Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were repeatedly warned that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States using hijacked passenger aircraft.

Nevertheless, they failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks, according to declassified documents released by the Trump administration on Friday.

The New York Post reports on the story, which is based on the documents that have now been made public.

The previously classified documents substantiate assessments made after the attacks that Washington did too little to counter bin Laden’s Islamist terrorist group. This ultimately resulted in nearly 3,000 people losing their lives on 11 September 2001.

According to the documents, members of Al-Qaeda were in the United States and had even carried out a ‘dry run’ at an airport in New York almost three full years before 11 September 2001.

Bin Laden [sic] Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft, states a document dated 4 December 1998 that was prepared for Clinton’s Presidential Daily Brief.

Some members of bin Laden’s network have, according to various sources, received training in aircraft hijacking. Bin Laden may be considering other types of operations targeting US aircraft.

It further states that a source had revealed that bin Laden might carry out plans to hijack a US aircraft before Ramadan began on 20 December.

Two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent dry run at an unidentified airport in New York.

On 10 September 1998, another warning appeared as part of the daily briefing presented to Clinton:

Bin Laden said late last month that his preferred option is to attack the United States on its own territory in Washington … the same group that was behind the bombings of the US embassies in Africa, Kenya and Tanzania could fly an aircraft loaded with explosives into a US city.

In July of the same year, a document stated:

We have received four reports from highly dubious sources suggesting that Usama [sic] bin Laden is planning to carry out an attack in the United States.

On 11 February 2000, Clinton’s intelligence advisers wrote that a manifesto had been seized identifying possible targets, such as the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

In other documents, analysts relayed assessments that bin Laden was considering an attack on a shopping centre in Washington, D.C.

The package of documents contains the notorious memorandum of 6 August 2001 entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US’, which followed Bush for the remainder of his presidency.

Members of Al-Qa’ida [sic] – including some who are US citizens – have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks, the memorandum stated, among other things.

Following US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told his followers that he wanted to retaliate in Washington, the document states, noting that the FBI had detected patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

In August 2001, a few weeks before 11 September, Bush’s daily briefing reported that the FBI was conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations across the United States that it considered to be linked to bin Laden.

Screenshot: New York Post.

In an interview with the bipartisan 9/11 Commission in April 2004, Bush claimed that he had received no ‘actionable intelligence’ relating to bin Laden before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but that his administration was aware of the threat posed by Al-Qaeda and was considering how to deal with the terrorist group.

The documents were released on Friday as part of a wide-ranging transparency initiative by President Trump:

– Today, I authorised the release of 71 Presidential Daily Briefs to honour the memory of those killed on 11 September, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement.

In a striking moment hours before the release, Condoleezza Rice, the US National Security Adviser at the time of 9/11, apologised to the victims’ families for the authorities’ failure to combat terrorism, writes The Post.

Those of us who were in positions of authority that day did not understand the nature of the threat we faced in time to prevent the attack on 11 September, Rice said.

– I will always carry a deep personal regret for the pain that you, the families of those who died, still feel, and for the trauma our country endured.

Some of the documents show that bin Laden, in addition to waging jihad against America, was interested in freeing ‘the Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was serving a life sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina after being convicted of plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Bush confirmed to the 9/11 Commission that he had seen the report that hijackers might seize control of a passenger aircraft to secure the release of Abdel-Rahman or other convicted terrorists, but insisted that his administration had received no intelligence indicating that passenger aircraft could be used as missiles.

In a September 2006 interview on ‘Fox News Sunday’, Clinton defended his handling of Al-Qaeda and told presenter Chris Wallace that he came closer to killing bin Laden than anyone has since.

When Wallace pressed him on the subject, the former president replied sarcastically: – You did Fox’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.

Clinton is highly confrontational in the interview, and at one point tells Wallace: – You’ve got that little smirk on your face, as if you think you’re so clever.

In a memorandum dated 21 July 1999, the CIA wrote that bin Laden said his group had carried out a trial run for a bombing of FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and suggested that the operation would take place soon.

The authorities were also concerned that bin Laden might have acquired a nuclear weapon, perhaps from Russia, before eventually concluding that he did not possess one. Nevertheless, they feared that the Al-Qaeda leader could use chemical or biological weapons to cause death and chaos.

If bin Laden succeeded in purchasing a chemical or biological weapon, a February 1999 document stated, his past behaviour and statements suggest that he would have no compunction about using it and would begin looking for a suitable target.

Another memorandum in Clinton’s daily briefing, dated 11 February 2000, described bin Laden as a driving force behind a global drug-trafficking network to export heroin and opium to Europe and the United States as part of his anti-Western campaign.

By that time, bin Laden was well established in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where the fundamentalist rulers made large sums of money from the cultivation and processing of poppies for narcotics.

Bush and Clinton attended Friday’s memorial ceremony at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.