Tag: cia

Declassified CIA files reveal Clinton and Bush received warnings about Bin Laden plotting an ‘explosive-packed airplane’ attack on U.S. soil prior to 9/11

Marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the Trump administration has declassified a collection of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files confirming that former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both made aware of potential Al Qaeda schemes to attack the U.S. using explosive-packed aircraft beforehand.

On Friday, through the newly released 71 documents, it was revealed that Clinton and Bush separately received distinct, high-level briefings during their respective terms in office regarding threats to the homeland.

In a Presidential Daily Briefing provided to President Clinton on September 10, 1998, intelligence officials reported that the Al Qaeda leader intended to strike on U.S. soil. The brief noted intelligence agencies “had received four reports from highly questionable sources suggesting Usama [sic] Bin Ladin is making plans to conduct an attack in the United States.”

“Bin Ladin late last month said his preferred option is to strike the U.S. on its own soil in Washington,” the document warned, adding that “the same group responsible for the [U.S. Embassy] bombings in Africa [Kenya and Tanzania] may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city.”

Just months later, Clinton’s December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Briefing included an item explicitly titled, “Bin Ladin [sic] Preparing To Hijack U.S. Aircraft.”

The report highlighted that “some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training” and cautioned that “Bin Ladin could be weighing other types of operations against U.S. aircraft.”

“Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack a U.S. aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.”

By February 11, 2000, presidential intelligence aides reported that authorities had seized a manifesto outlining possible targets “such as the Statue of Liberty.”  

Similar warnings followed into the next administration. On July 25, 2001, President Bush was provided a file titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

“Al-Qa’ida [sic] members-including some who are U.S. citizens—have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks,” the memo warned.

“After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington,” the document stated, further noting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had uncovered “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.”

The documents were released by the Trump administration as part of President Donald Trump’s initiative to foster better transparency between the U.S. government and the American public. The move follows the previous release of long-awaited secret files concerning the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

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25 Years Ago, 9/11 Triggered a US Crusade of Torture

A quarter-century has passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled. The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite – and because of – their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the U.S. opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports. “In the name of the U.S.’s ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the U.S. to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries… Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime – just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Among the report’s conclusions:

  • “The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
  • “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
  • “The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
  • “Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners. All these actions were taken only after CIA and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating U.S. and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions. Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the U.S. were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.”

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Gloria Steinem: The CIA, White Feminism, Intersectionality & COINTELPRO

The obituaries have settled into their shape. Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, dead at ninety-two, a life well lived. Somewhere below the tributes, below the aviator glasses and the Ms. covers, a short paragraph appears. Yes, there was the matter of the CIA. But she addressed it head-on, the paragraph says, and besides, she called the Agency liberal and honorable. That paragraph’s doing quiet work. It’s built so the reader forgives and forgets in the same breath.

We’re not here to withhold or grant forgiveness. We’re here to read the ledger.

The facts aren’t in dispute, and they were never secret. From roughly 1959 to 1962, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, an operation funded almost entirely by the CIA, whose purpose was to send non-Communist American students to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki to blunt Soviet influence. The money moved through a chain of cutout foundations before it reached her. Ramparts exposed the arrangement in March 1967. Steinem didn’t deny it. She defended it, and said that if she had the choice she’d do it again. Take her at her word. The question that matters isn’t what was in her heart. The question is what the state was buying, and what it was destroying at the same time.

Because there’s a second column in this ledger, and the tributes never print it.

While the CIA was underwriting a liberal, gender-first, anti-Communist internationalism through people like Steinem, the same state was running COINTELPRO. That program operated from 1956 to 1971, and its Black nationalist directive, opened in 1967, named the goal plainly in Hoover’s own memos: prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify the movement. This wasn’t surveillance in the abstract. It was Fred Hampton dead on his mattress in December 1969 in a raid coordinated with the FBI. It was the systematic gutting of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. It was Assata Shakur driven into exile and Angela Davis put on trial for her life. Reach further back and the pattern holds. Claudia Jones, a Black Communist who in 1949 theorized the superexploitation of Black women, the triple burden of race and class and sex decades before the vocabulary caught up, was deported by that same state in 1955.

Set the two columns side by side. One feminism received laundered money and a soft landing in the popular memory. Another current, the one carrying the class analysis and the anti-imperial edge, received infiltrators, indictments, deportation orders, and bullets.

Both statements are literal. This is what we mean when we say the state has a revealed preference. You don’t need to prove that any single person engineered anything. You only need to read what was resourced and what was repressed.

