Amid political furor, Bush to give 9/11 address

George W. Bush

WASHINGTON - President George W Bush today scheduled a prime-time speech to mark the fifth anniversary of September 11 amid an acrimonious election-year debate over whether America is safer and who is to blame for the attacks.

The Oval Office address will culminate a series Bush has delivered to insist that five years after the catastrophic hijacked plane attacks that killed almost 3000 people, the United States is more secure but still threatened by al Qaeda.

While White House spokesman Tony Snow insisted the Monday (Tuesday NZT) speech has no political element, Bush has been attempting to frame a debate on national security to political and policy advantage and save Republicans from losing control of the US Congress to Democrats in the November election.

Democrats eager to make big gains in November were releasing a report on what they called failures by the Bush administration and the Republicans to enact recommendations on how to improve US security from the independent commission that investigated the attacks.

At the same time, Democrats have been on the defensive over a made-for-television miniseries suggesting then-President Bill Clinton and his top aides did too little to head off Osama bin Laden in the years before the 2001 attacks.

Chronicling events leading to September 11, the programme suggests the Clinton administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal properly with the gathering threat posed by Islamic militants.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has called the five-hour miniseries, scheduled for broadcast in the US next week, "a work of fiction" and demanded it be cancelled. The network reportedly was making last-second edits to try to satisfy the critics.

Bush risks missing millions of viewers because the Washington Redskins and Minnesota Vikings will be two hours into their National Football League season-opener on sports cable network ESPN at the same time as his speech, estimated to last 16 to 18 minutes.

The political unity that Bush experienced in the months after September 11 has long since given way to bitter partisanship over the Iraq war.

In the run-up to the anniversary, Bush has faced questions about whether the war in Iraq is a distraction from the al Qaeda threat and he admits it has been difficult to convince Americans that Iraq is a "critical part of the war on terror."

"Osama bin Laden has called Iraq central to the war on terror. And if we lose, if this young democracy fails, the enemy will be emboldened. They will have resources in which to launch attacks," Bush told ABC News on Thursday.

Snow said Bush's speech will reflect "what September 11 has meant for our country and where we've been since September 11 and how we move together."

"It will not be a political speech. It will not be calls to action by Congress, but instead reflect a date that's burned into all our experiences," Snow said.

The speech will cap Bush's observances of the fifth anniversary of the single most dramatic event of his presidency. He will travel to New York on Sunday to visit the site where the World Trade Centre towers crashed down.

On the anniversary day, Bush travels to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to pay homage to the victims of United Flight 93, which crashed after a passenger revolt against its hijackers before it reached targets in Washington.

Later the day, Bush was to visit the Pentagon to honour the memory of those killed when a hijacked plane slammed into the building.

- REUTERS