Rice: Bush Understood Al-qaida Threat

The US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, today told the commission investigating the September 11 attacks that there was "no silver bullet" that could have stopped them, and praised George Bush's leadership in fighting terror.

She said that "if anything could have stopped 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States" and more cohesion between agencies in sharing information.

There was an admission that the administration had not been on a "war footing" at the time of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, in which almost 3,000 people were killed.

However, Ms Rice insisted: "We recognised the [al-Qaida] network proposed a serious risk to the United States ... President Bush understood the threat, and he understood the importance."

She said that Mr Bush had "made it clear to me that he did not want to respond to al-Qaida one attack at a time. He told me he was 'tired of swatting flies'".

Ms Rice made the comments during the opening of what was expected to be a two-hour defence against damaging claims that the Bush administration had paid too little attention to the threat from al-Qaida terrorists.

Her appearance follows claims made to the commission two weeks ago by Richard Clarke, a former White House chief counter-terrorism adviser, that Mr Bush's team had virtually ignored al-Qaida because of its "obsession" with Iraq.

Unlike Mr Clarke, Ms Rice offered no apology for the failure to prevent the attacks, but said: "As an officer of government on duty that day, I will never forget the sorrow and the anger I felt."

The chairman of the commission, Thomas Keane, asked her whether the administration was "worried too much about Iraq and not enough about al-Qaida".

Ms Rice said that, because the US had a hostile relationship with Iraq, which had tried to assassinate the first President Bush and was "still shooting at our planes in the no-fly zone", it was a "reasonable question to ask if Iraq had been behind those [September 11 attacks]".

She said that she thought the focus after the 2001 attacks was on Afghanistan, and that was a "trying enough task".

At a Camp David meeting of senior Bush administration officials, there had been a discussion about Iraq in the context of the wider war on terror, during which the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfotwitz, had spoken about Saddam Hussein's regime, she said.

But she added that, when the president went round the table, everyone had said that Afghanistan was the priority and "not a single person" had said that Iraq should be targeted at that time.

She said that there were contingency plans about Iraq, however, had it emerged that the country had been behind the September 11 attacks.

Ms Rice was also asked whether she had been aware of reports about the threat of terrorists using hijacked planes as weapons.

She said that she had not been aware of these reports, but added that she could not say for sure whether they had never reached her department. She said there were "thousands of pieces of information ... [you] have to rely on intelligence agencies to sort it".

Earlier in her prepared testimony, Ms Rice neither criticised Mr Clarke nor offered a point-by-point rebuttal of what he had said.

She said she had taken the unusual decision to retain him when the new administration came into office, saying that he was an "expert in his field, as well as an experienced crisis manager".

She said confronting terrorists competed with other foreign policy concerns when the president came into office, but added that the administration's top national security advisers completed work on the first major national security policy directive of the administration on September 4 2001.

The subject, she said, was "not Russia, not missile defence, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaida".

The questions turned to examining whether or not there had been the right structural changes to the US institutions designed to deal with terrorism.

Ms Rice conceded that, in the first seven months of the administration, all the structural reforms had not been made, but that they had been completed "immediately" after September 11.

She said that more work needed to be done, and that the structural change was very difficult, but said that the creation of a department for homeland security had been "absolutely critical".

Information from agencies responsible for issues such as immigration and customs was fed into it, and it was important to have a "place where wall of this is coming together", Ms Rice said, citing the example of what are now almost daily meetings between the heads of the CIA and FBI and the president.

One of the commissioners told her: "It may well be fixed at the top, but we also need to fix it at the bottom." Ms Rice agreed.

She said that the terror threat had existed long before the September 11 attacks, listing attacks on US interests including the bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. "The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them," she said.

Historically, governments were slow to respond to new threats, she said.

She has been cast as the White House's prime defender of anti-terror policies, and today's hearing was expected to be a crucial test of whether the Bush administration could reassure the public.

Commentators have described her sworn testimony to the 10-member panel as a vital event ahead of November's presidential elections. National security is a crucial issue for voters.

Network television stations in the US have cleared their schedules to show continuous coverage of Ms Rice's evidence.

The commission has already said that the Clinton and Bush administrations made numerous mistakes prior to the attacks, although no one on the panel has suggested that any single change would have prevented the suicide attacks.

Ms Rice's appearance today could also have big repercussions for her own political future. Some in the Republican party are known to be keen for her to stand for president in 2008.

Ahead of Ms Rice's appearance, Patty Casazza of New Jersey, whose husband died in the attacks on the World Trade Centre, said she hoped that the national security adviser would explain what had gone wrong in national preparedness and detail efforts to protect the country in the future.

"Her testimony will either undermine our confidence in this administration or bolster it," Ms Casazza said.