Just days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration had come up with a comprehensive plan to destroy al-Qaeda, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday.

Testifying before an independent commission investigating the attacks, Powell said when President George W. Bush took over the White House, the Clinton administration did not give the new team a counterterrorism action plan.

He said that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asked for a complete review of America's terrorist strategy a week after the new administration came to office.

Colin Powell

Powell said "we wanted the policy to go beyond tit-for-tat retaliation" that "might lead al-Qaeda to believe we lack resolve."

"We wanted to move beyond the roll-back policy of containment, criminal prosecution and limited retaliation for specific terrorist attacks. We wanted to destroy al-Qaeda," he said.

He said a strategy involving the military, intelligence, diplomacy and law enforcement came together eight months later, on Sept. 4.

Madeleine Albright

"We were putting in place a comprehensive strategy that would go after the threat and destroy it," Powell said.

"Then 9/11 hit and we had to accelerate our efforts."

Earlier in the day, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright told the 9/11 commission the Clinton administration did everything it could to defeat al-Qaeda and would have killed Osama bin Laden if officials had better intelligence.

"President Clinton and his team did everything we could, everything we could think of, based on the knowledge we had, to protect our people and disrupt and defeat al-Qaeda," Albright said.

She said after the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton was prepared to kill bin Laden.

"The president was prepared to order military action to capture or kill bin Laden. If we had had the predictive intelligence we needed, we would have done so ... and I would have strongly supported that step."

Albright said U.S. cruise missile attacks against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan after the embassy bombings proved they were serious.

"There should have been no confusion that our personnel were authorized to kill bin Laden," Albright said. "We did not, after all, launch cruise missiles for the purpose of serving legal papers."

But Albright was challenged by Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who asked why the U.S. didn't respond with strong military force against al-Qaeda.

"It is very difficult to assess what the targets would have been," she said.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and William Cohen, his predecessor in the Clinton administration, are also expected to testify Wednesday.