25 Years After 9/11: Michael Masters on the Lessons Learned and Threats Ahead

As the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, approaches, Harry Hurley spoke with Michael Masters, National Director and CEO of the Secure Community Network, about the lasting lessons of the attacks and today’s evolving security threats. Masters reflected on the failures to connect intelligence before 9/11 and emphasized how federal, state, local, law enforcement, and community organizations have since improved coordination. He also warned that emerging threats–including artificial intelligence, online radicalization, and foreign and non-state actors–require continued vigilance and a new approach to security. The discussion underscored the importance of preparedness, information-sharing, community partnerships, and protecting religious freedom while ensuring that the lessons of 9/11 are never forgotten.

Listen Below:

Harry Hurley: Standing by on the Guy Benson Show Newsmaker Hotline, Michael Masters. He is the National Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Secure Community Network. Michael, welcome to the Guy Benson Show.

Thank you very much for having me today. Great to be with you.

I know we’re going to talk a little bit about September 11, 2001, and I really look forward to your content and your participation. I want to share with you just briefly that it’s hard to believe it has been 25 years.

I was on the air doing the same morning show that I am doing to this very day when, all of a sudden, in the nine o’clock hour, the national news came on to say a small plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Well, that was wrong from the get-go. That was a CBS News top-of-the-hour report, it turns out, because nobody would ever imagine–not even in the movies, I don’t think–that the terrorist enemy would use commercial airplanes, belly-filled with fuel, targeted to be American-named planes, doing it on 9/11, 9-1-1, with small passenger loads on these planes that were going from east to west.

I mean, everything was calculated, and they turned these planes into deadly weapons, as we all know. And then, really, life changed because we looked at things very, very differently. We were united for a period of time. That was beautiful. And then we became very divided ever since.

I remember that first hour. I had a daughter up in North Jersey at the College of New Jersey. It was very, very scary. As you know, Michael, all the cell phones went down. You couldn’t reach anyone. They were scared. We as parents were scared. We as Americans were scared–something we had never seen before.

Airlines, everything except the President of the United States, not eligible to be in the sky. Talking about shooting planes out of the sky–I mean, really tough stuff, surreal stuff.

Twenty-five years later, have we learned a single cotton-picking thing, Michael?

Michael Masters: Well, I think one of the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report, to your point at the top of your statement, was that things were not imagined, and it was a failure of imagination.

We had clearly gathered enough signals to potentially detect and disrupt the plot, but we failed to connect those dots. And history is repeated by those who don’t remember it.

We are now dealing with a threat environment where we’re not needing to simply connect the dots. We need to identify which dots matter in literally a tsunami of dots.

And we cannot allow our imaginations to fail us again. We do that at the peril of American lives, the lives of our allies, and the safety and security of the country.

Harry Hurley: That is such an important comment, Michael. Let me double down with you. I second everything that you just said, and you just jogged my memory about the famous Jamie Gorelick firewall.

For people who have forgotten or didn’t know in the first place, we did have information, but we had departments that specifically, by design, did not share information with one another. In other words, just government creatures that kept the information to themselves, where I believe what you’re talking about, Michael–the connection of the dots–could have taken place.

Have we learned our lesson? And I think we have, to an extent. Obviously, the Department of Homeland Security was created. Usually, things that are created at a time of a national emergency hastily fail miserably. I think Homeland Security is successful.

People complain about this, that, or the other–maybe elements of Homeland Security, ICE, and some things. I don’t, but many do.

What are your thoughts relative to whether we are communicating–I would hope–a whole lot better now than we did prior to September 11, 2001? Your thoughts.

Michael Masters: First of all, there’s no question that we’re communicating much better than we were on September 10, 2001.

But the threat environment is more complex. It is more dynamic right now than it has ever been at any point in this nation’s history or in the history of the world, with the advent of AI and really a borderless society.

That means that even those incredible systems that were built–and to your point about Homeland Security, people can make comments or they can have observations–who in this country would get on an airplane today the way that we used to on September 10, 2001, versus the way we do it now today?

There are incredible men and women who are out there protecting and serving our country, from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, at local, state, and federal levels.

But 25 years after those attacks, the systems that we created need to be reexamined and reimagined for the threat environment we are dealing with today, which is increasingly AI-enabled and perpetuated by foreign state and non-state actors in a non-kinetic way–the same individuals that we’re dealing with kinetically right now on battlefields around the world.

Harry Hurley: In addition to the great spoken-word content that you are getting from Michael Masters, the National Director and CEO of Secure Community Network, there is a great piece on the digital platform of Fox News, FoxNews.com, on this whole topic about 25 years later and that we need a new model to prevent the attacks.

