The CIA is not practicing transparency, but archaeology
By Nikhil Raghavan · Reporting from San Francisco ·
On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, CIA Director John Ratcliffe decided to gift the public a series of declassified presidential daily briefs.
# Archaeology, Not Transparency
CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently released a series of declassified presidential daily briefs, calling the move “an act of exceptional transparency.” In the world of platform integrity, executives use the word “transparency” when they release logs after the system has already crashed and the data is gone. This is not transparency; it is a post-mortem delivered a quarter-century too late. When an agency releases the specifications of a failure decades after the event, it is not informing the public—it is managing a legacy.
The Signal Was Not Noise
Reporting from The Guardian and Al Jazeera confirms the intelligence community had the information but lacked a way to route it. In September 1998, a briefer warned that Osama bin Laden preferred to strike Washington and might fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city. By December, the CIA reported that conspirators had already tested the fences, evading security checks during a trial run at a New York airport and receiving hijack training.
Defenders of the intelligence community call this "noise." They argue that in a flood of daily reports, analysts cannot distinguish a vague threat from a specific plot without freezing the country's infrastructure. They claim that "plausible" priorities are not actionable.
This argument fails because these were footprints, not vague priorities. In any technical system, a successful trial run is a breach in the perimeter. It is the ultimate red flag. Yet the system remained unpatched. By August 2001, the FBI tracked roughly 70 field investigations related to Bin Laden, noting activity that mirrored hijacking preparations.
When an agency combines a documented trial run at a New York airport with specific mentions of explosive planes, it is no longer dealing with a coin flip—it is dealing with a blueprint. The failure was not a lack of fragments to assemble, but a refusal to see the picture they already formed.
Who Missed the Memo?
This release follows a pattern of cleaning the record. In 1975, the Church Committee investigated systemic abuses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The Senate sought to restore trust through a curated burst of releasing files, but the committee did not stop the abuses while they happened; it wrote the failure into the record to create a veneer of oversight.
The CIA is running the same play. By releasing these briefs now, the agency signals openness while the victims—nearly 3,000 lives—remain a statistic.
A similar impulse surfaced during the Arab Spring, when agencies released reports during political upheavals to justify past actions or perform a sudden pivot toward honesty. In both cases, releasing the files serves institutional survival, not public service.
The National Archives has added a new layer of confusion by releasing interviews with officials from the Clinton and Bush eras. This shifts the debate toward which administration missed the warning—whether it was the 1998 brief on weapons of mass destruction or the 2001 focus on biological agents—rather than critiquing the system that allowed the warnings to be ignored.
The Archive is a Mirror, Not a Map
A bipartisan commission from 2002 to 2004 tried to fix this by creating a Director of National Intelligence. But these documents suggest the problem was not the org chart; it was the way the agency actually behaved.
Historians will use the National Archives' interviews to pinpoint communication gaps. For the citizen, however, one fact outweighs the rest: a presidential brief in 1998 explicitly warned that terrorists might use aircraft-borne bombs to strike a U.S. city.
This release will likely trigger performative legislative inquiries. The real danger is mistaking the act of declassifying a failure for the act of preventing one. The state does not learn to regulate its own incompetence by publishing old mistakes; it only learns to archive them.
The CIA is not practicing transparency; it is practicing archaeology. Releasing the blueprints of a disaster a quarter-century later does not prove the agency can read the signs—it only proves they finally feel safe admitting they ignored them.