No silver bullet to stop terror attacks, says Rice

US President George W Bush was determined to "eliminate" al-Qaida before the September 11 attacks but there was no silver bullet that could have stopped the outrage, his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.

Giving much-awaited evidence to a congressional commission investigating the terror outrage, she rejected claims that the Bush administration failed to react to warnings al-Qaida was about to strike.

She said: "I know that, had we thought that there was an attack coming in Washington or New York, we would have moved heaven and earth to try and stop it. And I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack."

But Ms Rice, whose competence has been questioned following September 11, conceded America "simply was not on a war footing", when the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were attacked. "The terrorists were at war with us but we were not yet at war with them," she said.

In a three-hour appearance before the panel, she rebuffed claims the Bush administration did not see the terror threat as an urgent issue and hit back at accusations that the president ignored pre-September 11 warnings because he was obsessed with Iraq.

Watched by relatives of some of those killed on September 11 and featured live on US television networks Ms Rice said the president considered al- Qaida a "serious threat" as soon as he took office.

The cross-party commission was shown a presidential daily briefing on intelligence, dated August 6, 2001, entitled: "Bin Laden Determined To Attack United States."

Ms Rice insisted the paper was not considered to be a warning, claiming that it simply stated the obvious.

Defending her administration, Ms Rice said: "We understood that the network posed a serious threat. We wanted to ensure there was no respite in the future against al-Qaida." But there was no "silver bullet" which could have stopped the September 11 outrage.

Ms Rice said the administration discussed "doing something against Iraq" after the September 11 attacks and drew up contingency plans, but decided against taking action and to stay focused on Afghanistan.

"Given our exceeding hostile relationship with Iraq at the time ... it was a reasonable question to ask whether indeed Iraq might have been behind this."

She said Mr Bush asked for "contingency plans" for Iraq in case it was found to be responsible for September 11 or tried to take advantage of US vulnerability in its immediate aftermath.

Ms Rice said the issue of Iraq was raised by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and pressed by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a leading hawk and architect of the later invasion of Iraq.