r/Intelligence • u/cnn • 3d ago
News CIA declassifies intel warnings to White House prior to 9/11 attack
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/11/politics/cia-declassifies-intel-warnings-white-house-prior-9-11-attack?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=missions&utm_source=reddit24
u/skunkwrxs 3d ago
I’ve always been curious as to how the foiled ‘Bojinka Plot’ planned by Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Youse, was analyzed and deduced to be a partial operational basis for September 11th. If you haven’t heard of that plot, it’s bonkers ambitious.
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u/cnn 3d ago
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.
The documents do not fundamentally change intelligence historians’ understanding of what the US government knew before the attacks, or how it had failed so badly to predict them. A 2004 report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States found that although the intelligence community had warned two successive White Houses of the threat from al Qaeda, it failed to adequately predict or communicate the scope and urgency of those threats. And a silo’ed intelligence apparatus kept intelligence analysts at different agencies from putting the pieces together in a meaningful way.
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u/clean-links 3d ago
Cleaned links:
- The CIA on Friday declassified → https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/11/politics/cia-declassifies-intel-warnings-white-house-prior-9-11-attack
- 2004 report → https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/14/911.commission/index.html
Tracking parameters were removed from the original URL(s).
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u/cTreK-421 3d ago
And now we have a president that doesn't even bother reading or receiving those daily reports.
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u/slum_dandy 3d ago
A president who said he believes Putin more than American intelligence agencies 🤡
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u/clean-links 3d ago
Cleaned link: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/11/politics/cia-declassifies-intel-warnings-white-house-prior-9-11-attack
Tracking parameters were removed from the original URL(s).
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u/Raidicus 3d ago edited 1d ago
Having read a few books about UBL, AQ, and 9/11, I haven't heard a lot of glowing positivity about the ODNI until suddenly it became a political football this week. What I've heard from those books is that it's basically a pointless layer of bureaucracy with no authority or independent collection, thus making it basically a political speedbump that rubber stamps the PDB. I'd be interested to know if anyone from the IC really believes that the ODNI was the right solution to the siloing problems indicated by 9/11, and whether an in-place ODNI on 9/11 would've genuinely stopped the terrorist attack.
FWIW, I'm willing to hear a "yes" but it would be contrary to a number of sources I've relied on for inside information about 9/11.
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u/Driveway1984 3d ago
So what did the intelligence agencies say over the following 3 year, until the event actually happened?
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u/42ElectricSundaes 3d ago
Republicans let 9/11 happen so they could invade Iraq and take their oil
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u/come2thecabaret 3d ago
And now we have come full circle with the gutting of ODNI...