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June 5, 2002
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Wednesday
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Rabi-ul-Awwal 23,1423
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US was alerted to attack: Mubarak
WASHINGTON, June 4: The United States said on Tuesday it had no information to support Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s claim that Egyptian intelligence warned US officials a week before Sept 11 about a pending attack.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said it was “unclear what information” Mubarak was referring to in an interview with The New York Times.
The Times quoted the Egyptian leader as saying Egyptian intelligence warned US officials about a week before Sept 11 that Osama bin Laden’s network was in the advance stages of executing a significant operation against an American target.
The Times said Cairo obtained the information through a secret agent in close contact with the Al Qaeda network and had tried unsuccessfully to halt the operation.
“We didn’t know that such a thing could take place,” the paper quoted Mubarak as saying, referring to the Sept 11 attacks. “We thought it was an embassy, an airplane, something, the usual thing.”
Fleischer said US. and Egyptian intelligence agencies exchanged information in the early part of last year about a general terrorism threat outside the United States but that there was no specific suggestion about Sept 11.
“Nothing that I’ve been made aware of” would support Mubarak’s quoted remarks, Fleischer told reporters.
Mubarak is due to travel to the United States this week for talks with US President George W. Bush this weekend.
“We knew that something was going to happen,” Mubarak told the newspaper. “We informed them about everything.”
The New York Times report came amid controversy over how US agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and CIA handled potential clues about a pending terror attack in the months before Sept. 11.
Congressional hearings start this week to investigate the failure of intelligence agencies to uncover the plot in which four planes were hijacked in an attack blamed on al Qaeda.
One of the main criticisms of US security agencies has been that they failed to share intelligence among themselves.—Reuters
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