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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Trump administration has released a batch of previously classified documents showing that the Clinton and Bush administrations had been warned for years that Al Qaeda was interested in attacking the United States, including the apparently revolutionary concept of hijacking an airplane.
The documents, declassified on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, reportedly contain more than 100 pages of intelligence briefings seen by Presidents Clinton and Bush between February 1998 and September 2001.
Among the revelations is the stunning discovery that American intelligence agencies had actually received information suggesting that terrorists might use passenger aircraft as weapons.
In other words, the government apparently had some idea that something bad could happen involving airplanes, terrorists, and America.
Unfortunately, the information seems to have remained safely inside the federal government, where intelligence warnings are traditionally placed in a secure location where nobody has to do anything about them.
One 1998 intelligence report warned:
"Reporting suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh 'Umar' Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sadiq Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gama'at al-Islamiyya (IG) saying that as of late October, the IG has completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of Bin Ladin but that the operation was on hold. A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options—perhaps including an aircraft hijacking."
Apparently, "perhaps including an aircraft hijacking" was intelligence-speak for "there is a possibility that terrorists could hijack an airplane," a concept that would become considerably less hypothetical three years later.
The documents also reportedly stated that:
"IG leader Islambouli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during the 'next couple of weeks' to free 'Abd al-Rahman and the other prisoners,"
The same source reportedly warned that:
"Bid Ladin might implement plans to hijack a US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport."
That last detail seems particularly encouraging, since it suggests terrorists were not merely discussing hijacking airplanes over coffee. They were apparently conducting practice runs at American airports.
The documents further warned that members of Bin Ladin's "network" had "received hijack training."
They also said Bin Ladin and his allies "are moving closer to implementing anti-US attacks at unspecified locations, but we do not know whether they are related to attacks on aircraft."
At some point, one imagines, the government had accumulated enough warning signs to fill an entire filing cabinet.
And yet here we are.
On September 11, 2001, 19 Al Qaeda terrorists ultimately hijacked four passenger planes. Two were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City, another struck the Pentagon, and passengers aboard the fourth plane fought back against the hijackers before it crashed in Pennsylvania.
More than 3,000 people were killed.
Among the dead were hundreds of firefighters, police officers, emergency workers, and other first responders who ran toward the danger while everyone else was desperately trying to get away from it.
Twenty-five years later, the release of these documents provides yet another painful reminder that the warning signs were there.
For decades, Americans have debated whether the government knew something was coming, whether intelligence agencies adequately connected the dots, and whether more could have been done to prevent the attacks.
The newly released documents are unlikely to settle every question.
They do, however, provide another remarkable glimpse into the world of pre-9/11 federal intelligence, where warnings about terrorists planning to hijack American aircraft could apparently make it all the way into the President's Daily Brief without making it quite as far as the people who needed to do something about them.
Because apparently the one thing nobody in Washington had thought to classify was the possibility that terrorists might actually mean what they were saying.
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