Even so, it foiled a number of murderous al-Qaeda plots prior to the terror strikes, said Cofer Black who headed the center from 1999 to May 2002.

Black said the center had provided effective warnings that thwarted al-Qaeda plans in 1998 to attack the US embassy in Albania, to blow up hotels and tourist sites in Jordan at the end of 1999, and planned attacks on US embassies in Yemen and France in the summer of 2001.

"Our people fought with what we provided them and turned back and defeated constant terrorist attacks saving hundreds and perhaps thousands of lives," he told a joint House-Senate intelligence panel.

The agency, he added, had tracked Osama bin Laden for years, watching the 22-year-old "rich kid from a prominent Saudi family" turn into a frontline mujahedin fighter, a construction financier, and finally the founder of the global terrorist network al-Qaeda.

But agents did not have a warrant to pick him up.

By 1998, the center had substantial intelligence about bin Laden, Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and their training camps. Efforts to capture him and disrupt his network grew increasingly intense from 1998 till the present.

"During the spring and summer of 2001, I became convinced that al-Qaeda was going to strike hard.

"By late summer, I was growing more concerned about a potential attacks on the United States," but he said his warnings did not carry enough specific evidence for the president to be able to take effective defensive action.

"They need to know such things as: the attacks is coming within the next few days and here is what they are going to hit.

"I regret that we did not have the specific, actionable intelligence before the September 11, 2001 attacks as we had provided many times before," said Black, who declined the offer to testify before lawmakers behind a protective screen.

"We gave it all we had. Nobody regrets more that we did not stop the attacks on September 11 than the officers of CTC or their former chief."

(NAMPA/AFP)

World News Headlines Of The Last 48 Hours

•  Global unions on the financial crisis
•  Pik Botha says Machel crash probe should be re-opened
•   Panic grips world stock markets
•   Forty-two face trial over French 'Angolagate'
•   Africa improving
•   Forty-two face trial over French 'Angolagate'
•  AIDS pioneers and cancer researcher win Nobel prize
•   Forty-two face trial over French 'Angolagate'
•  Zim parties fail to meet
•  I am hurting, says Tutu
•   Dissidents tipped for 60th Peace Prize
•  'Alternative Nobels' for journalist, activists
•  9 killed in Mpuma plane crash
•  'Crime is bad. That's a fact': SA Minister
•  Tutu would welcome new SA party
•  Russian troops start dismantling Georgia posts
•  Zim parties resume Cabinet talks
•  World's heaviest man helps another to lose weight
•  OJ Simpson's luck runs out after 13 years
•  Europe joins fight in financial storm
•  Judges' wigs get the chop
•  Lack of medics plagues developing world
•  Identity of famed Sofia church painter revealed