Rice: 'No silver bullet' could have stopped 9/11

George Bush’s national security adviser insisted that the US president fully understood the threat of terrorism before September 11, 2001, but no intelligence foretold the deadliest attack on American soil.

Disputing criticism that Bush was negligent, Condoleezza Rice told a government commission yesterday “there was no silver bullet that could have prevented” the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Broadcast live around the world, the hearing turned contentious as Democratic members questioned why alarms did not ring when Bush was presented with an August 6 classified memo entitled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside United States”.

Former senator Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the commission, described the memo as saying that “the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking”.

Rice dismissed the document as “historical information based on old reporting” and said it did not warn of attacks inside the United States.

Commission members unanimously asked the White House to declassify the memo, whose title had not been revealed previously. Sean McCormack, a National Security Council spokesman, later said: “We have every intention to declassify it at this time.”

Relatives of victims killed on September 11 sat in the audience behind Rice, scribbling notes and shaking their heads at times as she dismissed accusations by former counter-terrorism aide Richard Clarke that Bush had fumbled opportunities to eliminate al-Qaida.

Unlike Clarke, Rice offered no apology for the government’s failure to prevent the attacks.

“Accountability, ma’am, accountability,” called out Carie Lemack, whose mother died on the first hijacked plane to hit the World Trade Centre. After three hours in the witness chair, Rice shook hands with a few family members and then reached out to embrace a few more.

After hearing from Rice, the commission met with former President Bill Clinton for more than three hours and said he was “forthcoming and responsive to questions”.

A person familiar with the session said Clinton explained the rationale for many of the terror-fighting policies his administration instituted and the message his administration left behind to the incoming Bush administration.

The person familiar with Clinton’s testimony said he told the panel he did not order retaliatory military strikes after the USS Cole was bombed in the autumn of 2000 because he could not get “a clear, firm judgment of responsibility” from US intelligence before he left office the following January.

US intelligence determined al-Qaida sponsored the attack only after the Bush administration took office.

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are to be questioned soon, also in private.

Rice, recalling a rash of vague warnings over the summer, said: “One of the problems here was there really was nothing that looked like it was going to happen inside the United States.”

She said the threats pointed overseas to possible targets in the Persian Gulf, Israel or perhaps the summit in Genoa, Italy, of leaders of industrialised nations.

Bush and his wife, Laura, watched the testimony on television from their holiday home in Texas.

Rice was pressed on whether she had talked with the president about the existence of al-Qaida cells in the United States after being alerted by Clarke. She said she could not remember.

Rice also was challenged on why Bush’s national security team met 100 times before it took up the subject of terrorism and whether she bore responsibility for the failure of FBI offices nationwide to be alerted about increased threats before September 11.

“Tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11, this country simply was not on a war footing,” Rice said.

Even so, Rice said, Bush “understood the threat and he understood its importance”. She said Bush came into office determined to develop a “more robust” policy to combat al-Qaida and told his national security adviser he was ”tired of swatting at flies”.