The CIA Declassified 71 Intelligence Reports on 9/11 — We Ask, Is This What Has Been Scrubbed or Not Released Yet?
A Capitol Times Media - Exclusive
Friday's release included the infamous memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"
from August 2001, which was declassified in 2004 at the request of the 9/11 Commission.
The memo said that FBI information
"indicates 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."
Nothing Happens in a Vacuum
The assessment that followed the USS Cole bombing made one thing clear: the attack did
not emerge from nowhere. It sat at the end of a chain, financing, logistics, leadership, that
intelligence agencies had tracked for years.
That chain stretches back to Khartoum.
Hassan al-Turabi, head of Sudan's National Islamic Front, founded and ran the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC), holding three major international conferences in Khartoum in the 1990s, 1991, 1993, and 1994/95, explicitly aimed at unifying mujahideen and radical Islamist leaders worldwide.
Bin Laden, living in Sudan at the time, was tied to those gatherings. They were open conferences hiding nothing of their intent.
The Wall Between Domestic and Foreign Jurisdictions and Diplomatic Theatre
The CIA's charter, rooted in the National Security Act of 1947 and reinforced by Executive Order 12333, prohibits it from conducting domestic intelligence collection, law enforcement, or internal security functions inside the United States.
Counterintelligence and domestic security fall to the FBI, which has jurisdiction over intelligence activities within U.S. borders.
Coordination between the two, happens through established channels (field offices,
intelligence community sharing frameworks), but the jurisdictional line is explicit: CIA
abroad, FBI at home. If "CC" was operating inside the U.S., moving between cities,
assessing stadium security, and the connection ran through foreign channels, then domestic authority (and domestic legal exposure) sat with the FBI, not with a foreign
service. Whoever assessed U.S. targets domestically would have been doing so outside their lawful remit, which is precisely the kind of activity that intelligence-sharing
arrangements and congressional oversight were supposed to catch.
If the 9/11 Commission and later reviews flagged "information sharing failures" between agencies, the wall between domestic (FBI) and foreign (CIA/international) jurisdictions is exactly the seam where things fell through. It's fair to ask what material was carved out before release, versus what was never collected in the first place.
The Figure Known as "CC"
In early 2001, John Brennan was brought back to CIA by Director George Tenet. By this
account, both Brennan and George Bush Sr. knew of an asset referred to here as "CC",
while Tenet's awareness remains unclear. From April to September 11, 2001, commercial airline manifests place CC traveling city to city, assessing security at sports stadiums.
The timeline, as the author relates it:
• July 18 — CC was warned just in time not to board his scheduled flight to Baltimore,
rebooking to the following day.
• Earlier that summer, Minneapolis — When CC urged the FBI to focus on Minneapolis, he was told the Bureau was "very much in tune" with the Minnesota issue, but that political correctness made certain actions impossible to apply.
• August 4, Boston — CC told an FBI associate in person: something is going to
occur.
• August 6 — The "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" PDB was delivered to
President Bush.
• August 30, Minneapolis — In a follow-up meeting, CC was, by the author's
account, treated dismissively and painted as a bigot. Perspective: When the Lens Outweighs the Facts It is worth putting the Bureau's conduct in perspective. Americans who had historically been denied opportunity and positions climbed into leadership across every sector of society, including the intelligence agencies. That climb is a good thing, and we here, make it clear it should be celebrated.
But the truth is more complicated. Some who rose still carried historical and social-justice
teachings in their hearts and minds, and their decisions began to reflect what philosophy
has long recognized: the oppressed becomes the oppressor unless they mature out of it,
which most do. This dynamic traces from Hegel's through Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire. It is well documented throughout the history of philosophy and epistemology and has come to become the norm in the melting pot of America over the last 4 decades.
This does not paint the entire department, but the institutional drift was occurring prior
2001, which is easily identified today as we witness its scale in all institutions in America. It identifies a precise institutional risk: when those occupying the highest positions cannot
remove themselves from a particular lens, their decisions flow through the social-justice
and historical-justice framework, overlooking the logic, reasoning, and facts actually
presented to them at the time and not the past. Typically, excuses become the norm
alongside peer pressure and acceptance as well as paycheck protection.
This is precisely what happened. And the testimony carries particular weight, because CC himself was, at that time, a liberal, he knew the environment well, both those who held
traditional views and those newly gaining access to positions who did not share them.
The What If, Worth Asking Yourself
Consider a parallel question, one that reaches beyond intelligence agencies to politics
itself:
Suppose a person who spent decades as a traditional liberal Democrat began to believe
that a new wave of candidates was filtering every issue through the same historical-justice and social-justice lens and that decisions were being driven by narrative and philosophyrather than epistemology and evidence. The honest response would be to look past party loyalty when November came.
Suppose further that the person noticed a prominent figure who had done the same,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lifelong Democrat and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, leaving his party rather than endorsing its current direction, joining a ticket he once opposed.
The Kennedy family name carries decades of Democratic legacy, from JFK's presidency through RFK's assassination campaign in 1968. For RFK Jr. to break from that tradition and align with opponents of the party establishment represents a significant departure from family political history and it is the belief here that he did so knowing such truths mentioned here as he was searching for the truth about his uncles and fathers assassination.
His campaign drew criticism from party elders, yet supporters argued he was following a conviction that went deeper than allegiance to a brand. Others questioned whether the same institutional drift we observed in the intelligence community, where ideology may have overtaken evidence, had also taken root in the Democratic Party itself.
Is that lens-drift enough to explain the move? Or were other factors at play?
The question isn't whether the connection holds. It's whether the same institutional pattern we traced through the FBI and CIA, judgment filtered through ideology rather than evidenceis echoing elsewhere, most importantly at the ballot boxes.
The picture that emerges is not of a single failure but of a chain: networks formed abroad, intelligence gathered at home, warnings delivered in person, and a system whose structural divisions and institutional habits let the pieces stay scattered.
As more documents surface, more will be updated here at Capitol Times Media.