Clinton Officials Knew bin Laden Would Target Civilian Aircraft

A newly declassified State Department document says that more than three years before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, American diplomats warned Saudi officials that Osama bin Laden would target civilian aircraft. The National Security Archive, the George Washington University nonprofit with a vast library of declassified United States Government documents, recently made the information public.

There are a couple of interesting things about this new document. First of all, the memo was absent from the reports prepared by the September 11 Commission, the panel appointed by Congress in 2002 to investigate how U.S. intelligence failed to detect planning for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Secondly, the so-called mainstream media coverage was quite lacking, probably because this new discovery didn’t shed a very positive light on Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeline Albright. In fact, the short New York Times article downplayed the memo and didn’t bother to mention Clinton or attempt to seek comment from the former president or his former secretary of state. Most other mainstream media outlets ignored the story.

The online Free Market News Network took the opportunity to criticize media entities on the left, right and center for not raising more questions regarding negligence from numerous government agencies that could perhaps have prevented the 9/11 attacks.