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Home >> World
UPDATED: 14:11, June 25, 2004
Bush defends pre-9/11 intelligence handling
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US President George W. Bush on Tuesday defended his handling of intelligence before the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, describing an earlier memo which warned of a possible terrorist attack as "mainly history."

At a prime-time televised news conference at the White House, Bush said the secret briefing, which he received on Aug. 6, 2001 at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, "was talking about '97 and '98 and '99."

Bush acknowledged there was an indication that Osama bin Laden might want to hijack an airplane, "not to fly into a building, butperhaps to release a person in jail."

"There was a warning about bin Laden's desires on America" in the Presidential Daily Brief that he received a bit more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, but he "didn't think that was anything new," as major newspapers had talked about bin Laden's desires on hurting America, he said.

Bush said no nobody in his government and the prior (Bill Clinton) government could envision flying airplanes into buildingson such a massive scale.

If he had "any inkling whatsoever that the people were going tofly airplanes into buildings," he said, "we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country."

Bush's first televised news conference this year came when polls showed his popularity among US voters is eroding.

Bush's job approval rating in the latest quarter beginning Jan.20 averaged a 50.9 percent, down from 55.4 percent in the final quarter of 2003, a Gallup poll released on Tuesday showed.

The president's quarterly approval averages have been on a downward trend since Bush averaged "an unprecedented 86 percent job approval rating in the first several months after the Sept. 11terrorist attacks," Gallup said.

A Newsweek poll released Monday showed Bush trailing John Kerry,the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, by seven percentage points in a two-man matchup, 50-43 percent.

While 59 percent of respondents approved of Bush's performance in the war on terrorism and homeland security, his approval ratingon Iraq was only 44 percent.

On fighting terrorism, Bush said he was dealing with terrorism a lot as president, by talking with CIA director George Tenet about the emerging threats and having a regular counterterrorism group meeting to analyze those threats.

Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism adviser, has accused the Bush administration of largely ignoring the threats from al-Qaida before the terrorist attacks.

Testifying before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks and in his new book published in February, Clarke said theBush administration had not considered terrorism an "urgent" priority before Sept. 11 and had not done enough to fight terrorism.

Bush dodged a question whether he felt a sense of personal responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed some 3,000 people, and refused to offer an apology to the American people, asClarke did at the hearing for failing them prior to the attacks in2001.

Source: Xinhua

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