18 April 2004	Sunday	27 Safar 1425

WASHINGTON, April 17: The US Central Intelligence Agency warned the White House and other policymakers as early as 1995 that Muslim militants, angered by US support for Israel and the military presence in Saudi Arabia , could mount an attack on American soil, an official said.

The disclosure comes amid an intensifying blame game in the US capital, in which the intelligence community is facing stinging criticism for allegedly failing to alert top officials in a timely fashion to the growing threat of terrorism.

The warning was contained in the National Intelligence Estimate for that year and subsequent reports designed to increase the government's awareness of the growing threat of Muslim radicalism, said the official.

While the 1995 analysis did not specifically mention Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, it referred to the possibility that Muslim extremists could target American civilian aircraft as well as key landmarks in New York and Washington, according to the official.

Among the landmarks that aroused the most concern were Wall Street and its financial institutions as well as the White House and the Capitol.

"There was intelligence reporting to that effect in substantial intelligence products," the official said.

The estimate titled "The Foreign Terrorist Threat in the United States" also insisted that America was most likely to face an attack from "transient groupings" like the one cobbled together by Ramzi Yousef, the jailed mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"Such groupings lack strong organization but rather are loose affiliations," the document said.

The revelation appears to be aimed at blunting charges the CIA has failed to timely recognize the threat from Al Qaeda.

In a report released this past week, an independent commission investigating the attacks chided the US intelligence community for not describing Al Qaeda in its documents until 1999, although the group had already existed for 11 years at that time.

As late as 1997, the CIA was describing Osama in its documents as "a financier of terrorism", rather than a mastermind of terrorist plots, according to the report.

The spy agency was aware that Osama and his organization had been involved in a 1992 attack on a hotel in Yemen housing US military personnel and the 1993 shootdown of US Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia, the document said.

The commission said that despite an occasional paper on Osama, the intelligence community had failed to produce "complete authoritative portraits of his strategy and the extent of his organization's involvement in past terrorist attacks".

CIA Director George Tenet said he could not agree with these findings.

President George Bush has denied he had any warnings of Al Qaeda specific plots before Sept 11, but admitted he knew about the group's hostile intentions.

The US official said the CIA had issued a number of reports on aviation-related threats prior to 9/11 that have been widely disseminated within the US government.

The National Intelligence Estimate is usually provided not only to the White House but across the policymaking community, according to the official.

"Congressional leaders would be briefed on substantive findings," the official added.-AFP