The 9/11 comission delivers its report: The commission chairman, Thomas H. Kean, said the worst failure of all was "a failure of imagination," in the sense that the signs had existed for years that an attack was coming. As the report itself put it, "The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise." Mr. Kean said an attack "of even greater magnitude" than the one in which terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the World Trade Center, blast a hole in the Pentagon and kill about 3,000 people is "possible — even probable." "We do not have the luxury of time," Mr. Kean said at a news briefing accompanying release of the book-length report, the product of many months of inquiries and an agonizing self-examination of many units of government. He said, as did the commission report, that changes of function and attitude are needed in Congress as well as the executive branch. As expected, the commission called for creation of a new national intelligence director to supplant some functions now performed by the director of central intelligence, who heads not only the Central Intelligence Agency but supervises the work of a dozen or more agencies scattered through the government. "No one person can do all these things," the commission said. It called, too, for creation of a national counterterrorism center that would both unify strategic intelligence-gathering against Islamic terrorists and operational planning against them. But the report emphasizes that the enemy is not Islam, "the great world faith, but a perversion of Islam." Osama bin Laden has capitalized on seething discontent among people "disoriented by cyclonic change as they confront modernity and globalization," the report says, and used it to build "a dynamic and lethal organization" which, while damaged since Sept. 11, 2001, is still deadly. "We believe we are safer today," the report says. "But we are not safe." Mr. Kean said it was clear there had been many "unexploited opportunities" to thwart or at least interrupt the Sept. 11 plot. Sadly, he said, nothing was done that "disturbed or even delayed the progress of the Al Qaeda plot." The commission said the administrations of President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush must share blame for not recognizing earlier the threat posed by terrorists. "Indeed, it barely came up during the 2000 presidential campaign," the commission said. Nor was terrorism much discussed in Congress, whose turf-guarding instincts must change if the legislative branch is to do its part in making the country safer, the report says. Nor were the American public and the news media much interested, the commission said. "It is not our purpose to assess blame," Mr. Kean said. "We look back so we can look forward." The commission's vice chairman, former Representative Lee H. Hamilton, said military action and heightened security would not be enough. He said the United States must promote an "agenda of opportunity" in impoverished countries, join "the battle of ideas," so that those regions do not become incubators of future terrorists. You can read the whole thing here