2026-09-11T13:04:34-04:00 / 福克斯新闻
2001年9月11日上午，贾韦德·阿里开车经过五角大楼，前往弗吉尼亚北部的工作岗位。
大约半小时后，美国航空77号航班撞入了这座建筑。
从福尔斯彻奇的办公室里，阿里能看到五角大楼方向升起的浓烟。一年后，他走进了这座仍在修复的建筑——当时他已在国防情报局反恐办公室工作，这一转变生动展现了美国发生的翻天覆地的变化。
特朗普证实五角大楼将举办9/11袭击25周年纪念活动，否认缺席世贸遗址的报道
成千上万勇敢的美国人在数十年后仍因9/11有毒暴露后遗症离世。(iStock)
“那是我职业生涯中非常诡异、怪异且超现实的时刻，”阿里告诉福克斯新闻数字频道。
阿里的职业生涯最终从国防情报局转向新成立的国土安全部，之后又进入联邦调查局，让他得以近距离观察美国在本土遭遇最致命的外国袭击后构建的庞大国家安全体系。
25年后，这一体系呈现出一种悖论。
从最明确的衡量标准来看，9/11后的体系让另一场规模堪比9/11的袭击变得难上加难。美国再也没有遭遇过规模和复杂程度接近9/11的恐怖袭击，那场袭击造成2977人死亡。美国情报和军事行动瓦解了策划袭击的基地组织大部分网络，同时新设机构、扩大监视权限、建立监视名单和情报共享体系，以确保其他组织无法利用美国防御体系的同样漏洞。2026年美国情报界评估报告称，反恐行动削弱了基地组织和伊斯兰国快速重建领导层、策划针对美国本土大规模袭击的能力。
但针对2001年威胁的成功并未消除恐怖主义。它反而改变了恐怖主义的形态。
美国青年被网络激进化，因在社交媒体上仇视国家而涉嫌恐怖袭击的案件被破获
一名男孩于2022年9月11日周日，指向纽约国家9/11纪念博物馆反思池的中心区域。(邦妮·卡什/UPI/彭博社通过盖蒂图片社拍摄)
如今最棘手的威胁越来越多地涉及被网络激进化的个人、几乎无预警迹象的小型细胞、试图从远方煽动袭击的外国恐怖组织，以及能够无需劫持飞机就能深入美国境内的日益增多的网络和国家支持的威胁。
因此，9/11事件25年后的问题并不简单是美国人是否更安全。
他们在一类袭击中更安全——却越来越容易受到其他类型袭击的威胁。
人工智能网络攻击可能在华盛顿反应过来之前就切断美国电力供应
2025年10月22日周三，弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿五角大楼的鸟瞰图。(比尔·克拉克/CQ-罗尔公司通过盖蒂图片社拍摄)
9/11后构建安全国家
美国的应对规模堪称空前。
袭击发生仅两个多月后，乔治·W·布什总统签署法案成立了运输安全管理局。运输安全管理局表示，该局的成立是当时美国政府历史上规模最大的民用工程，联邦政府迅速承担起机场旅客和行李安检的责任。
次年，国会成立了国土安全部，整合了22个联邦机构和办公室的全部或部分职能。国土安全部于2003年3月开始运作，如今拥有超过26万名员工，业务范围涵盖边境和航空安全、网络安全、情报和应急响应等多个领域。
变革远不止于新设机构。
乔治·W·布什总统在9/11后讨论成立国土安全部。(盖蒂图片社)
9/11委员会发现，袭击前的体系崩溃比人们熟知的“未能串联线索”问题更为严重。责任分散在各个机构之间，信息未能得到一致共享，也没有任何一个实体有权整合情报并推动跨国内外壁垒的联合行动。委员会得出结论，“责任和问责制模糊不清”。
在接下来的二十年里，华盛顿一直在努力填补这些漏洞。
布朗大学战争成本项目估计，9/11后的战争及相关义务已耗资约8万亿美元。该项目估计，自国土安全部成立以来，美国已在本土预防和反恐的国土安全工作上投入了超过1.1万亿美元。
基地组织并未一夜消失
阿里表示，以25年后的后见之明来看，人们很容易忘记最初的威胁有多持久。
即便在美国入侵阿富汗、击毙或抓获基地组织高级头目并给该组织带来巨大压力后，该组织仍在设法重返美国本土。
