Barbara Ferguson • Arab News Correspondent

WASHINGTON, 31 July 2003 — US President George W. Bush said yesterday there was a “real threat” of Al-Qaeda attempts to attack the United States, possibly through airline hijackings, but he was confident they would be thwarted.

“The threat is a real threat... We don’t know when, where, what,” Bush said at a news conference when asked about new government warnings of possible Al-Qaeda attacks. “We have got some data that indicates that they would like to use flights, international flights for example,” he said. “I’m confident we will thwart the attempts.”

In his first solo press conference since March, Bush fiercely defended his war on Iraq and solicited foreign help in fending off nuclear crises in North Korea and Iran.

Bush, who faces slipping opinion poll ratings and the smoldering controversy over Iraq’s alleged weapons programs, appeared in the sun-baked White House Rose Garden days before heading off for a month at his Texas ranch. Just 15 months before his re-election battle, Bush also put a sunny complexion on the sluggish US economy.

Bush admitted he did not know when US forces would snare Iraq’s ousted leader Saddam Hussein, but claimed credit for lifting a “blanket of fear” in the country.

“I don’t know how close we are to getting Saddam Hussein. Closer than we were yesterday, I guess. All I know is, we’re on the hunt,” Bush said.

Bush sidestepped a question over his discredited claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa by saying: “I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course.”

The goal of a Palestinian state by 2005 enshrined in the road map for Middle East peace was still “realistic,” he said, and claimed “pretty good progress in a short period of time” since diving into Middle East peacemaking earlier this year.

Hours after North Korea renewed its call for one-on-one talks with the United States, Bush revealed he had just spoken by telephone with China’s President Hu Jintao as part of his drive to defuse the nuclear crisis.

“I told President Hu that it is very important for us to get Japan and South Korea and Russia involved as well,” said Bush, who has told Pyongyang that his government will only discuss the drama in a multilateral setting.

“We are actually beginning to make serious progress about sharing responsibility on this issue in such a way that I believe will lead to an attitudinal change by (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Il,” he said.

Bush also made a pitch for support in the US bid to frustrate the alleged nuclear aspirations of another member of his “axis of evil,” Iran. “We’ve got to work in a collective way with other nations to remind Iran that, you know, they shouldn’t develop a nuclear weapon,” said Bush.

“It’s going to require more than one voice saying that, however. It’s going to require a collective effort of the Europeans, for example, to recognize the true threat of an armed Iran to achieving peace in the Middle East.”

Separately, Prince Saud Al-Faisal came to Washington on Tuesday to urge President Bush to declassify 28 pages of a congressional report on Saudi Arabia, because “everybody is having a field day casting aspersions” on the Kingdom, he said.

The foreign minister, who said the 28 pages were the main reason for his trip, admitted to “tremendous frustration” over the situation, but said he had not asked to meet any of the senators on the intelligence committee. “All the time that this research about Sept. 11 was being made, we were never asked one question. We were never asked for information about any of the aspects of it — which speaks badly about the type of truth-finding aspect (regarding) Saudi Arabia in that report.”

Following his meeting Tuesday afternoon with the president, Prince Saud briefed a handful of journalists in the offices of Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, Saudi ambassador to Washington, and invited them to open press offices in the Kingdom. “It’s true. You are welcome there,” he said. “Cross my heart.”

Prince Saud said he was disappointed when President Bush said he would not declassify parts of the congressional report. “The refusal deprives the Arab Kingdom of a chance to clear its name.”

But he said he was grateful the president publicly announced that Saudi Arabia “is an ally against terror and that we are both victims of this terror.”

“We told him of our wishes that (the 28 pages) be made public, to present whatever facts they may have of our supposed culpability,” said Prince Saud.

The Saudi government should be able to confront “anybody who accuses the government of Saudi Arabia of being part of the Sept. 11 attack,” he said. “We are sure of our efforts against terrorism.”

He said it seemed “strange” that Sen. Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate banking committee, “talks in an accusatory form about Saudi Arabia, without saying what the accusation is.”

The foreign minister denied knowledge of any specific accusations made about the Kingdom. “All I know is that there are 28 pages that were not released in the report, and in them something is mentioned about Saudi Arabia, and now everybody is having a field day casting aspersions on Saudi Arabia.”

Vice President Richard Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell were all present for the 40-minute meeting with the president, he said.

Following his meeting with President Bush, Prince Saud met for 30 minutes with Dr. Rice and gave US authorities permission to question Omar Bayoumi, an employee of the Saudi aviation authority who befriended two of the Saudi hijackers on their arrival in California.

Prince Saud said FBI and CIA agents in Saudi Arabia could freely question Bayoumi, who had already been questioned by American, British and Saudi investigators, who found no proof of a connection to the terror attacks. He said Al-Bayoumi was at large in Saudi Arabia “because there was no request to question him.”

Asked about alleged funding by foreign sources to the terrorists, and specifically about allegations that the money high-ranking Saudis gave to some charities may have ended up in the hands of terrorists, Prince Saud said: “Before Sept. 11, who knows?”

“Who knows how much American money went to these hijackers from American sources? Before Sept. 11 we didn’t have the same measures we have now to know if donations made to charity organizations were going in the right direction. They were not monitored.”

“You must understand,” he added, “in our part of the world, charity is an important part of our lives. We are religious people, we believe in the afterlife, and we believe that in this life we have to do good deeds. And one of the most praiseworthy efforts of achieving good deeds is charity. And if you talk about charity, you diminish the return that you get from giving to charity. That is how people can be so easily deceived by evildoers... and how they were deceived.”