifying the people and organizations that pose a threat to the United States, a job that put her on the ground in the Middle East. 
She helped lead the investigation into the deadly terror attack on our diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, and then <a href="http://amazon.com/Benghazi-Know-Enemy-Cold-Investigation-ebook/dp/B0BHV5R7CT?ref_=ast_author_dp&amp;th=1&amp;psc=1">wrote the book on it</a>. Now, she’s warning the world that global terror threats are rising and we may not be prepared for it. The next 9/11 is being planned right now.
We asked Sarah to work with us to make sure our readers know what’s happening. Her first examination for The Daily Wire is on a loophole that allowed a terrorist to execute his deadly mission, even after we caught him. &#8211; Brent Scher, Editor-in-Chief
**
Four months after an ISIS supporter walked into a classroom and opened fire at Old Dominion University, an independent investigation revealed another disturbing part of the story: the university had no idea it had readmitted a convicted terrorist to its school.
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh’s terror ties were well known to the federal government. In 2016, the former Virginia Army National Guard soldier pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS. His case involved weapons he believed would be used in an attack against U.S. military personnel. He was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison, followed by five years of supervised release. He was released early, in December 2024.
Before he was even out of prison, Jalloh had applied to return to Old Dominion University. He was readmitted in January 2025 and approved for on-campus status. Old Dominion was left in the dark about why he had spent the previous years in federal prison.
Just over a year later, on March 12, 2026, Jalloh entered a classroom for the ROTC program, which trains college students to become commissioned officers in the armed forces when they graduate. After confirming that it was, he shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire.
Lt. Col. Brandon Shah was killed, and two cadets were wounded before students stopped the attack.
Last month, an independent review released by Old Dominion concluded that Jalloh had carried out a targeted terrorist attack against ROTC students and their instructor. It also documented the information gap that preceded it. No federal or state law-enforcement agency had notified Old Dominion about Jalloh&#8217;s terrorism conviction. His probation officer had not notified the university either.
That leaves a much larger question than what happened on one campus: who owned Jalloh&#8217;s risk?
Terrorists After Prison
For more than two decades, the United States built an enormous counterterrorism system around finding people before they could attack. Intelligence agencies mapped networks. Investigators tracked communications and money. Joint Terrorism Task Forces developed cases. Prosecutors charged hundreds of defendants with terrorism-related offenses, and courts sent them to federal prison.
Most of those sentences end. The ISIS cases of the last decade are now moving into that next phase. Defendants arrested during the height of the group&#8217;s western recruitment campaign have completed sentences and returned to American communities. More will follow.
Jalloh had not disappeared from government oversight. He was serving a five-year term of supervised release. His conditions allowed his probation officer, when appropriate, to require notification of third parties about risks associated with his criminal history or to make those notifications directly. Old Dominion was never notified.
This was not a simple case of a university failing to run a background check. Virginia law restricts public universities from asking applicants about criminal history on their admissions applications. Universities can only inquire after admission and before enrollment, allowing them to assess whether a student&#8217;s history presents a threat to the university community.
Old Dominion already had a process for doing that. Since 2022, the university has sent a voluntary criminal-history questionnaire to newly admitted freshmen, transfer students, and graduate students. The gap was readmitted students. Jalloh was a readmitted student, so he was never asked.
The federal government knew Jalloh had been convicted in an ISIS case involving a planned attack against American military personnel. It knew he had been released from prison, and he remained under federal supervision. Old Dominion knew none of that. That becomes harder to dismiss as an administrative oversight when considering where Jalloh eventually went. He did not randomly enter a classroom. He went to ROTC.
The independent investigators later concluded that if Old Dominion&#8217;s threat-assessment personnel had known about Jalloh&#8217;s terrorism conviction, it was highly likely the university would have tried to remove him from campus because of the potential threat he presented, particularly to military-affiliated members of the university community. The people responsible for protecting that community never received what they would have needed to make that assessment.
There is another unanswered part of the story. During its investigation, the law firm conducting Old Dominion&#8217;s independent review sought information from the FBI and the U.S. Probation Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Both declined to meet with the investigators. As a result, the review could not fully determine what happened during Jalloh&#8217;s federal supervision or why his terrorism history was never passed to the university.
We know where the system broke. We still do not fully know why.
This Was Already Coming
The larger problem did not begin at Old Dominion. Researchers had already warned that the United States was entering a new stage of the ISIS-era terrorism problem. A 2024 analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, using data from George Washington University&#8217;s Program on Extremism, found that 72 of 209 Americans arrested on ISIS-related charges had already been released. At least 73 more were expected to reach their scheduled release dates during the following decade.
The overwhelming majority had not been publicly linked to new terrorism activity. That matters. A terrorism conviction should not create a lifetime presumption that someone will attack again. People can disengage from extremist movements and rebuild their lives, and education and employment can be an important part of that process.
Researchers, however, also identified a smaller group who had been rearrested or reincarcerated after violating conditions of supervised release. Some returned to behavior remarkably similar to what brought them into the system in the first place.