阿里在国土安全部任职期间表示，官员们多次挫败涉及基地组织及其分支机构的袭击阴谋，包括2006年起源于英国、旨在炸毁飞往北美的跨大西洋航班的阴谋。
随后威胁再次演变。
奥萨马·本·拉登于2011年5月在巴基斯坦被美军击毙。但这并未标志着圣战恐怖主义时代的结束，此后数年出现了新的、在某些方面更棘手的挑战。
伊斯兰国从伊拉克基地组织演变而来，在伊拉克和叙利亚战争期间迅速扩张，并于2014年6月宣布成立自封的哈里发国。在鼎盛时期，该组织控制着伊拉克和叙利亚的大片领土和数百万人口，同时鼓励或指挥其境外的袭击。美国国务院报告称，伊斯兰国从伊拉克基地组织演变而来，并在2013年和2014年大幅扩张。
阿里表示，对美国反恐官员而言，工作重心越来越从识别有组织团体派遣的受训特工，转向寻找可能在西方国家内部被激进化的个人。
随后又出现了另一种转变：不同意识形态的独行袭击者发动袭击，通常与海外组织没有直接的行动关联。
“大多是独行演员、独行作案者，与海外团体没有关联，没有前往海外，也没有受到海外人员的指使，”现为密歇根大学福特公共政策学院实践副教授的阿里说道。
国土安全部部长宣布更改部门徽章，以反映该部门“每天都处于战争状态”
一名美国海军海豹突击队队员在支援“持久自由行动”的阿富汗任务中，为队友掩护前进，目标是疑似基地组织和塔利班据点。(梅/盖蒂图片社)
恐怖组织变成了手机屏幕
这种转变如今已体现在政府自身的威胁评估中。
国家情报总监办公室2026年年度威胁评估报告称，伊斯兰恐怖组织开展“大规模复杂袭击”的能力受挫，促使它们转向信息作战和宣传活动，旨在煽动或协助身处或有途径进入西方国家的人员发动袭击。
该评估报告称，2025年美国至少发生了三起伊斯兰恐怖主义袭击事件，执法部门当年挫败了至少15名美国本土伊斯兰恐怖主义策划者。根据评估报告，约一半被挫败的策划者与伊斯兰恐怖分子有过在线联系，或受到外国恐怖组织的启发。
2025年新年期间的事件证明了这一漏洞：来自德克萨斯州的美国公民沙姆苏丁·贾巴尔驾驶一辆皮卡车撞向新奥尔良波旁街的人群，造成14人死亡。联邦调查局将此次袭击描述为恐怖主义行为，并表示贾巴尔在接受极端主义观点前日益孤僻。
袭击发生后的几天里，联邦调查局表示，近年来独行作案者和通过网络被激进化的小型细胞对美国本土构成了最大的恐怖主义威胁，原因正是这些人极难被发现和挫败。
这几乎与9/11问题完全相反。
9/11袭击需要19名劫机者、海外领导层、资金、国际旅行、飞行训练和多年的策划。调查人员面临的挑战是收集分散在不同机构的信息碎片，并迅速将它们拼凑起来。
独行作案者最初可能留下的线索要少得多。
阿里表示，许多近期的袭击者或涉嫌策划者此前并未进入联邦调查局或当地执法部门的视线，这让当局面临一项极其艰巨的任务：识别那些在转向暴力前可能不会犯下明显罪行的人。
“所以没错，我们在某一类威胁面前更安全了，”阿里说，“但再说一遍，我们并未免受恐怖主义的威胁，其他类型的威胁更难识别或阻止。”
卡什·帕特尔披露联邦调查局特工悄悄挫败的令人不寒而栗的节日恐怖袭击阴谋
路透社由IntelCenter发布的一张照片显示，索马里伊斯兰反叛组织青年党成员在摩加迪沙，1月1日。(IntelCenter/路透社)
为过去的威胁打造的安全体系？
不断变化的威胁也引发了更广泛的辩论：9/11后设立的机构是否过于庞大、过于昂贵，或过于专注于前一个时代的危险。
摩根·墨菲曾在特朗普首届政府期间担任国防部长的新闻秘书，后来在特朗普白宫任职。他认为，华盛顿在9/11威胁上堆砌了过多的官僚体系，而其他漏洞却在不断扩大。
“运输安全管理局的特工仍在对老奶奶搜身、阻碍出行，而北京却通过克林顿、布什、奥巴马和拜登留下的供应链，将廉价电视和自拍杆送进我们的客厅，”墨菲说，“我们花了二十年时间搜查美国乘客，而我们的对手却渗透进了我们的家庭和企业。”
“珍珠港事件后，美国的高明之处在于我们为战斗而构建体系。9/11事件后，我们却为流程而构建体系，”墨菲告诉福克斯新闻数字频道，“真正的安全意味着国内的主权和国外的威慑力——封闭的边境、理顺的供应链，以及让敌人畏惧我们的能力。”
