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."