WASHINGTON, March 23: Even if the United States had gone after Al Qaeda before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks it might not have prevented them from taking place, Secretary of State Colin Powell told investigators on Tuesday.

In a defence of the administration's conduct before the attacks that killed 3,000 people, Powell also said top officials mistakenly believed the main danger from the militant network was against targets abroad.

Powell's comments before a national commission examining the attacks came amid a raging election-year debate over the inability of well-funded US intelligence services to detect or block the militants who carried out the deadly attacks.

He said the Bush administration determined early on to destroy Al Qaeda but did not complete a strategy to carry out that decision until just days before the attacks.

"Most of us still thought that the principal threat was outside the country," Powell told the commission meeting in a hearing room at the US Congress. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was to appear later in the day.

"Anything we might have done against Al Qaeda in this period or against Osama may or may not have had any influence on these people who were already in this country, already had their instructions, were already burrowed in and were getting ready to commit the crimes that we saw on 9/11," Powell said.

His testimony followed a weekend bombshell by Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism official for both President George W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton, who said the Bush administration did not take the al Qaeda threat seriously before the attacks and then focused on trying to link the strikes to Iraq.

No such link has ever been made public, and many experts are skeptical that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein - a strict secularist - and the militants of Osama Al Qaeda organization would ever have worked together. -Reuters