A quarter century after the September 11 terrorist attacks, CIA Director John Ratcliffe has released 71 President’s Daily Brief documents covering February 1998 through the morning of September 12, 2001.
The disclosure is the largest public release of presidential intelligence tied to the attacks in CIA history.
The collection contains more than 100 pages, many still heavily redacted despite the passage of 25 years.
Ratcliffe described the release as “an act of exceptional transparency” and said it was “consistent with President Donald Trump’s historic transparency initiative.”
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Ratcliffe also honored the intelligence officers who pursued the terrorists responsible for the slaughter.
“25 years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our Nation, but they did not break us,” he said.
The documents reveal that warnings about Osama bin Laden and attacks inside the United States were not confined to a single briefing delivered shortly before September 11.
They stretched across two presidential administrations and repeatedly described hijackings, domestic targets, and bin Laden’s desire to bring terrorism directly onto American soil.
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Americans have long known about the August 6, 2001 briefing given to President George W. Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Its now infamous title was “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.”
That memorandum said members of al Qaeda had lived in or traveled through the United States “for years.”
It also warned that the terrorist network “apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.”
The same briefing cited FBI information showing “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.”
WATCH:
The document leaked in 2002 and was formally declassified for the September 11 Commission in 2004, after becoming a political weapon in Washington.
The newly released collection makes clear that the Bush briefing was not some isolated alarm buried among routine paperwork.
It rested on years of intelligence reports delivered during the Clinton administration, when officials were already being warned that bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States.
A September 10, 1998 briefing said bin Laden preferred an attack on American soil and viewed Washington as a leading target.
Even more alarming, the CIA warned that his terrorist organization might use an airplane packed with explosives against an American city.
Another briefing, dated December 4, 1998, carried the title “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.”
The CIA wrote that available reporting indicated bin Laden and his allies “are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking.”
That warning arrived nearly three years before hijacked passenger jets struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
It was not vague chatter about unrest in some distant corner of the globe, but intelligence specifically discussing hijacked aircraft and attacks within the United States.
The December briefing also reported that two members of an operational team had “evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.”
Other members of the network reportedly had already received training connected to hijacking operations.
The warnings continued through the following years, covering efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, experiments involving chemical and biological agents, kidnapping schemes, and possible targets around Washington.
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By the summer of 2001, the intelligence stream had become a steady drumbeat indicating that a major operation was approaching.
The September 11 Commission later counted dozens of President’s Daily Brief items involving bin Laden or al Qaeda during 2001 alone.
Friday’s disclosure includes 18 documents from the Bush administration before the attacks, along with a CIA product prepared at 4 a.m. on September 12, 2001.
The documents do not contain a precise prediction identifying four aircraft, exact targets, and a specific Tuesday morning.
They do, however, show that federal officials were warned repeatedly about bin Laden’s intentions, his interest in hijackings, and his determination to attack Americans at home.
Separate declassified FBI and CIA records have also raised questions about possible Saudi activity inside the United States during the same period.
Those files identified Saudi government employees Mutaeb al Sudairy and Adel al Sadhan as filming Washington landmarks in December 1998.
Those landmarks were later treated as potential al Qaeda targets, while the men reportedly operated around a Southern California support network eventually connected to the hijackers.
Former FBI counterintelligence chief William Evanina said the pair “may have served as an advance team.”
The timing is difficult to ignore, especially since the airplane warning appeared during the same year those Saudi figures entered the American record.
Washington’s accountability machine may move at a glacial pace, but these documents leave little room for pretending the danger came without years of flashing red lights.
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