西奥·沃尔德曾在特朗普首届政府期间担任司法部法律政策办公室代理助理司法部长，以及总统国内政策副助理。他提出了类似的批评，认为9/11后的华盛顿过于依赖庞大的官僚体系、扩大的政府权限和中东战争。
“乔治·W·布什和华盛顿的执政精英按照其政治逻辑应对9/11事件：成立庞大、笨拙的官僚机构，推动缺乏有效监督的特殊法律权限，并在中东发动地面战争，”沃尔德告诉福克斯新闻数字频道。
“这些战争并未让我们更安全，这些法律权限被用来对付美国人，而官僚体系充斥着浪费，且被证明几乎无法运转，”他说。
沃尔德认为，过去25年的教训应该是建立一个更精准的国家安全模式。
“现在我们有了更清晰的认识。当我们灵活应变、精准打击真正的敌人时，美国人才最安全，”他说。
下一次袭击可能与9/11截然不同
当前的挑战已不限于恐怖主义。
移民海关执法局逮捕了一名由拜登政府释放进入美国的疑似基地组织成员。(ICE)
2026年的情报评估报告警告称，中国、俄罗斯、伊朗、朝鲜和非国家勒索软件组织仍在试图进入美国政府网络和私人关键基础设施，以开展间谍活动、谋取经济利益，并可能在未来实施破坏。报告还警告称，人工智能正在加速网络能力的发展，若干敌对国家正在开发能够威胁美国本土的导弹系统。
始于基地组织特工受训驾驶客机的安全格局，如今已扩展到定义远为宽泛的领域：传播到个人手机上的恐怖主义宣传、插入计算机网络的恶意代码、针对关键基础设施的袭击，以及能够从数千英里外针对美国人的敌对国家。
但阿里表示，威胁的演变不应让华盛顿得出原威胁已经消失的结论。
他表示，9月11日之前数年的核心教训之一是，必须在新兴恐怖组织有时间和空间发展行动能力之前对其进行打击。
“当这些恐怖威胁出现时，无论是在海外还是国内，你必须在它们积蓄力量发动袭击之前施加压力，”阿里说。
他认为，危险在于反恐工作在华盛顿的优先事项清单上排名过低，以至于美国开始重现9/11前的自满情绪。
“恐怖主义作为一种战术可能永远无法被彻底击败，”阿里说。
在他亲眼目睹五角大楼升起浓烟的25年后，阿里对美国是否更安全的回答，反映了后9/11时代的核心矛盾。
美国构建了庞大的体系来防范下一场9/11袭击。
这似乎确实让另一场9/11袭击的实施难度大大增加。
2026年6月13日日落时分，两面旗帜在新泽西州巴约讷的“泪滴9/11纪念地”的围栏上飘扬，背景是曼哈顿下城和一号世界贸易中心。(加里·赫肖恩/盖蒂图片社)
如今更棘手的问题是，这个体系能否识别出与9/11截然不同的袭击。
埃弗拉特·(埃菲)·拉赫特是福克斯新闻数字频道的记者，拥有超过15年的冲突、全球事务、人权和政治问责报道经验。她执导并制作了200多段纪录片片段，足迹遍布40多个国家，记录了冲突、人道主义危机、腐败、人口贩运、基于性别的暴力以及重大世界事件背后的人类故事。
拉赫特的报道将她带入中东、欧洲、亚洲和非洲的冲突区和危机地区。她的工作包括揭露人口贩运网络、揭露叙利亚境内的伊斯兰国地下酷刑监狱、记录乌克兰战争，以及采访高级政治人物和世界各国领导人。她也是战争开始后进入俄罗斯报道的西方记者之一，带来了普京反对派的证词。拉赫特曾获得2022年佩雷斯和平中心和平奖，2023-2024年担任密歇根大学奈特-华莱士新闻研究员，还曾两次获得洛克沃尔卓越报道奖。她拥有传播学学士学位和政治学硕士学位。
America built a fortress after 9/11. Then the threat started hiding in plain sight
2026-09-11T13:04:34-04:00 / Fox News
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Javed Ali drove past the Pentagon on his way to work in northern Virginia.
