The 9/11 Files reveals how the Bush administration ignored 40+ bin Laden warnings in a single August 6, 2001 briefing—despite NORAD’s 2001 hijacking drills near Dulles Airport and CIA’s "blinking red" alerts. Former CIA officer Michael Scheuer exposes Clinton-era failures: canceled ops like the 1998 Tarnak Farms raid (aborted over a child swing set) and dismissed threats, including the USS Cole attack. Summer 2001 saw escalating intel—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s U.S.-bound recruits, embassy closures—but Rice banned briefings on September 10. Unanswered: insider stock trades, watchlist origins, and whether allies knew. The result? A preventable tragedy rooted in bureaucratic neglect and political paralysis. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, for one thing, the United States had incredible intelligence on bin Laden and his plans, precise intelligence, actionable intelligence.
On August 6, 2001, President Bush received a presidential daily briefing.
Its title, literally, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S., it continued.
Al-Qaeda members, including some who are U.S. citizens, have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.
And then it added this, FBI information indicates patterns of suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijacking.
Bin Laden was mentioned no fewer than 40 times in the president's daily intelligence briefing.
CIA Director George Tenet said that in the summer of 2001, quote, the system was blinking red.
So how far-fetched was it that al-Qaeda might hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings?
Not very far-fetched, it turns out.
In May 2001, an intelligence report concluded this, operatives may hijack airplanes, end quote.
The FAA issued a circular to airlines warning of heightened increase in hijackings.
And then in July of 2001, the FAA issued another circular, this one noting that, quote, currently active terror groups were known to plan and train for hijackings and were able to build and conceal explosives and luggage.
Between 1999 and 2001, NORAD, which defends North American airspace, simulated a foreign hijacked airliner crashing into a building in the United States as part of a training exercise, and they were not alone.
The National Reconnaissance Office, a little-known intelligence agency that runs our spy satellites and remote-controlled surveillance planes, was planning an exercise in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.
That exercise was on September 11th, 2001, and planned to take place just a couple of miles from Dulles Airport.
That's where the American Airlines flight number 77 had taken off before it crashed into the Pentagon.
In other words, the idea of al-Qaeda hijacking an airplane and flying into a building was entirely plausible before 9-11.
Officials knew it could happen, and there were other signs as well.
During the presidential transition in 2000 and 2001, nine months before 9-11, Bill Clinton told President Bush, I think by far your greatest threat is bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
In January of 2001, Philip Zelico, the future executive director of the 9-11 Commission, attended a briefing in which Condoleezza Rice, the future national security advisor, was warned by Sandy Berger, that would be Bill Clinton's outgoing national security advisor, that, quote, the biggest national security threat facing this country is al-Qaeda.
On July 10th, 2001, the CI Director George Tennant and his counterterrorism deputy, Jay Kofer Black, were so alarmed by intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al-Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Condoleezza Rice and her Security Council staff.
In fact, on the morning of the attacks, Director of Central Intelligence Tennant told a U.S. Senator, quote, I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.
And of course it did.
By any measure, including, according to the heavily biased commission report, George W. Bush and particularly Condoleezza Rice had ample warning that al-Qaeda was plotting an attack.
And by all accounts, the U.S. intel agencies were fully aware the hijackers were in the United States.
And in fact, it helped at least two of them get to the United States.
U.S. intelligence was so strong at the time on the morning of the attacks, the majority of the hijackers were flagged at the airport for additional screening.
The question is, how did they wind up on the watch lists in the first place?
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, into a well-connected and wealthy family.
He was one of 50 siblings.
His father built a multi-billion dollar construction business, reconstructing, among other things, the cities of Mecca and Medina.
In 1979, Osama bin Laden moved to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion there.
After the war, he returned to Saudi Arabia, but he was eventually exiled to Sudan because he was openly critical of the Saudi government's close ties to the United States.
In 1996, he returned to Afghanistan and declared war on the U.S. In 1996, bin Laden announced what he said was his declaration of war against the United States.
And it's a very compelling document to this day because it doesn't have anything to do with what the American people were told about either Islam or Al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.
The basis of the declaration of war from him was, get out of our land.
That was a compelling message within a Middle Eastern framework that had been dominated by the United States government and the Israelis since the end of World War II.
We wanted some basic information about Osama bin Laden.
His bank accounts, his health information, his educational information.
Very basic things.
We kept sending a message because it was important.
We were building a base of data.
And so the COS in Saudi Arabia at the time, John Brennan, we didn't know if he was dealing with them on the issue or not.
And so we finally sent a message that didn't say pretty please, but said, please do this as quickly as possible.
He called Tennant.
And that was the end of that.
Don't send Brennan any more of these notes.
So whatever the reason was, I don't know.
But, you know, if you identify a liaison service who you know has information you need, it's not impossible to persuade them to do it since we defend Saudi Arabia, especially in that case.
We were told not to send any more cables on that issue to Riyadh.
Just because I was the chief of operations on Osama bin Laden didn't mean there wasn't somebody else working on the same issue in an opposite direction.
And as it turned out, the opposite direction carried the day with the approval of presidents.
As Brennan was withholding critical information on bin Laden, the CIA's counterterrorism center started developing a plan to capture bin Laden at a terrorist training facility known as Tarnak Farms.
The plan was finalized with the help of friendly Afghan tribal leaders.
It was even rehearsed twice in the United States in late 1997.
All it needed was approval from the White House.
On March 7th, 1998, Richard Clark, who headed the Interagency Counterterrorism Security Group, described the plan as embryonic to then National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, even as the CIA was conducting its third rehearsal of the action.
Military officers in the Pentagon reviewed the plan, and despite some mild misgivings that could have been attributed to interdepartmental rivalries, they generally expressed their satisfaction.
They supported it.
