AMMAN, May 20: Contradicting the White House line, US first lady Laura Bush said on Thursday the president should have been interrupted during a bike ride to be told about a plane scare that forced her to take cover in a bunker as fighter jets scrambled over Washington. “I think he should have been interrupted, but I’m not going to second-guess the Secret Service that were with him,” Laura Bush told reporters during her flight to Amman, Jordan to start a five-day solo visit to the Middle East.

The first lady said she hoped her visit to Jordan, Israel and Egypt would help counter rising anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, fuelled by the Iraq war and, more recently, by a Newsweek magazine report that the Quran was desecrated by US interrogators. Newsweek has since retracted the report. The White House went all the way to “red” alert on May 11 after a small private plane entered restricted airspace over the executive mansion, prompting the Secret Service to evacuate the vice president to a “secure location” and rush the first lady and the visiting former first lady, Nancy Reagan, into a fortified bunker.

Despite what the White House characterised as the most serious alert since the Sept 11 attacks, neither the White House nor the Secret Service interrupted the president’s bicycle ride at a suburban wildlife centre in nearby Maryland to tell him about the threat. Instead, the Secret Service decided to wait until the end of his bike ride — and some 40 minutes after the “all-clear” was given — to fill Bush in.

The White House defended the Secret Service’s handling of the incident, arguing it followed proper procedures and there was no need to interrupt President Bush’s ride because he was not in any danger. Asked if Mr Bush had expressed any frustration about not being told sooner, the first lady said: “No. Not really.”

“He did feel like they followed the protocols. The fact is, we got to the bunker, and within two minutes the plane had turned (away) so that was a very short part of his ride, really, before they knew that everything was alright,” she added.

“We were not fearful, Nancy Reagan or I.” Asked about the first lady’s comments, White House spokesman Trent Duffy would not say whether Mr Bush agreed with his wife that he should have been told sooner.—Reuters