WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush was told in the months before the September 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's network might hijack United States passenger planes, prompting the Administration to alert federal agencies - but not the American public.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday that Bush was briefed on the US intelligence last northern summer but received no information to suggest that bin Laden's al Qaeda network planned to use aircraft as missiles. "Until the attack took place, I think it's fair to say no one envisioned that as a possibility," Fleischer said.
The disclosure came amid questions about whether US authorities failed to recognise and respond to warnings about possible terrorist attacks before the hijackings of the four passenger planes on September 11.
The New York Times reported that an FBI agent in Arizona warned his superiors that bin Laden might be sending students to US flight schools.
Washington accuses bin Laden's al Qaeda network of masterminding the attacks, which killed about 3000 people.
"There's been a long-standing awareness in the intelligence community, shared with the President, about the potential for bin Laden to have hijackings," Fleischer said. "The information the President got dealt with hijackings in the traditional sense - not suicide bombers, not using planes as missiles."
After the information was presented to Bush, the Administration put domestic agencies on alert.
That alert was not announced publicly. Fleischer said that might have prompted the hijackers to change their tactics.
"The Administration, based on hijackings, notified the appropriate agencies and, I think, that's one of the reasons you saw the people who committed the 9-11 attacks used box cutters and plastic knives to get around America's system of protecting against hijackings," he said.
Fleischer did not say which agencies were alerted, or how they responded.
Fleischer made the comments following a Times report that an FBI agent urged the bureau to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in US flight schools several months before September 11, even naming bin Laden.
Lack of co-ordination probably caused the FBI to miss any connection between the warning from Phoenix and the August arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui - a French citizen of Moroccan descent detained in Minnesota after raising suspicions among instructors at a flight school.
FBI director Robert Mueller told a Senate hearing the agent in Minnesota had told headquarters of the possibility "of Moussaoui being that type of person that could fly something into the World Trade Centre."
When hijacked airliners ploughed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, Middle Eastern men trained at US flight schools were at the controls.
The House and Senate intelligence committees are investigating why US intelligence agencies did not detect the plot.
CBS News reported that Bush was alerted of a possible airliner attack during his daily briefings in the weeks before September 11.
A US intelligence official, on condition of anonymity, said the CIA had continually informed policymakers throughout the summer before September 11 that bin Laden and his network might try to harm US interests and discussed a range of possibilities that included hijackings.
"That was among the many things we talked about all the time as a potential terrorist threat," the official said.
"But when we talked about hijackings, we talked about that in the traditional sense of hijackings, not in the sense of somebody hijacking an aircraft and flying it into a building."
On February 6, CIA Director George Tenet told a congressional hearing the agency had seen "spectacular threat reporting about massive casualties against the US" in the northern spring and summer last year, but there was no specific information.
Mueller is making final plans for a shake-up at the bureau.
In the next few weeks, he is expected to announce his plans to reallocate FBI agents and resources to improve analysis and consolidate activities at the Washington headquarters.
Mueller has said the bureau needed to focus more heavily on analysis and co-ordination with other organisations and with its field offices. The bureau needed more agents, had to shuffle resources and focus more on analysis.
Mueller plans to create a centralised anti-terrorist team in Washington to co-ordinate intelligence warnings.
The FBI's new "super squad" will run all major terrorism investigations around the world while a new Office of Intelligence will co-ordinate the analysis of all classified terrorism information.
The move marks a dramatic reduction of the power of the FBI's Manhattan field office, which until September 11 took the lead on anti-terrorism. Congress plans to raise intelligence spending by almost US$3 billion ($6.53 billion) to US$35 billion next year.
- REUTERS
Story archives:
Links: Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Bush warned of plot before September 11
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