Legal justifications were prepared in advance from the CIA to the NSC for approval.
The Attorney General of the United States, the FBI director, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where bin Laden was to be tried if he was captured alive, were all briefed on the plan.
The CIA ran a fourth rehearsal between May 20th and May 24th with the expectation that the plan would be executed in late June of that year and no later than late July.
And yet less than a week later, the CIA's assets in the field were informed that the operation had been suspended by the Clinton administration.
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When we wrote the operational plan, you have to keep in mind, speaking to the policymaker, you have to keep in mind that they have their families there.
And if there is violence, if they don't surrender, there's liable to be people killed, non-combatants.
They said, okay, we'll go ahead with it.
So that one went almost to the starting gate.
And one of the last dumps of overhead imagery we got happened to show a child swing set.
And they suddenly said, oh, we can't do that.
What if that picture gets out and we, you know, we'll be responsible?
The Pentagon targeted suspected terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, which U.S. intelligence falsely claimed was making chemical weapons.
The pattern became clearer over time.
The CIA would offer a way to capture or kill bin Laden, and then somebody would call off the strike at the last moment.
Schoier was removed from his role running Alex Station in 1999.
He was replaced with a figure called Richard Blee, who barely comes up in the 9-11 Commission report.
On October 12, 2000, the failure to act in bin Laden caught up to the agency and with our country when the USS Cole, a destroyer anchored in Aden, Yemen, was attacked by a suicide bomber.
17 American servicemen died, but this time, the government didn't strike anyone or anything in retaliation.
The official reason given by the report for the lack of action was that the administration lacked definitive proof that Al-Qaeda was responsible for the terror attack.
And then I hear Clinton on the radio or on the television saying, well, my experts, my team, my intelligence community says we can't be sure if it's Osama bin Laden or not, or Al-Qaeda or not.
And we just stood there and said, no, what do we see?
In this case, the 9-11 Commission offers excuses for Clinton, citing an absurd blame game with Clinton administration officials who claimed they were waiting for the legal go-ahead from the CIA and the FBI.
But at the same time, then-CIA Director George Tennant is reported to have said that he was surprised to hear the White House was awaiting a conclusion from him on responsibility for the coal attack.
My impression over the course of my career after over 22 years is that the first thing the seventh floor ever considered when you brought them an operation to approve was what if we fail and how will we get roasted by the media?
It took Bill Clinton just 13 days to respond to the embassy bombings, but for some reason, a reason that has never been explained, he had no response at all to the attack on the USS Cole.
Even more bizarre and telling is the Bush administration's explanation for why it didn't respond.
It was most clearly articulated by the neocon number two at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz.
He described the coal bombing as stale by the time Bush took office.
It was just five months after the terror attacks.
Wolfowitz wanted something bigger to respond to, and soon he got it.
If you want to understand why and how 9-11 happened, the years to look at most closely are 1999 to 2001.
Those years coincided with George Tennant's implementation of what became known simply as the Plan.
To formulate this effort, CIA Director Tennant elevated a man called Kofer Black, a former spy who'd risen to head CIA stations in the Sudan and elsewhere, to director of the Counterterrorism Center.
To give you an idea of Kofer Black's character, in 2017, he joined Hunter Biden on the board of directors of Burizma, the Ukrainian gas company.
But at that time, in late 1999, the core of the future 9-11 hijackers were gathering in Afghanistan.
Here's a summary of some of the warnings they had.
In December 1999, a 23-year-old Algerian man called Ahmed Rassam attempted to cross with a rental car on the ferry from Victoria, British Columbia to Port Angeles, Washington state.
Thanks to alert border security in Port Angeles, Rassam was apprehended with hundreds of pounds of explosives in his car.
His plan had been to set off a car bomb at LAX on January 1st, 2000.
But the biggest warning signs of an impending attack in the United States came in the summer of 2001, just months or weeks before.
On April 20th, 2001, a briefing to top Bush administration officials noted that bin Laden planned multiple operations.
In May 2001, a report was distributed to Bush administration officials noting that bin Laden public profile may presage attack.
On May 16th, 2001, an Intel report mentioned a phone call to an embassy that bin Laden's supporters were planning an attack inside the United States.
On June 12th, a CIA report indicated that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was recruiting people to travel to the U.S. possibly to aid in terror attacks.
On June 22nd of that year, the CIA notified station chiefs about intelligence suggesting an al-Qaeda suicide bombing in the United States could be on the way.
At about the same time, U.S. intelligence issued a terror advisory threat indicating a high probability of near-term spectacular terrorist attacks resulting in numerous casualties.
On June 25th, George W. Bush's counterterrorism czar Richard Clark told Condoleezza Rice that six intelligence reports showed al-Qaeda personnel warning of an impending terror attack.
Three days later, he told Rice that something very, very, very, very big was about to happen.
On June 30th, top U.S. Intel officials were warned bin Laden planning high-profile attacks of catastrophic proportion.
In July, intelligence reports of an impending attack reached a fever pitch that led to the closure of U.S. embassies in the Middle East.
None of this apparently got the attention of the White House.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the man who thought the coal bombing was, quote, stale, questioned the reporting in a conversation with Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor.
On July 12, 2001, acting FBI Director Thomas Picard opened Attorney General John Ashcroft's intelligence briefing with the latest on the CIA warnings about an al-Qaeda attack.
Ashcroft responded by saying, I don't want you to ever talk to me about al-Qaeda, about these threats.
I don't want to hear about al-Qaeda anymore.
Picard appealed for more counterterrorism enhancements, meaning funding.
An appeal the Attorney General denied on September 10th.
The United States was attacked the very next day.
By lying to the American public serially and aggressively, the CIA, the Bush administration, and the 9/11 Commission created the perfect condition for conspiracy theories to thrive.