Bush was warned about hijack threat
President Bush was warned only weeks before the terrorist attacks on 11 September that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijack American passenger planes, the White House admitted last night.
Security sources briefed the President on the threat posed by the al Qaeda terror network over the summer, putting the CIA and FBI on full alert.
The White House admission comes in the wake of reports that an FBI agent had urged his agency to investigate a number of Arab men who were taking courses at US flight schools and that Bin Laden was named as a prime suspect.
It raises further questions about the failure of American intelligence over the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in which 3,000 people died, and casts serious doubt on the ability of the CIA and FBI.
However, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that while Mr Bush was aware of the hijacking threat, there were no clues that the planes would be used as flying bombs to attack targets inside the US. Nor had any time or place been mentioned.
"The information the President got dealt with hijackings in the traditional sense, not suicide bombers, not using planes as missiles," he said.
Questions are increasingly being asked in the US about whether the authorities failed to recognise warnings-that a terrorist attack was imminent. The information was passed first to the White House, which then alerted internal security agencies. Mr Fleischer said that putting the security services on alert may have forced the hijackers to change their plans.
"That's one of the reasons you saw that the people who committed the attacks used box cutters and plastic knives to get around America's system of protecting against hijackings," he said.
At the same time, it is clear that, along with an almost total absence of airport security, the incompetence of US intellegence was a major factor in the success of the hijackers' plans. It was revealed last month that immigration officials issued new student visas for several of the hijackers months after they had died carrying out the attacks.
The FBI also faces tough questions about Zacarious Moussaoui, a Moroccan-born Frenchman arrested in August when the owners of a flight school in Minnesota became concerned at his behaviour. FBI Director Robert Mueller now says he wished the agency had been more agressive in following up leads about Moussaoui, who, it is now believed, had been planning to pilot one of hijacked jets.
