Angry Bush defends US response to terror threat

Pressure mounted last night for an independent commission to investigate the background to the 11 September attacks to see whether they could have been prevented.

As the White House launched a counter-offensive to criticism it had failed to act on warnings that some sort of attack was imminent, President George Bush responded to the controversy in person for the first time.

Dismissing "second guessing", Mr Bush angrily rejected suggestions he had any inkling of what was to happen. "Had I known the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," he told air force cadets at a White House ceremony none too subtly designed to underline his role as Commander-in-Chief.

A few minutes earlier, his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, revealed that in the days before 11 September, a presidential order was being prepared for the dismantling of Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network.

The order, which contained plans incorporated into the subsequent campaign to uproot al-Qa'ida's operations in Afghanistan, had not reached the desk of the President by the time of the attacks. But for the White House, the order's existence reinforced the administration's case that it was alive to the danger the network represented, even if it did not know where and when it would strike. "The enemy is not President Bush, it is bin Laden," Trent Lott, the senior Senate Republican, said.

But the harshest words in an increasingly bitter political argument came from the Vice-President, Dick Cheney. He laid into Democrats at a Republican fundraising dinner in New York, resurrecting the argument that to criticise the administration "at a time of war" was "incendiary" and little short of treason.

With their suggestions that the White House had not reacted adequately to an intelligence warning on 6 August, the Democrats were being "thoroughly irresponsible", all the more so when the country faced the threat of further and perhaps deadlier attacks than 11 September, Mr Cheney said.

His criticism followed charges from a host of senior Democrats, who see a chance to tarnish Mr Bush's image and damage the Republican cause ahead of mid-term elections this November. The stakes are high, with control of both Houses hinging on a few seats.

As the angry words flew, senators and congressmen from both parties were expressing a growing interest in establishing an independent body to investigate the circumstances of 11 September, and decide what intelligence failures occurred, and where.

The fear is that the joint inquiry now under way by the House and Senate intelligence committees will be fatally hampered either by partisan feuding or by inadequate co-operation from the CIA and FBI. Some committee members are already privately complaining about this.

Both the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, who challenged Mr Bush for the 2000 Republican nomination, back an outside body, which could resemble the Warren Commission set up to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.

A new commission would be made up of "independent, non-political citizens", Mr Lieberman said. It would look into everything, "not just intelligence but law enforcement, foreign policy, military policy, to see whether there's anything we could have done to prevent 11 September or to prevent another 11 September," he said.

The signs are that the row is not hurting Mr Bush too badly. Although 68 per cent of respondents in a USA Today/CNN poll thought the White House should have made the 6 August warning public sooner, another poll by CNN found 70 per cent believed the criticism of Mr Bush was "just political".That figure coincides with the President's most recent approval rating. It seemed clear yesterday that unless Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser, was grossly misleading in her briefing on Thursday, the warning given to the President on 6 August was vague in the extreme, based on an accumulation of intelligence snippets that contained no detail.

Mr Bush was not, for instance, told of the FBI agent's report from Phoenix in July, warning of Arab men taking flying lessons in the US, nor of the August arrest in Minnesota of Zacarias Moussaoui – now alleged to be the 20th hijacker – which prompted another FBI agent to speculate that he might be interested in flying a jet into the World Trade Centre.

If anyone is guilty of oversight, it is the FBI, the immigration services and to a lesser extent the CIA. The FBI took no action on either of the clues, and did not follow up the Moussaoui arrest by examining the contents of his computer.

When these were checked after 11 September, they revealed other pointers to possible terrorist action. The CIA, which prepared the 6 August report, has been accused of not working closely enough with the FBI.