The now-infamous warning to then-President Bill Clinton was tucked at the bottom of a presidential intelligence brief delivered on September 10, 1998: A group associated with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.”
In the end, there were no explosives. Just four planes, two piloted into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and one intended for the US Capitol that crash-landed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers heroically fought back against the terrorists.
The CIA on Friday declassified and released more than 100 pages of presidential daily briefing papers provided to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush that dealt with the threat from al Qaeda and bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11, providing for the first time to the American public an eerie snapshot of the information two presidents saw but failed to act on.
They show a drumbeat of warnings over the course of years that bin Laden was considering an attack in the United States or on American sites overseas. Fragments of intelligence suggesting he wanted to attack a shopping mall in Washington, acquire nuclear bomb materials, launch chemical weapons attacks or kidnap an American — whose name is redacted — flicker through the pages.