Michael, do you have a vision? Do you have an idea of what that new model should look like?

Michael Masters: Well, unfortunately, the Jewish community, which is the organization Secure Community Network that I oversee, works with 550 Jewish communities across the country and more than 13,000 organizations.

We’ve had to engineer a new model. We’ve had to recognize that a troubled individual can consume content today, ideate, and then move to violence tomorrow.

So we have built a national intelligence and threat-management effort that’s connecting Jewish communities around the country, coordinating with state, local, federal, and law enforcement, while we are also working in those Jewish communities to protect our houses of worship, our community centers, our senior centers.

And we’re going to have to keep doing it. And it affects every faith because it fundamentally affects religious freedom and the preservation of our democracy.

Harry Hurley: Michael, you’ve done it again. You said something that just makes me want to say this to you because I know you’ll have a comment about this.

We learned a lot. You know, Israel has dealt with the terrorist enemy in the way that we learned on September 11th long before we did.

As you know, El Al–their flights–the cockpits were fortified for years prior to when we started doing it. You could visit with the pilot and have pictures, and sometimes that still happens right before the flight. But you know what I’m talking about: once they shut that door, you’re not getting in there.

We learned the hard way, didn’t we?

Michael Masters: We certainly did, and we need to continue to remember those lessons.

The lessons of 9/11 came at the cost of 3,000 American lives in the immediate aftermath, and over 60,000 killed and wounded in the aftermath, including many of our service members.

We owe it to the people in this country of all faiths, and fundamentally as a country, to ensure that anyone can walk into a synagogue, a church, or a temple and do so proudly displaying their faith and upholding the values of this country.

And to do that, we’re going to need to be much more proactive. We’re going to need to adapt to the threat environment. We need to identify and connect those dots so that we can stop these bad actors at their doorsteps before they get to ours, whether they are in the Middle East or they’re in Middle America.

Harry Hurley: Michael Masters, National Director and CEO of Secure Community Network, it is, I think, rather impressive that it’s almost 25 years since September 11, 2001.

And I think if we were privy to the daily threat assessment, I don’t know how we would sleep at night. I mean, the bad actors are enemies. They are trying every single day.

And the often-recited phrase is, “They just have to get it right once.” You know, we have to stop them every time.

I think it’s remarkable that we’re very, very close–just days away–to exactly 25 years, and to not have had a major terrorist attack since then. I think that speaks to the phenomenal job done by our officials who do this, Michael.

Michael Masters: It absolutely speaks to the dedication of the men and women of law enforcement working collaboratively with so many communities.

Sometimes we get good. Sometimes we get close and lucky.

We had an incident on March 12th in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where a radicalized Islamist extremist affiliated with Hezbollah ideology tried to drive an explosive- and fireworks-laden truck into a school and was literally inches away from massacring close to 140 people, including over 100 preschoolers.

It would have been the worst massacre of American children in U.S. history.

It was because of preparation, training, coordination, and phenomenal response from the community, law enforcement, and private security that that was prevented.

We need to recognize that reality.

And to the point that you made at the top of that comment about what keeps us up at night, what I think we need to do is adopt a posture as a community and a country that our ethos is going to be: We’re going to work to keep our adversaries and our bad actors up at night.

Let them lose some sleep, understanding what we’re doing to prevent them from undertaking attacks that are seeking to undermine and destroy our democracy.

Harry Hurley: I like that. I like that a lot.

And remember, in New Jersey, there was a 10-year plan to attack one of our military installations. And we got lucky.

You remind me–everything you say reminds me of something that I think is value-added to your conversation, Michael.

They plotted for 10 years. They slept here. They were next-door neighbors. “Hey, can I take your kids to school today?”

I mean, they assimilated into our community, and then, like that, they’re ready to go.

We got lucky. Chatter at the last second–we got lucky.

So you’re right about that. We’ve been good over 25 years. We’ve also been lucky.

Michael Masters: Well, and I think to that point, we have to recognize that many of our adversaries, as a country, as a Western democracy, measure time not in clocks but in calendars.

And so we have to take a longitudinal view of this threat. It’s not going to be over today. It is not going to be over tomorrow.

And we need to work together to put the systems in place. And it’s moving faster than ever, which means that we need to make sure that our law enforcement agencies and our departments, from the FBI to local, state, and federal law enforcement, have the resources they need while we’re also empowering the community.

You know, the Jewish community spends between $765 million and $1 billion every year on our own security.

That is the cost of being a faith-based community here in this country. It’s a cost we have to pay because we can’t afford to not allow religious freedom to ring true here.

But it comes at a burden. We all have to shoulder that burden together.

Harry Hurley: Michael, you’re very interesting. It’s been really an honor to present you today on the program. Be well.