Intelligence failures force Bush to create new security agency

President George Bush has unveiled plans for a new agency to take charge of protecting America against terrorist attack, amid a surge of criticism over the failure of the US intelligence community to prevent last September's strikes by al-Qa'ida.

Mr Bush envisioned that the agency, which must be approved by Congress and whose head would have cabinet status, would have final responsibility for thwarting future assaults on American soil. Its creation would be the biggest reorganisation of the American government since the Second World War.

However, many will see it as a defensive step by the President, who is determined to head off calls for an independent inquiry into the growing mound of evidence of errors, notably by the CIA and the FBI, in failing to foretell the terror attacks.

President Bush said: "I do not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of 11 September. Yet we now know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us and this terrible knowledge requires us to act different."

But he added: "We need to know when warnings were missed or signs unheeded, not to point the finger of blame, but to make sure we correct any problems, and prevent them from happening again".

The new Department of Homeland Security would inherit 169,000 employees and $37.4 billion in budgets from the agencies it would absorb, including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, and the embattled immigration and customs services. The White House said it was the biggest government overhaul in a half-century.

There seemed no coincidence that Mr Bush – who asked all the main television networks to carry his announcement live during prime time – was proposing the agency on the day that a Senate hearing into botched communications inside the FBI was beginning on Capitol Hill. The President acknowledged this week that the CIA and the FBI had failed to share scattered clues about the attacks.

Reaction among Democrats was cautiously positive. "This is a very strong departure," Senator Edward Kennedy said, although he suggested that rejigging the bureaucracy in Washington might not be enough. "The question is whether shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic is the way to go."

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said the agency would pull together data from the other intelligence organisations.