The Trump administration released 71 formerly classified Presidential Daily Briefs showing both Presidents Clinton and Bush received repeated, specific warnings that Osama bin Laden was plotting to hijack American aircraft, warnings that went unheeded before nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe authorized the release on Friday, calling it an effort "to honor the lives of those killed on 9/11." The documents, part of a broad transparency push by President Trump, lay bare a paper trail of intelligence alerts stretching from mid-1998 through the summer of 2001, alerts that described hijack training, dry runs at American airports, and even the possibility of a plane packed with explosives being flown into a U.S. city. The New York Post reported that representatives for both Clinton and Bush did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The disclosures landed the same day Clinton and Bush stood together at a remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the very site where the deadliest of the attacks unfolded. Hours before the documents went public, former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice issued a rare personal apology to the families of victims.
Among the most striking documents is a Presidential Daily Brief dated September 10, 1998, prepared for President Clinton. It warned that bin Laden "late last month said his preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington" and that the same group behind the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania "may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city." That warning arrived more than three years before the Twin Towers fell.
AP News confirmed the September 1998 brief specifically identified Washington, D.C. as bin Laden's preferred target and flagged the explosive-laden aircraft scenario. A separate intelligence document from July 1998 noted 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."
By December 4, 1998, the warnings had grown more granular. A PDB 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." The same document described an operational team that had conducted a trial run at an unidentified New York airport, and two members of that team had successfully evaded security checks during the exercise.
Fox News reported that the December 1998 briefing also noted bin Laden "could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft" and that the hijacking plot might be carried out before the start of Ramadan on December 20. Al Qaeda operatives had penetrated airport security at a New York facility nearly three full years before the September 11 hijackers boarded their flights.
A February 1999 intelligence document went further still, warning 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."
On July 21, 1999, a CIA memo reported that bin Laden's group claimed to have "made a dry run of a bombing of the FBI headquarters" in Washington, D.C., and suggested the operation would happen "soon." The CIA itself added a caveat: analysts had "reservations about the source." But the memo reached the president's desk all the same.
By February 11, 2000, Clinton's intelligence aides flagged that a seized manifesto identified possible attack targets including the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The same briefing 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 December 2000 State Department fact sheet, also among the released materials, noted 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." Clinton, now 80, has never fully accounted for why these cascading warnings did not produce a decisive disruption of Al Qaeda's operations on American soil.
The documents also show that the intelligence pipeline did not dry up when the White House changed hands. A PDB dated July 25, 2001, and titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," was prepared for President Bush. It stated plainly 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."
That same briefing reported that after U.S. missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998, "Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington." It also noted 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, barely a month before the attacks, Bush's daily brief reported the FBI was "conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related." Seventy active investigations. And still the hijackers boarded four commercial flights on the morning of September 11.
When Bush appeared before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission in April 2004, he claimed he had received no "actionable intelligence" related to bin Laden before the attacks. He did, however, confirm to the commission that he had seen the report warning hijackers could seize 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.
Rice, who served as Bush's national security adviser on September 11, offered a different tone on Friday. In her 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, she had acknowledged that "America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient" against the growing terrorist threat. On Friday, she went further, telling families of victims:
"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."
The newly released documents cast fresh scrutiny on Clinton's most public defense of his counterterrorism record. In a September 2006 interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace pressed the former president on whether he had done enough to stop bin Laden. Clinton pushed back sharply:
"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 himself, accusing the host of partisan motives:
"You did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me."
What Clinton did not address, and what the declassified PDBs now make visible to the public, is the sheer volume and specificity of the warnings his administration received. A trial run at a New York airport. An explicit scenario involving an explosive-laden plane flown into an American city. Hijack training confirmed by multiple intelligence sources. A dry run against FBI headquarters. Targets identified by name: the Statue of Liberty. Washington, D.C. The Clinton family's public legacy has weathered many controversies over the decades, but this paper trail presents a different category of accountability question, one measured in lives.
The 9/11 document release is part of a broader declassification effort by the Trump administration, which has also released long-secret files related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The administration has framed the initiative as a commitment to openness on matters the public has long demanded answers about.
Ratcliffe's statement was direct: the 71 Presidential Daily Briefs were released to honor the dead. But the documents do more than memorialize. They establish, in the government's own words, that the executive branch possessed detailed, recurring intelligence about the method, the targets, and the intent behind what became the worst terrorist attack in American history, and that two successive administrations failed to act decisively on that intelligence.
Neither Clinton nor Bush responded to requests for comment on Friday. Both attended the Ground Zero ceremony. Clinton's public appearances in recent years have tended toward the social and ceremonial. This one carried a heavier weight.
The Clinton-era political class has spent two decades arguing that the threat was murky, the intelligence uncertain, and the options limited. The 71 declassified briefs tell a different story, one written by the intelligence professionals who tried to sound the alarm, in plain language, to the men sitting behind the Resolute Desk.
Nearly 3,000 Americans paid the price for what those men did, and did not do, with the warnings they received.