Roughly half an hour later, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building.
From his office in Falls Church, Ali could see smoke rising from the Pentagon. A year later, in a turn that captured how dramatically the country had changed, he was walking into the still-damaged building himself — now working in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism office.
TRUMP CONFIRMS PENTAGON PLANS FOR 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11 ATTACKS, DISPUTES REPORT ON GROUND ZERO ABSENCE
Thousands of brave Americans still dying from 9/11 toxic exposure effects decades later.(iStock)
“It was a very eerie and odd and surreal moment in my career,” Ali told Fox News Digital.
Ali’s career would eventually take him from the DIA to the newly created Department of Homeland Security and later the FBI, giving him a front-row seat to the enormous national security architecture America constructed after the deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil.
Twenty-five years later, that architecture presents something of a paradox.
By one of its clearest measures, the post-9/11 system appears to have made another attack on the scale of 9/11 far harder. The United States has not suffered another terrorist attack remotely approaching the scale and complexity of 9/11, which killed 2,977 people. U.S. intelligence and military operations dismantled much of the al Qaeda network that planned it, while new agencies, surveillance authorities, watchlists and intelligence-sharing systems were designed to ensure that another group could not exploit the same seams in American defenses. The 2026 U.S. intelligence community assessment said counterterrorism operations have degraded al Qaeda and ISIS’s ability to quickly rebuild their leadership and plan large-scale attacks against the U.S. homeland.
But success against the threat of 2001 did not eliminate terrorism. It helped change it.
AMERICAN YOUTH RADICALIZED ONLINE, BUSTED IN SUSPECTED TERROR PLOTS AFTER HATING COUNTRY ON SOCIAL MEDIA
A boy points towards the center of the reflecting pool at the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York on Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022.(Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Today’s most difficult threats increasingly involve individuals radicalized online, small cells with little warning signature, foreign terrorist organizations seeking to inspire attacks from afar, and an expanding layer of cyber and state-sponsored threats capable of reaching deep inside the United States without hijacking an airplane.
The question 25 years after 9/11, therefore, is not simply whether Americans are safer.
They are safer from one kind of attack — while increasingly exposed to others.
AN AI CYBERATTACK COULD TURN OFF AMERICA’S LIGHTS BEFORE WASHINGTON EVEN UNDERSTANDS WHY
Aerial view of the Pentagon building in Arlington, Va., on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025.(Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
Building a security state after 9/11
The scale of the American response was extraordinary.
Just over two months after the attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration. TSA says its creation amounted to the largest civilian undertaking in U.S. government history at the time, with the federal government rapidly assuming responsibility for airport passenger and baggage screening.
The following year, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, combining all or part of 22 federal agencies and offices. DHS began operating in March 2003 and today employs more than 260,000 people across missions ranging from border and aviation security to cybersecurity, intelligence and emergency response.
The changes went far beyond new agencies.
President George W. Bush discusses creating the Department of Homeland Security following 9/11.(Getty Images)
The 9/11 Commission found that the pre-attack breakdown was deeper than the familiar failure to “connect the dots.” Responsibility had been scattered across agencies, information was not consistently shared, and no single entity was empowered to integrate intelligence and drive joint action across the foreign-domestic divide. The commission concluded that “responsibility and accountability were diffuse.”
