WASHINGTON, April 4: Members of the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, speaking four days before national security advisor Condoleezza Rice's highly anticipated public testimony , criticized on Sunday the US government's handling of terrorism threats.

Former Democratic senator Bob Kerrey, a commission member, said the men suspected of carrying out the attacks fooled every major US government agency. "Nineteen men with 350,000 dollars defeated every single defensive mechanism we had up on the 11th of September, 2001, and they defeated it utterly," Kerrey said on CBS television.

"Our Department of Defence, our FBI, our CIA, our FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), I mean, every three-letter acronym in Washington, DC, where there's billions of dollars being spent, was defeated on 11 September, and defeated absolutely utterly," he said. "It wasn't even a close call."

Kerrey said former president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and his successor George W. Bush, a Republican, had been warned about Al Qaeda and both had a plan to counter the threat. "The problem was that neither President Clinton nor President Bush put that plan into effect," said Kerrey.

The commission's vice chairman, Democrat Lee Hamilton, told NBC television: "The more I look at it, the more I see kind of system wide problems, rather than individual responsibility."

Republican commission member John Lehman, a former Navy secretary, told CBS the Federal Bureau of Investigations was unable to penetrate terrorist cells in the United States and failed to share intelligence.

Meanwhile "we had a CIA with a total aversion to covert activities, that had no capacity to penetrate Al Qaeda, that was not set up really for transnational enemies," he said. The commissioners were looking forward to Rice's public testimony on Thursday.

The White House, citing separation of power concerns, had resisted until recently political pressure to allow Rice to speak under oath publicly before the panel, whose official name is the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

"We expect it to be very exciting," Republican commission chairman Thomas Kean told NBC News. "We want to know about what happened and what the differences were between the Bush policies and the policies of the Clinton administration," Kean said.

"We want to know what she heard and what she knew, and of course what differences there may be between her, (former Bush and Clinton counter terrorism aide Richard) Clarke and a number of other people we've heard," he added. Lehman described Rice as "the conduit to the president and the coordinator of national security policy."

It was Rice "that had to deal with all of the people that had their hair on fire. ... so she really has the view we need to establish the facts," he said. The goal of the panel is to ensure the United States learns from its mistakes and stops future terrorist attacks, he added.

"So that's really what the purpose of this commission is, not to point fingers at people, but to lay out the facts, draw the lessons and come up with some very real, far-reaching changes to see that this doesn't happen again," Lehman said. Commission members said they saw no problem with having Bush testify in private alongside Vice President Dick Cheney. -AFP