This is where the hagiography’s favorite complaint collapses. Mainstream liberal feminism is often faulted, correctly, for abstracting gender away from class and race, for treating the boardroom ceiling as the frontier while the floor gave way underneath poor and colonized women. The usual explanation is intellectual immaturity, a movement that simply hadn’t yet learned to think in more than one variable. That’s a comforting story, and it’s false. The analysis existed the entire time. It was never missing from feminism. It was carried by the tradition the state was busy dismantling.

Claudia Jones named the interlocking structure in 1949. Frances Beal wrote Double Jeopardy in 1969 out of SNCC, and the Third World Women’s Alliance built organization around it. The National Black Feminist Organization formed in 1973. The Combahee River Collective, in 1977, stated it as flatly as it’s ever been stated, that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and that a politics adequate to Black women’s lives had to confront race and class and sex and sexuality at once. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave the framework its legal name, intersectionality, in 1989. None of this was a late correction to feminism. It was feminism’s most rigorous line, developed in real time, by the women the funding never found.

So the class-blindness of the feminism that got the CIA’s money and the magazine covers isn’t an accident of the calendar. It’s downstream of a choice. The currents that insisted on class and empire were the currents the state spent a decade and a fortune trying to break. What remained, what could be safely elevated, was a feminism that named patriarchy but left the ownership question alone. The single-axis frame wasn’t the movement’s growing pain. It was, in part, the movement’s survivors, the ones permitted to survive.

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Ex-FDA Commissioner Privately Told CIA That Up to 25% of Americans Had Already Achieved Natural Immunity Through Exposure to COVID by May 2020, Unclassified Document Reveals

Newly released documents are raising explosive questions about what pharmaceutical insiders and America’s intelligence community knew about COVID-19 immunity during the earliest months of the pandemic and why Americans were hearing a dramatically different story in public.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) released records detailing a May 7, 2020, CIA briefing involving Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who had joined Pfizer’s board of directors the previous year.

Paul announced on X:

“I released documents showing Pfizer and the CIA privately acknowledged high population immunity as early as May 2020, while the public heard a different story. Americans deserve the truth.”

He pointed to reporting at Brownstone Institute on a newly unclassified CIA meeting summary buried in the latest tranche of records Paul entered into the congressional record.

The date on the briefing is May 7, 2020.

That is two months after the country was shut down. Churches closed. Small businesses crushed. Kids locked out of school. Fauci and Deborah Birx still talking as if this was a rare, novel threat that required indefinite emergency rule until a pharmaceutical product arrived.

Inside the CIA, they were already talking seroprevalence. Seroprevalence is the percentage or proportion of people in a specific population who have antibodies against a specific disease or infectious agent in their blood serum.

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New Documents Confirm Fauci’s NIAID Provided Cover for CIA Bioterrorism Research — CIA Helped Obtain the Viruses and Controlled What Data Could Be Shared

As The Gateway Pundit has reported for years, Fauci was never merely a public-health doctor.

After the anthrax attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration remade NIAID into the civilian hub of U.S. biodefense.

Billions poured in. High-containment labs proliferated. Dual-use research on the most dangerous pathogens exploded, work that Fauci later funneled, through EcoHealth Alliance, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The new documents fill in how early that partnership with the intelligence community really was.

According to Sen. Rand Paul:

“JUST RELEASED: The official hearing record of Anthony Fauci’s “testimony” before my Committee—which ultimately led the Committee to hold him in contempt. Beginning on page 96: previously unreleased documents I entered into the permanent congressional record, like this one showing CIA funds were transferred to Fauci’s NIAID.”

An undated interagency agreement obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation confirms that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases worked directly with the CIA on sensitive research involving viruses and biological threats.

The eight-page agreement shows that the CIA’s Biological Technology Center initiated a collaboration with NIAID involving “forensic microbiology” research for the intelligence community.

Fauci served as director of NIAID from 1984 until 2022.

According to the documents, the CIA planned to leverage existing civilian research programs at NIH to support intelligence-related biological research.

Unclassified NIH virus research would be used to “augment and complement” the CIA’s own research and development.

The CIA would even help Fauci’s agency obtain the pathogens needed for the research.

The arrangement also gave the spy agency control over what could be released publicly.

Although the resulting research was reportedly considered sensitive rather than classified, NIAID could not share the data without first receiving permission from the CIA.

In other words, Fauci’s supposedly civilian public-health institute was working alongside America’s premier spy agency on research involving dangerous biological agents, with the CIA controlling access to the findings.

The project reportedly sought to expand the government’s ability to conduct comparative forensic analyses of complete viruses rather than examining only individual genes.

This is not ancient history. It is the origin story of the same apparatus that later funded bat-coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, steered the intelligence community away from the lab-leak hypothesis, and produced the “Proximal Origin” paper that media and public-health officials treated as gospel.

