Rice: Nation Ill-Prepared Despite Threats.

WASHINGTON - National security adviser Condoleezza Rice testified Thursday “there was no silver bullet that could have prevented” the Sept. 11, 2001 terror strikes, conceding the United States was ill-prepared despite a threat two decades in the making.

President Bush “understood the threat, and he understood its importance,” in advance, she told a national commission in implicit rejection of claims made last month by former terrorism aide Richard Clarke.

Rice said the president came into office determined to develop a “more robust” policy to combat al-Qaida. “He made 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’,” she told the commission delving into the attacks that killed nearly 3,000, destroyed the twin World Trade Center towers in New York and blasted a hole in the Pentagon.

In widely anticipated testimony, Rice offered no apology for the failure to prevent the attacks — as Clarke did two weeks ago. Instead, she said, “as an officer of government on duty that day, I will never forget the sorrow and the anger I felt.”

But she also said, “Tragically, for all the language of war spoken before Sept. 11, this country simply was not on a war footing.”