The chairman of an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks said Tuesday the attacks could have been prevented if some events "gone a different way."  

"My feeling is a whole number of circumstances, had they been different, might have prevented 9/11 and involve everything from how people got into the country to failures in the intelligence system," Thomas Kean, former New Jersey governor and head of the panel, said on CBS' "Early Show."

"There's a whole series of things that didn't go differently. Had any number of them gone in a different way, then perhaps 9/11 could have been prevented," he said.

The commission began two days of critical public hearings Tuesday, scheduled to hear testimony from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and William Cohen and Madeleine Albright, Rumsfeld and Powell's predecessors in the Clinton administration.

The public hearing came at a time when the Bush administration is under fire for its antiterrorism efforts, blasted in a new book released Monday by a former aide who says the administration ignored repeated warning signs before Sept. 11 and later wrongly focused on Iraq at the expense of more vigorously targeting al-Qaeda.

The White House has denounced the book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by former antiterrorism chief Richard Clarke as a wildly inaccurate account of the administration's efforts. But Clarke has stood by his assertions, saying Bush "botched the response to 9/11."

Co-chairman of the Sept. 11 panel, former Congressman Lee Hamilton, told the CBS program that the commission would not make any judgments about whether there was anything the Bush administration could have done to prevent 9/11, until it hears all witnesses.

"I think it would be a mistake for Governor Kean or myself or members of the commission to try to prejudge the situation," he said.

The bipartisan commission was created by Congress in 2002 to look into the intelligence failures in the months lead to the Sept.11 attacks. It has till July 26 to finish its report.

(Xinhua News Agency March 24, 2004)