Washington spent the next two decades trying to close those gaps.
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that post-9/11 wars and related obligations have cost roughly $8 trillion. It estimates that more than $1.1 trillion has been spent on homeland security efforts to prevent and counterterrorism inside the United States since DHS was created.
Al Qaeda didn’t disappear overnight
Ali said it can be easy, with 25 years of hindsight, to forget how persistent the original threat remained.
Even after the United States invaded Afghanistan, killed or captured senior al Qaeda figures and put the organization under extraordinary pressure, the group continued attempting to find ways back into the homeland.
During Ali’s years at DHS, he said officials repeatedly confronted plots involving al Qaeda and its affiliates, including a 2006 plot originating in Britain to bomb transatlantic airliners traveling to North America.
The threat then evolved again.
Usama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan in May 2011. But rather than marking the end of the era of jihadist terrorism, the following years produced a new and in some ways more difficult challenge.
ISIS grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq, expanded rapidly amid the wars in Iraq and Syria and declared a self-described caliphate in June 2014. At its height, the group controlled vast territory and millions of people in Iraq and Syria while encouraging or directing attacks far beyond its borders. The State Department reported that ISIS had emerged from al Qaeda in Iraq and expanded dramatically during 2013 and 2014.
For U.S. counterterrorism officials, Ali said, the center of gravity increasingly shifted from identifying trained operatives sent by an organized group to finding individuals who might be radicalizing inside Western countries.
Then came another shift: attacks by lone offenders across different ideologies, often with no direct operational relationship to an organization overseas.
“Mostly lone actors, lone offenders, not tied to groups overseas, not traveling overseas, and not being directed by people overseas,” said Ali, now an associate professor of practice at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.
DHS CHIEF ANNOUNCES CHANGES TO ITS SEAL TO REFLECT THAT DEPARTMENT IS ‘AT WAR EVERY SINGLE DAY’
A U.S. Navy SEAL provides cover for teammates advancing on a suspected al Qaeda and Taliban location during missions in Afghanistan supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.(Mai/Getty Images)
The terrorist organization became a phone screen
The transformation is now reflected in the government’s own threat assessments.
The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said setbacks to the ability of Islamist terrorist groups to conduct “large-scale complex attacks” have pushed them toward information operations and propaganda designed to inspire or enable people in or with access to Western countries.
The assessment said there were at least three Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States in 2025 and that law enforcement disrupted at least 15 U.S.-based Islamist terrorist plotters that year. Roughly half of those disrupted plotters had some online contact with Islamist terrorists or were inspired by foreign terrorist organizations, according to the assessment.
The vulnerability was demonstrated on New Year’s Day 2025, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas, drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. The FBI described the attack as an act of terrorism and said Jabbar had become increasingly isolated before adopting extremist views.
In the days after that attack, the FBI said lone actors and small cells who radicalize online had posed the greatest terrorism threat to the homeland in recent years precisely because they can be so difficult to detect and disrupt.
That presents almost the inverse of the 9/11 problem.
The 9/11 plot required 19 hijackers, overseas leadership, financing, international travel, flight training and years of planning. The challenge for investigators was collecting pieces of information held across different agencies and assembling them quickly enough.
A lone actor may offer far fewer pieces to collect in the first place.
Ali said many recent attackers or alleged plotters had not previously come onto the radar of the FBI or local law enforcement, leaving authorities with the extraordinarily difficult task of identifying people who may not commit an obvious crime until they move toward violence.
“So yes, we are safer from a certain type of threat,” Ali said, “but again, we are not immune from terrorism, and other types of threats are much more difficult to identify or stop.”
KASH PATEL REVEALS THE CHILLING HOLIDAY TERROR PLOTS FBI FEDERAL AGENTS QUIETLY STOPPED
A handout released to Reuters by IntelCenter shows members of Somalia’s Islamist rebel group al Shabaab in Mogadishu Jan. 1.(IntelCenter Handout/Reuters)
A security system built for yesterday?
That changing threat has also fueled a broader debate over whether the institutions created after 9/11 became too large, too expensive or too focused on the dangers of the previous era.
