Donald Trump’s administration has released more than 100 pages of declassified briefings provided to US presidents in the years before September 11, 2011, marking what the CIA is calling its largest-ever disclosure of intelligence about Osama bin Laden and events leading up to the attacks over the last 25 years.
The Independent reports that Friday’s release of 71 presidential briefs includes a document from 1998 during Bill Clinton’s administration discussing a potential operation led by Bin Laden to hijack a commercial airliner, and that two accomplices may have successfully evaded security checks in a trial run.
The heavily redacted documents also discuss “potential US targets” and reports from “questionable sources” that Bin Laden was preparing for an attack on US soil.
Other documents appear to trace how CIA analysts came to understand al-Qaeda’s operations and intentions under Bin Laden, stressing his desire to bring “war to America,” despite what analysts characterized as limited or incomplete intelligence, as they delivered warnings to White House officials about the terror network.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said he declassified the documents “in an act of exceptional transparency” to “honour the memory of those we lost on that tragic Tuesday.”
The documents – with heavy redactions to protect the names of informants – do not appear to produce any major new revelation about the attacks but a paint a fuller picture of what intelligence officers were sharing with President Cinton and George W Bush in the years leading up to 9/11, with memos from February 1998 through September 12, 2001 showing incomplete strands of intelligence presented by analysts in their typically detached style.
Those findings largely reinforce what was previously reported by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the UUnited States and its 2004 report that examined threats from al-Qaeda.
