by Olivier Knox
WASHINGTON, July 21 (AFP) - Bracing for a report into the failures that led to the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes, US President George W. Bush said Wednesday he did not have enough warning to prevent the attacks.
"Had we had any inkling whatsoever that terrorists were about to attack our country, we would have moved heaven and earth to protect America," he said as he met with Romania's prime minister. "Any president would."
In a report due out Thursday, the panel probing the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is not expected to say they could have been prevented while listing a number of missed opportunities to avert them.
The bipartisan commission's findings could pose an election-year headache for Bush, who has made his response to the attacks a key part of his reelection campaign, just over three months before the November 2 vote.
Bush said he would meet with the commission's Republican chairman and Democratic vice chairman to discuss how to carry out much-needed reforms of US intelligence gathering and analysis.
"A president and a Congress must have the best possible intelligence to make good decisions about how to protect America and our friends and allies," Bush said as he met with Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase.
But he did not explicitly endorse calls for putting the US intelligence apparatus -- currently a hodge-podge of agencies with different missions and answering to different masters -- under a new Cabinet-level chief.
"There needs to be a full discussion about how best to coordinate the different intelligence-gathering services here in the country," Bush said.
"I hope they talk about more human intelligence, because human intelligence is one of the most effective ways for us to gather intelligence in the first place.
"I hope they talk about -- and I suspect they will -- about using modern technologies to better listen and see events taking place so that we can protect ourselves."
Opposition Democrats have charged that Bush ignored critical warnings that al-Qaeda was targeting the United States, while Bush's Republicans have accused former president Bill Clinton of not taking the terrorist threat seriously enough during his eight years in office.
The bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is expected to fault both Bush and Clinton for not taking the terrorist threat posed by Osama bin Laden's network seriously enough.
But its report reportedly pins blame for the attacks on on a broad array of lapses by federal and local law enforcement officials and intelligence agencies.
Members of the 10-member panel, composed of five Democrats and five Republicans, reached their conclusions unanimously -- an achievement after months of sometimes partisan bickering in the group.
After fiercely opposing the commission's creation, Bush ended up taking questions from its members -- albeit not under oath and without anyone present to transcribe his answers.
The panel is expected to deal a blow to one of the president's key rationales for invading Iraq, elaborating on an earlier finding that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda did not have a collaborative relationship.
Bush has repeatedly insisted that "there was a relationship" between the two, though he has dropped his prewar claim that Saddam possessed vast arsenals of banned biological and chemical weapons, which have not been found to date.