President George Bush said yesterday he would have acted more quickly against al-Qaeda if he had had information before September 11th, 2001, that a terror attack against New York City was imminent.
Mr Bush was speaking in the White House as an independent commission on pre-9/11 intelligence failures began taking public evidence in Washington. The televised hearings got under way against a furious debate over allegations by a former counterterrorism adviser, Mr Richard Clarke, that the Bush administration did not treat the al-Qaeda threat seriously enough.
In a preliminary report the commission said that the Bush administration had taken seven months to come up with a three-year plan - on September 10th, 2001 - to tackle al-Qaeda. "What made you think we had the luxury of seven months, much less three years?" a Republican commission member, Mr Slade Gorton, asked the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld.
Mr Rumsfeld said that a pre-emptive strike against al-Qaeda would have made 9/11 look like retaliation, and there were few good targets in Afghanistan. He also warned bluntly that "another attack on the United States will be attempted."
The commission heard testimony confirming Mr Clarke's claim that some senior aides to Mr Bush were obsessed with finding a reason to attack Iraq. The Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, confirmed that the Deputy Defence Secretary, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, had argued at a Camp David meeting four days after the 9/11 attacks for an invasion of Iraq, when it was known that al-Qaeda was responsible.
Mr Powell quoted Mr Wolfowitz as saying: "Iraq should be part of military action we were getting ready to take." Members of the public applauded when a Democratic commission member, Mr Richard Ben-Veniste, criticised the National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, for refusing a request from the commission to testify under oath.
In his first direct response to the charge that he ignored the threat of attack by al-Qaeda while focusing on Iraq, Mr Bush told reporters yesterday that the CIA director, Mr George Tenet, briefed him regularly about the terrorist threat.
"Had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September 11th, we would have acted," he said.
Mr Bush also expressed concerns about a threat from Hamas to retaliate against both Israel and the US following Israel's assassination of the Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Mr Clarke, who is to testify to the commission today, has been dismissed as "irresponsible" and "out of the loop" by the White House and accused of timing a book critical of the administration for publication this week to embarrass the Bush White House.
Mr Clarke said yesterday that White House lawyers had in fact held up publication for several months. In the book he said he warned Bush officials in a January 2001 memo about a growing al-Qaeda threat but it was not heeded by Ms Rice who "gave me the impression she had never heard the term al-Qaeda."
Ms Rice and her deputy, Mr Stephen Hadley, proposed a broad review of al-Qaeda that wasn't approved for seven months.