CIA releases declassified 9/11 documents showing pre-attack warnings on bin Laden

Twenty-five years after nearly 3,000 lives were lost in a single morning, the CIA has opened its most restricted vaults to release dozens of presidential briefing documents tracing what American intelligence knew — and warned — about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years before September 11. The papers do not rewrite history so much as they illuminate its contours more sharply: a portrait of warnings that were specific, sustained, and, in the end, insufficient to prevent catastrophe. In releasing them, the agency gestures toward transparency while the documents themselves raise the older,