CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of 9/11 | Hacker News Reader

CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of 9/11

cia.gov

156 pointsstmw82 comments

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/cia-releases-presidents-da...

The thing missing from these briefs is the context. We're not seeing the hundreds or thousands of other daily reports that are mixed in and have to be acted on. It's easy to cherry pick after the fact.

Case in point, just going off of the reports here it would have been hard to predict what happened. They were concerned about Bin Laden starting civil wars, taking embassies, launching a biological attack, cells in Europe, etc. And even their preliminary reports about a possible plane hijacking in the US presumed it would be a simple quid pro quo for prisoner releases.

I'm worried this release is being thinly veiled as an attack on previous administrations. But it should be pointed out that the current administration eschews intelligence entirely and has no qualms about worsening the country's current security posture.

The PDBs are summaries intended for only the President.

Intended only for the President means that only carefully crafted half truths to influence the desired result are present.

Not true. The PDB comes from a lot of sources. They are hand picked but are often left pretty raw. I know this because I used to be a HUMINT collector in DIA. They are hand picked, but usually in the sense of "what briefs well". It ends up being more about yearly performance objectives and how it looks on a quad chart than anything agenda related

Well... were, anyway.

You can read the PDBs from 1961 to 1977 on the CIA's site.[1]

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/president...

Yeah, its a bit like a medical test that promises to detect cancer 100% of the time, but actually just says everyone has cancer.

To be useful, information doesn't just have to have a good false negative rate, it also has to have a good false positive rate, and be specific. Otherwise its useless as you can't persue every possible lead.

The New York Times summary noted that there was a fear of "alert fatigue" coupled with a lack of confidence about the strength of the signals they were getting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/us/politics/cia-sept-11-i... (gift article)

I don't buy htat given they felt it was necessary to engage in a massive amount of domestic spying and further expansion of foreign intelligence.

Eh, seems perfectly believable to me, I've seen exactly that dynamic in several engineering orgs — the top-down comms is "more metrics, more alerts, more everything", while the bottom-up comms is "current alerts are low-quality, rank and file has alert fatigue".

> there was a fear of "alert fatigue" coupled with a lack of confidence about the strength of the signals they were getting.

This and the parent comment might be correct, but also, the US has one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world and the US defence budget dwarfs everyone else’s.

They failed spectacularly in the role they exist to perform. This deserves criticism.

The role they exist to perform is maintaining the American empire and hegemony, and they've done a pretty good job of that up until ~this year.

'Keeping Americans safe' is not on their agenda. If it were, they wouldn't be sticking America's hand into Middle Eastern quagmires, like the one that radicalized OBL and provided a training ground for his friends and allies. If it were, they wouldn't be working half as hard in demonstrating to hundreds of millions of people that yes, America does, in fact, mean them harm, and is happy to inflict that harm on them.

> ...and they've done a pretty good job of that up until ~this year.

Not really.

When you look back, seeing how things turned out, history looks different than it almost certainly felt to most people at the time.

It took 250-300 years for the Roman Empire to collapse. You could make a pretty strong argument that the US has been in decline for decades, and that cracks in Pax Americana were already forming during the Vietnam War era.

> 'Keeping Americans safe' is not on their agenda. If it were, they wouldn't be sticking America's hand into Middle Eastern quagmires...

Even though I agree with you that the US shouldn’t have been executing the foreign policy it did, especially in Western Asia, I’m going to push back on your statement.

Since the 1920s, oil has been the #1 input to any industrialized economy, and since the 1960s, any economy. And since crude oil is the #1 commodity product (despite coming in different grades), it’s in not just the US’s interest but almost everybody’s interest to have a stable supply since a disruption anywhere causes pricing turmoil everywhere (as seen in the current situation). Without that, you disrupt food, healthcare, and production of almost any goods. So yes, it’s a form of self-interested safety.

Naturally even when you consider this as the policy driver, plenty of people will misunderstand, sometimes willfully, and use the machine for other purposes.

