12.10pm
Only two days before the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, United States President George W Bush was given a "detailed war plan" to dismantle Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, NBC News has reported.
Citing "US and foreign sources", NBC said Bush was given a national security presidential directive to sign that aimed to use means ranging from diplomacy to military power against the network that the United States blames for the September 11 attacks.
NBC said the plan was "pretty much" the same the Bush administration followed after the attacks, and included asking other countries to co-operate and share intelligence, disruption of al Qaeda cells using covert actions and the freezing of al Qaeda bank accounts and stopping its money laundering operations.
While the directive was on Bush's desk on September 9, the NBC report said he did not have a chance to sign it before four passenger planes were hijacked and slammed into US landmarks, killing about 3000 people.
The NBC report follows insistent questions from lawmakers as to whether the administration missed potential warnings of the attacks.
The White House said that Bush received information in August that bin Laden's group was seeking to hijack US planes. The White House has said it received no specific information that would have revealed the attackers' plans.
A senior Bush administration official said the government warned airlines about threats of hijackings and other attacks, some from terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden, in the months before September 11 but never considered a public alert because the information was too vague.
A former top United States intelligence official said that when he left in June he had been more worried that Osama bin Laden would use a biological weapon than hijack planes as happened three months later.
"It (hijacking) was one of the things we put in the long menu of options that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups had," said John Gannon, who served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
"When I left I think I was most worried about the biological threat," said Gannon, now vice chairman at the consulting firm Intellibridge.
The National Intelligence Council, which reports to the CIA director, produces classified assessments on various threats from long-range ballistic missiles to terrorism.
Key members of Congress have asked whether the government had information pointing to the attacks on America after the White House disclosed President George W Bush had had an intelligence briefing in early August that included concerns bin Laden's group might try to hijack a passenger plane.
"It was not a warning. There was no specific time, place or method mentioned," Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser, told reporters.
On September 11 four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon near Washington and a field in Pennsylvania, killing about 3000 people. The United States has blamed bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.
"We did not have the intelligence to suggest that it was going to be US aircraft in the United States against US facilities and buildings," Gannon told Reuters in a telephone interview.
US intelligence agencies had been concerned that bin Laden was developing biological and chemical weapons and also threatening cyberspace attacks to disrupt computer networks.
"We were also telling the president about broader threats to space systems that adversaries and terrorist groups could potentially shoot down satellites with laser technology," Gannon said.
On the list of national security concerns were ballistic missile threats from Russia and China, and the capabilities of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran to develop missiles that could be deployed against the United States, he said.
"We also told him (the president) that he should be worried about the nonconventional launch of weapons of mass destruction from trains, boats, planes," Gannon said.
"When I left, I could not, I did not have the intelligence to predict which one of these things they would do, but I was most worried about biological, maybe chemical and nuclear as an option in the future," Gannon said.
Former CIA Director Robert Gates said the number of intelligence reports that would be as specific as those that enabled the recent prevention of attacks on US embassies in Paris and Singapore was "very rare".
"The problem with these terrorism warnings, and it's characteristic of them from 20 years ago to the present, is that most of the time what you get is a report that somebody is planning something, and that they might be using this or that technique, but there is no time, there is no place, there is no specificity at all that would give you something to protect against," Gates said.
Co-ordination between the CIA and FBI on information they had separately gathered on potential threats before September 11 was lacking, intelligence experts said.
"It's a little bit like Pearl Harbour, something could have been done if it had been pooled together in one place," former CIA Director James Woolsey said, noting that Pearl Harbour was the reason CIA was originally established.
"Often intelligence is not specific as to a time and place something is going to happen. It's a matter of pulling things together from different locations," he said.
- REUTERS
Story archives:
Links: Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Al Qaeda 'game plan' on Bush's desk September 9
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