US President George W. Bush was told in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's network might hijack US passenger planes, prompting the administration to issue an alert to federal agencies -- but not the American public, the White House said on Wednesday.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush was briefed on the US intelligence last summer but received no information to suggest that bin Laden's al-Qaeda network planned to use airplanes as missiles as they did on Sept. 11 to attack the Pentagon and destroy the World Trade Center.
"Until the attack took place, I think it's fair to say that no one envisioned that as a possibility," Fleischer said.
The disclosure came amid questions about whether US authorities failed to recognize and respond to warnings about possible terrorist attacks prior to the hijackings of the four passenger planes on Sept. 11.
The New York Times reported that an FBI agent in Arizona had 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 more than 3,000 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 in the summer, just months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Fleischer said.
That alert was not announced publicly but Fleischer said it may 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 that you saw that 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 put on alert and what they did in response.
In contrast, he said the Bush administration did go public last summer with a warning about terrorist threats on the Arabian peninsula.
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 Sept. 11, even naming bin Laden.
The FBI failed to make a connection between that warning and the August arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui -- a French citizen of Moroccan descent detained after raising suspicions among his instructors at a flight school.
When the hijacked airliners crashed on Sept. 11, Middle Eastern men trained at US flight schools were at the controls.
Earlier this month, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham complained that the Justice Department and CIA had not provided congressional investigators with adequate access to documents and witnesses for a probe into intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Graham's spokesman said the senator had no comment on the White House's disclosures on Wednesday. The House and Senate Intelligence committees are conducting a joint investigation into why US intelligence agencies failed to detect the Sept. 11 plot.
Fleischer said Bush had received general information about the threat of airplane hijackings by bin Laden's group.
"That was information that has been known and the president was informed of it," he said.
But Fleischer would not discuss specific information Bush received during his daily intelligence briefings.
CBS News reported that Bush was specifically alerted of a possible airliner attack during his daily intelligence briefings in the weeks before Sept. 11.
A US intelligence official, on condition of anonymity, said the CIA had continuously informed policymakers throughout the summer before Sept. 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 that we talked about all the time as a potential terrorist threat," the intelligence official said.
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