More importantly, though energy will remain the pre-eminent input to all economies,it no longer need be petrochemical. The US seems to be ignoring this, to its long (and short) term detriment.

So if USA hadn’t interfered in the middle east or supported Israel, ever, the oil supply coming from the Middle East would be significantly less stable? How…?

If energy security were that high a priority, the US would have been rushing head-first, instead of dragging its feet, in a transition off fossil fuels and onto renewables and energy independence.

It's quite clearly not.

That's a really solid set of counterpoints to which I'd respond that the foreign policy has not merely been to maintain supply of oil, but to do so at discount prices and prevent other powers from developing it. This has demonstrably not improved stable access to oil and necessarily requires bringing an increasing fraction of the world to ruin and relative turmoil. In short, it's bad long-term strategy because it's not sustainable. Meanwhile, they've notably resisted efforts to diversify access to alternative sources of energy that'd reduce that reliance on oil.

You have huge gaps in your understanding of history.

And Israel too, yet October 7th happened.

This all goes to show that either the budgets are overblown or inefficiently used, in any case who's in charge is responsible.

Very good mini doc on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5gKaqOrCpk

PBS Frontline isn't a bad source of information, but too prone to making stories and narratives fit the 60 minutes mark even at the cost of heavy cherry picking and producing misrepresentations.

True, but I think a lot of the reporting was done by WaPo who traditionally are not the worst offenders. Genuine question, do you think this particular video is sensationalism and cherry picking? It read as seeming credible to me, but I do worry I'm becoming more gullible/less critical thinking into my old age, unfortunately.

It seemed a very informative piece of journalism, very well done to be honest into the topic of "how the breach happened and how did Israeli intelligence failed".

I did not like the narrative of equating the pains of the two sides though, because they are very different in every sense.

Eh, October 7th quite literally kept Netanyahu out of prison, consolidated his power, and pushed all of his most important objectives forward.

There's definitely a third possibility, which is that it served his purposes to "discount" intelligence.

and then the new york times pushed us into the iraq war.

What? How?

While not the only ones, the NYT notoriously pushed a lot of false and poorly verified information from questionable sources as fact in an effort to be the first to publish. They subsequently issued a mea culpa.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

They did the same thing with the Israeli holocaust

I think reality is that “lowercase p” politics just lowered the heat on Bin Laden from an attention point of view.

They did a reorg, and Richard Clarke, who was the terrorism and Bin Laden “guy” was in effect demoted and lost access to the president.

The timing was bad for the US. Clinton was deeply personally engaged in this stuff. Bush was an arms length guy who delegated. Personally, I think Bin Laden and his cronies had a really good read or an instinct in this dynamic.

> We're not seeing the hundreds or thousands of other daily reports that are mixed in and have to be acted on.

There is one PDB per day. One. It is a presentation, not just a sheet of paper. And it's assembled by a team who are producing something for someone who (normally) is the most scheduled person alive save astronauts, who are well aware of that person's fixed resources in terms of time and attention.

Acting like the amount of information presented, especially to someone with extensive executive experience as the governor of Texas, is somehow overwhelming, is beyond disingenuous.

The important context missing here is that Bush was infamous for treating the PDBs like a hassle he didn't want to have to deal with.

The important context missing here is that the terrorists practically put up a neon flashing sign saying "WE WANT TO HIJACK AIRLINERS." They literally told instructors they only cared about specific phases of flight - I think one said "we don't need to know how to land." You know, the hardest part of flying a plane?

The important context missing here is that the WTC attack was used to justify a massive amount of domestic spying.

The last important context missing is that the current president has a very similar attitude toward almost any form of briefing, and entered us into a war largely because he didn't understand nuclear weapons treaties and did not listen to anyone who told him that a weapons treaty having an end date is normal - so the treaty can be revised and renegotiated to meet changes in both countries and the rest of the world. You-know-who thought it was a weakness and the US was getting screwed.

> The important context missing here is that Bush was infamous for treating the PDBs like a hassle he didn't want to have to deal with.

