The intelligence was sitting right there in the files.
Two presidents read it, filed it away, and nearly 3,000 Americans paid the price.
And a chilling CIA smoking gun exposed the 9/11 warning that Bill Clinton ignored.
What Ratcliffe Released and Why It Matters Now
Ratcliffe declassified 71 President’s Daily Brief products in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, consistent with President Donald Trump’s historic transparency initiative.
This collection represents the Agency’s single largest release of declassified CIA PDB products related to 9/11, providing unprecedented transparency on America’s most sensitive intelligence publication from the years before and the day after one of the darkest moments in the nation’s history.
“In an act of exceptional transparency, we honor the memory of those we lost on that tragic Tuesday by releasing 71 declassified products,” Ratcliffe said.
Presidential Daily Briefs are delivered to the Commander in Chief and a handful of other senior officials and summarize the half dozen or so most pressing intelligence matters of the day. These are not rough field reports. They are polished, high-confidence documents placed directly in front of the most powerful person on earth.
The CIA declassified 71 intelligence memos about bin Laden, the Taliban and Afghanistan’s opium trade spanning the presidential administrations of both Clinton and former President George W. Bush.
What the Memos Actually Said — and When They Said It
Newly declassified documents show the CIA repeatedly warned Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike at the United States, as far back as three years before the 9/11 attacks.
The warnings were not vague. They were not buried in footnotes. Some of them named the method.
Specific threats about a plane hijacking began appearing as early as December 1998 under Clinton via a PDB titled “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” “Reporting suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking,” it reads.
The document noted that “Two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport. . . Some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training.”
Read that again. Hijack training. A trial run at a New York airport. Security checks evaded. This was December 1998 — nearly three full years before the towers fell.
Other intelligence memos stated that bin Laden’s militants were training to hijack commercial airliners, experimenting with crude chemical or other unconventional weapons, doing dry runs to test US airport security, plotting to take hostages and trafficking narcotics to fund terrorism plans.
“Bin Ladin and his associates also agreed to expand narcotics exports to Europe and the US using legitimate businesses as conduits,” a February 1998 PDB reads. The intelligence community was tracking his financing, his network, his movements — and still the plot got through.
The memos date back to before the October 1998 arrest of four men linked to bin Laden involved in bombing the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The embassy bombings should have been a fire alarm. The intelligence community treated them as confirmation that the threat was real. But real action never followed.
The intelligence reports to the White House also consistently found that bin Laden was in no danger of being expelled by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, even though some senior figures worried his plotting against the US could put the Taliban in jeopardy. “The Taliban is not likely to give up bin Ladin for less than full diplomatic recognition and significant reconstruction aid,” said one intelligence memo from March 26, 2001.
And then came August 6, 2001. The document that became the most famous and most debated piece of paper in modern American history.
“Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US,” the briefing states. The PDB was titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Thirty-six days later, 19 Islamic terrorists directed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda boarded four commercial aircraft and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans.
Bin Laden had routinely appeared in PDBs under Clinton and Bush, including 40 from January 20 to the day before the attack. Forty briefings in roughly eight months. The information was there. The pattern was there. The bureaucracy failed.
The Deep-State Failure Behind the Tragedy — and What Families Are Still Demanding
The intelligence community did not miss this because the information was hidden. It missed it because the permanent national-security bureaucracy — the same apparatus that later turned its institutional weight against President Trump — lacked the will, the coordination, and the accountability to act on what its own analysts had written down and handed to two presidents.
The products trace the story of CIA analysts’ evolving understanding of al-Qaeda and efforts to highlight and warn of Usama Bin Ladin’s attack plotting despite sparse, vague, and imperfect information. That framing is generous. The December 1998 memo naming a New York airport and hijack training was not sparse or vague. It was specific. And it was ignored.
Briefs prepared for President George W. Bush in early 2001 focused in part on bin Laden’s “experimentation by crude means to make and deploy biological agents.” A report a month before the attacks indicated bin Laden’s commitment “to conduct terrorist attacks in the US,” noting that 1998 al-Qaeda attacks on US embassies “demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks.”
But the institutional failure did not end on September 11, 2001. It continued for 25 years in the form of withheld documents, redacted files, and unanswered questions about who else may have known what — and who may have helped.
“For 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families,” said Terry Strada, national chair of the group 9/11 Families United, who lost her husband in the attacks, to loud cheers and applause from the crowd in New York City.
In New York, family members of the victims, many carrying pictures of their loved ones, joined Vice President JD Vance and four former US presidents at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
Strada called out President Barack Obama, who was at the memorial, for vetoing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, in 2016. Congress later overrode the veto, allowing 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia over its alleged role in the attacks.
The nephew of Lisa Marie Terry, who was also killed during 9/11, claimed during the ceremony that “the Deep State has hidden the truth about what happened 25 years ago.”
The nephew of victim Lisa Marie Terry said, “President Trump: you are our last hope, release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia while what’s left of the victims’ families are still alive to see it.”
That is a direct appeal to the one president who has actually moved the needle on transparency. “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, which is why he authorized the declassification and release of hundreds of pages of documents related to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement.
The release of 71 PDBs is a genuine act of accountability. It is also, for anyone willing to read the documents honestly, an indictment of the permanent intelligence bureaucracy that surrounded two presidents with warnings and still let the worst terrorist attack in American history happen on its watch.
That same bureaucracy spent years after 2016 pointing its institutional machinery at a different target — a president it despised rather than the jihadists it was built to stop. The pattern is worth keeping in mind as the country reads these memos and asks how a government that knew this much could have failed this completely.
The 9/11 Commission found in 2004 that the failure was one of imagination. These documents suggest it was something more stubborn than that. The imagination was there. The warnings were written down. What was missing was the will to act — and the accountability that should have followed when the system collapsed so catastrophically.
Americans deserve every page. The families of nearly 3,000 murdered people have waited 25 years. The least the government can do is stop hiding the file.
Sources: The Daily Caller, CIA.gov, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, The Epoch Times, Bloomberg