WASHINGTON, September 19 — The Central Intelligence Agency has released a set of declassified presidential intelligence briefings tied to the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to reporting by KYMA/News 11, the Yuma, Arizona-based outlet whose coverage sits on its Pentagon Files beat. The material comes from the President’s Daily Brief, the tightly restricted intelligence summary prepared for the US president each day, and covers the period before the attacks. Under the hood, the PDB is a product of the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence.
It is normally distributed only to the president and a small number of senior officials, and items from it surface publicly only through deliberate review and release decisions.
The August 2001 Precedent
The best-known prior example remains the August 6, 2001 PDB item titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” That item was declassified and released in April 2004 by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the 9/11 Commission, and it warned that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States, including possible hijacking operations. The current release follows that precedent, making presidential-level intelligence assessments from the pre-9/11 period available to the public.
As ever, the detail that matters is what the president was actually shown, and when.
What the Documents Are — and Aren’t
No specific contents, document counts, or dates of the newly released briefings beyond the 9/11 context are established in the source material. The release is being described as reported, and particular findings should not be attributed to the documents themselves. The CIA’s declassification of presidential briefings is governed by executive order and the agency’s historical review programs, which require interagency review before documents are cleared for release.
That process is slow by design, and it is the reason PDB items rarely reach the public record at all. The attacks themselves occurred on September 11, 2001, when hijackers affiliated with al-Qaeda seized four commercial airliners.
Two struck the World Trade Center towers in New York City, one struck the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and one crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers resisted. The attacks prompted the creation of the 9/11 Commission, whose 2004 report examined intelligence failures, and led to the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which restructured the US intelligence community and created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The newly released briefings add to the public record of what intelligence was presented to the president in the months and years surrounding 9/11. Historians, researchers, and congressional oversight bodies interested in the pre-attack intelligence picture, and in how presidential-level warnings were handled, are expected to examine them.
Watch for the review process to determine how much of the surrounding PDB material follows this release into the public domain.
