On 10 September 1998, at the bottom of the daily intelligence report prepared for then US president Bill Clinton, stood a sentence saying a group linked to Osama bin Laden "might fly a plane full of explosives into an American city". Three years later, almost to the day, four passenger aircraft were turned into weapons over New York and Washington.

That sentence is now public. The CIA released more than 100 pages of previously classified presidential reports - 71 documents in total - to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks. Agency director John Ratcliffe called it "an act of extraordinary transparency" and the largest release of such reports in the agency's history. The documents cover the period from February 1998 to 12 September 2001 - the day after the attacks.

It was not one warning, but a series

The released documents show this was not an isolated tip. The reports mention possible attacks on facilities in Washington, attempts to acquire material for a nuclear bomb, plans for chemical weapons attacks and kidnappings of Americans. One report from September 1998 states that bin Laden's preferred option was a strike on the US on its own territory, in Washington.

The warnings continued under George W. Bush. The document of 6 August 2001, a little over a month before the attacks, carried the title that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States. It states that al-Qaeda members had lived in or travelled to the country for years and that the organisation probably had a network capable of supporting an attack. The FBI was at the time running around 70 detailed investigations linked to bin Laden.

"Warning fatigue" - the excuse that repeats everywhere

Why did none of it come together? The documents offer a term: warning fatigue. Year after year new assessments arrived, but without precise data on time, place and method. When everything is a potential threat, nothing is a concrete threat, and the apparatus stops reacting.

The 9/11 Commission later concluded that the services had warned continuously, but failed to connect the individual pieces of information into a picture of the operation that actually followed. The last report before the attacks, dated 28 August 2001, no longer mentioned the passenger-aircraft scenario at all - it listed assassinations, kidnappings and rocket attacks.

What remains of this after twenty-five years

It is easy to read this as a story about a missed chance. The more accurate reading is different and harder: the service did its job, the document reached the top of government, and still nothing happened. The problem was not a lack of information, but that information means nothing until somebody decides to act on it.

That is a mechanism that is neither American nor old. A report sitting in a drawer until the event happens, and then published as proof that everything was known - that is a scene every administration in the world has staged at least once. The question is how many such documents are right now waiting for somebody to read them to the end.