US President George W. Bush was told more than a month before the September 11 attacks that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned a strike within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Citing an unnamed government official, the newspaper said the warning came in a secret briefing that Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Texas on August 6, 2001.
A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by al-Qaeda, the paper said.
The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the al-Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect an al-Qaeda attack within the United States, The Times said.
The congressional report said that al-Qaeda operatives had appeared to have a support structure in the United States and that intelligence officials had "uncorroborated information" that bin Laden "wanted to hijack airplanes" to gain the release of imprisoned extremists.
It also said that intelligence officials received information in May 2001, three months earlier, that indicated "a group of bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives."
The paper said the White House had also offered evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had received instructions more than two months before the September 11 attacks to increase its scrutiny of terrorist suspects inside the United States.
The disclosure appeared to signal an effort by the White House to distance itself from the FBI in the debate over whether the Bush administration did enough in the summer of 2001 to deter a possible terrorist attack in the United States in the face of increased warnings, The Times said. A classified memorandum sent around July 4, 2001, to Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, from the counterterrorism group run by Richard Clarke, described a series of steps it said the White House had taken to put the nation on heightened terrorist alert, according to the report.
Among the steps, the memorandum said, "all 56 FBI field offices were also tasked in late June to go to increased surveillance and contact with informants related to known or suspected terrorists in the United States."
Parts of the White House memorandum were provided to The New York Times on Friday by a White House official seeking to showcase the administration's work against terrorism, the paper said.
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