WASHINGTON - In the months before the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the CIA unit dedicated to hunting for Osama bin Laden complained that it was running out of money, and analysts considered the likelihood of catching the terror leader to be extremely low, according to government records published Tuesday.

The declassified documents, dated between 1992 and 2004, are heavily blacked out and offer little new information about what the United States knew about the Al Qaeda plot before September 2001. Many of the files are cited in the 9/11 Commission report, published in 2004. The commission determined that the failure that led to 9/11 was a lack of imagination and US intelligence agencies’ failure to connect the dots that could have prevented the attacks.