The Trump administration released 71 formerly classified Presidential Daily Briefs showing that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush received repeated, specific intelligence warnings that Osama bin Laden was plotting to hijack American passenger jets, years before nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe authorized the disclosure on Friday, the same day Clinton and Bush stood together at a remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. The timing placed both former presidents within steps of the site where the Twin Towers once stood, even as the newly public documents laid bare just how much their administrations had been told, and how little either did to stop what was coming.
The documents, part of a broader transparency push that has also included long-secret files on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., paint a picture of an intelligence community that sounded alarm after alarm to two successive White House teams. Some of the briefs had been previously described in press reports, but many are reaching the public eye for the first time.
The earliest and most striking document in the batch is a Presidential Daily Brief dated September 10, 1998, three full years before the attacks. It told Clinton that bin Laden's "preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington" and that the same group responsible for the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania "may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city."
That was not a vague, hedged assessment buried in caveats. It named the method, named the target country, and named the city bin Laden wanted to hit.
By December 4, 1998, the warnings had grown sharper. A brief titled "Bin Laden Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft" told Clinton that members of bin Laden's network had received hijack training and that the Al Qaeda leader "could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft." The same document warned that bin Laden might move before the start of Ramadan on December 20 and that two operatives "had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport."
A trial run. At a New York airport. Reported directly to the president of the United States.
An earlier document from July of that year, the exact year is not specified in the released material, acknowledged that intelligence agencies had "received four reports from highly questionable sources suggesting Usama Bin Laden is making plans to conduct an attack in the United States." The sourcing was weak, but the pattern was forming.
The debate over how the United States teaches the history of these attacks continues to generate controversy, but the newly released documents add hard evidence to the record that the threat was identified, documented, and delivered to the Oval Office well before the towers fell.
The briefs did not limit themselves to aviation threats. A February 1999 intelligence document warned Clinton that bin Laden was actively seeking weapons of mass destruction. "If Bin Laden succeeded in buying a chemical or biological weapon, his past behavior and statements indicate he would have no reservations about using it and he would begin searching for a suitable target," it read.
By July 21, 1999, a CIA memo reported that bin Laden had told associates his group "made a dry run of a bombing of the FBI headquarters" in Washington and that the operation would occur "soon." The agency flagged reservations about the source and suggested the intelligence may have been unreliable, but the claim still made its way into the president's daily reading.
A February 11, 2000 brief described a seized manifesto that identified possible targets "such as the Statue of Liberty" in New York Harbor and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. A separate document from the same date described bin Laden as pushing a "global drug trafficking" network to export heroin and opium to Europe and the United States as part of "his anti-West campaign."
A State Department fact sheet from December 2000 backed up that narcotics angle directly. "Afghan territory under Taliban control is now the largest producer in the world of illicit opium, which is refined into heroin," it stated. "Narcotics-related income strengthens the Taliban's capacity to provide support for international terrorism."
So by the end of Clinton's second term, the intelligence community had told him that bin Laden wanted to hijack American planes, fly explosives into American cities, bomb federal buildings, acquire chemical and biological weapons, and fund the whole operation with Afghan drug money. Clinton left office in January 2001. Bin Laden struck eight months later.
The document trail did not stop when Bush took office. The infamous memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US", dated July 25, 2001 in the released files, told the new president that Al Qaeda "members, including some who are US citizens, have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."
The same memo noted that after US missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden "told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington." It flagged FBI findings of "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
By August 2001, Bush's daily brief reported that the FBI was "conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related." Seventy active investigations, and still no decisive action before September 11.
When Bush sat before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission in April 2004, he claimed he had received no "actionable intelligence" related to bin Laden prior to the attacks. He confirmed he had seen a report about hijackers potentially seizing an airliner to secure the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, then serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison, but insisted his administration had not received intelligence that passenger jets could be used as missiles.
The declassified briefs complicate that claim. The September 1998 document delivered to Clinton, which would have been available to any incoming administration willing to review its predecessor's files, explicitly referenced an explosive-packed airplane flown into a US city. Whether Bush's team reviewed Clinton-era briefs is not addressed in the released material, but the intelligence community clearly had the concept on paper years before the attacks.
Meanwhile, a military judge recently threw out the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the 9/11 plot, adding another layer of frustration for families still waiting for full accountability a quarter-century later.
Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's national security adviser on September 11, issued a public apology to the families of the victims just hours before the documents went public. Her statement carried a weight that years of Washington hedging had not:
"Those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11."
Rice added that she would "always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured." It was the most direct admission of failure by a senior Bush administration official in years, and it arrived on the same day the paper trail behind that failure became public.
Clinton, for his part, addressed his own record in a combative September 2006 interview on Fox News Sunday with host Chris Wallace. Pressed on whether he had done enough to stop bin Laden, Clinton fired back:
"I got closer to killing [bin Laden] than anybody has gotten since. I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it."
He then turned on Wallace, accusing the host of doing "Fox's bidding on this show" and delivering "your nice little conservative hit job on me." The newly released briefs suggest the question was more than fair.
Representatives for both Clinton and Bush did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the declassified documents.
Both former presidents attended the remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday, standing at the site where the Twin Towers collapsed and nearly 3,000 people perished. The ceremony has become an annual ritual of national grief, but the simultaneous release of the intelligence files gave it an uncomfortable edge, two presidents who had been warned, standing where the warnings went unheeded.
The Ground Zero anniversary has itself become a flashpoint in recent years. New York City's current mayor faced sharp criticism over his plans to attend the ceremony, and 9/11 families have petitioned to keep certain officials away from the sacred site altogether.
Ratcliffe framed the document release in simple terms:
"Today I authorized the release of 71 Presidential Daily Briefs to honor the lives of those killed on 9/11."
Honoring those lives means reckoning with what the government knew and when it knew it. The 71 briefs now in public hands show that two administrations, one Democratic, one Republican, received specific, repeated warnings about bin Laden's intentions to use hijacked aircraft against American targets. The intelligence was not perfect. Some sources were flagged as unreliable. But the pattern was unmistakable, and neither president acted decisively enough to prevent the worst terrorist attack in American history.
Political sensitivities around 9/11 remain raw across the spectrum. Even elected officials have stumbled over how to address the anniversary, a reminder that the wounds of that day still cut deep enough to end careers.
The families of the fallen deserved the truth twenty-five years ago. They are getting it now, and the record shows that the people who could have acted had every reason to.
