Previously classified 9/11 documents released by CIA on 25th anniversary of attacks

The CIA released 71 declassified documents related to the 9/11 attacks on Friday, the 25th anniversary of deadly Al Qaeda terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The documents, which were posted on the CIA’s website, cover the period from February 1998 to Sept. 12, 2001, which is the day after the attacks.

All are drawn from the daily intelligence briefings that were given by the CIA and other spy agencies to President Bill Clinton and his successor, President George W. Bush.

In a statement, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it “the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever.”

“Americans can now see for themselves the intelligence leading up to this tragic day for our Nation,” Ratcliffe said in a post on X.

The document drop came the same day that 9/11 widow Terry Strada broke with the long-standing tradition of keeping politics out of Sept. 11 remembrances and called on President Donald Trump to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the attacks.

“Tell the Saudis to stop lying,” said Strada, who lost her husband Tom during the attacks and raised their three children on her own. “Tell them if they want to be friends with the USA they cannot continue to deny all of this — all of the pain, all of the destruction that we have all been suffering through.”

Trump was at the memorial ceremony at the Pentagon, but Vice President JD Vance was in Lower Manhattan. So Strada directed her message at him.

“Vice President Vance thank you for being here today, please carry that message back, stand with the families, stand with the survivors, stand with Americans, as my husband Tom said that is always the right thing to do,” Strada said.

Fifteen of the Al Qaeda plane hijackers were Saudi nationals. And Strada is part of a coalition of 9/11 families that believes the Saudis were complicit in the attacks and have sued the country’s government.

The Saudis deny that claim and are fighting the lawsuit in court.

Strada, who is seeking information about two Saudi nationals in California the FBI gathered as part of “Operation Encore,” told NBC News last year that “because of this lawsuit we now know there was critical evidence in the hands of the FBI within days of the attacks.”

“It was never properly analyzed or shared with the 9/11 commission,” Strada said.

The 9/11 Commission was an independent, bipartisan group created to investigate the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

It concluded in a report released in 2004 that poor communication between the FBI and CIA, as well as a “failure of imagination” within the U.S. national security apparatus, enabled the terrorists to pierce America’s defenses.

The report led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).