WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush received intelligence in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden might be plotting to hijack U.S. passenger planes, prompting his administration to put security agencies on alert last summer, the White House said. But White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush and other senior administration officials had no information to suggest hijacked planes could be used as missiles as they were on Sept. 11 to attack the Pentagon and destroy the World Trade Center.

The disclosure came amid questions about whether U.S. 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 U.S. flight schools. Washington accuses bin Laden and his al Qaeda network of masterminding the attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people. The information was presented to Bush last summer. In response, the administration put domestic law enforcement agencies on alert 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 FBI failed to make a connection between that warning and the August arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui — a French citizen of Moroccan descent detained in Minnesota after raising suspicions among his instructors at a flight school. 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.

Reuters