Documents released this year by Sen. Rand Paul and then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard showed Fauci briefing CIA officials, feeding the IC a hand-picked list of NIAID-funded scientists, and denying under oath that he had discussed viral research with intelligence agencies.

The new CIA–NIAID agreement shows the relationship was baked in from the start.

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Trump Stuns By Outright Dismissing Notion Putin Preparing To Attack A NATO State

President Trump has added fuel to the fire of controversy and speculation over the question of why CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a surprise and highly rare trip to Moscow on Tuesday.

Media accounts which seek to explain the nature of his meeting with top Kremlin intelligence officials, while apparently being snubbed by Putin in terms of a direct interaction, have shifted in days since the visit. The early ‘consensus’ was that he delivered a stern warning for Russia not to attack any NATO state. But President Trump has poured cold water on this explanation, appearing to dismiss it outright in his latest comments. 

“I’ve had good talks with him. He’s not going to be attacking a NATO territory,” Trump said of Putin on Thursday while talking to reporters in the Oval Office.

Trump didn’t answer specifically when pressed on if the president directed Ratcliffe to deliver a warning to Putin to not attack NATO. “I don’t want to comment on that but they’re not going to attack,” Trump said.

While many times over the course of the Ukraine war, European heads of state have claimed that Russia is expansionist and seeks to attack countries in Europe beyond Ukraine, this has not ever been a public allegation of Trump, who has tended to downplay it as a possibility. 

Trump did deny the reports centered on Ratcliffe in an interview with Axios Thursday, saying “Ratcliffe sees his Russian counterpart once every six months or once every year. They have a very good relationship. There was no message and there was nothing unusual.”

And when asked over whether he’s concerned that Putin might attack NATO or deeper inside Europe, Trump replied, “I am not concerned … at all. There is no problem.” According to more:

The president called Ratcliffe’s trip “standard business” and expressed puzzlement over the media accounts of it.

But the reality is that no CIA director has made such a trip in well over four years. The prior time was November 2021, when then-CIA Director William Burns traveled to Moscow to meet with senior Russian officials and issued a stark warning against invading Ukraine.

It was also highly unexpected in terms of timing, given the stalemated nature of the Ukraine conflict, and the fact that zero peace negotiations are happening. There has not even so much as been any efforts at achieving a short-term ceasefire, akin to last year’s Christmas truce.

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A Top FBI Official’s Remarks About Running a Secret Government Are Now More Chilling

It didn’t happen all at once, but the timelines and the new document dumps paint a disturbing picture of what we knew would appear on the canvas long before Trump’s second presidency and the disclosures that exposed the whole deep state circus. We have former presidents, including Obama, ordering intelligence assessments to thread in Russian collusion nonsense; a former CIA director who lied about how the Steele Dossier, the document responsible for this hoax, was used in analyzing the intelligence; and the media’s incessant and destructive crusade to make this ruse legitimate. They failed because there was no evidence, and every bombshell was debunked within hours. 

Given the latest trove of documents about the FBI’s investigation into former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and his Chinese tryst with Fang Fang, who everyone knew was an intelligence agent, the pattern emerges: the FBI truly was running a secret government of sorts. They eschewed investigations into foreign influence involving Democrats, the Biden family, and the Clintons, and redirected all efforts to legitimize shoddy evidence and outright lies about Trump.

Again, you knew this, but now you have mountains of paperwork and damning emails from top FBI officials who admitted to “basically running a shadow government across the FBI.” That official reported to then-FBI Director Chris Wray daily. Even worse, under Operation Round River, the FBI targeted those who brought forward evidence regarding allegations of foreign influence and corruption on the Hunter Biden laptop (via Public):

Many of the FBI’s abuses of power have been reported before. There was coverage of how the FBI received warrants to spy on Trump aide Carter Page based on a July 2016 email that the Bureau, in five separate interviews, never once asked Page about. Reporters covered the FBI’s claim in its warrant application that Page had “met with” senior Russian officials when he had, in fact, only shaken a deputy prime minister’s hand, and spoken briefly with a staffer. And journalists wrote about how the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz documented 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions across four FISA applications targeting Page.

But now, new files released today reveal that the FBI walked away from a far stronger case against Rep. Eric Swalwell. The FBI opened its investigation in 2014 and named as its objective to “obtain sufficient evidence to indict and arrest Swalwell and Fang for violations of campaign finance laws and quid pro quo exchanges.” Christine Fang, known as Fang Fang, was a Chinese national whose parents the FBI identified as “known MSS intelligence officers,” a reference to China’s Ministry of State Security, that nation’s equivalent to the CIA.

