The Trump administration released 71 formerly classified Presidential Daily Briefs showing that Presidents Clinton and Bush received repeated, specific 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 announced the disclosure Friday as part of a broad transparency push by President Trump. The documents, some previously described in press reports and others surfacing publicly for the first time, lay out a paper trail of intelligence assessments stretching from mid-1998 through the summer of 2001. Taken together, they show that the threat of a catastrophic bin Laden attack on American soil was not a surprise buried in some analyst's filing cabinet. It was placed directly in front of two sitting presidents.
The release came on the same day that both Clinton and Bush attended a remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Neither former president immediately responded to requests for comment, the New York Post reported.
The earliest warning in the released batch dates to a document prepared for Clinton's daily intelligence briefing on September 10, 1998, three full years before the Twin Towers fell. That document stated plainly that bin Laden's "preferred option" was to strike the United States on its own soil in Washington, and that the same group responsible for the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania "may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city."
That was not a vague, hedged assessment. It named the method, an airplane loaded with explosives, and the target geography, a U.S. city. And it landed on the president's desk.
By December 4, 1998, the warnings had grown sharper. A document titled "Bin Laden Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft" told Clinton that "some members of the Bin Laden network have received hijack training, according to various sources." It went further: a source had revealed that bin Laden "might implement plans to hijack a US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December" and that two members of an Al Qaeda operational team "had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport."
Two operatives had already tested airport security in New York. And passed.
The documents reveal that the intelligence community was not sending one-off memos. The warnings arrived in waves. A document from earlier that same year, July, based on the sequencing of the released files, acknowledged that analysts 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 unmistakable.
By February 1999, the threat picture had expanded beyond hijackings. A document warned that "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." U.S. officials ultimately concluded bin Laden did not obtain such a weapon, but the assessment underscored the scale of ambition the intelligence community attributed to Al Qaeda.
A July 21, 1999 CIA memo added another data point: bin Laden had claimed his group "made a dry run of a bombing of the FBI headquarters" in Washington and suggested the operation would occur "soon." The CIA itself noted "reservations about the source," but the memo still made its way into the intelligence pipeline.
Clinton, for his part, has long insisted he took the bin Laden threat seriously. In a combative September 2006 interview on Fox News Sunday with then-host Chris Wallace, he said:
"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."
In that same interview, Clinton accused Wallace of doing "Fox's bidding on this show" and called it "your nice little conservative hit job on me." The declassified documents now let the public judge for itself what Clinton knew and when he knew it. The Clinton Foundation has faced its own share of scrutiny over the years, but the questions raised by these intelligence files go to a far graver matter than organizational management.
On February 11, 2000, Clinton's intelligence briefing flagged a seized manifesto that identified possible attack targets "such as the Statue of Liberty" in New York Harbor and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. A separate memo prepared for that same day's brief 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."
The drug trafficking angle was not peripheral. A State Department fact sheet from December 2000 stated that "Afghan territory under Taliban control is now the largest producer in the world of illicit opium, which is refined into heroin," and that "narcotics-related income strengthens the Taliban's capacity to provide support for international terrorism." The Taliban, which harbored bin Laden, was bankrolling its operations through poppy cultivation, and the U.S. government documented it.
Analysts also relayed assessments that bin Laden was mulling an attack on a shopping mall in Washington, D.C. The specific mall was not identified in the released documents.
Clinton left office in January 2001. The intelligence trail did not stop. It followed him out the door and landed on the desk of his successor.
On July 25, 2001, less than seven weeks before the attacks, a Presidential Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" was prepared for President George W. Bush. The document stated that "Al-Qa'ida 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." It noted that after U.S. missile strikes on bin Laden's Afghan base in 1998, bin Laden "told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington."
The same briefing flagged that the FBI had found "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, weeks before the attacks, 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. The intelligence community was not asleep. But the political leadership did not connect the dots in time.
Bush told the bipartisan 9/11 Commission in April 2004 that he had received no "actionable intelligence" related to bin Laden prior to the attacks. He confirmed he had seen the report about hijackers potentially taking control of an airliner to secure the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who was serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison, but insisted his administration had not received intelligence indicating passenger jets could be used as missiles.
The September 10, 1998 document, however, had warned of an "explosive-packed airplane" flying into a U.S. city. That document was prepared for Clinton, not Bush. Whether its contents were ever briefed forward to the incoming administration remains one of the open questions the released files do not answer.
The broader Clinton record has drawn renewed public attention in recent months. Clinton recently turned his 80th birthday into a fundraising event at a Hamptons estate, a reminder that the former president remains deeply embedded in the political fundraising circuit even as these documents reframe the legacy of his presidency.
Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's national security adviser on September 11, issued a public apology to the families of victims hours before the document disclosure. Her words were direct:
"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."
She added:
"I will 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."
Rice's statement stands as the most explicit acknowledgment by a senior Bush administration official that the government failed to act on the intelligence it possessed. Whether that acknowledgment satisfies the families who lost loved ones is another matter entirely.
The document release is part of a broader declassification effort by the Trump administration, which has also released long-secret files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The pattern is consistent: open the vault, let the public see what its government knew, and let accountability follow.
The Clintons, meanwhile, continue to create headlines of a different sort. Hillary Clinton recently drew criticism from an Iowa congresswoman over her stance on intelligence sharing, an ironic backdrop given the intelligence failures now documented in her husband's presidential briefings. And the Clinton scandals of the 1990s remain a fixture of public memory, though the declassified files suggest the most consequential failure of that era was not personal misconduct but a failure to act on clear warnings of mass murder.
Some of the 71 released Presidential Daily Briefs had been previously described in press reports. Others appear to be reaching the public for the first time. The full scope of what remains classified, and what the documents reveal beyond the excerpts reported so far, is not yet clear.
What is clear is the timeline. From September 1998 through August 2001, the U.S. intelligence community told two presidents, in writing, that bin Laden was planning to hijack American planes, that his operatives had tested airport security, that he wanted to strike Washington, and that the FBI was running dozens of active investigations into his network on American soil. Nearly 3,000 people died anyway.
The families who gathered at Ground Zero on Friday deserved to know what their government knew, and when it knew it. Now they do. The only question left is whether anyone besides Condoleezza Rice has the honesty to say they failed.