The important context missing here is that Bush was only president for about 8 months when 9/11 happened, and most of the released PDBs were presented to his predecessor, Clinton.

The PDB contains multiple topics.

> There is one PDB per day

> Acting like the amount of information presented, especially to someone with extensive executive experience as the governor of Texas, is somehow overwhelming, is beyond disingenuous.

First of all, the vast majority of the released files were under Clinton's tenure - it had nothing to do with who was president.

Secondly, to your point these would have been in the form of small snippets in much larger briefings. If only 1-2 paragraphs of a 20 page PDB are related to a fringe terror cell in Afghanistan, it's obviously not going to get the same attention as the other 19 pages. And we're only talking about 71 PDBs over 3 years. It's not about being unable to ingest the information, it's about the massive amount of noise you have to deal with.

Thirdly, you can read for yourself in these documents that there was never any such large neon flashing sign except in retrospect. Planes and suicide attacks were not mentioned until August - less than a month before the attacks. And until then they were completely viewing it as a hostage or conventional bombing attack.

> But it should be pointed out that the current administration eschews intelligence entirely

That's not fair, they happily hand over intelligence briefings to people with no clearances or vetting whatsoever.

Who then share it within private group chats, literally right next to assurances that they are "currently clean on OPSEC"...

> just going off of the reports here it would have been hard to predict what happened

You don't have to predict exactly what's gonna happen to surveil or interfere with known terrorists you let into your own country, who you know are engaged in some sort of training having to do with aircraft hijackinng, and keep that from happening.

You should watch the Tucker Carlson 9/11 series. He does a good job picking up where Michal Moore left off in the mid 2000s (though they'd both probably be offended to hear me say that) and does so with the hindsight of 20yr of declassification and general hindsight that hadn't yet happened in the mid 2000s

The various agencies knew something was gonna happen. Nobody knew what or when or where exactly because the pieces hadn't been put together. They were all looking through their own little keyholes. They all should have seen enough to take action. But why didn't they? But it's pretty clear that the CIA and maybe some other intel agencies either through blunder or neglect or hubris had something to do with it.

Here is some more context, before and after. I highly encourage clicking each of these links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6856550

I would like to plainly say something that is likely unpopular: the CIA has been relatively great in the last ~30 years for the USA, and the world. They do real research, state facts, and when asked, even sometimes publicly speak out against the geopolitical dumbasses leading their own country. They are often circumvented and ignored due to politics, which usually makes us all suffer. Our politicians ignore them, go around them, and then we all somehow blame them.

I will take it a step further. After some time spent working for public and private firms, I think you could say the same for largely every single U.S. federal agency/department. Defense, Education, Energy, Agriculture, State, on and on, they've all been on a general upward trend over the last few decades.

It's heartening.

It's not always obvious because progress comes in fits and starts, and sometimes we move in very different directions, but as Dr. King said: "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice".

yeah, I'll avoid details to not give up the game but they're generally more important than ever.

it's not thinly veiled

what's worrying is they knew they were going after an operator whose organization they recognized as competent in terms of carrying out operations, recruiting and passing down information.

& they sat on it.

that's gross negligence honestly - if your adversary seems competent - you've to destroy them at the earliest chance before they amass more resources.

What’s the purpose of publishing these? Why now? Why redacted still?

Interesting to read but … why bother?

> Why redacted still

Because a number of the people associated with this are still alive on all sides.

1998-2001 was only 25-28 years ago, so a lot of sources are still alive or active sources as we speak, and in a number of cases now decisionmakers in theirs early-mid 60s.

It's the same way how a KGB liaison officer in 1989 Dresden ended up invading Ukraine 25 years later.

> Interesting to read but … why bother?

It still has academic value, and plenty of information to be garnered.

The redacted parts are a lot more than names and detailed locations.

I think there should be a law that any info is fully public after like 20 years unless releasing it would put a specific person or named group in danger, like a source's identity but not the things they said. No vague talk about national security that can't be verified unless you have a clearance and is probably subjective anyway.

