The CIA warned the White House for years about the threat that Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, posed to the United States, including possible airplane attacks, but did not predict the attacks of September 11, 2001, according to documents declassified this Friday on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
The agency partially published 71 intelligence reports prepared for presidents between February 13, 1998 and September 12, 2001, during the Administrations of Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush, a disclosure that it described as the largest exercise in transparency on 9/11.
In one of the documents, dated September 10, 1998, three years before the attacks, an intelligence analyst wrote that the terrorist group “could crash a plane loaded with explosives into a city in the United States.”
Another document, dated December 4, 1998, collected information according to which “Bin Laden and his allies are preparing to attack the United States by hijacking planes.”
The documents reinforce the conclusions of the national commission that investigated the attacks. In its 2004 report, it noted that intelligence agencies had repeatedly warned about the threat from Al Qaeda but failed to understand the magnitude and precise nature of the attack the group was preparing.
As a result of the attacks, the United States reorganized its national security architecture to integrate the work of the CIA, the FBI and other organizations, which until then did not share information among themselves.
The current director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, stated in a statement that the declassification seeks to “honor the memory” of the victims of the attacks and the Americans who subsequently died in the fight against terrorism.
The Al Qaeda attacks against the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington left nearly 3,000 dead and triggered the so-called ‘war on terrorism’, as well as the US invasion of Afghanistan.
