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Federal bulletin warns of encouraged attacks

September 11, 2026

Federal authorities warn, ahead of the attacks' 25th anniversary, that overseas terrorist groups keep urging strikes on American soil.

Hijackers from al-Qaeda crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the deadliest terrorist strike on American soil, and the US president answered nine days later by proclaiming a War on Terror.

Key facts

ABC News reports a Homeland Security bulletin. Overseas terrorist groups keep urging strikes inside America, the document warns, and have circulated propaganda tied to the attacks before past anniversaries. The FBI, in the same bulletin, expects some actors within the country to attempt violence or fake threat scares as the quarter-century mark arrives, moving with scant warning. A department spokesperson adds a second front at home, where people hostile to government and bent on destabilizing society plan violence of their own, and says artificial intelligence speeds such plotting, widens its reach and makes it harder to spot.

The BBC reports the long arc. Investigators for the 9/11 Commission faulted Washington for imagination, policy, capability and management that all fell short, and spies that morning held scattered fragments they never assembled into a picture. Lord Jonathan Evans, MI5's chief from 2007 to 2013, says Britain judged after the attacks that al-Qaeda and those around it towered over every other danger to the country. Washington then rebuilt its spy apparatus from the ground up, the BBC reports, standing up a counterterrorism center near the capital and a single director charged with moving intelligence among 18 agencies, while the scramble to head off a follow-up wave produced abuses of human rights by America and its partners. Axios takes up what the attacks left behind for national security a quarter of a century on, and The New York Times treats a response that started in heroism and later curdled.

The accounts part over the danger's present form. In one, America faces something sharper and more tangled than in 2001, the old centralized networks now joined by scattered actors. In the other, the al-Qaeda threat runs unbroken across 25 years, redirected rather than displaced by the rebuilt agencies and by later shocks, among them Moscow's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas-led raid out of Gaza on 7 October 2023. What holds across every version is the bulletin's warning, the FBI's worry about the anniversary, the commission's finding of failure, and the counterterrorism center and directorship built afterward.

Lord Jonathan Evans, who led MI5 from 2007 to 2013, said that after the 2001 attacks "the assessment was that by far the most pressing security threat to the UK was the terrorist threat from al-Qaeda and associated individuals and groups".

Still developing

The bulletin names no specific plot, target or date tied to the 25th anniversary, and the acceleration it attributes to artificial intelligence carries no figure. The extent of the change in the terrorism threat environment since September 11, 2001 sits unresolved, one account putting it as heightened and increasingly complex, another tracing an unbroken al-Qaeda threat through the reorganisation of the 18 US intelligence agencies.

How settled the reporting is

Reported 95% · Contested 1% · Developing 4%

Sources