Yes, that includes nuclear weapon designs, hacking tool source code and every assassination plan ever dreamed up by some megalomaniac CIA officer. The system needs to go.

"the things they said" could very well reveal their identity.

From NYT article:

> the C.I.A.’s standard practice is to release them only after about 40 years, to ensure no sources are compromised and minimize any potential tension with allies.

So this was released much earlier than usual and that might be why it's more aggressively redacted

> I think there should be a law that any info is fully public after like 20 years unless releasing it would put a specific person or named group in danger

They don't even release files about human trafficking rings (epstein). Pretty sure what you are suggesting is impossible.

From the outside, it even looks like Trump attacked Iran because of the epstein files. The war is causing more deaths and terror. And it is causing economic problems worldwide. Pretty sure US government legitimacy is at the lowest point in my lifetime.

> From the outside, it even looks like Trump attacked Iran because of the epstein files.

He attacked Iran because he has warhawks and wannabe crusaders in his core group of advisors who believed that it would actually be a quick war, and that the people who had always cautioned against it were just nervous nellies. It doesn't help that Hegseth actively worked to remove people who would have cautioned against it so the yes-men "leaders" left behind were more willing to go along with the false confidence that a short few strikes would be enough.

> fully public after like 20 years unless releasing it would put a specific person or named group in danger

As the recent AI safety discourse should make clear, the set of information that potentially endangers people could be much broader than you'd naively expect.

There is an automatic declassification system with a 25 year clock but it’s a bit more restrictive than what you propose. That said we have a cornucopia of classified info from the Cold War era available today and that has had significant academic value.

Well spoken.

In surprised they're redacting things like labels on a map

> In surprised they're redacting things like labels on a map

I think you're referring to this one:

https://www.cia.gov/static/06-23-1998-Potential-Targets-for-...

Since it's redacted, we can only guess what's on the map, but looking at the various points preceding it there are a lot of specific location names that are redacted. If any were also on the map then it'd be kind of stupid to redact the name once, but not the other times they're included.

Without a doubt, this material has been scrubbed and censored and altered. There are no lengths to which this administration (or any other) would go to, to safeguard publishing material that might be used against them or their associates.

There is no reason that anyone should consider these briefs credible (I'm sure some details are truthy). At best, it's performative theater.

25 years is the standard time horizon for automatic declassification, and someone high up probably decided to collect things together to publicize in an attempt to score some political kudos.

I believe that it's time, a quarter century after 9/11, to abolish the DHS, the department which was created pure out of spite towards the FBI and NSA.

It's a service looking for a purpose and in doing so is trampling the rights of Americans and foreigners alike and coming up with crazier and crazier schemes to spend its huge budget. It's creation has also lead to an enormous duplication of work and infighting between the intelligence services.

Reminder that Trump famously doesn't take Daily Briefs (first term and now) and for a year with Gabbard, she was omitting huge swarths of info from what he did get.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/09/trump-intelligence-...

https://www.npr.org/2016/12/13/505348507/what-exactly-is-the...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tulsi-gabbard-reveals-li...

Its harder to ignore reality if you’re being explicitly told about it each day

Alternate reality then?

No, it's not, if you just forget what you were told.

TBH, that was probably Biden, and Reagan at least toward the end of his second term. There really should be an upper age limit on federal offices.

TBH the president should primarily be relying on trusted, competent advisors that they’ve surrounded themselves with. They can’t possibly be experts in enough areas to make unilateral decisions.

Which is probably why Biden didn’t attack Iran.

You're idealising one government rule to stop other government stupidity. The fact is that enforcing that kind of thing is meant to be the electorate's job. Instead of howling these people out of office as the spent, bought-and-paid for geriatrics that they are, they keep electing them instead.

