WASHINGTON, Aug 4: US President George Bush on Wednesday faced fresh questions about whether he is manipulating terrorism alerts, like the one newly blanketing key US financial centres, before the November elections.

Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry, though fiercely critical of Mr Bush's handling of the occupation of Iraq, has shied away from accusing the administration of milking specific terrorist threats for political gain.

But other Democrats, especially former presidential candidate Howard Dean, have said that the alert declared on Sunday in New York, New Jersey and Washington may have been timed to steal attention from Kerry's formal nomination three days earlier.

Mr Dean said on Tuesday that the information that led to the security crackdown stemmed from a mid-July arrest by Pakistani forces and questioned the decision to issue a warning three weeks later.

"This administration knew about this at least three weeks ago," he told MSNBC television. "They could have chosen any date they wanted to reveal this to the public." Top Bush security officials were red-faced but defiant after news reports revealed that the alerts stemmed from information that Al Qaeda had cased potential targets three years ago and may have updated their information in January.

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," the head of that agency, Tom Ridge, said during a joint news conference on Tuesday with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Governor George Pataki.

But Mr Ridge seemed to do exactly that in announcing the new alert on Sunday, saying: "We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror."

The administration appeared to counter-attack in the media on Wednesday as the New York Times cited anonymous intelligence officials as saying that the alerts stemmed from new intelligence pointing to a current threat.

One official told the daily that one report pointed to a possible attack "in August or September" while another said "all the information wasn't from one source; there was new information that was introduced late Friday night". -AFP