Several dozen presidential briefing documents declassified Friday, the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, detail intelligence government officials had gathered about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida leading up to the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people and upended American national security.
Briefs prepared for President George W. In the years immediately following the attacks, a bipartisan commission highlighted a lack of information sharing among agencies such as the CIA and FBI, and issued recommendations that yielded new positions, including a centralized director of national intelligence, as well as the National Counterterrorism Center, which analyzes domestic and foreign terrorism information across different government branches. 12, 2001, report in which a source indicated the attacks had been planned for two years and had also targeted the US Capitol. By June 1999, according to intelligence officials, his operatives had conducted such experiments with explosives to “increase their energy output. Bush in early 2001 focused in part on bin Laden’s “experimentation by crude means to make and deploy biological agents.
Proclaiming it “an act of exceptional transparency,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the documents were the agency’s single largest release of declassified presidential daily briefs — the highly classified briefings prepared by the nation’s intelligence community for the government’s most senior leaders. The documents range from a February 1998 file — prepared for then-President Bill Clinton — titled “Terrorists seeking WMD capability” and mentioning bin Laden and other Islamic extremists to a Sept. Other documents detail bin Laden’s pursuit of materials for making “dirty bombs,” conventional weapons infused with radioactive material.
About two years before the attacks, intelligence officials were aware bin Laden appeared to be misleading the Taliban about his reluctance to launch an unprovoked attack on the U.S.