The new files show Swalwell admitted to FBI agents that he had “physical relations with Fang” on multiple occasions. They also show that he confirmed that Fang referred interns to him, whom his staff placed in his campaign and congressional offices. And agents traced 2013 straw donations through conduits back “to Fang herself,” making her, in the Bureau’s words, an “illegal source of campaign contributions.” And yet on February 8, 2017, the FBI dropped Swalwell as a subject and narrowed the case to Fang alone.

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VoterGA: Declassified Intelligence Reveals Massive China Election Interference Cover-up

President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address from the White House on July 16, 2026, on the subject of US election security.

During the speech, Trump announced the declassification of intelligence documents and made a series of allegations involving China, the 2020 election, and a subsequent effort by intelligence officials to withhold information from him and from Congress.

As reported earlier by Patriot Perspective, one CIA report outlined China’s broader objective as leveraging domestic and foreign groups opposed to Trump to reduce his support, pressure him to resign, or stop him from winning another term.

Another report alleged that information collected from millions of TikTok users could be used to place authentic names, addresses, and identification numbers on the fraudulent licenses, making them more difficult to detect.

The release by the US government in July, via an earlier TGP report by Patriot Perspective, revealed China’s massive, multi-year US election interference campaigns.

The documents depict a foreign adversary determined to exploit America’s political divisions.

The most alarming material concerns the collection of Americans’ personal information.

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US Officials Reveal Reason For CIA Chief’s Surprise Moscow Visit

The Wall Street Journal has late in the day Wednesday revealed the reason for CIA John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow yesterday where he met with top Kremlin intelligence leaders, citing officials. It was to warn against attacking NATO countries, says the Journal:

The surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.

The trip was spy-agency chief John Ratcliffe’s first publicly known visit to the Russian capital. It followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years.

U.S. officials are concerned that Putin, squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion, likely on a Baltic nation, the Journal reported. 

Some pundits have suggested a weaker Baltic nation like Estonia, which has long issued provocative anti-Moscow statements of its own, could come under some kind of limited attack.

The report further suggests Putin could be ready to seize on NATO’s munitions supply weakness – given the drain amid the Iran war and after over four years of constantly supplying Ukraine.

“A shortfall in critical Western munitions, driven by expenditures in the Iran war, also could factor into Putin’s thinking,“ the report continues. “The U.S. has degraded its stockpile of certain weapons because of transfers to Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion, as well as the Iran conflict.”

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Iran Says Persian-Language Media Outlets ‘Funded By CIA’ Are Military Targets

One key tool Washington has long utilized for influence operations and covert regime change plotting abroad has long been the establishment of foreign media for political messaging.

The idea is that a foreign language satellite news channel gets presented as ‘independent’ while in reality it beams propaganda onto a unsuspecting population within a so-called ‘rogue’ state being targeted by the US.

For example, WikiLeaks previously revealed that US intelligence invested heavily in such projects to bolster anti-Assad forces and sentiment in the context of last decade’s proxy war in Syria.

Currently, Iran says it is fully aware of several Persian-language media outlets which are subversive, given they have the backing of the US, UK, or Israeli governments, or others like Saudi Arabia.

The AFP in a Wednesday report has said Iranian state media has newly called out the following as hostile propaganda media fronts:

  • BBC Persian
  • Iran International
  • Radio Farda

An Iranian military spokesman has said these have been added to the armed forces’ “military target bank” – putting the outlets on notice that their offices and infrastructure could come under attack.

“These hostile media outlets are the soldiers of Zionism and America and are included in our military target bank,” military spokesman Abolfazl Shekarchi announced.

He charged that they are “directly connected to Mossad, CIA and enemy intelligence organizations.” He emphasized: “The Iranian Armed Forces do not view these news outlets as media.”

And interestingly, per AFP: “Iran has designated Iran International as a terrorist organization since 2022 and has warned that cooperation with the channel is punishable under Iranian law.”

Earlier in the Iran war, we featured analysis which pointed out that Iran International calls itself the “most popular Persian speaking foreign based news channel in Iran”.It employs 700 people and broadcasts into Iran from London via satellite, radio and social media outlets.

Iran International has been accused by critics of promoting “regime change” in Iran and advancing the position of the former shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, for a return to power. The outlet has long denied links to Israel or Saudi Arabia. The outlet reported heavily on protests that struck Iran at the beginning of this year, sparked by a cost-of-living crisis brought on, in part, by US sanctions.

In January 2025, the news site reported that more than 36,500 people were killed in a crackdown on protests. Those numbers were significantly higher than those estimated by the US and other western-based human rights groups.

US President Donald Trump cited casualty numbers similar to those reported by Iran International days before launching a war on Iran on February 28, but did not disclose where he had gotten the death toll number.

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