Years — and Days — Before 9/11, Security Officials Warned of Hijacks, Documents Show
The 71 newly released briefs show repeated warnings about hijackings, biological agents and dirty bombs, but not the specific 9/11 plot, officials said.
- On Friday, the CIA declassified 71 presidential daily briefs from years before September 11, marking the 25th anniversary. CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the release "an act of exceptional transparency."
- Declassified documents reveal U.S. intelligence officials repeatedly warned that al-Qaeda terrorists were plotting to use airplanes, documenting Bin Laden's interest in striking Washington and New York years before the 2001 hijackings.
- Briefs detail that conspirators evaded security checks during trial runs at airports, and "some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training," alongside reports of Bin Laden's biological weapons experimentation.
- According to The Associated Press, the files do not indicate officials knew the specific September 11 plot beforehand; the White House simultaneously released related documents through the National Archives.
- Post-9/11 reforms created the National Counterterrorism Centre to improve interagency information sharing, a structural evolution following the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and reshaped U.S. national security.
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14 Articles
Sydney Morning Herald
‘May fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city’: CIA releases pre-9/11 Bin Laden briefings
The documents dating from 1998 to 2001 detail intelligence that US government officials had gathered about al-Qaeda in the lead up to the hijackings that killed nearly 3000 people and upended American national security.
The 9/11 Files Show America Heard The Warning And Missed The War
The most disturbing thing in the newly released 9/11 files is not how little the United States knew before September 11, 2001. It is how much it knew and still failed to understand what al-Qaeda was becoming. The newly released 9/11 Commission summary of the President’s Daily Briefs, or PDBs, shows that years before the attacks, intelligence reaching the president warned that Osama bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States. It reported…
More than 100 pages of declassified CIA intelligence documents reveal that the U.S. administration was repeatedly warned years before the September 11 attacks about possible airstrikes and the al-Qaeda threat.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified the Presidential Daily Briefings, presented to the White House before the September 11, 2001 attacks, which contained assessments of the al-Qaeda threat. A striking piece of information emerged from the documents: the White House had been warned repeatedly before the attacks.
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