Roy Cohen School of never hearing never believing anything you don't want to hear, making up what you want to believe in. And never ever ever reassessing or letting anyone else or any other fact impune on your perfect carefully maintained and manicured fantasy.

he doesn't read, he's literally Biff from Back to the Future

also Roy Cohn taught him reality doesn't matter, just make up any lie and repeat it to the very end until that's all people will respond to

now he's surrounded by people that only tell him what he wants to hear like his "human printer" with $45,000 "xmas gifts"

imagine if there was an actual attack now

he'd invade Canada, seriously, wouldn't matter who did it, he'd make up a reason and repeat it constantly until it's the only talking point

notice how we're not talking about the Epstein Files anymore?

SOB changed the topic enough times to make it slide out of the news

Trump is the undisputed champion of creating/influencing the narrative. The mainstream news these days (left and right-leaning) is really nothing more than an amplifier for his various social media accounts. There's so much scandal to this administration - from being named-checked throughout the Epstein files to the billions he and his family have made during this term, yet nothing happens. The media only talks about his latest, dumb-ass Tweets. Trump has tuned 'flood the zone' so well that he can literally do anything he wants without consequence.

The CIA has considered Fox News style reports as a form of the daily brief that Trump might be able to understand.[1]

Trump does get regular briefs several times a day, by Natalie Harp. Her job is to find flattering press reports, print them out for Trump, and hand them to him.[2] She has a backpack with a battery-powered printer for this when away from the White House.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbard-c...

[2] archive.is/CFCQT

If only the tsar knew ...

The absence of Iran in any of this is notable.

Almost like there was no reason to include them in the 'Axis of Evil' at a time when the US was providing cover for them in the fight against Taliban.

Only if you ignore the 40+ years Iran has been funding jihadists and terrorist paramilitary groups. Including founding Hezbollah in 1982, the group who pioneered the VBIED car bomb tactic who along with Palestinian groups made plane and bus hijacking part of their brand, both of which Osama himself said heavily influenced Al-Qaeda.

Iran also directly funded Shia terrorist groups in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. Al-Qaeda/ISIS were just the local Sunni variety, but with less state-backing and more decentralized.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hezbollah was created after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, and Hezbollah was not involved in 9/11.

By your logic, shouldn't we be enemies with Saudi Arabia and Israel, who have incubated and funded terrorists for much longer than Iran (80 years in the case of Israel)?

'Terror was justified' to establish Israel, Reuter, September 6, 1991

https://www.caymancompass.com/1991/09/06/terror-was-justifie...

Here is the comment you just deleted:

  Of course Saudis have their finger in it too, including pushing radical Wahhabism Islamism that also inspired Osama. Which is also currently one of the major reasons UAE/MBZ is in a proxy fight with Saudis because they think Saudi's continued support of Islamists destabilizes the region (which is true).

  US-wise, geopolitics aren't as simple there, since Saudi was always a way less blatant offender than Iran and Iran/Saudi both were left untouched because of their oil power. There's a reason neither Bush nor Obama attacked Iran despite having plenty of good reasons. Trump and Israel apparently saw an opportunity to finally take on Iran. But it was always extremely risky, as we've seen... Likewise it would be risky trying to interfere in Saudi politics, especially when they serve as a counterweight to Iran and their proxies. Enemy of my enemy etc. Same deal with Israel..Israel is a complex issue which I'd rather not get into right now.

I'm curious why you'd rather not get into it about Israel. Do you not think Iran is a complex issue?

I deleted my comment because I read some your own comment edits after I posted my reply and decided I don’t want to engage with this sort of thing on HN.

I see you’ve tried to make it less incendiary in further edits but it’s obvious what you’re aiming for. I find that conversation boring and overly social media brained.

What was incendiary? All I did was remove some quotes from the article that I already linked. I decided to see what you would reply to the first message first.

Curious why you won't engage about Israel, now you're doing ad hominem attacks.

You didn't even really engage with the points I made in my initial comment.

>Under President Trump's leadership, CIA conducted the most thorough declassification effort—unprecedented in size and transparency

Oh my, the CIA do comedy now.

Seems more like:

'the president said we had to flood the zone with aliens and UFO shit because he was desperate to continue to break the law in order to hide the Trump-Epstein files; if you think the sexual deviancy and assaults he bragged about were bad ...'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com