BOMBSHELL: Clinton, Bush Were Warned About al-Qaeda Before 9/11

Newly declassified CIA documents released on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks show that both the Clinton and Bush administrations received repeated, high-level warnings that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network intended to strike the United States, in some cases with disturbingly specific detail, years before the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe announced Friday that the agency had released more than 100 pages, comprising 71 separate documents, drawn from Presidential Daily Briefs and internal intelligence memorandums provided to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Ratcliffe called the release the single largest disclosure of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever made public, and said the documents were being declassified in part to honor the CIA officers who later gave their lives in the Global War on Terror that followed the attacks.

Perhaps the most striking document in the release is a Presidential Daily Brief dated September 10, 1998, nearly three full years before the attacks, which was prepared for President Clinton and senior officials with access to the president’s most sensitive intelligence product. The briefing, titled “Bin Laden’s Location and Intentions,” stated plainly that the same terror network responsible for the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings might fly an explosive packed airplane into a United States city. The document also noted that bin Laden had reportedly said his preferred target was to strike the United States on its own soil, specifically naming Washington.

The 1998 briefing further disclosed that intelligence agencies had received multiple reports, even if from sources described internally as questionable, indicating bin Laden was actively planning an attack inside the United States. It also revealed that operatives connected to his network had already conducted a trial run at an unidentified New York area airport, testing whether they could evade existing security checks years before hijackers would exploit similar vulnerabilities on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The documents show that the plotters at that time were reportedly hoping to use hijacked aircraft as leverage to demand the release of imprisoned extremists, including Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Ramzi Yousef, the man convicted of orchestrating that earlier attack. That the network’s ambitions toward hijacking American aircraft were already being discussed at the highest levels of government in 1998 underscores just how long the warning signs had been present before they were tragically realized.

The release also includes a memo dated January 25, 2001, just five days after President Bush took office, sent by outgoing counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke to incoming national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. That memo warned the incoming administration in stark terms that officials would make a major error if they underestimated the challenge posed by al-Qaeda, and recommended an urgent, high level meeting to discuss the scope of the threat and a strategy for confronting it. That requested meeting reportedly did not take place until September 4, 2001, just one week before the attacks.

Perhaps the best known document referenced in the new release is the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” which had previously been referenced by the 9/11 Commission but is now available in fuller context alongside the rest of the CIA’s briefing history on the subject. That document stated that clandestine, foreign government, and media reporting indicated bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks inside the United States dating back to at least 1997, and that dozens of FBI investigations tied to bin Laden were active around the country at the time, including reports of surveillance activity near federal buildings in New York.

CIA officials were careful to note that the warnings, while numerous and at times unsettlingly specific, generally lacked the kind of precise operational detail, dates, targets, or methods, that would have allowed either administration to disrupt the specific plot that was eventually carried out. Even the 1998 brief that mentioned an explosive laden aircraft striking a U.S. city noted internally that intelligence at the time provided no conclusive information about bin Laden’s actual future intentions. In other words, the warnings described a general and growing threat rather than a blueprint for the attacks that would eventually occur.

Even so, conservatives reviewing the documents point out that the sheer volume and consistency of the warnings across two separate administrations, spanning nearly the entire second Clinton term and the first eight months of the Bush administration, raises serious and long overdue questions about why more aggressive action was not taken sooner to disrupt bin Laden’s network before it was able to carry out an attack of that scale on American soil. The Clinton administration’s 1998 attempt to kill bin Laden using Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, launched in response to the East Africa embassy bombings, ultimately failed to eliminate him and did little to slow his organization’s planning.

The 2004 report issued by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 Commission, had already concluded that the intelligence community warned both administrations about the growing al-Qaeda threat but failed to adequately convey the scope and urgency of what was coming. That commission also found that a siloed intelligence apparatus, with different agencies failing to share and connect available information, prevented analysts from piecing together the full picture in time to act. The newly released documents do not fundamentally overturn those 2004 findings, but they do provide the American public with direct access to the actual language used in the briefings themselves for the first time.

Notably, the timing of the release coincided with renewed calls from 9/11 families for accountability on a related front. Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United and widow of a man killed in the attacks, broke with the long standing tradition of keeping the September 11 anniversary free of political statements, publicly calling on President Trump to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its alleged role in supporting the hijackers. Her comments reflect an ongoing and long running effort by many victims’ families to obtain full disclosure of any Saudi government connections to the attackers, a fight that has spanned multiple presidential administrations of both parties.

For conservatives, the newly declassified record reinforces a familiar and frustrating narrative, that Washington possessed ample warning of the growing terrorist threat well before the attacks but was hamstrung by bureaucratic inertia, interagency turf battles, and a general unwillingness across both the Clinton and Bush national security teams to treat al-Qaeda as the existential threat it would ultimately prove to be. The documents underscore just how many opportunities existed over the preceding years to take the threat more seriously, whether through more aggressive covert action, tighter aviation security screening, or a faster embrace of the kind of high level strategic planning that Clarke’s January 2001 memo had explicitly urged.

The release also sheds renewed light on how differently intelligence was handled and briefed across the two administrations, with Clinton era officials receiving warnings tied closely to the aftermath of the 1998 embassy bombings and the failed missile strikes that followed, while the incoming Bush team inherited a warning apparatus already flashing red before officials had even finished settling into their new roles. Critics on the right have long argued that the transition period between the two administrations, occurring at a moment of peak threat activity from bin Laden’s network, exposed a structural weakness in how national security priorities are handed off between outgoing and incoming presidents, regardless of party.