Morgan Murphy, who served as press secretary to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration and later worked in the Trump White House, argues that Washington built too much bureaucracy around the 9/11 threat while other vulnerabilities grew.
“TSA agents still pat down grandma and gum up travel while Beijing wires our living rooms with cheap TVs and selfie sticks through the supply chain handed to them by Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden,” Murphy said. “We spent two decades frisking American passengers while our adversaries plugged themselves into our homes and businesses.”
“The genius of America after Pearl Harbor was that we built to fight. After 9/11, we built to process,” Murphy told Fox News Digital, “Real security means sovereignty at home and lethality abroad — a sealed border, an untangled supply chain, and enemies who fear us.”
Theo Wold, who served as acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy during the first Trump administration, offered a similar critique, arguing that post-9/11 Washington relied too heavily on large bureaucracies, expansive government authorities and wars in the Middle East.
“George W. Bush and the D.C. governing elite responded to 9/11 the way their politics demanded: create large, unwieldy bureaucracy, push for special legal authorities with limited oversight and activate ground wars in the Middle East,” Wold told Fox News Digital.
“Those wars didn’t make us safer, the legal authorities were wielded against Americans, and the bureaucracy is full of waste and has proven nearly unworkable,” he said.
Wold argued that the lesson from the past quarter-century should be a more narrowly targeted national-security model.
“Now we know better. Americans are safest when we are nimble and focus ruthlessly on targeting real enemies,” he said.
The next threat may not look like 9/11
The challenge now extends beyond terrorism.
ICE arrests a suspected al Qaeda member released into the U.S. by the Biden administration.(ICE)
The 2026 intelligence assessment warns that China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and non-state ransomware groups continue seeking access to U.S. government networks and private critical infrastructure for espionage, financial gain and possible future disruption. It also warns that artificial intelligence is accelerating cyber capabilities and that several state adversaries are developing missile systems capable of threatening the homeland.
The security landscape that began with al Qaeda operatives training to fly passenger jets has therefore expanded into something far less geographically defined: terrorist propaganda transmitted to an individual’s phone, malicious code inserted into a computer network, attacks on critical infrastructure and state adversaries capable of reaching Americans from thousands of miles away.
For Ali, however, the evolution of the threat should not lead Washington to conclude that the original threat has vanished.
One of the central lessons of the years before Sept. 11, he said, was that emerging terrorist organizations have to be confronted before they have the time and space to develop operational capability.
“When these terrorist threats start to emerge, whether it’s overseas or here, you have to put pressure on them before they gather momentum to carry out operations,” Ali said.
The danger, he argued, would be allowing counterterrorism to fall so far down Washington’s list of priorities that the country begins recreating the complacency that existed before 9/11.
“Terrorism as a tactic is probably never going to be defeated,” Ali said.
Twenty-five years after he watched smoke rise from the Pentagon, Ali’s answer to whether America is safer reflects the contradiction at the heart of the post-9/11 era.
The United States built a massive system to prevent the next 9/11.
It appears to have made another 9/11 far harder to execute.
Two flags flutter on a fence in front of Lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center at the Tear Drop 9/11 Memorial at sunset on June 13, 2026, in Bayonne, New Jersey.(Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)
The harder question now is whether that system can recognize the attack that doesn’t look anything like it.
Efrat (Effie) Lachter is a reporter for Fox News Digital with more than 15 years of experience covering conflict, global affairs, human rights and political accountability.She has directed and produced more than 200 documentary segments across more than 40 countries, documenting conflicts, humanitarian crises, corruption, human trafficking, gender-based violence and the human stories behind major world events.
Lachter’s reporting has taken her into conflict zones and crisis areas across the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa. Her work has included uncovering human trafficking networks, revealing an ISIS underground torture prison in Syria, documenting the war in Ukraine and interviewing senior political figures and world leaders. She was also among the Western journalists who entered Russia after the war began to bring testimonies from Putin’s opposition. Lachter is the recipient of the 2022 Peres Center for Peace Award and was a 2023–2024 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. She also won two Rockower Awards for Excellence in Reporting. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication and a master’s degree in political science.