One of those cases is particularly relevant because, by conventional measures, the individual appeared to be succeeding after prison. Ali Shukri Amin was 17 years old when he pleaded guilty in 2015 to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS. Amin had operated a prominent pro-ISIS social-media account and helped another young man travel to Syria. After cooperating with authorities and serving several years in federal prison, he was released in 2020.
His life afterward appeared to be a model of reintegration. He earned numerous technical certifications, graduated summa cum laude from Northern Virginia Community College, pursued graduate education in information technology management, and obtained professional employment.
At the same time, federal authorities determined that Amin had repeatedly violated the conditions of his supervised release. Court records examined by researchers showed that he had resumed prohibited contacts, including communication with convicted terrorist John Walker Lindh, and engaged in activity involving the dissemination of ISIS propaganda.
In 2023, Amin was returned to prison for violating supervised release. His case does not show that education failed. It shows that education, employment, and outward signs of stability do not necessarily tell us whether ideological disengagement has occurred. Those are different assessments, and confusing the two creates its own blind spot.
A Campus Is a Community
Universities make this problem particularly visible because they are designed to be open. Thousands of people move through campuses every day. Universities contain laboratories, research facilities, religious organizations, political groups, foreign students, major public events, and military programs. Many operate more like small cities than controlled facilities.
That does not mean that terrorism offenders should automatically be excluded from higher education. The problem at Old Dominion was not simply that Jalloh was allowed to pursue an education after prison. It was that nobody at the university knew enough to assess the risk.
There is a significant difference between giving someone a second chance and requiring the people responsible for security to operate blind. A terrorism conviction may involve extremist relationships, allegiance to a foreign terrorist organization, specialized knowledge, previous target selection, or a demonstrated interest in attacking a particular population. None of those factors prove someone will offend again, but they matter when assessing risk.
Old Dominion has already fixed one part of the problem. Following the attack, the university expanded its post-admission criminal-history questionnaire to include readmitted students. Someone returning through the same admissions pathway Jalloh used should now receive it.
The university has also increased resources for its Office of Threat Assessment, added staffing, and moved toward additional investigative and threat-management capabilities. Those are reasonable changes, but they still depend in part on someone disclosing their own history.
The independent review recognized that limitation. A voluntary questionnaire is only useful when the person filling it out decides to tell the truth. For someone who presents a serious threat, that is not much of a safeguard.
The review therefore pointed toward the issue at the center of the case: information sharing. Old Dominion already had a working relationship with the FBI&#8217;s Joint Terrorism Task Force before the attack. The university&#8217;s police chief regularly communicated with the task force, yet Jalloh&#8217;s terrorism history never reached the university. Investigators recommended that Old Dominion explore using that relationship to establish a notification process when terrorism defendants or people convicted of other particularly dangerous crimes seek to enroll or are already students.
That may be the most important recommendation in the report. The information existed. It never reached the people who needed it.
What Has Changed, and What Hasn&#8217;t
The Bureau of Prisons has addressed another part of Jalloh&#8217;s case. He received an early release, despite his terrorism conviction, because he completed the federal Residential Drug Abuse Program. The Bureau of Prisons has since closed that loophole for terrorism-related offenders.
That addresses how Jalloh got out early. It does not solve what happened after he got out. As of August 2026, there is no publicly announced national requirement directing federal probation offices, the FBI, or another federal agency to notify a university when a terrorism offender under federal supervision enrolls there. Virginia&#8217;s underlying admissions law also remains in place.
That does not mean that nothing has changed internally. Policies and practices can change without becoming public. But there is no publicly announced nationwide system that would guarantee a different outcome if the same circumstances occurred somewhere else tomorrow.
The concern is not that every terrorist offender leaving prison is waiting to attack again. The concern is that we already know some do not fully disengage. Some violate supervision. Some reconnect with extremist networks. Some return to the same behavior that put them in prison. A functioning system has to identify the individuals who continue to present a risk, and it cannot do that when the relevant pieces remain separated.
America spent the years after September 11, 2001, building one of the most sophisticated counterterrorism systems in the world. We became very good at finding terrorists. Now we have to get better at what happens after prison.
More terrorism offenders will complete their sentences in the coming years. They will go to work, attend universities, move into neighborhoods, and rebuild their lives. Successful reintegration should be the goal, but reintegration and threat management are not opposing ideas. Someone can deserve the opportunity to start again while their history still matters to those responsible for assessing a legitimate security risk.
Old Dominion has begun fixing what it can control. The larger gap remains. Mohamed Bailor Jalloh had been convicted of attempting to support ISIS. His case involved an intended attack against American military personnel. He remained under federal supervision and returned to a university with a significant military-affiliated population. The pieces were there, but no one connected them before he walked into an ROTC classroom.
The next terrorism offender leaving federal prison may go to work, return to school, or enroll at another American university. In most cases, that will simply be part of rebuilding a life. But when someone presents a genuine threat, the institution responsible for the people around them should not have to discover that history after an attack.
Someone needs to know, someone needs to make the assessment, and someone needs to own the risk.

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Sarah Adams

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