Former Nebraska Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey said he was not satisfied Thursday by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's responses to questions posed by the commission investigating the September 11 attacks.

"I simply don't like a conclusion that says we didn't make any mistakes," Kerrey said after he questioned Rice as part of the 10-member commission in Washington.

Rice appeared to blame lack of communication between the FBI and CIA on intelligence matters, but that is not an acceptable response, Kerrey said. There were enough warnings that Rice and others in the Bush administration should have demanded to see all communications that hinted at possible terrorist attacks in the
United States, Kerrey said.

Mistakes made by Rice and the national security team leading up to the September 11 attacks were understandable but they should be acknowledged, Kerrey said.

Kerrey pressed Rice on why the Bush administration did not better respond to evidence that hijackings of commercial airplanes appeared imminent.

During Rice's testimony before the 10-member commission in Washington, Kerrey referred to an Aug. 6, 2001, memo to President Bush that said the FBI had uncovered patterns of suspicious activity consistent with preparation for hijackings.

"That was checked out and steps were taken through FAA circulars to warn of hijackings," Rice said. "But when you cannot tell people where a hijacking might occur and under what circumstances. . ."

Ideally, Rice said, airplane cockpits would have been made more secure in the years prior to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

The hijackers' method of commandeering four planes was to barge into cockpits and overpower the pilots.

"We weren't going to harden cockpits in the three months we had a threat spike," she said. "The really difficult thing for us, and those who came before us, was that systematic changes needed to be made, not on July 5, June 25 or January 1 (2001). Those needed to be made a long time ago so the country was hardened against the
kind of threat we faced on September 11.

"The problem was, for a country that had not been attacked on its territory in 200 years, there were a lot of structural impediments."

Kerrey expressed frustration with Rice's references to President Bush being "tired of swatting flies" in dealing with overseas terror outbreaks.

"What fly had he swatted?" Kerrey said. "We only swatted a fly once, on the 20th of August 1998. We didn't swat any flies afterward. How the hell could he be tired?"

In August 1998, the U.S. attacked terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Rice said Bush believed the CIA was going after individual terrorists "here and there" and that the president was using a "figure of speech."

"I think it's an unfortunate figure of speech," Kerrey said. "After the attack on the (USS) Cole in 2000, it would not have been a swatting of a fly. There were a lot of military plans in place in the Clinton administration."

Rice pointed out that Kerrey himself did not, at the time, advocate an immediate military response to the attack on the Cole.

She referred to a speech Kerrey gave in which he said the best thing the nation could do in response would be to address the threat of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Kerrey, at the time, was vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"I was blown away by the speech," Rice said. "It was a brilliant speech."

Kerrey interrupted, saying, "Are you saying had I not given that speech, you would have attacked them?"

Rice said the best approach was to put into place a plan that would eliminate the threat and not respond to an individual attack.

Kerrey and Rice talked over each other frequently, and at one point when Kerrey wanted to move on in his questioning, he chastised Rice, saying, "Don't filibuster me. It is not fair. I have been polite. I have been courteous."

Said Rice: "Commissioner, I am here to answer questions. You have asked me a question, and I would like to have an opportunity to answer."

At one point, after one of several times Kerrey referred to Rice as "Dr. Clarke," as in former terrorism aide Richard Clarke, Rice said: "I don't look like Dick Clarke."

Kerrey prefaced his questioning by telling Rice that he thinks the war on terrorism is really a war on radical Islam and that military action under way in Iraq is "dangerously off-track" and that it would lead to civil war.