Attorney General Todd Blanche pledged to release more documents related to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“The one thing that we are not doing, we’re not protecting people,” he told CBS News. “The reason that we’re not releasing documents has nothing to do with protecting any government or any entity. It’s just to protect, genuine classified [information].”
“Sometimes there’s documents that are classified and they shouldn’t be,” he explained. “And so those are the ones that we’re going to release.”
Discussing families seeking answers related to the attack, Blanche declared, “There’ll be more records coming out. And so, to the families that are still looking for answers, we are, too. And that’s what we’re going to deliver to them.”
Last week, the CIA declassified documents that revealed officials under the Clinton administration were aware that Osama bin Laden plotted to hijack a plane.
In a September 10, 1998, memorandum titled “Bid Ladin’s Location and Intentions,” officials wrote that Bin Laden said his “preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington.” It noted that the “same group responsible for the bombings in Africa may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city,” although officials concluded there was no information on Bin Laden’s “intensions for future attacks.”
Another memo from December 4, 1998, “suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh ‘Umar’ Abd Al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad ‘Sadiq’ Awda.”
A separate document from August 2001 declared, that “clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US.” It stated that Bin Laden “implied in US television interview in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’”
