WASHINGTON, May 18: Despite White House avowals that it would have been impossible to conceive before Sept. 11 of using a hijacked plane to attack US targets, a 1999 report for the CIA envisioned a very similar threat.

It predicted Osama bin Laden would retaliate “in a spectacular way” against Washington for US cruise missile strikes in 1998 against training facilities of his al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.

“Suicide bombers belonging to Al Qaeda’s martyrdom battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives ... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House,” the report said.

The report, titled “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism,” was commissioned by the CIA and conducted by the research arm of the Library of Congress, well before Bush took office.

One work in a vast output of terrorism studies, the report has long been public and is available on the Internet. (http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Sociology-Psychology of Terrorism.htm)

But its on-target prediction prompted new questions on Friday over how much the government knew about potential threats, in the wake of disclosures that President George W. Bush was alerted in his daily CIA intelligence briefing to the possibility of a hijacking by al Qaeda last August.

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon,” Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Thursday.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Thursday the alert to Bush did not say there was a chance planes would be used by al Qaeda as suicide bombs.

“Traditional hijackings prior to Sept. 11 — it might as well be a different word in a different language from what we have all unfortunately come to know about the post-9/11 world,” he said.

On Friday, Fleischer played down the significance of the report, saying it was primarily a study of the thinking of potential terrorists and not based on specific intelligence.

He said he had not learned of the report until Friday, but noted it had also long been available to Congress, some of whose members have called for an investigation into potential administration intelligence failures.

“I think what it shows is this information that was out there did not raise enough alarms with anybody ... because it was not intelligence information,” Fleischer said.

The Library of Congress report said retaliation could also come in the form of a “building buster” bomb at a federal building or, more likely, a time bomb on an airliner. “A horrendous scenario consonant with al Qaeda’s mindset would be its use of a nuclear suitcase bomb against any number of targets in the nation’s capital,” the report said.

It said other groups that could carry out terror attacks on the United States, including Lebanon’s Hizbollah, Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam, and Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo.

However, it said, “al Qaeda poses the most serious terrorist threat to US security interests, for al Qaeda’s well-trained terrorists are actively engaged in a terrorist jihad against US interests worldwide.”—Reuters