'Bush given warning months before 9/11'

The White House was warned months before September 11 that al Qaeda was planning to crash aircraft into skyscrapers, a whistleblower revealed today.

In a potential hammer blow to President Bush's credibility, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said senior US officials had told "an outrageous lie" when they claimed they had no prior warning.

Ms Edmonds, a Turkish-American who worked on wire taps, has told a special investigation into 9/11 there was information in the spring and summerof 2001 that such an attack was being planned on American cities. "There was general information about the timeframe, about methods to be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts or terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities - with skyscrapers," she said.

The 33-year-old revealed she had given evidence at a secret session of the Congressional commission hearing testimony from government officials, intelligence agents and politicians on the New York and Washington attacks. "I gave details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them [the commission] everything so that they could go back and

follow up. This is not hearsay. These things are documented."

With the issue sure to dominate his bid for re-election, President Bush has repeatedly denied that officials had received any warning about a specific attack on September 11. Any suggestion the White House misled the US public about this would be more damaging than current claims it deceived the nation over Iraq's weapons.

Only last week, Condoleezza Rice, the President's national security adviser, wrote in the Washington Post: "We received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using aeroplanes as missiles." But Ms Edmonds said it would be "impossible" for that to be the case.

The White House has sought to gag Ms Edmonds but she told the Independent: "President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September."

Ms Rice, who appears before the commission next week, has come under attack from the former White House counter-terrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, who said she failed to do her job.