The warnings did not begin a month before September 11.

They reached back years.

On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, the CIA released 71 declassified President’s Daily Brief products showing what the nation’s most senior leaders were told about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida between February 1998 and September 12, 2001.

The collection runs more than 100 pages and is the largest public release of CIA analysis related to 9/11.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe announced the release and put the records directly before the American people:

The documents are not internet speculation, anonymous recollections or a partisan reconstruction written decades later.

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They are intelligence products prepared for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

The Central Intelligence Agency says the release gives the public new access to the intelligence picture that developed before the attacks and to the assessments written immediately afterward. The agency presented the disclosure as part of President Trump’s transparency initiative and as a tribute to the 2,977 people murdered on September 11, along with the officers who later died in the fight against terrorism.

What the pages show is not one perfect warning that named the date, flight numbers and targets.

They show something more sobering: a threat picture that kept sharpening while the government failed to assemble its pieces into an effective defense.

A February 1998 brief discussed terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction. An April brief reported that the Taliban had no intention of surrendering bin Laden, whom it regarded as a guest and ally from the fight against the Soviet occupation.

By July 1998, analysts judged it plausible that bin Laden placed a high priority on striking the United States and noted his interest in chemical and biological weapons.

Then came an assessment that should stop every reader cold.

The Associated Press reports that a September 1998 brief said bin Laden’s preferred option was to strike America on its own soil, especially Washington, and raised the possibility that al-Qaida could fly an explosives-packed aircraft into an American city.

That was almost three years before the towers fell.

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A December 1998 brief described possible hijackings. According to the document, conspirators had beaten security during a trial run at an unidentified New York airport, and members of bin Laden’s network had received hijacking training.

Other briefs tracked bin Laden’s financing, support network and pursuit of radioactive material for a dirty bomb. By June 1999, analysts believed his operatives had experimented with explosives in an attempt to increase their destructive power.

One of the newly public briefs was sent to President Bush just eleven days before the attacks:

The release also adds depth to the famous August 6, 2001 brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” The newly available record shows that it was not an isolated document appearing from nowhere.

It sat at the end of a long trail of reporting about domestic targets, hijacking, surveillance and operatives working inside the country.

By August 2001, analysts wrote of suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other attacks. They noted surveillance of federal buildings in New York and approximately 70 full-field FBI investigations considered related to bin Laden.

The public deserves to understand that distinction.

Intelligence rarely arrives as a finished police report. It comes as fragments: a source report, a suspicious trip, a financial connection, a training pattern, a surveillance lead.

The job of national-security institutions is to connect those fragments before the enemy turns them into an operation.

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In 2001, that system failed.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission later identified deep barriers to information sharing between agencies. Its recommendations helped produce the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center so domestic and foreign threat reporting could be analyzed across bureaucratic boundaries.

The newly released briefs give Americans a chance to inspect the raw institutional history behind those reforms instead of relying only on summaries.

The release totals 71 presidential intelligence briefs and more than 100 pages of newly public analysis:

Transparency does not mean forcing the documents to prove more than they prove.

The CIA document collection remains heavily redacted in places to protect names and sensitive details. The records do not show that officials knew the precise time and method of the coming attack and deliberately allowed it to happen.

They do show repeated, serious warnings that bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States, that aircraft and hijacking were contemplated, and that his network could plan for years.

The archive spans both administrations and continues through September 12, 2001. The final product records a source’s account that the attacks had been planned for two years and that the U.S. Capitol had also been targeted.

Reading the sequence matters because it reveals how threat reporting accumulated over time rather than arriving in one cinematic flash. Americans can now compare the language, dates and changing assessments for themselves.

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That is damning enough.

The National Archives’ Public Interest Declassification Board had pressed President Trump for the release of high-priority 9/11 Commission records, including the summary of presidential briefs and memoranda from interviews with senior Clinton and Bush administration officials. The board said those materials should be released as fully as national security permits.

In a June 30 letter, the board renewed that request and emphasized the 9/11 Commission’s own expectation that its records eventually receive declassification review. Its work covers intelligence products and interviews that can explain how senior officials interpreted and acted on them.

The CIA briefs answer only part of that demand. The interview memoranda and any remaining releasable records could show where information stalled, what options were discussed and which assumptions shaped decisions before the attack.

President Trump’s administration has now opened a major part of that record.

More should follow.

Families who lost husbands, wives, children, parents and friends have waited a quarter century for the fullest possible accounting. They should not have to accept permanent secrecy merely because the truth may embarrass institutions or former officials.

The lesson of the new files is not that intelligence work is easy.

It is that warnings are worthless when agencies cannot share them, leaders do not force action, and bureaucracies protect their compartments more effectively than they protect the country.

Twenty-five years later, the names of the victims remain sacred. So does the public’s right to know what its government knew, when it knew it and how it responded.

Release the records. Read them honestly.

Learn the lesson.

Never forget must mean more than remembering the attack. It must mean refusing to repeat the failure.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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